Chapter 6: What the hurricane paid for
Mr. Carl Rhodes and Mr. John Scanlon were influential in getting me to go to Bates College. I first went up to Lewiston with a local family whose daughter attended there. My clothes arrived in a laundry box and a footlocker. The footlocker went home after I arrived.
My freshman year I lived on the third floor of Roger Williams Hall. I was homesick when I first went to Bates. I took classes in chemistry, biology, mathematics, English, German, and sociology — I had Herr Buschman for German — and I worked during the school year each year to pay my room and board.
I can remember the first days when Prohibition was repealed, as I was in college. We all went down to town to have a drink of beer, but you had to be over the age of eighteen.
I met Kathleen Curry when my girlfriend went out with her boyfriend. She was two years behind me in school.
During the time I was at Bates my dad changed jobs. Uncle Erlon had heard that a man on one of the Weston estates was more interested in raising animals than in paying attention to his employer, a Mrs. Fisher, and was about to lose his position. Erlon alerted Dad. Dad entered into negotiations with Ed Rummal and Mrs. Fisher and was given the job, which included living at the house on 46 Love Lane.[1] There was a bell in the house that used to ring when he was needed by the fire department.
I helped them move during the summer of 1938. The hurricane came shortly afterward.
The storm of September 1938 was one of the worst to hit New England in living memory.[2] Trees came down across roads and power lines all over Weston and the surrounding towns. I was able to work the two weeks after the hurricane for the Town of Weston, doing cleanup and driving a truck for Charlie Wheelock. I earned enough to pay my tuition at Bates for that last year.
At my graduation, one of the professors spoke on the founding of Bates College. He was heard to say that Bates was founded as a Baptist cemetery. Clearly, he was nervous.
We had grown beards and long hair for the celebration. Mother insisted that I shave and get a haircut right afterward.
My mother was a very private person and she did not express her emotions freely. I think that my favorite memory of her is the expression on her whole personage at the time of my graduation from Bates and Guy’s graduation from Northeastern. It was the realization of her long-held dream of having her children educated.
Guy and I graduated on the same day, but my folks were able to attend both ceremonies. Bates graduated in the morning, and right afterward they jumped in the car and drove back to Boston to see Guy graduate in the afternoon. My brother graduated from Northeastern with a degree in chemistry and metallurgy and went to work for the Waltham Watch factory in their chemistry department.
After graduation I worked at the Paine estate for a year and then went to graduate school at Boston University. I lived at home and drove into Boston every day. I got my Masters degree before joining the Army.
One day Jack and Tom Williams and I went up to fish in the north branch of the Ellis River. As we drove toward Upton there is a large flat area where a farm used to be. We noticed a car ahead of us with smoke coming out from it in all directions. Tom said that fellow had real problems, as he thought there was a fire in the car.
We ran up the road. We found an elderly man and his wife stranded in a car that smoked every time they started the motor. We got the people out. Tom had worked on cars, and he opened the engine hood and yanked the battery lines off the battery with his bare hands to reduce the risk of fire. Jack crawled under the dashboard and pulled out the insulation that was burning. I had the sole duty of keeping the elderly couple away from the car, as all their belongings were in the trunk.
After we got the insulation removed, Tom hot-wired the car and told the man to drive it home. It was a brand new car with less than a hundred miles on it. He told them to keep going and not turn the car off until they got there. They were going back to New Hampshire, where they ran a store selling fishing and hunting equipment. They got our names and addresses for insurance purposes.
Sure enough, in about two weeks a small package arrived containing three identical tie bars — a gold bar with a chain across it which held a plastic disk, and inside the disk was a real fishing fly. I wore it proudly and gave it to my son David when he was older.
When he died, Grandfather Akers left his pocketwatch to Dad. After the funeral, when we were ready to go home, the watch had disappeared. This was a real disappointment to Dad. I think he probably knew who took the watch, but it never showed up again.
Dad bought himself a pocket watch after that, which he left to me. When I graduated from Boston University, Kathleen bought me a watch fob from the Sigma Xi science fraternity. I wore the watch and the fob for several years. I gave the watch to my son David and the fob I had made into a pendant and gave to my granddaughter Laura Libbey when she was inducted into the same honor society at Williams College.
From westonma.gov: “In 1913, after the death of her husband, Caroline Freeman sold the estate to her sister Louisa, who held it until the sale to the Paine Estate in 1920. The property was bought by the Paine trustees and occupied by Georgina Paine Fisher, who lived there as her principal residence. Her first husband, Richard Fisher, was a forester who was head of the Harvard School of Forestry in Petersham. Her second husband, Llewellyn Howland, was a writer. After Mrs. Howland’s death in 1989, the house at 55 Love Lane was sold but the farmhouse at no. 46, always occupied by staff, and the adjacent 32 acres were retained by the Paine Estate.” (https://www.westonma.gov/687/Historical-Narrative, accessed February 2026) ↩︎
The Great New England Hurricane of September 21, 1938, made landfall on Long Island as a Category 3 storm and swept through New England with sustained winds estimated at 115 to 120 miles per hour. It killed over 550 people, destroyed nearly 24,000 buildings, and brought down 20,000 miles of power and telephone lines. It was the most destructive hurricane to strike the region in the twentieth century. ↩︎