Chapter 2: The first world I knew
We lived on the Blanchard estate, which was located on what is now Route 20 in Weston. Miss Blanchard was the favorite girlfriend of a wealthy man. She had lived on an estate in Andover, but the ladies of the town had whispered to each other that she was a kept woman, and Miss Blanchard was not a person who took that kind of criticism lightly. She left Andover and bought the place in Weston, and my father came down from Maine to work for her.
She was someone in society who was not to be taken lightly, and when you saw the cars that came to her place you understood why. Pierce Arrows with built-in headlights on the front fenders, collapsible roofs — otherwise touring cars. Guy and I both admired them very much.
We lived in the caretaker’s cottage, which was several hundred yards down the back street in the corner of the property. There was a swamp nearby with a slowly moving brook in it, and below the house a lane that led down to where the pigs were kept, and beyond that a lower field that was used as a vegetable garden. My father used to take his light horse and cart down to the post office each day to pick up the mail for the ladies on the estate. There was no place to hitch the horse, so he had a specially designed device that looked like a flat iron, hooked into the bridle by a long strap. It was designed to restrain the horse. I remember it being called a plug.
I have a vague recollection of these early times and of things that happened, tempered of course by the hilarity of the incidents as they were told and retold over the years. Some of the stories about my brother Guy and me include us going down the lane to where the pigs were kept and riding on their backs. We apparently let them out of the yard where they lived and grabbed them for a ride. It was great fun to ride on those pigs.
We also scavenged in the lower field that was used as a vegetable garden. We hunted for carrots that were big enough to eat. One particular day we had especially good luck finding baby carrots. I had a bunch in my hand that needed scrubbing. I took them over to the brook and promptly fell in, carrots and all.
I ended up on a swamp tussock — a bunch of grass growing in the middle of a non-flowing section of the brook. I was cold, wet all over, and very frightened. They tell me that you could hear my screams for miles. My brother Guy was much better situated. He was neither cold nor wet. But he knew that the rage of our mother would soon descend on his head if he didn’t act quickly, so he headed straight for the source of his hope, yelling as he ran: “Mom, Mom, Ra is in the aw.”
My mother scooped him up and ran for the brook. She carried him until she could hear me. Then she put him down and told him to stay put. She found me on the tussock and waded over to me. The water was waist-deep on her. She grabbed me and carried me out.
There was a man named Luke who appeared several times in our lives. He was the hired man, working in the fields that day. He heard me crying and saw my Mother running, and when she got me out of the brook he told her to draw hot water and soak me in it to get rid of the swamp water. It was good advice. Luke was a practical man who knew what needed doing and said so without being asked. My father kept him on for years afterward, even when Luke was so old he had a hard time moving and kneeling on the ground. I wished Dad had been able to do more for him, but he did what he could.
I learned a very good lesson from the brook — not to go into the water without Mother’s approval.
My dad’s sister, my Aunt Effie, had married Erlon Merrill, who had served in the Coast Guard during the war. I can remember the welcome home party the family had for Uncle Erlon when he came back. He looked for a job in Weston and found one with Miss Blanchard. He and my Aunt Effie lived above the Cuttings store in the center of Weston, and Erlon also worked at the fire station in town.
Uncle Erlon and my dad thought they could drive Miss Blanchard’s car without a doubt. One day they got into the car, put it in gear, stepped on the starter, and promptly drove through the barn wall.
Their only excuse was that the wall was in the way while they were trying to leave the barn.
In Weston there was no Congregational Church, which distressed my mother. She would have joined in a minute, as she was a strict Congregationalist. Instead we went to the First Baptist Church, where my parents — mainly my mother — became active. She taught in the Sunday School and took on other duties. My father did not always go.
The story goes that one Sunday morning Dad did not go to church, and some of the people converged on my brother Guy and me, asking where he was. I supposedly piped up for the both of us to say that he was home making dandelion beer.
Now, the main ingredient of the beer was dandelion blossoms, and I suppose that Guy and I had a part in the enterprise, as we had been made to pick a great many of them. The beer must have turned out well, because when Uncle Erlon and Dad went to vent the pressure — to let off the excess carbon dioxide created during the fermenting process — they blew the bung out of the barrel. It spurted all over the place. Dad took off his hat to try to catch the fluid while sending Uncle Erlon off to find pots or pans to catch the remainder.
On the eleventh day of November, 1918, at eleven minutes after eleven o’clock, the war ended.
