Thinking Things Through

The picture to the left was taken in 1952. I am with our dog, Joey, and I am proudly wearing one of my father's Army caps. You can just see one of the vacant lots and the begining of the woods in the background.




Our house on Montgomery Ave. in Holyoke, MA was at the end of a dead end street. To the north, just past our house, were two vacant lots, and on the other side of these vacant lots began “the woods”. The woods were so important to me as a child that I sometimes view this space as a kind of character in my life. There was a straight path through the woods to the Daniel Wax home where my friends Marilee and Bobby Wax lived, and then on to the home of my friend, Dana Hathaway, the only child of Dwight and Doris Hathaway. Both the Wax and Hathaway homes were essentially to the west of the woods, right on Northampton Street (Rt 5); those homes are still there, but alas, the Waxes and the Hathaways are long gone. To the north of “our woods” are the dinosaur tracks which I write about in another piece on my Blog. However, we rarely roamed north of the Hathaway house. On the eastern boundary of our woods there is a steep embankment, at the bottom of which are the RR tracks which run from Holyoke to Northampton and on to Montreal (though just about the only train traffic today are cars containing coal for the Mt. Tom Power Plant), and just beyond the tracks lies the Connecticut River. We rarely went down this embankment, because our parents told us that tramps stalked the RR tracks looking to kidnap little boys and girls. There was an old log stairway down the embankment, but we hardly ever went down there.

We all loved the woods; we could play all sorts of games there; “cowboys and Indians”, “capture the flag”, “kick the can”. We built tree houses in the woods (where I was the “ground lookout” because I couldn’t climb trees). One year, we made ice blocks using snow and boxes, and we built an igloo out of these blocks. We discovered that it’s true; if you sit in an ice igloo for a while, it gets quite warm from the heat of our bodies. . Of course, with the trapped heat of our bodies, it started to drip inside. I could never understand how real Eskimos managed to live with the constant dripping. Over time, I got to know every square inch of the woods. I remember once I had to go into the woods to retrieve Eddy Abbot’s pants which had been taken from him by the “older” kids in the neighborhood. Eddy hid in a bush until I found his pants. He never showed much gratitude, though. Well, I was just a little guy at the time, and I don’t think it was Eddy’s finest moment.

One time, Gary Cox, the oldest son of Dr. Gardner and Helen Cox, tagged along as a few of my palls and I went playing in the woods. Gary was a few years younger than we “big” kids, so we decided to play a trick on him. We told him we were going to play hide and seek and he was it. As he closed his eyes and counted to 100, we ran away. But before Gary got to 100, we started yelling “Help, Help – the tramps have caught us.” Gary went tearing off, and we all had a good laugh. But unfortunately, we had not thought this out completely. Gary ran straight home screaming “The tramps have Bobby Fowler and Larka Twing and Jerry Web. The tramps have them”. This in turn led to urgent phone calls to our mothers, who absolutely freaked out. The police were summoned. And as Jerry, Larka and I casually emerged from the woods, we discovered that we were in a raft of trouble. But worse was to come.

Once, a friend of mine and I found a huge boulder right at the edge of the embankment. I honestly can’t remember who that friend was. It might be easy to guess it was Jerry Webb; whenever I got into trouble, Jerry was generally there. Anyway, we decided to see if we could get the boulder to roll down the embankment a bit. We dug out the dirt surrounding the boulder and pushed and pushed. At first it didn’t budge, then it rocked a bit, then more --- and finally, to our delight, it came out of its hole and started to roll down the embankment. It was a very heavy boulder and a very steep embankment, and the boulder simply bounced off of trees and such as it plunged down below. We were, like I said, delighted. Well, we were delighted for a little while. Just a moment, really. Then we weren’t delighted.

In fact, we were quickly horrified. You see, we just hadn’t thought this thing out completely. The boulder had simply bounced off of every obstacle until it came to rest right between the rails of the RR tracks. Yikes! Down the log stairway we went. And we pushed and we pushed, but we were unable to roll the boulder out of the tracks. It started to get dark. We were nervous about the tramps. Our parents expected us home for dinner. So we did the natural kid thing – we climbed back up the log stairs, went home and forgot all about it.

About a week later, my family was just sitting down to dinner. My father was finishing drinking his martini and reading the newspaper. “Here’s an interesting bit of news”, said my father, as he folded the newspaper. “A train de-railed near here. Just north of our house, I think. Seems the train hit a big rock and went right off the tracks. Fortunately, it was a freight train and nobody was hurt.” I was absolutely immobilized with fear, but I managed with great effort to say nothing. In fact, I said nothing to anybody about this little episode until both of my parents were many years deceased. Why take chances? To tell the truth, before writing this piece in my Blog, I have tried to look up the statute of limitations on train de-railings. Not much luck finding precedent of young children de-railing trains, but according to general tort law, I think I am ok about revealing this little mishap now. Anyway, I’ll bet lots of kids have de-railed trains. Like me, they just didn’t get caught. So what’s the big deal? I used to think this was the worst thing I ever did. But on reflection, I realize that I have done much worse things in my life. I’m just not going to tell you about those other things. Let’s just say that de-railing a train was fairly close to the worse thing I’ve ever did and leave it at that.

On the 4th of November, 1955, an airplane crashed into the river just below “our woods” and promptly sank. It was a C-47 ( a twin engine “tail dragger”, the military version of the famous DC 6) on route to Westover Airfield. There were 8 people on board; only 4 survived. The pilot had radioed Westover that he was having engine difficulty. It is supposed that the plane encountered carburetor icing and subsequent engine failure. I have always imagined that the pilot, realizing that he couldn’t make it to Westover, looked at his charts and saw this long, straight stretch of the River – an inviting emergency landing strip. Of course, he had aeronautical maps which would NOT have shown water depth. And the water is very shallow there in “the rapids”; the rocks simply tore the belly out of the plane. Moreover, just past the rapids, the water gets very deep, going to 80 feet in some places. So the plane came down, hit the rocks, suffered catastrophic damage to the underside of the aircraft and then sank in extremely deep water.

Immediately, all sorts of people showed up in a large scale effort to recover the plane and the bodies of the occupants who didn’t get out of the plane. There were frog men, and cranes and special railcars outfitted with emergency equipment, and boats of all description. Oh boy! This was serious stuff for a 10 year old kid. Frog men, for crying out loud! A real plane!! Dead people!!! Like every kid in the neighborhood, I begged my parents to temporarily lift the ban on going down the embankment so I could watch the fantastic goings on. And I had an ingenious argument; with all these military and special-forces guys around, how could a tramp possibly kidnap me? Eventually, my parents relented, with all sorts of admonitions about staying out of the way of the workers and certainly staying out of the River. It was November! What were they thinking I might do?

As it turned out, the emergency workers were great about our little band of spectators. They seemed happy to have us about and even invited us to keep warm by the big brush fire they always had going to keep the frog men from freezing to death. My mother sent me down there with cookies, doughnuts and other treats for the workers, so that helped in making us welcome. For days, I would beg the clock to move faster as I sat squirming in school, and then I would bound home and head straight for the embankment stairs and the River. We all expected a plane to emerge from the River with dead bodies at any time, but it was not to be. At least while I was observing, no plane ever came out of the River.

Some years later, after I mentioned this to a friend, she sent me newspaper clippings from that time which reported the entire event AND stated that the plane had indeed been recovered, dragged to the South Hadley side of the River and sent on to Westover for the detailed safety examination to determine the cause of the crash. How could I have missed it? Even if it was recovered during the day when I was in school, certainly the recovery workers would have told us.

Much later, a good friend, Carl Eger, told me that he was one of the three frogmen attempting to recover the plane. This is what he has told me:

"The airplane was a military C-47 that we know in civilian life as a DC-3. It is not uncommon for the military to leave downed planes that are in odd places and difficult to retrieve, e.g. there is one left in Quabbin Reservoir. They do take the time to make certain sensitive equipment is removed - if possible - and that there is no leaking of fuel. The pilot ended up as far away as Essex, CT. A sailor unfortunately made it thru the canal gatehouse, ending up next to the former Parsons Paper Co. - certain of his anatomy missing. Another passenger, a Naval Commander, ended up surviving and making it out of the river onto Rt. 5, north of where you lived. As for the airplane, it is still in the river at the bend where N. Pleasant & Montgomery Streets intersect. Though we were able to make it down to the plane in search for any human remains of those who might not have made it out of the aircraft, none were found inside. Because of the current, we had to use a surfing type board with a rope tied to a motor boat, and by planning it in a downward position the current took us to where we could maneuver to the plane and not be swept away by the fast current."

Now this has intrigued me. If the plane was not recovered, why did the Air Force put out the story to the press that they had recovered the plane? I can only think of one reason – to discourage people from looking for it.

I did ultimately pay a price for the fun I had during this exciting time. Remember the brush fire that was always burning to warm the workers and the frogmen? Well, they must have thrown in some poison ivy. Do you know you can get the poison ivy rash from exposure to smoke? Indeed you can. In fact, it is a very dangerous way to get poison ivy. Of course, as I sat by the fire waiting anxiously to see dead bodies, I had no idea. I got an epic case. It was interesting that I got the rash on one side of my face, neck and head but not the other. I must have been facing sideways to the smoke, no doubt to help me breathe. But on that one side, the rash was devastating. One whole side of my face was so swollen that my cheek hung down on my shoulder. But more seriously, I got it in my ear, up my nose, even on one of my eyeballs. What concerned my doctor the most was the fact that I got a small exposure to the poison in my lungs. This can actually kill you. I was put on all sorts of powerful anti histamine medications and kept home from school for weeks. Ever since that experience, I have been hyper-sensitive to poison ivy, and believe me, I have learned to identify it and stay the hell away from that plant. Several of my childhood friends got the poison ivy rash as well, though no one got it as bad as I did. I would imagine that many of the frogmen and emergency workers got it as well. They were sitting closer to the fire than we kids, so some of them probably got fairly severe cases. You see, they just hadn’t thought this brush fire business through completely.

Most of the woods were owned by Daniel Wax. I was very good friends with both of his children, and was often at their home. Dan Wax was a real character. My parents didn’t like him all that much, but they loved his wife Agatha. One 4th of July, Dan brought to the annual neighborhood party some truly fabulous fireworks. Fireworks had just become illegal in Massachusetts, so God knows where Dan got them. Probably from that “outlaw” state, Connecticut. But Dan’s fireworks clearly outshone all of the other pinwheels, sparklers and roman candles and such. One firework in particular was to be Dan’s “Grand Finale”. It was shaped like an ambulance with wheels and everything. When lit, it was supposed to go screaming across the field propelled by rocket power, complete with a loud siren and flashing lights, and then it was to explode. Dan lit the fuse and the entire neighborhood waited expectantly. Nothing. Dan walked back to it and nudged it with his foot. Nothing. Dan tried to re-light the fuse. Nothing. Annoyed, Dan picked it up and peered under it. Not thinking it through, again. BLAM. Off to the hospital, but nothing serious had happened, just a few minor burns.

