Event: Telling Tales Out of School #1

Oral History Project Interviews

Location: Old Lyme Town Senior Center

Date: November 15, 2009

Interviewee: Elizabeth Whittley (Muffy)

Interviewer: Helen Scott

You may start if you want to say how many years you’ve been living in Old Lyme.

Well, I’ve just had an 80th birthday and although I have not lived here all my life, because I went away to school and college and got married but kept coming back. I think maybe the longest time was we moved briefly to Miami for a year or so and I think that was the longest that I had not at least visited Old Lyme. Seen lots of changes, seen lots of dirt roads that are now macadam, but on the other hand the town pretty much stayed rural.

Well, when did you come to Old Lyme.

OK, actually I don’t know exactly when I came to Old Lyme, there again my grandparents lived here and we probably visited, but I moved into my uncles farm house on Mile Creek Road probably when I was 3 or 4, I certainly don’t remember, but I know that I lived there for probably 3 or 4 years and then moved into a different house on Mile Creek Road when I was around 6, I guess. I don’t know, I don’t remember things, I’m always amazed at my son who can remember things from when he was little and its like a don’t remember a whole lot.

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Any particular stories you can remember from school or happy memories that you want to share.

Well I guess I remember that the school was all from first grade to twelfth grade all in one building – the first six grades on one side of the building, so there was a division, which was very exciting when we went from sixth grade to seventh grade it was a big deal because you went from one side of the building over to the other side and I also remember there was some Kindergarten when I started school. The first grade class rooms, the lockers didn’t have numbers on them, they had cut out animals, and I always remembered that. For years afterwards for a long time they still kept those, course now-a-days the kids by the time their in first grade they’re spelling, they know their numbers, they now all that, I guess we were dumb! They gave us animals. I guess as far as the thing I remember most about being in that school is the ’38 hurricane where I was in fourth grade and we were – the older kids had already gone on the busses but the younger kids, they kept us there and that was very exciting. I remember a big tree that went down right outside our classroom window. And remembering the absolute devastation on Lyme Street with all those trees down. Even for a child it was mind boggling to think that just in an instance it could change like that.

Do you remember any of your teachers from that time?

Well I do but I’m not very good about their names. I remember a third grade teacher I liked very much, well and first grade, yeah for some reason first, second and third grade teachers. I did not like the teacher in fourth grade, and I don’t think many of the other kids did either. I remember liking the music teacher. Class size was probably 20, I don’t know. I don’t think they were gigantic, but I don’t remember them being really small. I remember that you had to have gym and I can remember I was hit in the face with a baseball one of the first times we played baseball with the boys. I don’t even like baseball as an adult. But I can remember going in the gym and that was very exciting. It was great fun for the school to put on a play, the high school students, you got to go and watch them.

Back in that time between families that your parents knew and then families that you knew from school, you literally knew every family in town. You know where knew where the Goss’s lived, you knew where the Griswold’s lived, you kind of liked everybody, not like today.

How long did you go to school here?

I went through ninth grade and that’s when we left. That was kind of exciting, I went to school outside of Philadelphia and that was during the war and no one was driving you to outside of Philadelphia, you went on the train and the train was packed with service people, standing, so many service people. Were they all on leave, or was that how army/navy got their people from here to there. I don’t know, but I do remember that there were so many of them.

When you went to school in Philadelphia was your family there?

No, it was boarding school.

Did you come home on vacations?

I can remember a couple of years that I did not come home, you went in the all and you came home at Christmas you did not come home for Thanksgiving, because of war, because of travel, because of expense, so you were there.

You came home for summers, what was summer like for you?

You think about summer today and everyone is so conscious of skin cancer, all we wanted to do was go to the beach and be in the water and lie in the sand in the sun. We did all summer long and the other thing that’s so different today, we could ride our bikes and nobody worried about you and you didn’t have to worry about the traffic and so you were free, you just rode all over the place.

What are some of the places you would go?

Well, I lived kind of half way between the beach and the town, you could ride to your friends houses or down to the beach, basically that was it. I was riding down to the beach or up to town. It wasn’t Lyme Street and it wasn’t Main Street, it was just the street.

And your grandparents were also in town?

My mother’s parents lived at the end of Academy Lane so that made it very nice. In the ’38 hurricane there were only 3 houses on the power line that went to our house, so guess who were the last people to get power back. So it was very nice we’d go up to my grandparents house to get water and take showers and baths. Made a big difference because we were without water and power for weeks and weeks. I also remember that there was no such thing as a power saw so all those trees had to be cut by hand.

Your mothers parents, how long did they live in town?

My mother’s mother had visited in Old Lyme from when she was tiny, she grew up in Ohio but they visited their family in Old Lyme. She was Marsh, but her maiden name was Moss. Marsh, Moss and Lane were the family names. And they’d been visiting but then I guess in the early 30’s they moved permanently to Old Lyme.

My father’s family came from Erie, Pennsylvania but there again he had relatives in Old Lyme and although he had not visited in Old Lyme, my mother would literally visit very year, they would come and visit, my father only a few times.

