My father was a minister in Litchfield, CT when I was very young. Our family moved to Puerto Rico after someone in the congregation, who was also on the church board, led a movement to force my father out of the ministry at that church, most likely due to my father’s complete lack of punctuality, since he was absolutely never on time. Apparently my father was very popular anyway, as this person on the church board was subsequently kicked off, because the congregation tried to get my father to stay, but by this time he’d moved on.
So we were to become missionaries, and had a choice to go to either Puerto Rico or New Guinea. My mother’s quote was ‘I’m not taking my children to a place with headhunters’….so we ended up in Santurce, Puerto Rico. However, there was an interim stop–Gaylordsville, CT. Keep in mind we were moving from Litchfield, a town my mother loved, and a very upscale town, where there were still fox hunts on some of the old New Englanders’ estates.
Gaylordsville was just one more stress point between my parents, since my mother didn’t want to leave Litchfield. We ended up in Gaylordsville because my father’s ministry ended in Litchfield at the beginning of summer, while his position at Robinson School in Santurce, Puerto Rico didn’t start until the fall semester, leaving him with two to three months of no work and no income. So, he took an interim ministerial position in Gaylordsville for the summer, at the Methodist Church.
My first hint that something was amiss with this town happened my first day in the new parsonage, which was adjacent to a funeral home. I was about ten at the time, didn’t know anyone yet in Gaylordsville, but there was a large, paved driveway at the funeral home next to the parsonage, so I rode my bike over there for something to do. I immediately met another boy around my age or older, and proceeded to get into a very odd argument with him about the days of the week.
Upon arriving home, I told my parents about it, and my father told me that there were a lot of people in Gaylordsville who had various learning disabilities. He said I should just leave it alone if anyone tried to convince me of things that didn’t make sense. This happened several times, and those interactions are among my most memorable recollections of Gaylordsville. The history is that factory owners imported people from Eastern Europe who were definitely afflicted with various hereditary problems, which left them unable to grasp much of what was going on, but were still able to work real cheap in the factories set up by European industrialists. They then multiplied, as people tend to do, passing along to many of their descendants their qualifications for being imported to Gaylordsville.
Interestingly you won’t find this aspect of the town in any history books I’m aware of. Currently it seems to be just a normal colonial era town, and even a bit upscale, but back then it made for a lot of strange looking people and strange situations. I still remember how odd some of the people leaving church looked, and how the kids around my age looked very different from the kids in Litchfield.
My mother, of course, hated it there, and was particularly mad at my father for landing her there, of all places, in these circumstances. It would have been hard to find a worse place ‘to summer’ after leaving Litchfield and heading into the unknown of missionary work. To top it off the parsonage was odd too. I recall that there was a running stream in the basement, the steps were steep and crooked to get down there, and there were still a lot of canned vegetables, etc., that had been there a long, long time, judging by the dust on them.
Not helping the situation, the floors were slanted in the parsonage, and one time, while having dinner, the entire table (apparently the parsonage was unfurnished–it was a fold up metal table) collapsed due to the tilt, spilling food on my Dad’s lap at the end of the table. My mother’s comment was something along the lines of “it serves you right”.
I also remember my mother wanting us kids, and maybe my father, to help “do the dishes” one evening, an attempt that got nowhere….we kids thought it was funny, and I think my father, not unusual for this era, was a total chauvinist, so thought it was Shirley’s job. She was mad about that, too.
The upshot of this misfire of a move to Gaylordsville was that us kids and my mother went to her family’s dairy farm in Pennsylvania for the summer while my father stayed behind, to enjoy Gaylordsville’s splendor all on his own. I recall hearing that he was quite lonely and came to visit frequently, but actually don’t recall much from that summer. Fishers’ Farm was where I wanted to be, and that’s where we were–I was riding around on hay wagons, ‘helping’ to milk cows, looking at the giant pigs, and having a fine time. Where my father was, was of no concern to 10 year old me.
The plane flight to Puerto Rico and the move was also a disaster. My brothers and I all came down with chickenpox in Pennsylvania, which prevented us from moving on schedule from the farm to Puerto Rico, so my father had to go on ahead, as his job was starting. After we had recovered, my mother’s brother Ed drove us to the airport in his Plymouth Barracuda, and the four of us flew to Puerto Rico on our own.
My father, as to be expected, was late to pick us up, adding to my mother’s stress and poor attitude towards the move. For once though, this wasn’t totally my father’s fault, but rather some sort of traffic jam that caused the tardiness, but my mother was still furious with him. I have a faint memory of that situation–standing with my mother in the airport, us kids hanging on for dear life, in a vast sea of people mostly speaking Spanish, looking for my father, who was nowhere in sight.
Eventually my father picked us up in our Rambler, which I suppose was shipped there as part of our move, since we had it in Litchfield. A Rambler was a car made by American Motors, which was famous for mostly bad things about cars. In our case, the car lasted mechanically better than it did body-wise, as it basically rusted into junk over the period of time we were in Puerto Rico. The moist salt air, combined with poor craftsmanship, ruined the car. By the time we left, the car had a few issues: The floor in the back seat was rusted away, so you could see the road underneath. The wipers didn’t work properly, so they constantly got stuck to each other in the violent rainstorms of the tropics. It was my younger brother’s job to hop out and free them up. The car was blue, but it had rust all over it, and I think that the back doors didn’t open, making us kids climb out the windows to exit the car. On the bright side, we didn’t really stand out, particularly amongst the Puerto Rican locals, as just about all cars down there were junky. One time, pulling up to a stop light, a friend of my parents was also there, and he yelled out “Get that piece of shit off the road”. I thought that was hilarious. His car wasn’t so hot either, but not as bad as ours.
Arriving at Robinson School uneventfully, we finally saw our second story apartment, which was our home for the next four years. It was unusual, previously being the infirmary for the school, but all of our memories of it turned out to be good.