Another year, Dan Wax invited the entire neighborhood to his house for the annual 4th of July party. And again, Dan had acquired the most dramatic fireworks. One rocket was fired off, shot up over the woods, exploded into these wonderful star bursts and such. “Ohh.” “Ah.” The star bursts slowly descended, unfortunately without extinguishing, and promptly started a fire deep in the woods. Dan had not thought this through, completely, and he had no “contingency plan” for a fire. Consequently, the fire department was called, and the firemen were not amused when they arrived. In fact, the firemen were notably annoyed because it was a difficult fire to control, way away from fire hydrants and such. And they were probably called away from their own fireworks parties. Since the firemen and several police officers were down there in the woods, Dan didn’t fire any more rockets in their direction, though I honestly think he would have done just that if Agatha had not pleaded with him to stop. Obviously, Agatha had thought that through.

I spent many nights enjoying “sleepovers” at the Wax house. They had the biggest house in our neighborhood. It was huge, with rooms on rooms. It had a complete bar, for example, just about the same size as Francy’s Tavern in Holyoke. While I was friends with Merilee, I was very good friends with Bobby Wax. When I was about 8 years old, Bobby Wax had managed to discover his father’s pornography collection, hidden away in a big box in Mr. Wax’s closet. We pored over these magazines every time his parents were not around. I got some very early anatomy lessons from these pictures. Some of these magazines were what we would call today “hard core”. Bobby Wax told me he thought that what we were looking at had something to do with making babies. Of course, the people in these pictures were doing all sorts of things to each other, so it was hard to tell precisely what had to do with making babies, besides getting undressed. Maybe you had to do all of those things to make a baby.

Now this puzzled, indeed, troubled me no end. Naturally, I had asked my mother where babies came from, but she had told me that I was delivered by the mailman, and that satisfied me for several years. Our mailman delivered all sorts of things; why not babies? But after looking at Mr. Wax’s porno magazines, I began to have serious misgivings about the mailman. I knew my father had been away for a long time fighting in WWII …… Could it be???? …… One day about that time, our Welch Terrier dog, Joey, bit the mailman. This distressed my mother because she feared that we might have to put our dog to sleep if the mailman lodged a complaint. I remember thinking: “Probably served him right”. Well, I just hadn’t thought it through completely.

My First Friends

Martha & Jim Anwell

Me and Toby Chase, Halloween, 1952

Jerry Webb, Toby Chase & Dana Hathaway, Halloween, 1952

Millie Chase, my Mother and me, Mother's March of Dimes Campaign on WHYN, 1952



I spent most of my fourth year of life in the Polio Ward of the Holyoke Hospital, as related in an earlier writing. I spent the first part of my fifth year in the Physical Therapy Department of the Holyoke Hospital. So I really began my “social life” towards the end of my fifth year. That’s when I met my first friends, Toby Chase and Dana Hathaway.

Both boys were a year older than I was. More importantly, they were wiser in the ways of the world than I was. Since my “formative years” were spent battling back from disease, I was at a definite disadvantage when it came to life’s little competitions and such. Whenever the three of us got together, I was always the one on the bottom of the totem pole.

Let me give you an example. One day just before I entered kindergarten at the Highland Elementary School, the three of us were playing in Toby’s back yard when his mother, Millie Chase, had to leave for a moment. Millie Chase was a famous radio personality on our local WHYN radio station here in Holyoke, Mass. “Now you boys play nice and don’t get into any trouble; I’ll only be gone a little while.” She was no sooner out of sight when Toby bounded into the house and came out with his father’s BB air rifle. Toby had been unable to locate any real BB’s, though, so for some time we just had fun pumping it up and shooting it. But that got boring, so Toby went back into the house in search of the allusive BB’s. Again, he failed to find any. He came out instead with a hand full of Rice Krispies which he normally ate for breakfast. (remember “Snap, Crackle & Pop”?) Toby put the Rice Krispies into the rifle’s BB chamber and pumped it up. They then put one of Mr. Chase’s hats on my head and took turns trying to shoot it off my head.

Do you see what I mean by “low man on the totem pole.” Naturally, I would have preferred to shoot the hat off Toby’s head. Fat chance. But being a trooper, I just stood there with this hat on my head, waiting for the worst. Fortunately for me, the Rice Krispies were too soft to do any damage. In fact, they were too soft to shoot out of the gun at all. Since Toby and Dana couldn’t shoot the hat off my head at point blank range, we all gave up on the idea, and Toby quickly put the rifle back in his father’s closet. It was always like that when the three of us played together. I was always on the bottom. But we all had a lot of fun together anyway.

Toby’s mother, I now realize, must have held the view that to be “regular” meant to go to the bathroom at exactly the same time every day. This was very different than at my house, where we all went to the bathroom when nature told us to. We boys would be playing in the back yard, and Toby’s mother would come out and say “Toby, you have to go to the bathroom now.” And Toby would dutifully get up and go to the bathroom. I remember that this amazed me. How does she know? I would wonder. It really did puzzle me back then.

When I was six, Toby’s father, Mr. Chase (I believe his first name was Homer) took Toby and me to an auction. I had never been to an auction before, so the whole idea was very exciting. My mother gave me a dollar and suggested that, as my father’s birthday was coming up, I buy a present for him. Mr. Chase had us sit right in the front row. As the auctioneer put up the first item, he asked “Who will start the bidding at a dollar?” Mr. Chase nodded at me, and I quickly raised my hand. Well, of course, the bidding went on way past a dollar, and someone else bought the item. The second item was put up, and again I started the biding with a dollar. And again the bidding went flying past a dollar.

The auctioneer quickly found this humorous and started the bidding of everything by pointing to me as he asked for an opening bid of a dollar. I bid a dollar on every single item that came up for sale. And in every case, the bidding went right past a dollar. Hour after hour, my dollar sat restlessly in my pocket. It got late. The best items had all been sold. People started to leave. Mr. Chase wanted to leave. But I still had my dollar and no present for my dad. Finally, after most people had long gone, the auctioneer quickly put up an item, pointed directly at me and asked if I bid a dollar? “Yes”, I said. “I bid a dollar”. “SOLD!!!” shouted the auctioneer.

I was so excited. I handed in my dollar and proudly took away my purchase. Mr. Chase was happy too, because we finally could go home. My mother was happy and helped me wrap it. On my father’s birthday, I proudly gave it to him. And my father was happy and excited to receive it. Yes, he was. In fact, he kept that present for years and years. And no wonder. It was fifty feet of underground electric fence wire. Every father’s dream present! Of course, we didn’t have an electric fence on Montgomery Avenue in Holyoke at the time, so my present stayed in its box in the cellar. You see, we didn’t have horses back then. But my father was happy with his gift nevertheless. When we moved to South Hadley, he insisted on bringing the electric fence wire with us. By then, I was in college. We never had an electric fence in South Hadley, either. Well, that was understandable; we still didn’t have any horses.

My most vivid memory of my seventh year was Halloween. By then, Jerry Webb had joined our little band of friends. That year, for Halloween, Jerry Webb dressed as a dangerous hobo. We were all afraid of hobos because our parents told us that hobos walked the train tracks down by the river and were fond of kidnapping little boys like us. (That way, we were all too frightened to go near the RR tracks and the nearby Connecticut River.) Dana Hathaway got to go as a vicious pirate, complete with a sword, a black eye patch and a knife between his teeth. Toby Chase was dressed as a brave big game hunter, with a pith helmet and everything. He even got to carry his father’s BB gun. My mother dressed me as a woman! A woman? A gypsy woman at that. Talk about Low Man on the Totem Pole! What was my mother thinking about? I already was pudgy from her efforts to fatten me up from polio, and I already was handicapped with a bad arm. Now, I had to be gender confused?

Anyway, off into the night I went with my luckier friends to fill my bag with candy. Our first stop was the Anwell’s. Jim and Martha Anwell lived right across the street and were grand friends of my parents. Martha greeted us at her door, candy bowl in hand. But Mrs. Anwell was suddenly concerned that Toby seemed to be toting a “real” gun. “Oh, don’t worry, Mrs. Anwell”, said Toby, who pumped the gun a few times. “It isn’t loaded. Watch.” He then pointed the gun into Mrs. Anwell’s house and pulled the trigger. Remember the Rice Krispies? Well, Rice Krispies get hard after sitting out for a few years. Hard as, … well, as hard as BB’s. BLAM, and one of Mrs. Anwell’s hallway lamps jumped off a table onto the floor with a loud crash.

Martha Anwell marched all of us back across the street to my house where she shouted things at my surprised mother. In the end, Toby was made to leave the BB gun at my house, and we continued on into the night trick or treating. “My, what do we have here; ah, I see a dangerous hobo, and a blood thirsty pirate, and a reasonably brave, albeit gun-less big game hunter, and ah, ah, well, aren’t you adorable?” Adorable! Let me tell you, no seven year old boy wants to be adorable. At least, I didn’t. The trick or treat candy made up for it, I suppose.

Years later, there was a real shooting in our neighborhood, and that saga likewise ended on Halloween. Just down on North Pleasant Street was the Henry Noel residence. One night, when the Noels were in bed, they heard a noise down stairs. Mr. Noel got up, took his unloaded shotgun from his closet, and went down the stairs to frighten the burglar. Unfortunately, that’s just what he did; he frightened the burglar, who promptly shot Mr Noel quite dead on the stairs. The whole neighborhood was alarmed. Burglars in the night! In their own home while they were in bed! Who was safe?

Actually, there were nasty whisperings that Mr. Noel had caught his wife in bed with another man, whereby a fight broke out, and Henry got the worst of it. One way or another, Mrs. Noel was somehow excised from the neighborhood. Everyone simply avoided her. For example, she was not invited to the neighborhood 4th of July party, and nobody sang Christmas carols at her door on Christmas Eve. I was her paper boy at the time. One day, she stopped me as I “collected” from her, and she told me that she was having a grand Halloween party. She asked me to tell the entire neighborhood that everyone was invited. This I managed to do. And after our trick or treating, the entire neighborhood wound up at Mrs. Noel’s house. All the parents came as well, no doubt curious about what the fuss was about. What a party!!! Mrs. Noel had an entire living room full of treats for the kids; cakes, ice cream, sodas, cookies, candies. It was heaven. And she had beer, cocktails and such for the parents. Everyone had a terrific time, and from then on, Mrs. Noel was “back in” the neighborhood.

When I was eight, Mr. Chase died suddenly. I remember being absolutely confused about it. An eight year old has a very tenuous grasp on the concept of mortality. After the funeral, Millie Chase quickly moved away. I imagine, now, that she must have moved back to be with her own people after the sudden and unexpected death of her husband. I never saw Toby Chase again. I eventually lost contact with Jerry Webb and Dana Hathaway when I went away to college. I did bump into Jerry one evening at a concert at Mt. Holyoke College about fifteen years ago or so, but we didn’t get much of a chance to talk. I don’t think we could think of much to say to one another, really. So many years.

A short while ago, somebody told me that Dana Hathaway had died suddenly of something or other when he was only in his 50’s. I remember it gave me a very creepy feeling when I learned of Dana’s death. You see, I still have a rather tenuous grasp on the concept of mortality.