After my parents were married they lived in Erie for awhile, then in Long Island and then came over to Old Lyme and during the depression in the 30s my father who had been working for Roman aircraft on Long Island, which is why we moved here, I think, lost his job and so he then worked for my mother’s father out in the woods. When he was younger he worked in the pacific in logging camps and all so he worked, but he also was part of the group of people that worked at the guild here in Old Lyme, like Beatrice Hoffman, and many, many artistic people and my father worked for Perelli who was a furniture maker and had a furniture store in Old Saybrook. He was a wonderful guy. He taught my father to make furniture and we have various pieces of furniture that my father made during that time when he was working at the Guild. The Guild was in Peck Tavern. An awful lot of people worked there ( a few names are mentioned but I couldn’t make them out—Matt Hall, Mary somebody’s mother??). They were craft kind of things that people were doing there, like book binding and weaving rugs and furniture making during the depression and it was giving an opportunity for people to make things and they could sell them if they wanted. I don’t know how long the Guild went on for but I’m sure people have dates for that.

Do you have any memories of the depression?

No, I don’t think so, I think I was too young. What I remember very distinctly during the war about the rationing. My father had a car, because by that time he was working for Sikorsky Aircraft down in Stratford, so that’s a long ways so he had a sticker on his car, because he had to have gasoline to get to work, so we used to pester the daylights out of him on weekends to take us here and there, to Gillette’s Castle, but it never worked, had to use the gasoline to go to work. I always remember that. But I remember you didn’t have the butter, but you had the margarine and the little pellets that dyed the margarine. That was my job to put the pellets in and stir it around. I do remember that. My mother was not a big cook, she cooked because she had to feed us, but she didn’t particularly like it, well during the war she canned things and she preserved things and every year we would raise one pig and then slaughter it and we would get the meat and the lard went to the government for the war effort. They wanted the lard.

There was a lot of things missing during the war years – what did you give up?

Well my mother who was a housewife and stayed home taking care of the kids in the family, she had the first job of her life during the war – she delivered the milk for the pioneer farm because the men were all off at the war. And so I can remember her hating it in the winter because she didn’t like to drive in the snow and a lot of the houses we went to were up narrow roads and we didn’t have plowing the way you do today and I can remember he absolutely dreading it. She also was an airplane spotter, I think they did that in the town hall but she went up to grassy hill. They had a tower or something or a platform. There were turrets with the silhouettes of the airplanes and we would all try to learn them. Not that I think we ever saw a German airplane flying over Old Lyme, but nevertheless they were prepared.

Was that a job that they mostly gave to the women?

I think so because the men were either in a job for the war effort, like my father who was working for Sikorsky or they were in the service and they were gone. Well, I’m sure there were older men who probably did it to.

How about the children, what did they do for the war effort?

We saved tin foil off the cigarette packages. We pressed it altogether and when it got big enough you gave it into the town hall for the war effort. We bought war bonds. Saved your allowance to do it. Where we lived is not conducive for very much gardening nor was my mother any more interested in gardening than she was in cooking so I don’t recall that we did much of any food growing although I suppose we grew some simple things. Although I do remember this pig because I was always horrified that you were going to kill this pig that you watched and fed all year long. I don’t remember having trouble eating it. I hated to eat anyways, I never wanted to eat anything anyways but I don’t remember thinking I’m not going to eat it because we slaughtered it. I can remember trucking down the path to get to the pig.

Did you have siblings?

Yeah I had 2 brothers who were older and a sister who was younger. They were still too young for the war. Both my brothers had just gone into the service when the war ended, so they never went overseas. They were starting to get their training.

Have you had any jobs in Old Lyme?

I really didn’t, I guess I was lucky enough that in the summer we just played around. I never babysat or anything like that, I suppose I did odd jobs for family but no never like worked in the drugstore or anything like that.

How about the Drug Store?

Oh Jane’s drug store, that was wonderful. If you think about all the ice cream flavors they have now including the local one with a sign that says beer ice cream, who in the world would want that, all the flavors of ice cream now, you went to Jane’s drug store and you got vanilla, chocolate or strawberry, that was it.

Was that a place where kids would hang out a lot?

Some, but you didn’t really stay there long periods. I think it was frowned on. The idea of kids just hanging around for along time was good, you kept moving and I always remember that going back and forth to the beach in the summer that right at the shore road at the black hall river there was always a good humor parked there. I don’t think we ever went by without getting one. I don’t recall that there was a big variety. It was vanilla ice cream with chocolate on it. But they had luck sticks. The ice cream was on a stick and the bottom part was just a plain stick, but you would eat your ice cream and if you at it and it said good humor on the part where the ice cream was and you gave it back to him the next day and you got a free ice cream. Obviously there weren’t that many that had good humor printed on them. That was always exciting.

What were the beaches like, was it mostly kids down there by themselves?

I think it was pretty much families, there were always adults. Definitely not little kids. We mostly went to the beach that was down near the point, sometimes to white sands and sometimes to where OL beach club is now. That property before it was the beach club belonged to my great, great uncle and he had a camp for boys there.

Thank you very much for talking with me.

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