said he would come back as a climber and swinger of birches. I would come back as a riverkeeper on Father’s Day Creek, and, in that fantasy I would have started my career at age 7 or 8, back in East Bridgewater, along little Meadow Brook.
East Bridgewater – population 8,500 when I lived there – did not offer much in the way of trout fishing. But it provided a lot of other things: A nurturing base for growing up and a sense of the big world beyond, if only from the sound of the train coming through, blowing its whistle as it passed during the night.
Sometimes the train stopped at the Woodward & Wright Last Company – they made wooden lasts, or forms, for shoes there – and I only knew this because, on the way to school the next morning, we walked over the tracks, and there would be burned-out road flares with piles of ash next to them; workers from either the train or from Woodward & Wright had set them out the night before. I cannot say I ever saw the train come through town. But I certainly heard and saw evidence of it, and it fostered wishful thinking about the future and the notion of moving on.
Some people have it all planned by the time they arrive at senior year in high school. For others, it just happens – college or a job takes them away. Or maybe they fall in love and part of the deal involves settling somewhere else. Some people moved away from East Bridgewater in one damn hurry – a couple of my classmates were never heard from again after graduation night – and others were not so sure about leaving the hometown.
But all who grew up in East Bridgewater took a piece of that small, simple and mostly delightful place with us.
Looking back, a lot of it seems idyllic now – playing outside all day in the summer until it was dark, inventing games, walking “up town” to buy a popsicle, riding my bike through woods and across fields, pretending I was Steve McQueen on a motorcycle in “The Great Escape,” going to the polo grounds for the Fourth of July bonfire. One year, when John F. Kennedy was president, the East Bridgewater Commercial Club gave JFK’s rival in the Cold War a hot seat: They capped the town’s annual 40-foot bonfire with an outhouse, and inside, seated on a toilet, his red Communist Party necktie flapping in the summer breeze, was an effigy of Soviet premiere Nikita Khrushchev.
We played Little League games on the old polo grounds and, at the time, there was no Mercy Rule to bring a game to an early end when one team had an insurmountable lead. The adults in East Bridgewater must have thought a good lickin’ was just part of life, just what we needed, a rite of passage for eight-year-old boys. So the games would go on and on, 15-0, 26-2, 36-3. I played for the Woodard & Wright Last Co. While we appreciated the team sponsorship, we found ourselves at a distinct psychological disadvantage, having the word “Last” sewn into our jerseys. And that was where we ended up that first season.
The fall in East Bridgewater brought high school football games and the smell of burning leaves. The winters were long, snowy, rainy and gray and, for long stretches, muddy and miserable. Plymouth County had an average annual average snowfall of 37 inches, and it was not unusual to get a foot of snow overnight. But life mostly went on, we mostly went to school after a big snow. And it was the short, stout, ruddy-faced man named Eddie Kenneally who saw that we did. If there was snow overnight, you knew there was a chance the schools might be closed. But if, by 6 am or so, you heard a cowbell out front, if you heard a man barking, “H’yar,” and, if you could feel the thud of big horse hooves, strong and heavy through the snow, you knew you were going to have classes that day. To confirm it, you rubbed the frost off a window so you could see Eddie Kenneally driving his huge draft horse on a sidewalk plow, his Dalmatian scampering alongside him in the snow.
As much as we appreciated a day off now and then, school was really the central part of the East Bridgewater experience – where you made friends, and where I had the good fortune of having some really great, committed teachers. When I take account of people who had the most influence on me – who took an interest in me, supported me – six of the Top Ten were teachers in the East Bridgewater public schools.
Spring meant the end of mud time, ice-out at Forge Pond, fishing for hornpout, Little League parades, trying to catch herring in a herring run with our bare hands, and failing every time.
The summer meant endless backyard baseball games and hanging out at my little piece of Meadow Brook.
I thought about the place so much – almost as much as I thought about baseball – that I took it to bed with me as I reviewed all the activities of a busy summer day. I imagined that I would construct an observatory alongside the pool. I would dig a big hole next to the brook and insert a large steel container, like an underground storage tank. My father was a foundryman, and the Santillis made castings from aluminum; certainly they would help me acquire the steel tank, outfit it with an air vent, a topside hatch door and watertight observatory window, then dig away the bank between the window and the water. From inside the tank, which I planned to line with blankets and pillows, I would be able to unravel the mysteries of the pool by regarding all of its comings and goings. My strategic plan included, eventually, charging admission for others who wanted to watch the fish, turtles, frogs and muskrat from my private observatory. However, I would reserve the right to ban any neighborhood kids who had mocked the idea, starting with the local wise guy, Stevie Abatti. No way was he getting a seat by the window.
I sketched plans in a notebook. I showed my father. I showed my older brother, a scientist still in graduate school at the time. While the reactions were encouraging, I never got the funding I needed. But the scheme has never left my mind.
There was a second place in East Bridgewater, also by a river, that I considered my own, and it was just another five-minute walk further up West Union Street, toward a place known as Cinder Hill because there used to be an ironworks with a big furnace in the area. There was a spot on the Matfield River where, in summer, I would wait in the mud to catch crayfish in a Maxwell House coffee can, and I approached my quarry with such intensity I was pretty much oblivious to the odor of sewage. To some people, it was the polluted old Matfield; to me, it looked like a pristine white-water river from a New England calendar on the wall of a barbershop. Despite the reality – foul water, devoid of fish, debased by years of industrial use and human waste – I dreamed about building an underwater observatory there, too.
I agree that the Matfield looked a lot better than it smelled. But the smell was not as acute in winter, when I trekked alone through the snow to snoop around in the woods and along the floodplain. I considered it my private scouting grounds, and my discoveries included bird nests on naked branches, rabbit tracks and what turned out to be the ruins of one of the town’s 22 long-abandoned mills. The one by the Matfield, I later learned, had manufactured arms for the Revolutionary War.
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