The Strawbridge family lived directly across the street from our house and next door to the Anwalls. Richard and Dorothy Strawbridge had two boys, David and Dick. Both were a few years older than I was, so we never really played together. I did get to “inherit” the Strawbridge brother’s discarded toys, as Mr. and Mrs. Strawbridge would give me these things for Christmas presents as their boys moved on to other interests. These were always great toys, really, and I always looked forward to the Strawbridge Christmas presents.

I remember one Strawbridge gift in particular, a chemistry set. It was a beauty. It had lots of little jars of chemicals and a book for doing experiments. My uncle Ralph was a professional chemist, and he looked over the experiment book and decided to contribute a little himself. He gave me some more chemicals in jars and a handwritten book of new experiments to try. Perhaps the most exciting of Ralph’s experiments involved putting sulfur crystals into a weak acid, which resulted in the production of hydrogen sulfide gas. Our cellar stank for days. You know, I suspect that my mother never really liked Uncle Ralph.

This experience did teach me a valuable chemistry lesson, though, which I was able to put to good use later when I was in prep school. One day during my sophomore year, when nobody was looking, I put a Coca-Cola cap full of lemon juice under the bed of the student next door. I then hung a string with a crystal of sulfur (that I snuck out of the chemistry lab) under his mattress springs so that the sulfur dangled just above the lemon juice. Nothing happened, of course, until the lad got into bed after “lights out”, and the mattress springs sagged a bit under his weight. My roommate and I could hardly contain ourselves as we heard them arguing next door. “You’re disgusting! What did you have for dinner, a dead rat?” “What do you mean me; it’s not me – it’s you!!!” And so on. It was terrific, though ultimately the entire dorm had to be evacuated and aired out before we could return to bed. I learned later on that hydrogen sulfide gas is actually a fairly lethal poison, but young boys don’t consider those little details. Of course, that didn’t seem to bother my Uncle Ralph much either, and he was a grown man at the time. A chemist, no less.

Another Strawbridge Christmas present was David’s and Dick’s magic kit. It had many wonderful tricks. I used to practice for hours making pennies disappear and dimes appear in their place and so on. One day, as I returned from school, my mother was entertaining her bridge club. “Show us a few tricks, Bobby”, my mother said. I went upstairs and brought down my magic kit. I performed a few tricks successfully, and then I attempted my famous “tape measure” trick. The tape measure trick consisted of a very “special” tape measure. It looked normal enough, but it had several hidden snaps along its length, and it had special Bobbie Pins at each end. Where Bobbie Pins normally spring out and are locked into place, these Bobbie Pins sprang in and fit into a simple grove. Theoretically, they pulled right out when you yanked on them.

I called for a volunteer, and one of my mother’s bridge friends stepped forward. I appeared to wrap the tape measure around her (but I simply hooked the snaps behind her instead of actually wrapping the tape around her). I then “pinned” the tape to the front of her blouse with the special Bobbie Pins. A few “Abra-Kadabras”, a quick wave of my magic wand, and I suddenly yanked the tape from my mother’s friend. But the trick failed, somehow. The snaps worked perfectly, but the pins didn’t slide off as they were supposed to, and I summarily ripped the entire front of the poor lady’s blouse right clean off, which just for a moment revealed her “unrevealables” before she ran screaming for the bathroom. Quite the memorable moment, that! Well, some things you just never forget. In any event, it ended my magic show. In fact, as I recall, it ended the bridge party. To tell the whole truth, it ended my career as a magician altogether. My mother certainly never asked me to perform again.

There was an elderly woman named Edith Murlless who lived next door to the Strawbridges. She was a wonderful old lady, and my mother frequently encouraged me to visit her. Mrs. Murlless had an extraordinary collection of antique glass paper weights that she kept in a large glass case. She was always prepared with cookies or a piece of cake or something, which, of course, I appreciated; just another cog in the everlasting struggle against thinness. I never gave it much thought as a kid, but I later learned that her husband, Dr. Charles Murlless had passed away in 1951. He had been a local dentist in Holyoke for years. I never met Dr. Murlless. Mrs. Murlless must have been very lonely, as they had been married for many, many years. That was no doubt why my mother was always sending me over there to chat. But actually, I really liked Mrs. Murlless, and I never minded going to see her. She always had a cheerful smile and was always happy to see me. And, of course, there was always the cookie or piece of cake. She apparently had no children or grandchildren of her own. None that I can remember, anyway. Mrs. Murlless was always alone and always happy to receive company, even if it was an eight year old kid. I can’t recall anyone else in the entire neighborhood having anything to do with Mrs. Murlless. Certainly the good Dr.’s patients never gave her a second thought. But that’s dentistry for you, I suppose.

Next to Mrs. Murlless was the Twing’s house. Kirby Twing and his family were all interesting folks and great friends, but that is the stuff for another story……..

Polio

Mother's March of Dimes Poster Picture. I am handing Phil Ryan, the Postmaster of Holyoke, MA a check from the campaign. Taken in 1950. I was only out of the hospital 1 year.

My earliest memory of my childhood is throwing up in my grandfather’s car. My grandfather (and my name sake, Robert Knox) had recently had a heart attack and was told to rest. So he spent a lot of time with me, having virtually raised me for the first several years of my life because my father was off fighting in WWII. I remember that I was very upset, as my grandfather used to take great pride in cleaning and polishing his car, and I had summarily yapped all over the backseat. This was the first sign that I had contracted polio. To be more specific, I had come down with Paralytic Poliomyelitis – also called “Infantile Paralysis. It was the summer of 1949, and I was four years old.

Right off the bat, it should be said that doctors in those days knew next to nothing about the disease. They had only vague ideas about what caused polio or how it was spread. They had even fewer ideas on how to treat it. They did note that the majority of cases struck very young children, but they had no idea why. The disease was first described by Michael Underwood in 1789, though “indications” of the disease date back to Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was confirmed as a virus in 1909 by Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper; they also confirmed two significant facts about polio: it was definitely contagious, somehow traveling between one host to another -- and – an initial infection conferred immunity to further infections.

Polio came in waves or epidemics. It first appeared as a disease to be reckoned with in Europe in the early 1800’s. Stockholm, Sweden suffered major outbreaks in 1887, 1905, and 1911. The first recorded outbreak in the USA occurred in Vermont in 1894. Slowly the disease picked up steam; the epidemic of 1916 left 6,000 dead and 27,000 disabled in New York State alone. There were outbreaks throughout the USA after that, occurring every few years. The lowest number of cases during the war years was 4, 167 (1940). My year, 1949, was a bad year with 42, 003 cases nation-wide. But the worst year was 1952 when a whopping 58,000 cases of paralytic polio occurred in the USA. Worldwide, the numbers went into the millions.

While doctors knew that the disease was caused by a virus, they knew little else. Most importantly, they did not know how the virus was transmitted from person to person. All kinds of theories abounded. A goodly percentage of kids growing up in the 1940s – 1950s never learned to swim because it was feared that the virus could hop from one kid to another through the water in swimming pools. Initially, there was a real stigma of having contracted the disease. Years ago, I met a women who became sick with polio around the time that I came down with the disease. She and her family had been living in the flats in south Holyoke. But when her father realized that she had polio, the entire family left their home in the middle of the night and secretly took residence in a house in South Hadley Falls. Her presence there was kept a secret for years, as the family feared that neighbors would “run them out of town” if they found out that a polio victim was living in their house. In my case, I was isolated from the rest of society for almost my entire 4th year in the Polio Ward at the Holyoke Hospital. To my knowledge, all the patients there were kids. The Polio Ward was a restricted area in the hospital. Only parents and health care givers were allowed in, and then only for short visits. It was considered highly dangerous for people to enter this ward. My parents were always grateful for the nurses and doctors who cared for the polio victims; it was understood that they were taking their life in their own hands just by walking into that room.

During that year in the hospital, I became progressively weaker. Eventually, almost my entire body was paralyzed. At one point, I was having difficulty swallowing and had to be fed through a tube. It was feared that my chest muscles would fail, making it impossible for me to breathe, so an “iron lung” was put next to my bed in case I started to suffocate. Thankfully, I never needed it. And boy, I mean “thankfully”! When you went into an iron lung, only your head and feet protruded from this huge, diving bell like apparatus. Few people who went into an iron lung ever came out. It was a life sentence of lying on your back while a machine breathed for you. But my chest muscles kept on working when just about every other muscle group simply stopped functioning. This was no small mercy. I have always been grateful for my chest muscles. Nice going, guys!!

The word poliomyelitis is derived from the Greek “polio” which means “grey” and “myelon” which means “marrow”. In other words, poliomyelitis is a disease of the Grey Marrow, which was taken to mean the spinal column. It is now understood that the polio virus was extremely common. Just about everyone was exposed to this virus as a child. Most kids weren’t even aware when the virus entered their bodies; their immune system simply “flushed” it out through their intestines. AND, this momentary ‘brush” with the killer gave them permanent immunity from the virus for the rest of their lives. In a very few cases, the virus managed to enter the victim’s blood stream, causing general flu like symptoms of fever and so on for a week or two. And in probably less than 1% of those cases where the virus entered the blood, it also managed to get into the central nervous system, where it traveled down the spinal column destroying motor neurons as it moved along. It is still not known why some few kids came down with full blown paralytic polio while the vast majority of kids didn’t even break a sweat. By the time most people entered their teenage and adult years, they had long since had their little run in with the polio virus and thereby obtained their lifetime “Get Out of Jail Free Card”.

Of course, there were always exceptions. Probably the best known was Franklin D. Roosevelt who contracted paralytic polio after he was married. The polio virus was particularly dangerous to adults who had not been exposed to the virus as a child. Ironically, modern sanitation has the potential of making us even more vulnerable to polio. It was frequently known as the Disease of Development. Why you might well ask? In areas of poor sanitation, virtually all kids are exposed to the virus, and most kids can defeat the virus with their own immune system. However, for kids living in the developed nations that have excellent public sanitation, natural exposure to the virus is less frequent, leading to the potential for more cases of adult on-set polio, like FDR.

It is now known that the polio virus traveled from host to host via what is called the “anal-fecal-oral route”........ Geese, Louise!!!!! Talk about piling on insult after injury!! “You know, Bobby, you were a strange little baby. Just as soon as you could crawl about on your hands and knees, you took an intense, even obsessive interest in the bottoms of other babies. This behavior embarrassed your mother and positively alarmed your father. But the doctors said it was just a phase, and that you’d grow out of it…….” No, it didn’t mean that at all. No doubt the majority of infections came simply because someone infected with the virus went to the bathroom and then did not wash and sanitize their hands before they handled food that others were going to consume. Still another pretty yucky thought, if you ask me.

