Chapter 8: Going back
After the war I returned to Boston University, expecting to begin work on my PhD in Physiology. They suggested that I get a teaching job for a while until they were able to reconstruct their graduate school.
I went to Bridgeport, Connecticut, as a teaching assistant at the University of Bridgeport. When I was there it was a two-year college, but that changed quickly with the returning veterans. I taught comparative anatomy and physiology. Kathleen and I lived as house parents for one of the dormitories — a house that had once belonged to P.T. Barnum’s daughter. I stayed there from 1946 to 1949, when I returned to Boston University and got my PhD.
Every summer we went back to Maine. We had always gone back — Guy and I as boys, every year we lived in Weston, fishing the Black Brook and working on the farm. Now Kathleen and I and the children went back. There was a camp in East Andover that the family kept, and we would pick up my mother and spend a week or more there.
The farmhouse where my mother had been born and my brother Guy had been born was still standing. I can remember that my dad and Grandfather Howard and Howard Glover jacked up the house and poured a higher footing and repaired the foundation. They installed central heating with heat registers.
One of my best memories of those summers is of how we bathed the children. There was a large wash tub at the camp that we would fill with water from the pump and heat on the wood stove. The small children were washed in the tub. When they got older we would take them down to the covered bridge and go swimming and take a bath there. We used Ivory Soap because it floated in the water. With the Ivory Soap and the Andover water your hair would be soft and lighter.
Several years ago Marie and I took my mother with us to spend a few days at the camp. On the way up from Route 2 to Andover, we went by the home of Osmon O.P. Howard in North Rumford — the house on the National Historical Record where my great-grandfather had lived.
She asked me to stop the car. She wanted to go in and explain to the person who lived there that she knew the house very well, and could she come for a visit.
The woman who lived there invited her to come in. My mother gave an interview about the history of the house as she remembered it from her youth. She told the woman about the people who had lived there, and the stories she had been told about them, and what the house and the land around it had been like when she was young. I believe these interviews are on tape somewhere, but they have never been transcribed.