The newspapers had announced that the trains would stop along with everything else. Dad didn’t quite believe it. Mother took her two boys by the hand and went down to the high bank above the railroad tracks, and we waited for the regularly scheduled freight train to arrive.
It came to a complete stop at the time designated. I don’t know how many cars there were behind the engine — I have thought about it over the years and I believe it was sixty to sixty-five freight cars, which was a full load for a single engine in those days. The train stopped and sat there on the tracks. We stood on the bank above it and watched.
It took quite a while to get moving again — fifteen or twenty minutes for the engineer to build up enough steam and momentum to get that load rolling from a dead stop. The single engine had to pull all of those cars from nothing. We watched the whole thing.
These were the days of horse and buggies and chauffeurs. There were cars on the road — Maxwells and Model T Fords — but not many, and the roads were not what they are today. Things were happening very fast in the opinion of the adults of that time.
I think that one of the election periods came while we lived in Weston the first time. It was Warren G. Harding who came through town on his way to the Wayside Inn in Sudbury. He drove through in a horse-drawn carriage. He won the election. The good news for Massachusetts was that we had Calvin Coolidge as vice president. He had been Governor of Massachusetts and was considered a good man, even though he was criticized for calling out the National Guard during the labor strike.[1] Guy and I sat on the curbstone and waved to them as they went by. Both of the men wore shiny top hats. J. F. Kennedy was the first president not to wear a similar hat.
A favorite memory of mine is of the time when all the ladies had long hair and buns. My mother and Aunt Effie decided to have their hair cut in the modern way. They boarded a bus for Waltham and went to the beauty parlor and had their hair bobbed. Dad teased my mother about her hair and made her cry. He was really a kind man.
During those years the Spanish flu epidemic got under way. It came through Weston as it came through everywhere else, and it reached our house.
Dad never got the flu, at least not any noticeable signs of it. But my mother had it very severely. Dad called Dr. Bell on the phone to come and see her. Dr. Bell asked him to describe the symptoms. Dad described them, and the doctor said that my mother had twenty-four hours to live unless there was a miracle.
My dad painted my mother’s throat on the outside with iodine and wrapped her neck and chest in a wooly scarf. The iodine blistered her skin from her throat down to her chest. But she was up and going in about three days.
I got the flu several days later and was very sick. Guy got the flu and had convulsions — the kind that frighten everyone in the house. Luke, the same man who had told my Mother to soak me after the brook, helped steam out Guy’s fever. He knew something about what to do when a child was burning up, and he did it without being asked.
Mother loved to read to us. When we were sick she read us the Peter Pan stories, and she read to us constantly during the flu to pass the time away.
Many years later, when we lived in Maryland and I worked at the National Institutes of Health, I was asked to be a volunteer for the swine flu vaccine they were developing. A fellow from Nova Scotia and I were called back some time later, as the vaccine had acted strangely in both of us. Then they asked if I had ever had the flu, and I let them know that I had had it in 1918 or 1919 and nearly died from it. The researchers found other people who had survived the Spanish flu and gave them shots of the swine vaccine and got the same unusual reaction they had seen in this other fellow and me. The antibodies from the original infection were still in our systems, all those years later.
When we were at the Exmore Farm in the early 1920s, my Dad had appendicitis and was very sick. The doctor took out the appendix. There were no miracle drugs at that time, so there was a real problem with infections. He recovered but never really talked about the experience.
Guy and I started school in Weston together. We started in the same class, as my folks thought Guy needed more maturity and his maturity would lead me along the right path. It led to all sorts of problems for me. We started in early September of 1922.
Miss Adams was our first grade teacher. She was a typical teacher-mother of twenty-nine first graders. It was easy to pull the wool over her eyes, but you didn’t want to try it too many times.
Within a week of entering school, our sister Barbara was born in a lay-in facility in Waltham. I presume that first week was rough with no mother at home for us. It wasn’t like the days when Guy and I were born in the bedroom of the family home. So our family had increased by twenty percent in one afternoon. I think that I felt Barbara was a curiosity. Guy was six years old. His only comment that I can remember was “damn girls.”
Barbara was younger than we were and not to be fooled with. She and Guy both took music lessons. Guy learned to play the piano and Barbara took both piano and pipe organ lessons.
Before Barbara was born we had been to visit in Maine. When we came back to Massachusetts for school, each of us had a head full of lice, probably acquired from the seats on the train. This was much to my mother’s disgrace and horror.