There were three distinct types of paralytic polio. Some 70% of the cases were Type 1 or “Spinal Polio”. Type 1 polio almost always involved permanent paralysis, which was usually asymmetrical (meaning, for example, that one arm would be paralyzed and the other arm left unharmed.) Spinal Polio most frequently affected the patient’s legs. Type 2, Bulbar Polio occurred in some 2% of the cases and was considered to be the most dangerous and life threatening because it attacked the trunk – what today we would call a person’s core. Type 3 polio was a combination of the first two, called Bulbospinal Polio. Naturally, that’s what I had. This generally meant some sort of asymmetrical paralysis and the real possibility of dying because of “core shutdown”. Yup, Type 3 Bulbospinal Polio was the pick of the litter, no doubt about it.

In fact, I was on the Holyoke Hospital’s “Danger List” for just over nine months. When I came out of the Polio Ward, I was almost completely paralyzed, but with daily intense physical therapy that took place during my entire 5th year, I regained the use of most muscles that had been lost. By the time I entered school in my 6th year, I was only left with extensive paralysis in my upper right arm and shoulder, some general weakness in my right lower arm and hand as well as some fairly minor loss of my trunk muscles, which has led, over the years, to degenerative disc disease and substantial curvature of the spine. The good news was: my left arm and both my legs, indeed everything else in my body was just fine.

I have only vague memories of the Polio Ward at the Holyoke Hospital. Of course, I was just a little guy. I do remember the “hot packs”. There was a theory at the time that the virus was sensitive to heat, so the nurses would strap these electric, wool blankets all over my body, wet them with water and crank up the heat to “drive that awful bug away.” Hot packs had a peculiar smell, like burning hair. The heat was terrible, the wool was scratchy … ah, yes, I remember the hot packs all right. I remember that I could look out the window and see cars going up and down Hospital Drive; and occasionally, I could pick out my parents’ car as they drove away. It was scary for a little boy to see his parents driving away into the night, but the nurses were grand and made me feel like I wasn’t completely lost.

Oddly enough, my most vivid memory of the Polio Ward had to do with the floor. The Hospital had “linoleum” flooring, which was quite new for its day. Anyway, it was new to me. I had only seen wood floors with rugs. I was fascinated by the swirling colors that almost seemed to be three dimensional, and I spent hours lying in my hospital bed wondering what it would be like to walk on that floor. The nurses picked up on this desire and used it as a carrot; “Do all your exercises, and someday you will get strong enough to walk on this floor”. It became my most important goal in life. And I distinctly remember my excitement when my parents told me that I could go home the very next day. All I could think of was, “I’m going to walk on the floor”. But the next day, they wrapped me up in sheets and carried me out of the hospital (screaming all the way, mind you). One day, when I was in my 30’s, I suddenly remembered this “unfulfilled” wish. I spoke with Harold Pine, the Hospital president at the time. Harold did a little research and found out exactly what room I was in. This was in the “old” section of the Hospital, and the floors had never been changed. So Harold and I had a grand old time walking about on that silly floor together. I know Harold thought it was all very amusing. I am sure he had no inkling of what it meant to me.

My father was quite slender most of his life, and I was a slender baby. However, polio had made me dangerously thin. As my parents took me home, the doctors pulled my mother aside and stressed the importance of my gaining some weight. So my mother set out to “fatten me up”. I think it’s safe to say that she succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. But beyond getting lots of ice cream and such, that first year out of the hospital was difficult for everybody. For me, it meant arm and leg braces and endless exercises in physical therapy. On top of all this, my parents were constantly telling me how “lucky” I was. Of course, they were happy I was still alive, but a young boy frequently overlooks that basic blessing. That year began a major struggle between my mother, on the one side, and everyone else (my father, my grandmother, the doctors, etc) on the other side of the issue of how much help I should get from adults in getting through the basics of life. My mother hated to see me suffer, and she hated to see me frustrated, so her approach was to keep me in bed, or at least tight by her side and to virtually do everything for me. The doctors and my father kept warning her that if she insisted on doing even the simplest things, like getting me dressed, she would ultimately have a real, life time invalid on her hands. So she had to stand there and watch me battle zippers and buttons and such with one arm. But gradually, I learned how to do these things by myself.

The battle continued over the question of my being allowed to go “outside” the house on my own. I had no memory of ever being “outside” alone. “He’s not ready”, my mother would sob. “Sure he is” would be my father’s reply. At that point, both parents were looking at the calendar, wondering if I would be ready to start school when I turned 6 years old, like everyone else. So one day, I (with my mother fidgeting nearby) bundled myself up in a snowsuit which took about an hour. The front door was opened for me because the stupid snowsuit was so stiff, I could hardly move at all. I stepped forward, and my mother tearfully shut the door behind me. “Go make some friends”, was my father’s advice. I didn’t find any new friends, but within the hour, I had somehow managed to fall off a high wall, landing on the pavement below on my head, which promptly fractured my skull. This, of course, confirmed my mother’s worse fears. But the struggle continued, and, as it turned out, I did enter kindergarten that next fall. And I did make friends, just like my father suggested.

As a school child, I certainly had issues with “anger management”. Sports were hard for me, and I was always self-conscious about my arm, which hung uselessly at my side. I was the “ground” lookout when the neighborhood kids built a tree fort, because, with one arm, I was never confident climbing trees. Many sports I was terrible at, but I would never concede that fact. For example, I was “unbalanced”, really, so I could only turn in one direction when ice skating. Believe me, if you can only turn in one direction (to the right, it turned out), you don’t make a really great hockey player. Nevertheless, I played hockey all throughout my adolescent years. Special rules were made for me when we played sandlot football. I caught and threw both with my left hand playing baseball, which required me to catch the ball, take off my baseball glove and throw, not the greatest system ever when some kid is running like hell for 3rd base. Tossing the tennis ball for the serve was always tricky for me. With golf, my handicap never got in my way, and I was able to play pretty competitively for years. Likewise, my handicap had no affect on my playing soccer. But I was terrible at basketball, and slowly had to concede that basketball wasn’t going to be my sport. And all though this, my parents kept telling me how lucky I was. Sometimes, I will confess, it was difficult for me to see good fortune in all this.

Through all these trials and tribulations, I was always willing to torture my poor mother with constant whining and complaining. I am sure my mother suffered from “Mother’s Guilt” about my polio. As my mother, it was her job to keep me safe, and if something terrible got through her shields and hurt me, it was somehow her fault. Whining and complaining would almost always land me some kind of treat. And, of course, these “treats” generally helped me in my lifelong battle against being thin.

Yup, whining and complaining and asking why I was paralyzed and other kids were not worked just about every time….until one day, that is. One fateful day, I griped just a tad too much about being handicapped. My mother exploded, and the next day, I was kept out of school and taken to a Long Term Care Facility for polio patients. Most of the patients were kids my age. One or two of them had been in the Polio Ward of the Holyoke Hospital when I was there. All had handicaps so profound as to make any kind of life outside an institution impossible. Many of the kids had no use of any of their arms or legs. Virtually everything had to be done for them. They couldn’t even hold their heads up straight. Many had lost control of their facial muscles and drooled on themselves continuously. And many were confined 24/7 to a breathing device. It absolutely amazed me that they all seemed good natured about their circumstances and happy to be alive at all. That did it. I never complained to my mother again. Mind you I can still feel that old rage brewing up, from time to time. Trying to nail a nail over my head can do it instantly. But that day at the institute for polio patients made me realize that my parent’s constant litany that I was “lucky” was profoundly true. And I learned as well that there are things worse than school.

Alas, my troubles may not be over just yet. As early as 1875, it was noted in the medical literature that some paralytic polio patients can experience new muscle weakness and atrophy many years after the initial infection, often involving parts of the body that escaped paralysis during the initial infection. This secondary paralysis has become known as Post Polio Syndrome (PPS). What could account for this phenomenon? Several theories have been advanced.

Theory 1. Like AIDS, syphilis and other viruses, polio can somehow remain dormant in the body, often times for decades. Then something occurs to activate the virus, and “new” damage is done. This theory has been largely discredited, though scientists cannot rule out the possibility that there is some validity to it.

Theory 2. When polio first struck, nerves were wiped out, resulting in paralysis. However, with intense physical therapy, new nerve tissue, called “Axonal Sprouts” developed, affectively reconnecting the muscles to the brain. The growth of Axonal Sprouts can result in regaining movement and control where it had been lost. The problem is, Axonal Sprouts are not as robust as normal nerves, and they ware out with use over time. As these Axonal Sprouts deteriorate, new paralysis occurs.

Frankly, I’m not too fond of either theory. And these two theories produce very different recommendations as to how to avoid PPS. With theory 1, a person should stay in absolutely the fittest condition possible, exercising vigorously and daily in order to keep the virus dormant. Theory 2, on the other hand, would suggest rest, or in any event, finding ways to take stress off of muscle groups. To make matters worse, current research is troubling. The most conservative estimates indicate that polio survivors have a 25% chance of getting some form of PPS before they die. The most common estimate is that 70% of polio victims will experience PPS. Symptoms of PPS include inordinate fatigue, new muscle weakness, muscle pain, muscle twitching, sleeping difficulties, breathing difficulties, decreased tolerance to cold, joint pain, and in the end, an inability to carry on life’s activities. Of course, now that I know, I am experiencing all of these things all of the time! Actually, to tell the truth, I generally don’t think about PPS at all. There’s nothing I can do about it. It will or it will not occur.

As mentioned earlier, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) contracted paralytic polio in 1929. The actual extent of his handicap was kept from the American people. Basically, his legs were both completely paralyzed. In 1938, FDR helped create the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis. This group started an annual fundraising campaign called “The Mother’s March of Dimes”, which poured money into research to come up with a vaccine. My mother was the Holyoke Coordinator for our local March of Dimes, and I was the “poster-boy”. Pictures of me, in full leg braces (which I didn’t need so never wore) and an arm brace (which I hadn’t used since I was 5) appeared all throughout our area. Nationwide, the March of Dimes raised millions to develop the miracle that everyone yearned for – a vaccine which would prevent polio.

And in 1954, Jonas Salk of South Africa announced the first human trials of such a vaccine. Salk’s vaccine was based on first culturing and then killing wild polio virus, which then had to be injected into the blood (because one’s stomach would destroy the vaccine before it could develop antibodies in one’s system.) Salk himself refused to patent his vaccine; it was his gift to the world. Salk’s vaccine, called Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV) had several wonderful features. It could not lead to the recipient’s contracting polio, because the virus was completely dead. Likewise, it could not revert back to “wild” polio virus. But it had a few shortcomings. It did not confer lifetime immunity with one inoculation; some “booster” shots would be required. And most serious from a public health point of view, it had to be injected by a trained (and expensive) healthcare provider.

