starting

1948; perhaps a good place to start. A war just over--not that I was at all aware of any of that; the Korean War was the first to penetrate consciousness, just as the first election of Eisenhower was the first national election I found interesting. The latter half of the 40s, by contrast, were all family centered, with little awareness ourside the immediate family circle. So I reached some sort of external awareness, at about the traditional age of reason. By then, the family had moved from Tennessee to Massachusetts. And we were Republicans, although my mother's uncle was at the time a Democratic state senator in Maryland. Don't recall any political discussions from the adults, other than Cold War worries. It was, after all, the time of duck and cover.
Hamilton was about 35 miles north of Boston, on the North Shore--but not on the shore--just inland from Beverly, Ipswich, Essex, Gloucester, which were on the actual coast. When my family moved there in 1949, a highway had just been completed going north into New Hampshire from Boston--an early freeway--which made a commute into Boston by car possible (there was also a train)--but the town was not yet a commuter place. We were among the first families there whose breadwinner--then always the father--actually worked in Boston. The town was otherwise all local people, divided into three widely separated groups, who rarely intermingled: 1) very, very, very rich people, who lived on very, very, very large estates. One was the owner of the United Fruit Company (of Chiquita Banana fame), Mrs. Bessie Preston Cutler. Another was the widow of General George S. Patton--indeed, a tank purported to be General Patton's sat in the center of the small park, called "Patton Park," and we climbed through it when we weren't on the swings or the teeter/totters (which about exhausted the playground equipment. 2) the people who serviced group 1--maids, butlers, groundsmen, gardeners, etc. Since Hamilton was also the home of the Myopia Hunt Club and Golf Course, there were also the folks who kept up the greens and the stables. Supposedly, the Myopia Hunt Club was founded in the nineteenth century by some myopic rich guys; I've no idea if that's true, but the golf course is apparently famous; see http://www.golfclubatlas.com/myopiahunt1.html --like most male kids in town, I served my term as a teenager as a caddy there. Wasn't much good at it, in those pre-golf cart days. 3) the people who serviced group 2 and occasionally group 1: merchants. Hamilton had a small downtown with a train station, a post office, a small grocery store, the 'paper store' where you bought newspapers and sundries (and could buy milk and bread on Sundays when the grocery was closed due to the 'blue laws'), a dry goods store, a bar, and a package store. There were also a few gas stations, some plumbers and contractors, the town librarian, and so forth. What there wasn't: a restaurant, other than a lunch counter at the drug store and a snack bar at the railway station--you had to go elsewhere to buy a meal. There was no movie theatre in town, although films were shown on Friday and Saturday nights at the Community House, an all purpose gathering place near Patton Park; there was also a Saturday matinee film showing, either of the regular weekend film or, if that was thought to be too adult in focus, of a special film for kids. For every kid in town went to the Saturday matinee, which usually turned into a screaming mass of kids; at some point nearly every week, the film was stopped, and the testy manager appeared on the stage in front of the screen to tell us all to shut up, or the film would be cancelled, and we'd have to go home. That usually quieted us down. My family were anomolies, at least at first, belonging to none of the groups. We weren't rich, weren't merchants, weren't part of the service class (most of whom were Irish and Roman Catholic; the merchants and rich were Protestants--the merchants mostly Methodist or Congrationalists, the rich almost exclusively Episcopalian). That made us hard to type. We were also hard to type since my folks were from the south, and had traces of southern accents. And the kids in school--I began second grade in Hamilton, my older brother in fourth grade--had all been together from kindergarten, and so were a cohesive unit. And it was a small school. My grade was the first to have two classrooms of 25 kids each--on the cusp of the baby boom. That was a huge number for the town's school, which up to that point had only a single classroom for each grade. And note that I said the town's school--there was only one, in two buildings: grades 1-6 in a building a block from our house, grades 7-12 three blocks away. So: the town was small. And people who've grown up in small towns know what that means: everybody knows everybody. You know family tragedies, and personal quirks. You don't buy candy at the paper store from just anybody, but from Neil Crockett, the son-in-law of the Millericks who live across the street who's married to their daughter Peggy who's slowly becoming crippled with arthritis. You go to school with the boy whose father was asphyxiated with the babysitter while they were making love in his car in midwinter and left the motor running to keep warm, so they were found nude and dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. And that girl's older sister disappeared one December after growing fatter and fatter, only to return six months later, newly slim, at about the same time her parents adopted a baby who'd been born to distant cousins. And the scoutmaster . . . .
In any event: my folks bought a brand new house, a Cape Cod cottage, with two bedrooms, one bath, and an unfinished attic. Here it is, that first winter (from the vacant lot across the street--the front yard wasn't all that large, even with the non grass strip left for a future sidewalk):