Dad said he could fix that. He took Guy and sat him in a chair. He basically shaved Guy’s head. Then he decided to check with my mother before he proceeded with me.
He put Guy in the carriage and went down to the hospital where Mother was with Barbara. He coached Guy as to what to say, and Guy announced that Dad had gotten rid of the lice. Mother was most upset. When she came home, I began a regime of combing and treatments. During this time I think we infested about fifty percent of the class.
My father would comb my hair and search for the lice. When he found one, he would drop it on the red-hot stove where it would go “pop.”
It was Miss Adams who first noticed something else. Guy did not do very well at mathematics. I didn’t do very well in coloring or design — the projects that were used to teach young children about numbers and shapes. Miss Adams noticed that the printing on our math papers was the same, and that all the concepts in our artwork were very similar. She called us up to her desk one recess time. She had several sets of these papers. She would ask Guy a math problem, but he had no concept of figures at that time. Then she took the crayons and peeled the papers off. She asked me for the blue one and the yellow one, which I could find. But I couldn’t pick out the red and the green.
My folks had noticed that both of us had gotten stars in both math and drawing. They knew that I was good at math and that Guy was good at drawing. The stars had not made them suspicious, but Miss Adams’s observation did.
The next time Uncle Henry came to visit — he was my Mother’s brother, a physician — he screened us both and found that I was color-blind. He told me that my grandfather and great-grandfather had both been color-blind. Uncle Henry worked out a chart to show that I had inherited the gene from Preston Osmon Howard, my great-grandfather and namesake, as he had had two parents who carried it. They found that one or two of the aunts were also color-blind, and the grandfather of one of the great-aunts.
This has come down through the family. Barbara’s son, my nephew Tom Williams, is color-blind, as is my grandson Matthew Libbey.
Miss Blanchard lived in Weston for a couple of years and then became poorly. She sold the estate to two would-be grocery concerns. One of the ladies was a daughter of the founder of the First National Grocery Stores. The other was the dominant character, by the name of Miss Farnsworth. She and my Dad did not hit it off well. Dad took it long enough and he eventually decided we should move back to Andover.
I have been asked why we moved, and the honest answer is that I am not entirely sure. Dad and Miss Farnsworth were oil and water, and that was reason enough for him. But there may have been other reasons. It is one of those great family secrets. What I know is that in the summer of 1923, we left Weston and went back to Maine.
But before we left — and I cannot pin the date exactly, only that it was during our years in Weston — there came a time when Mother’s sister Gladys became very sick with a heart infection. We took the train up to Rumford from Boston, and from Rumford we took a coach to Andover. It was wintertime, and the coach was a sleigh — a large one, pulled by a pair of horses, with runners where the wheels would have been.
We made three stops on the way. The first was in Rumford Center, where the horses were changed out for a heavy pair. There was another stop midway to East Andover. At each stop the new horses had the harnesses already on them and were waiting. While the men made the change, we were given a piece of bread or a donut to eat. The whole operation took only a few minutes at each station, and then we were off again.
It was at night. The horses had bells on their harnesses, and you could hear them in the dark before you could see anything. The co-pilot had a voice that could be heard for miles. When he made the turn from Rumford Point onto the regular road to Andover, he would shout ahead so that the horses at the next station would be ready. I suppose the people at the next stop could hear him coming a good while before we arrived.
I was very small. My mother had me bundled up beside her, and Guy was somewhere in the pile of robes and blankets that kept us warm. The cold was serious — it was a Maine winter night, and we were in an open sleigh — but the robes were heavy and we were packed in tight. I can remember the sound of the runners on the packed snow, and the horses’ breathing, and the bells.
It was the most wonderful ride I have ever had.
I will always remember how happy Grandmother Howard was to see us.
Aunt Gladys died soon after this visit. I can remember that my mother was always glad that we had made the trip.[2]
Robert recalled that Coolidge “had been President of Princeton University and Gov. of Massachusetts.” (“The Robert Akers Story,” draft dated August 3, 2000, Ch. 3.) Woodrow Wilson was the former president of Princeton University; Calvin Coolidge was Governor of Massachusetts. Robert appears to have conflated the two men’s résumés. ↩︎
Gladys Mary Howard was born on May 21, 1892, in Andover, Maine. She married Stephen Colby Abbott on July 16, 1919, in her hometown. They had one child during their marriage. She died on April 19, 1921, in Andover, Maine, at the age of 28. (FamilySearch, person identifier MV71-ZQJ; accessed February 2026.) ↩︎