Research continued. In fact, there were many efforts competing to be the first to discover a vaccine which could be taken orally and would give a person protection for life. The two principle scientists working on this were Dr. Hilary Koprowki and Dr. Albert Sabin, who, like Jonas Salk, were working in Africa. Africa? Why Africa? Because the culturing process, which is the initial phase of any manufacture of a vaccine had to use “primate” tissues (mostly livers), and they have a lot of primates in Africa. Dr. Koprowki was first to announce an oral vaccine, and his vaccine was given to thousands of people in the Belgium Congo between 1957 and 1960. But after a few years, Dr. Koprowki’s vaccine was withdrawn from use. Lately, a journalist named Edward Hooper has made the claim that this “pre-mature” inoculation of thousands of Africans actually introduced AIDS into the human race, because Koprowki’s vaccine was cultivated on chimpanzee livers and was contaminated with SIV, or simian immunodeficiency virus, the immediate precursor to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). It should be said that Hooper’s theory has many detractors, not the least is Dr. Hilary Koprowki himself. In any event, Dr. Sabin introduced his oral vaccine (OPC) in 1957, and after exhaustive clinical trials and studies, OPC was introduced into world health organizations for general use in 1962, and has become the “gold standard” for polio vaccine.

Because OPC is taken orally, it can be administered by the village dog catcher. Well, ok…. But it doesn’t have to be given as an injection by a licensed nurse. On a global scale, that is a huge difference in cost. And, unlike IPV, it gives one a lifetime protection from polio in one series of treatments. Of course, nothing is simple. OPC is not killed virus, so it can, in the rare case, actually give a child full blown paralytic polio. Talk about unintended consequences. Perhaps even more troubling, on a global scale, OPC can revert back to “wild” polio, making absolute eradication seem theoretically impossible. Hmmmm. Those are some drawbacks alright. Not surprisingly, there is sharp disagreement within the medical and scientific community. Many argue that despite the big differences in cost, only IPV vaccine should be used.

As a result of wide spread immunization in the schools, polio has slowed to a trickle in the "Western" developed countries. The last known case of “wild” polio in the USA was in 1972; the last case of “wild” polio in our hemisphere was in Peru in 1991. Worldwide, however, the statistics are much grimmer. The truth is many poor and developing countries have not been immunizing their children. All throughout the 1980’s, for example, cases of “wild” polio rarely fell below ½ million cases/year.

In 1959, the World Health Organization, an arm of the United Nations, launched a unique and pioneering campaign to literally eradicate the disease smallpox from the planet. Smallpox was a promising target for several reasons. First, the virus that caused smallpox could only live and reproduce in humans. Moreover, a single dose of smallpox vaccine confers lifelong immunity. This campaign was declared a success in 1980, and there have been zero cases of wild virus smallpox since then. With that monumental success in hand, in 1985, the International Rotary Foundation announced Polio Plus, a global initiative aimed at nothing less than the complete eradication of the polio virus from the earth. In 1988, Rotary International was joined by the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a world wide effort called the “Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Since that time, hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised, and hundreds of millions of inoculations have been administered around the world. The original goal was to wipe out wild polio completely by 2005.

The initial philosophy was simple to understand: every child in the world was to receive the full course of inoculations needed to confer life time immunity. Like smallpox, the polio virus can only survive in human hosts. If every single person in the world was inoculated, the virus would have nowhere to hide. In practice, the Initiative employed four key elements:
a. Routinely immunize every child in the world four times during the first year of life.
And the children were to be immunized for 6 major childhood diseases along side
immunization from polio.
b. Establish National Immunization Days (NID’s) in key countries where wild polio still
exists.
c. Establish a worldwide surveillance system so that no case of wild polio would go
unreported.
d. In the end, deploy house to house teams that would fan out around the globe to pick
up any children missed by the NID’s. Thousands of Rotarians throughout the world have
dropped out of their day jobs and volunteered to travel into the world’s politically most
dangerous places to personally administer the vaccine to children overlooked by the
NID’s.

By 2001, over a half a billion children were immunized in 94 countries. All in all, some 2 billion doses have been administered. As a result, the number of “polio endemic” countries fell from 20 to 10 and the geographical area of infections within these “endemic” countries has been sharply reduced. But political struggles and local wars have complicated these efforts. Not surprisingly, the “high intensity transmission areas where 85% of reported cases occur include Northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Anyone interested in hopping over to Afghanistan to administer polio vaccine to little children? Low intensity transmission areas which account for 15% of reported cases are in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola and Egypt. But even here, the numbers are small. Type 2 wild polio virus has not been recorded anywhere in the world since 1999, and type 3 has been isolated only in India, Pakistan, Somalia and Nigeria. There are still countries at risk. Congo, Chad, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Madagascar and Mozambique have reported no actual cases BUT have low immunization rates and poor public sanitation. Overall, the numbers of reported cases (and reporting has greatly improved) has dropped like a stone. Worldwide, in 1988 (just as Rotary was kicking off its Polio Plus program), there were an estimated 500,000 cases. In 1999, that number had dropped to less than 20,000; in 2001, less than 500 confirmed transmissions were reported.

Absolute worldwide eradication continues to be an allusive goal. There are many factors, including the ironic fact that the OPV vaccine can actually induce cases of polio and can revert back to “wild” polio. But by any standard, Polio Plus has been a global success story on a grand scale. Think of it. Down to only a few hundred cases per year from 500,000 worldwide before Rotary International kicked off their Polio Plus program! That is a whole lot of little arms and legs and chests that will not be rendered useless by this terrible disease! Every Rotarian throughout the world should be proud of this incredible result.

Dr. Arthur Lyman Kinney

Dr. Kinney at the marriage of his daughter, Transcript Telegram, 1951





When I was a young lad, I outgrew my pediatrician, and my parents began taking me to Dr. Arthur Lyman Kinney, an older doctor who was, at that time, actually about to retire from practice altogether. Dr. Kinney had practiced in Holyoke virtually all his adult life. He was a memorable doctor. How can you forget a doctor who asked you to say "ah" while a cigar sat smoldering at its station on the table next to you? For years, Dr. Kinney held forth in his office in town in Holyoke, MA, but in his later years, Dr. Kinney saw his patients at his home office.

And I remember Dr. Kinney's home office. It was a small but airy and light room with a pleasant view of the Connecticut River. It had a beautiful oriental rug and a fine leather topped desk. However, Dr.Kinney's office was not overly dominated by medical equipment. In fact, except for a small white table containing his tongue depressors, stethoscope, Q-tips, and eye, nose and ear thingie, Dr. Kinney's office was simply a pleasant study, suitable for a professor of Chaucer, or mediaeval tapestries or something. In fact, medicine vied for space with Dr. Kinney's "other passion" - stamp collecting. A table facing the window invariably contained stamp books, tongs, hinges, magnifying glasses, reference books - all telltale signs of a fanatic philatelist.

Over the years, Dr. Kinney obviously became philosophical about medicine. In one incident, my father went to Dr. Kinney with a bad cold. After an examination, Dr. Kinney said, "Frank" he said, "you have a bad cold, and it's a good thing you came to me. Under my care, you'll be over this thing in 2 weeks, whereas, if you'd gone to one of those younger doctors, it would have taken you a fortnight to recover".

Indeed, by today's standards, Dr. Kinney may well have been more of a philosopher than a physician. I am sure that Dr. Kinney would have been more than a tad uneasy in today's world of medicine. Cat scans, complex hip replacements, laser surgery, fiber optics and interferon drugs were not rummaging around in Dr. Kinney's little black bag, worn smooth and cracked red at the hinges. I am convinced that with today's techniques and advancements, if you are ill or injured, today's doctors can run rings around anything Dr.Kinney could do for you. So why do I long for the days of Dr. Kinney?

Well, in part, it has to do with the suffering of uncertainty. When you went to Dr. Kinney, he told you what was wrong with you and what to do about it: either you got better or you didn't. One way or another, you had done your part. You had gone to the best around, and it was in Dr.Kinney's hands - or the Lord's.

Today, medical knowledge is so complex, so fractured, with such an onslaught of research, knowledge, new techniques, new treatments, that doctors are understandably hesitant to pronounce absolute, definitive diagnosis and prognosis. And in a time of unbelievable malpractice suits, this hesitancy is simply enhanced to a complete unwillingness to be specific, to be the final word, to take the responsibility - "this is what you have-period". I maintain that this situation leads to a further dimension of suffering: not only do you have what you have, but you are always left with the feeling that you could be doing more to get well. With Dr. Kinney, he told you what was what, whether he actually knew or not. He never inflicted on his patients the further pain of uncertainty.

Another "cost" of the modern world of medical specialization is the inevitable de-personalization. Patients went to Dr. Kinney for everything; he got to know the "whole you", knew everything about you. You knew you were a real person to Dr. Kinney, and after the exam, the talk, the shot of penicillin, you might even get a peek at his one cent un-cancelled Washington. Today, as you are passed from one doctor to another, this sense of being fully understood as a person as well as a body has diminished. Doctors I know may bristle at this, but I believe it is so.

Let me illustrate my point. An acquaintance of mine had to go to the hospital for complete “lower GI exams”. Awaiting the results, she feared the worst: she could be told that she had colitis or even cancer. As it turned out, the news was good, but came in the form of a form which stated:

"Colon --- Unremarkable".

Her feelings were hurt! Older folks who had doctors like Dr. Kinney will understand my point. I simply cannot envision Dr. Kinney, stripping off his examining gloves, turning with that craggy smile, one eye closed, and saying,

"Yes, my dear - thoroughly unremarkable."

Indeed !!

Dr. Kinney knew how to treat his patients - and he knew how to treat a lady.

Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner

Photo of Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of the C.I.A. from 1953–1961.




I strongly believe that every American should read a book entitled “Legacy of Ashes” by Pulitzer Prize winner, Tim Weiner. Want to know why? The following is a brief outline of the covert operations of the CIA during the decade 1953-1963 as distilled from that book. I present this little outline here just as an appetizer.

1. 1953. US, with British help, unseated the duly elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq and installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as the “Shah” of Iran. The Shah was a virtual dictator and “our guy” in the middle east for 30 years. He ruled Iran through the SAVAK, a brutal secret police trained by the CIA.

2. 1954. “Operation Success”. US virtually created a military coup to oust President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala and installed Carlos Castillo Armas. The coup was originally very weak, requiring actual direct bombing by the US to succeed. It led to forty years of military rulers, death squads and armed repression.

3. 1954. Japan. Despite the fact that Nobusuke Kishi was a war criminal who has signed the declaration of war against the US, the CIA “rescued” him from prison and installed him as Prime Minister (1957) and chief of the ruling party that held power in Japan for nearly half a century, through continuous CIA payoffs that the Japanese called “kozo oshoku”, or “structural corruption”.

4. 1953. USA puts Gamal Abdel Nasser in power in Egypt in a military coup bankrolled by the USA. But Nasser proved unwilling to take orders from the US. In 1956, Nasser went so far as to nationalize the Suez Canal.

5. During the Eisenhower years, the CIA delivered guns, money and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon and President Nuri Said of Iraq, successfully placing them in power.“Our guy” in Iraq, Nuri Said was overthrown by his military led by General Abdel Karim Quasim who went public with proof of CIA control of his country. We responded by backing a successful coup in Iraq and installed the ruling Baath Party under Ali Saleh Saadi. Eventually, we supported the take over of the Baath party by a young assassin named Saddam Hussein.

6. We supported the independence of Indonesia from the Dutch and helped President Sukarno take office; that is, until it was discovered that Indonesia had some 20 billion barrels of untapped oil. Sukarno by this time wanted to be “unaligned”, tied neither to the USA or the Soviets. In fact, Sukarno called a conference in of 29 Asian, African and Arab leaders to Indonesia and proposed a global movement of unaligned nations. This set off a 10 year “war” to unseat him, which, of course, forced him closer to Moscow. And the war proved difficult, as most of the senior officers in the Indonesian armed forces were trained in the US. And were loyal to Sukarno. Despite bombings and naval operations, Sukarno defeated all rebel and American forces sent against him. Years later, the CIA supported General Suharto who led an insurrection which killed some 500,000 people, according to Marshal Green, the American ambassador. Whole villages were “depopulated”. Green was to later lie before a Congressional committee and stated that the CIA had nothing to do with the uprising. In the coming years, the military junta jailed more than one million people.

7. On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba, defeating the hopelessly corrupt dictator, Betista with substantial help from the CIA. In fact, in April – May that same year, Castro came to America for meetings with the CIA in Washington. But Castro proved difficult to control, so American policy quickly changed to “eliminating” him; this included an embargo which has almost starved the people of Cuba to death, the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs and various efforts to assassinate him, including a Mafia contract put out by the CIA’s Dick Bissell. He has just now relinquished power to his brother due to poor health, remaining alive and in power for almost 50 years, despite all efforts of the USA to kill him or otherwise remove him from power.

8. 1960. Patrice Lumumba was freely elected after the Congo expelled the Belgians, who had brutally ruled the Congo as a colony. When the Belgian paratroopers returned to reassert Belgium rule, Lumumba appealed to the US for help. This was denied, so Lumumba turned to Moscow for help. Thus, the CIA set out to kill him and replace him with “our man”, Joseph Mobutu. After a 5 year struggle, Mobutu came to power with the unwavering support of the CIA. He ruled for three decades as a brutal and corrupt dictator, stealing billions of dollars from his nation’s deposits of diamonds, minerals and slaughtering thousands to preserve his power. For that entire time, he was our “go to guy” in Africa, enjoying continuous American support.

9. The US brought Generalissimo Rafeal Trujillo to power in the Dominican Republic where he ruled for 30 years. He ruled by “force, fraud and fear, taking pleasure in hanging his enemies from meat hooks”. But he kept law and order, got the trains to run on time, etc. He was our kind of guy. Finally, under Kennedy, Trujillo became too much of an embarrassment, so the CIA had him killed. Chaos ensued as rioting in the streets of the capital broke out. The CIA claimed that the rioters were actually Cuban agents, and on that pretext, President Johnson sent in thousands of marines.

10. 1962; The American government spent millions of dollars to push Joao Goulart from power in Brazil and replace him with a military junta.

11. With American military and financial aid, Francois “Papa Doc” Dubalier came to power in Haiti. Papa Doc was a fanatically corrupt and violent dictator, a real mad man who ruled Haiti for years.

12. In 1953, Cheddi Jagan became the prime minister of British Guiana under the British colonial constitution. He was twice re-elected, visiting the oval office to meet with Kennedy in 1961. Almost immediately after that meeting, the CIA opened a covert operation to drive Jagan from power. It was know that he had a Marxist wife from Chicago (Jagan himself was an American educated dentist), and that was enough despite Jagan’s pledge that he was not going to hand Guyana to the Russians. At the time that this covert operation was started, Kennedy approved covert operations to overthrow the governments of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Pakistan, Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala and Venezuela. So much for Camelot!

13. In 1962, under Kennedy’s orders, the CIA’s Lucien Conein led an assassination effort that killed President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Diem was a Christian in a largely Buddhist country. We had put Diem in power and kept him there with millions of dollars. This, like our taking out Saddam Husain, let loose chaos in South Vietnam, which ultimately led to full out war, costing American thousands of lives and handing the USA it’ first ever military defeat.

14. In response to the North Vietnamese cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos, the CIA brought suitcases of cash to bear, which forced out the freely elected coalition government and installed Prince Souvanna Phouma, whose CIA case officer was a young Yale graduate named Campbell James who saw himself as the viceroy in Laos. The CIA poured millions more into arming commando forces called The Hmong commanded by a mountain tribesman named Vang Pao and overtly attempted to start a hot war in Loas.

15. In Thailand, the US overturned the local government and established a military/police state. The head of the national police, supported by the CIA, was “an opium king”, and the military commander controlled Bangkok’s whorehouses. Thailand remained under military dictatorship for more than a decade, ruled under martial law. Even after elections were called, the CIA dumped many millions of dollars more to fix the elections and keep the same junta in power.

This is just a ten year period in the history of the CIA. Weiner’s book goes on to describe just this sort of activity up to the present. Like I said. I think every American should read this book.

Dinosaurs in Massachusetts

Plenny Moody was plowing his father's fields when he uncovered some imprints in the bed rock below the top soil which caught his attention. Being a hunter, as all New England farmers were, in 1802, he understood them as "tracks"; being a good hunter, he understood them to be the foot prints of bird tracks - he considered them to be giant turkey tracks; being a good New Englander, he figured that people should pay to see them. His commercial success is unrecorded, but his "find" of fossilized footprints was the first discovery (or at least recognition) of dinosaur footprints recorded in the entire world, at Moody Corners in South Hadley, MA.

These tracks in the rock were a mere curiosity until the_1830's when Edward Hitchock, LL.D. took an interest in them. Dr. Hitchock was a remarkable man; during his career, he was principal of Deerfield Academy, an Episcopal minister and pastor of a church in Conway, professor of chemistry and natural history, Geologist to the State of Massachusetts, and ultimately the third President of Amherst College. Dr. Hitchock undertook the first real scientific study of these "footprints" from the past.

To understand just how remarkable his studies were, we should understand that Darwin's seminal work on evolution was several years away. In Dr. Hitchock's era, the accepted paradigm of his day believed in the Creation Story, that life on this planet was only 4 or 5 thousand years old, that Noah took two of every creature aboard his vessel, that all species of animals that had ever lived on the planet were still here. The notion of "extinct" beings was yet to be believed._ _ Dr. Hitchock began his observations by trying to rule out every other possible explanation besides animal tracks for these markings in the rocks. He cut down through the stone, revealing a distinct three dimensional aspect. There was simply no way that "leaves" or "geological" events could account for these markings. He had also observed that these markings in the rock displayed a distinct "trail"; that is, he noted that the imprints in the rock were definitely sequential - left foot, right foot, and so on. No geological or vegetable activity could explain that. As a professional geologist, Hitchock had some appreciation for the age of the sandstone that he was working with; to be real general about the subject, let's say that the rock was formed some 65 to_300 million years ago; he also knew that no living being could account for these tracks. Quite the crises of faith in the paradigm, wouldn't you agree?

After accepting in his own mind that these were very ancient "tracks", Dr. Hitchock went to work determining what kind of being might have made them. This required that he study the feet of living beings. His inquiry closed the search to two possibilities -- "saurians", or lizards, and birds. Oddly enough, he chose birds for the majority of the tracks. Giant birds!

I can hear you chuckling. Giant birds! Everyone knows that dinosaurs were reptiles; cold-blooded, scaly, stupid, primitive lizards. The very name "dinosaur" means "terrible lizard". Well, we might say, Dr. Hitchock was out there on the frontier, dealing with a new and troublesome concept. He can be forgiven for his mistakes; after all, he was an Episcopalian. We might be content with the knowledge that despite the fact that he was wrong in his conclusions about the nature of these animals, he is still remembered as a pioneer in this field of dinosaur studies, maybe even as its founder. Oddly enough, neither may be true. It would appear that he is not widely accepted as a significant contributor to the field of dinosaur paleontology, and, ironically, it may be true that he was not wrong in his conclusions, at least not too far wrong!
Why did he choose birds? He noted that the classical pattern of "prints" denoted three toes forward, with a slight imprint of a "heal", and in some cases the indication of a fourth "reciprocating" toe; in the clearer prints, he observed the imprint of knuckles or joints, following a strange pattern of one joint for the reciprocating toe, two for the inside toe, three for the middle toe, and four for the outside toe. He noted that the impressions of the prints were much deeper in the front toes than the heal or reciprocating toe. He also realized that there were usually several sets of prints at any given site that all seemed to be parallel, to suggest that several animals were traveling together and heading in the same direction.

His studies indicated that birds generally have the same pattern of toes, though some, like woodpeckers have two toes forward and two toes back (which allows woodpeckers to walk up as well as down tree trunks with equal impunity)._Lizards, on the other hand, generally have five toes, though indeed, some like alligators have three toes forward. Birds have the same pattern of knuckles in their toes; they are the only animals known that have that pattern. Birds have only one bone in their lower leg, unlike most other animals including reptiles, which have two bones. This obliges the birds to step down first with their toes, followed by their heels, whereas, most reptiles step down on their heels and rotate forward onto their toes. Bird footprints left in mud or soft sand are therefore deeper in the toe impression than the heel or back toe impression, whereas reptile footprints are deeper in the heel and more shallow in the toes.

Dr. Hitchock's final observation of the footprints, that they seemed to indicate a gregarious or "herding" lifestyle because of multiple tracks heading in the same direction, was for him the most compelling. Dr. Hitchock understood that lizards or reptiles are cold blooded and as such are incapable of this type of behavior. Because they cannot regulate their internal metabolism, cold blooded animals change their rate of activity according to the outside temperature; as the temperature lowers, they become slower and visa versa. However, each animal is likely to change its internal metabolic rate somewhat differently than another. Therefore, if there occurred a rapid fall in temperature, each cold blooded animal in the herd would slow down at a different rate; if they were on the move, the herd would begin to spread out until it lost its cohesiveness. Indeed, reptiles do not live gregariously, except under specific conditions, like hibernation. Lizards do not go on walks together. Birds do. As warm blooded animals, birds tend to live in groups, or flocks; their internal metabolic control allows for gregarious living. All in all, Dr. Hitchock's conclusion that the tracks were made by birds can hardly be seen as capricious or unsophisticated.

What is perhaps most interesting is that recent discoveries in paleontology would seem to indicate that Dr. Hitchock was at least on the right trail, if not completely on the mark. In 1988, John (Little Jack?) Horner published his findings in a marvelous book entitled Digging Dinosaurs. Horner, working in Montana, uncovered fossilized nests of baby dinosaurs, including eggs, babies, and the remains of adults. These nests were "clumped" together, like penguin nests. The presence of adult remains would seem to indicate an unexpected aspect of dinosaur behavior --_parenting. His findings would indicate that, unlike reptiles_which tend to lay their eggs and simply walk off leaving their young to hatch and fend for themselves, these dinosaurs tended their young, fed them, and protected them. Moreover, Horner found evidence of vast herds of these animals – tens of thousands of them found in a relatively small area. Horner has discovered not only a new conception of dinosaur behavior, that of parenting, but a new dinosaur that he called Maiasaura, or Good Mother Lizard. He placed this dinosaur in the general category of Hadrosaurs or "duck billed" dinosaurs. Duck billed? Well yes, their sculls definitely showed evidence of a duck-like bill. Now we're getting somewhere. Giant ducks!

Horner seems to have affirmed the fact that at least some dinosaurs were gregarious in nature, parenting creatures, and that therefore they must have been far more physically and socially sophisticated than previous ideas about these creatures; he suggests that the evidence of these fossilized remains leads one to believe that at least some dinosaurs might have been warm blooded. As his co-writer put it, "these dinosaurs were not only making nests but taking care of their young, just as if they were not dinosaurs at all but immense, leathery robin redbreasts"._ _ So, to you, Jack Horner, may you keep on digging and discovering. To you, Dr. Hitchock, may you rest in peace, may your ideas assume new respect, and, like the fossils that you studied, may your writings shed some light on the past and the future. And to you, Plenny Moody, I hope you made a buck or two.

My Encounter with Mr. William (?) Skinner

When I was a lad of 10 or so, neighborhood hockey dominated my thoughts during the winter months. None of my friends were in to skiing. Mt. Tom Ski Tow had not yet been built. Tobogganing and sledding were popular, but the conditions had to be just right. So hockey was "it" for winter sports.

There were a number of places where we could play hockey in my neighborhood. Bray Lake in the Holyoke Reservation was great except there were a lot of pleasure and figure skaters about, and they often complained of our exuberant play. The playing fields at the White School where my sister went to school were flooded during the winter to provide skating. Sometimes we could play hockey there, but again our play often conflicted with neighborhood pleasure skaters from the George Street area.

The very best place for our hockey, then, was the ornamental pond on the estate of Mr. William Skinner. The Skinner estate was on Northampton Street, just south of my street, Montgomery Avenue. From Northampton Street, all one could see was a winding driveway which turned out of sight behind a grove of tall trees and bushes. I think there was a simple sign at the beginning that announced SKINNER, but little else. If you walked up the driveway, however, just past that row of trees and bushes, there was, off to the left, a small pond, probably filled with goldfish during the summer. The pond was just perfect for hockey. It was in a kind of bowled out area, so the puck never went very far if it shot off the ice. The size was perfect for "sand-lot" hockey. And best of all, we boys were apparently the only ones who either knew about it or had the brass to use it, because there were never any pleasure or figure skaters there. Just we boys. It was great!

Beyond the row of trees and bushes, the property opened up into a huge terraced lawn and garden that rose up a substantial hill. There were frequent clipped and manicured rows of hedges, with occasional marble seats. At the top of the hill, quite a ways away from the pond rose a huge mansion. One could only see the general proportions of the house, which were huge.
Now, the plain truth is that we never much gave the occupant of that mansion much thought. Our strategy was a simple one and perfectly logical for boys our age. Start using the place, and if nobody came and chucked us off, then it must be OK for us to stay there. Indeed, I can remember thinking when we first started using the pond that someone would surely come down and throw us off, or even call the police, which had happened before when we tried to play baseball in a vacant lot. But nobody ever came down, and so the pond became ours.

Over time, we actually fabricated goals. We set iron pipes into the ice at either end of the pond and then spread sections of old fencing between the pipes. If someone scored a goal, there was a loud "whack" as the puck hit the section of fence. That made playing a lot more fun than shooting between two stones, which was our prior arrangement. It also made playing hockey a lot more dangerous. I can remember my friend Larka Twing racing toward the goal, falling on his behind with his legs apart, and sliding full speed into one of the pipes. Larka has gone on to father several children, so I guess his injuries were not that bad, though at the time, we were all concerned for him.

Jerry Web taught us all the "slap shot". When he first did it, we were all convinced that it must be illegal. After watching hockey on TV, however, we all realized that it was OK to try to loft the puck above the ice by slapping with a golf like swing. It amazes me that we never lost any eyes or teeth, because our skates and sticks were the only equipment we used.

Time was always our enemy during the weekdays. The rules in my house were such that I was expected to do my homework and chores before I could go out and play hockey. Since it got dark around 4:00pm during the winter, that meant I got very little hockey in during the week. It was like that for all of us. Arguments with our parents just didn't seem to work. I can remember explaining to my parents that if I could play hockey when I got out of school (around 2:30), I could play hockey for almost two hours. Then I would have all evening to do my homework. Nuts! Homework and chores first, then hockey if there is any time left. Parents!

It was in response to this quandary that inevitably led to my encounter with Mr. Skinner. At the time, there were a series of street lights that lined the winding driveway all the way up to the mansion. During the Christmas season, there were Christmas lights strung around these street lights. One day, one of my friends (I simply can't remember who) brought a fixture where we could simply take out one of the Christmas light bulbs and screw in this fixture. We could then plug an extension cord into the fixture and run it to the pond where we set up spot lights. Voila. Hours of more hockey per night. Now, I could race through my homework and chores, get 45 minuets of hockey in, race back home, wolf down my dinner, itch to be excused from the table, and race back to Skinner pond to play until I had to be home (9:00 pm). It was heaven. It also made us believe even more strongly that the pond was ours to play hockey on. Surely our lights could be seen up at the mansion, so no cops must mean approval.

We boys had a simple rule. First one there would turn on the lights (by unscrewing the bulb and screwing in our fixture) and the last one to leave would reverse the process and turn the lights off. On that fateful night, I was the one who got there first. I had not done this operation before, but I had watched others so I knew what had to be done. I was nervous, but I couldn't let the other boys show up to a dark pond and me saying I was afraid. So I un-screwed the Christmas bulb and screwed in the fixture, but I must have touched the fixture to the Street light pole somehow. Suddenly, there was a loud bang, a shower of sparks, a brilliant white light that illuminated every detail of the landscape, and just as suddenly the entire place was in complete darkness. The details of the scene remained in my eyes as a kind of weird, fading photographic negative. As this afterglow slowly disappeared from my eyes, I realized that all of the street lights, all the way up to the mansion were out. It was pitch black. Jesus! Home! And I simply tore off for my house.

Running back home, a thousand thoughts flowed over me. I was convinced that I had shorted out the entire house, and not just the driveway lights. I figured the police were already on the way. Could I just amble in to my house like nothing had happened? Nobody had seen me. Nobody could prove it was me. My parents didn't even know about the lights. It's not like I had to deny anything.

"I did it" I shouted, as soon as the front door was opened. In retrospect, I can see why I was never drawn to a life of crime. "Did what?" asked my alarmed parents. Out came the whole sordid story; pond, lights, rule of first one there, bang, sparks, darkness, home.
It always amazed me how calm my parents could be in a crises. "What do you think you should do about it?" asked my father. "What can I do about it? I can't make it un-happen. I've blown out the whole place, " I cried. "Well, for starters, you can go back and apologize and offer to pay for any damage." Said my father. "Give him my name and tell him that he can call me and tell me how much damage has been done."

I can distinctly remember trying to get my father to come with me. My mother supported that idea, but my father insisted that I clean up my own mess. "That's how one develops character." So off I went into the darkness, alone, to apologize, to offer to pay for the damage and to thereby improve my character. But apologize to whom?

Up the blackened drive way I trod. I had never been above the pond, so this was all unexplored territory. The mansion was at the very top of the hill, now in almost complete darkness. Nobody was about. The place was dismal, and silent, and cold. I walked up to the huge door under a kind of portico and knocked. Nobody. I thought about running. I wanted to run so bad. A boy of ten just loves to run sometimes. But then I would have to tell my father that I had not apologized and offered to pay, so I would simply have to come back and do it again. I knocked again, this time quite hard. I heard something. What? I knocked again. This time, the door opened, just a crack at first. Then a bit wider. Standing on the other side of this massive door, just barely visible in the gloomy light was a tiny, shriveled up old man. He was completely bald on the top of his head, but he had long straggly gray hair which hung down to his shoulders growing from the sides of his head. He was wrapped in some kind of shawl, and he was bent over with a pronounced hunch-back. I think he was propped up with cane.

I was absolutely frozen with fright. He said something. What was it? He said it again. "What do you want?" I took a huge gulp of the frosty night air and shouted at him, all in one breath. "My name is Bobby Fowler and I live on Montgomery Avenue and I blew out your lights and I didn't mean to do it and we only like to play hockey on your pond and I'm very sorry and I hope you let us keep playing there and my father says he'll pay for any damage and I'm sorry" And with that, my boyhood urges took over, and I ran as fast as I could all the way home.
"Did you apologize and offer to pay for any damage?" my father asked. "Yes" I answered. "What did he say?" asked my Mother. "He said 'OK' I think". The Christmas lights were out for weeks, and when they finally came back on, nobody had the courage to plug in our fixture. We continued to play there on weekends, though.

I have often wondered whom I confronted that frightening night. Perhaps it was an ancient servant who had grown old with his employer. It seems more likely to me, however, that it was Mr. Skinner himself.

The Angel of Hadley

One of the most intriguing bits of New England folklore involves the legend of the Angel of Hadley. According to the legend, on September 1, 1675, citizens of the frontier town of Hadley, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were gathered at their meeting hall, no doubt to discuss the recent Indian attacks on the neighboring towns of Deerfield and Northfield. Indians throughout Massachusetts were rebelling against the White Man’s presence in what was to be called King Philip’s War. While sporadic and unorganized, these encounters were particularly violent; the action at Deerfield was later called a “massacre”, and Northfield was left in flames. Understandably, the fifty or so families came to the meeting armed.

The fears of the townspeople were justified; Indians were indeed attempting a surprise attack. One could imagine that if surprise were achieved, the townspeople, bottled up in their wooden meeting hall, could have been in for a rough time. However, as the Indians were approaching, the strange figure of an old man with long white hair and beard, dressed in odd, old-fashioned clothing, and brandishing a broadsword, suddenly appeared, sounding the alarm. The stranger quickly took charge of the situation, shrewdly organizing the citizens to attack the Indians from their rear. The stranger’s strategy worked and the Indians fled in disorder. Some versions of the story maintain that the defeat was so complete as to put an end to the King Philip’s War entirely. During the conflict, the old man simply disappeared, never to be seen again. Considering these rather unique circumstances. as well as the remoteness of Hadley, the townspeople were hard pressed to explain this event without resorting to a “supernatural” explanation. Actually, these people were devout Puritans, naturally taken to supernatural explanations. They viewed the stranger as an Angel from God, sent to the “elect”, the righteous “chosen” people, so that they might prevail against the primitive forces of evil.

A painting by Frederick Chapman hangs over the stairs at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts, depicting the legend. Several authors have retold the story in works of fiction, including Sir Walter Scott in his novel “Peveril of the Peak” and James Fenimore Cooper’s “Wept of Wish-ton-Wish.” The first mention of the story by a serious historian, however, was by Governor Hutchinson in his “History of the Massachusetts Bay Colony”, published in 1764; the story was presented in a footnote by Hutchinson who claimed that the legend came from “family” stories, passed on through generations. The first important treatment of the Angel legend was published in 1794 by Ezra Stiles, then president of Yale University. Stiles not only maintained that the event actually happened, he presented a fantastic explanation behind the appearance of this strange apparition. To understand Stiles’ theory about the Angel of Hadley, we must go further back in time and to a different land. The story begins in England, at the end of the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

THE SEEDS OF DISCONTENT

During the second half of the Sixteenth Century, friction began to develop between the
Crown and the House of Commons. Taxes required to pay for Elizabeth’s ambitious foreign policy were a continuous source of aggravation in the land. Questions concerning the rights of the House of Commons to determine national policy were raised. Elizabeth was a skilled politician who was good at dealing with Parliament; her successor, James I (1603-1625) was not. Perhaps his greatest blunder came in the firing of the Chief Justice of Court of the King’s Bench, Sir Edward Coke. No longer working for the Crown, Coke entered Parliament to become the first great “leader of genius” in the House. Coke advanced the proposition of Law over King”. Naturally, James I felt otherwise.

The situation worsened as Charles I succeeded James I in 1625. Charles was determined to preserve the traditional rights of Kings, and he went about it with little diplomacy. To fan the fires of antagonism between Parliament and Crown, Charles married Henrietta Maria of France, a Catholic. This new Queen was deeply resented in Protestant England, and alarms of Popism were raised. Problems over taxes continued. Parliament denied the King the customary life grant of customs duties, called “Tonnage” and “Poundage”; the King proceeded to collect these taxes anyway. Also challenged was the highly resented Ship-Tax.” In 1628, Parliament passed the so-called “Petition of Right,” which sharply curtailed the powers of the Crown; specifically, the Petition made it illegal to quarter troops in private homes, to imprison citizens without showing cause, to apply martial law to civilians, and to raise taxes without consent of Parliament. Charles I simply ignored these restrictions to his power and continued to do all of these things.

Matters deteriorated. Charles appointed Thomas Wentworth, latter Earl of Strafford, as a virtual dictator of Northern England and Ireland. Strafford ruled with considerable cruelty, engendering much discontent. Charles I made another controversial appointment of William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury, nominal head of Christianity in England. Laud emphasized ritual and the discipline of dogma, worsening fears of Popism. These two servants of the King put forth the doctrine of “Thorough,” which was a dressed up way of saying that they had the right to do anything they pleased, regardless of opposition, as long as they had the King’s blessings. One can imagine the response by Parliament.

The proverbial camel-back breaking straw came in 1637 with the decision to impose the Anglican prayer book on Presbyterian Scotland. Predictably, the Scots rebelled; they put forth the famous Covenant” which asserted the supremacy of law over the Crown and gave the exclusive right to make the law to Parliament. Charles sent in the army.

This first conflict in the English Civil Wars, called the First Bishop’s War, was inconclusive. The war itself was very unpopular with English Protestants and came to an end in 1639. The Scots did not back down from the ideals in the Covenant, and a dark foreboding of worse to come settled on the nation. Ironically, Charles needed to raise money to pay the army for the First Bishop’s War and was forced to call for Parliament to sit. This “Short Parliament” was deadlocked on the issue and was dissolved in 1640. This did not solve the problem of paying the army, and Charles called for a new Parliament late in 1640.

This new Parliament, called the “Long Parliament” was certainly more radical than the Short Parliament; this Parliament had no difficulty taking action, though the actions taken
hardly served the King’s needs. Archbishop Laud was promptly impeached and sent to the Tower in late 1640. Strafford was impeached, tried, and executed early in 1641. The Long Parliament put forward its own version of the Scottish Covenant, called the “Protestation.” This


doctrine asserted the same rights of Parliament and the same restrictions on the Crown - and then some. The Protestation claimed that Parliament must be called every three years and could not be dissolved without its own permission; further, it declared Ship-Money illegal and would have demolished much of the King’s government machinery, including the Concilliar Courts. Charles was not pleased.

In fact, the King was furious. In 1642, Charles sent troops to Parliament to arrest five members of the House. Riots broke out and the King left London. Negotiations continued at a distance. The King agreed to keep bishops out of the House of Lords but would not meet Parliament’s demands that they be given control over the military. In June 1642, Parliament passed the Nineteen Propositions, by far the most radical affront to traditional royal authority. The Nineteen Propositions would have deeded virtually all executive power, including direct control of the army, to Parliament. King Charles I responded by raising his standard at Nottingham in August 1642, and the Civil War began in earnest. For a brief time at the beginning of the war, Parliamentary forces wore their hair short, earning the name “Roundheads.” The fashion was short lived, but the name endured. The Royal cry became “God save King Charles, and hang up the Roundheads.”

For the next nine years, war between Parliament and the Crown raged across the British Isles. As the war progressed, from great battle to great battle, the King’s fortunes declined, while on the Parliament side, one man was to emerge the giant of his age; in time, he was to become one of the most interesting and controversial characters ever to walk the paths of history. That man was Oliver Cromwell.

THE LORD PROTECTOR

Cromwell was just four year old when Elizabeth passed away. He was born into a good family from Huntington. Part of his ancestry came from Wales. His family had a fine estate and several business interests, including a brewery and ale house. Cromwell attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge for one year but, upon the death of his father, returned home to run the family affairs. He was happily married to one woman, Elizabeth Bourchier, and had five children gown to adulthood. Cromwell was a committed family man and remained deeply involved in the lives of all his children throughout his life. He was a somewhat rotund man of ruddy complexion (the result of severe acne as a youth and lifelong warts), a rough man who enjoyed hunting and horseback riding to the end of his days. Unlike the stereotype of straight-laced Puritans, Cromwell adored music all his life and loved to tell and hear jokes. Like so many landowners and businessmen, Cromwell was deeply angered by the Royal arrogances - and the taxes of James and Charles. In 1628, Cromwell stood for Parliament and entered the House as MP for Huntington; he rapidly became one of the King’s most avid tormentors.

It was about this time when Cromwell experienced his “conversion.” Upon falling ill (perhaps from drinking the poison mithridate as an antidote to ward off the plague), Cromwell experienced delirium and hallucinations, images of the Cross and such. When the sickness passed, Cromwell was convinced that he had been chosen by God, through passage of the “dark night of the soul,” to do great things. For the rest of his life, Cromwell was a religious fanatic, interpreting every aspect of life as evidence of God’s will.

Throughout the 1630’s, Cromwell split his time between his growing family, his business affairs, and the politics of Parliament, largely fixed on the conflict with the King. Cromwell became a major voice in the opposition of the draining of the fells, a massive land conversion project of draining wetlands for agriculture; the draining of the fells meant greater land use profits for the aristocracy and the King but the end of hunting and fishing for the com­mon people. He served on the endless committees designed to trouble the King. His direct rhetoric and his religious extremism made him a prominent figure in Parliament. It was in war, however,

that Cromwell came of his own. He was a natural military genius, credited with no less than the invention of the modern army.

Cromwell had seen first hand many of the shortcomings of the traditional approach to war in the First Bishop’s War. Armies were raised to meet an occasion and then disbanded quickly. There were no standards of dress or arms, no real battle tactics. Lines of men simply went at it, and the side that ran first lost; knowing who to kill was half the battle. Cromwell, as war was declared in the First Civil War, convinced Parliament to let him experiment with a new concept of warfare. Indeed, the result was termed “The New Model Army.” In this concept, men were conscripted as professionals, and given standardized dress (the famous Redcoats), standard arms, a formal command structure, and, above all else, training and discipline. The result was a quantum leap in warfare. The King’s forces, though about equally numbered, never stood a chance. In encounter after encounter, the New Model Army crushed the Royalists. The battles have become legend in English history: Edgehill, Grantham, Gainsborough, Winceby, Marstoon Moor, Newbury, Naseby, Langport, Basing House, Oxford, Pembrooke Castle, Preston, Pontefract Castle, and later, Drogheda, Wexford, Clonmel, Dunbar, Edinburgh, and Worcester. The New Model Army never lost a fight.

Charles I fled the field to Scotland in April of 1646; by June, his forces had collapsed. The poor King was seized by Parliamentary forces, escaped, and established new Royalist forces, touching off the Second Civil War. Once again, the Royalists were no match for the New Model Army. After several particularly one-sided slaughters, the Royalist forces finally disintegrated in late 1648. The King was once again captured, amazingly once again escaped, and was caught again, this time to stand trial for high treason and crimes against the nation.

What unfolded was a sordid chapter in British history. Cromwell had decided that the King must be found guilty and put to death. The Second Civil War, and no doubt the King’s uncanny ability to escape, had convinced him that Charles could not be left alive “for the good of the Nation.” A kangaroo court of sorts was rounded up, some 135 men who were to be both judge and jury. Cromwell had considerable difficulty finding judges, or “Commissioners,” as they were called. Many had to be strongly coerced to serve; about half of the commissioners never attended any of the proceedings. The trial was brief. Nine days after the opening of the commission, King Charles I was found guilty of the charges and sentenced to death. The King had refused to recognize the authority of the commission and had mounted no defense. Of the 135 commissioners, only 62 had found him guilty; of those 62, only 59 signed the death warrant itself. There was an air of the surreal about the whole affair; silliness broke out as several of the Judges splattered one another in an ink fight while signing the warrant. Nevertheless, the day after the verdict, on January 30, 1649, Charles I quietly stepped through a dismantled window of Whitehall Palace and on to a black-draped scaffold hastily built for the occasion; he was wearing two shirts because it was cold, and he was concerned that he would shiver and the people would believe that he was afraid. Cromwell himself did not attend the execution; as the King placed his neck on the block, Cromwell was at a prayer meeting with several other signers of the warrant.

It is impossible to overstate the enormity of this crime to the Elizabethan mind. The paradigm of the age described the universe as a morally organized hierarchy. God sat at the top of the order and Satan sat at the bottom. Between God and Satan was all existence, each entity occupying a specific place in the hierarchy. In Heaven, the angels were ordered according to their closeness to God. Purgatory came below Heaven, and the Temporal World came below Purgatory. Hell was at the bottom, again organized according to the crimes of the condemned.
Even inanimate matter was fit into this moral scheme; base metals were below noble metals. The principal science of the day, Alchemy, was the study of the relative moral level of matter. Among temporal existence, man was at the top of the hierarchy, above all other animals and plants. At the summit of mankind came the King. To kill the King, therefore, was not merely a political event. Regicide disturbed the universe.

Despite the death of the King, the struggle was not over. Royalists rallied around the King’s son, the Prince of Wales, who was promptly declared King Charles II. The country was in for two more years of bloody war. But the outcome was never really in doubt. Once again, the Royalist forces were no match for the New Model Army and the genius of Cromwell in the field. In 1651, Charles II fled England for the Continent and the Civil Wars finally came to a close.

During the Civil Wars, Parliament ran the Country through ordinances. An executive committee of Parliament, called the Council of State, was appointed and effectively became the executive branch of the government. Cromwell sat on this committee. As his record of phenomenal military accomplishment grew, so did his control of the government.

At the close of the war, in 1651, Cromwell and his close associates held several meetings to determine the “Settlement of the Nation.” There were some who felt that the fight had been with the Stewarts, and not with the concept of a King per say. Others felt strongly that a King would always present a threat to fundamental liberties. Issues such as the property requirement for voting, the right of the government to tax, the appointment of judges, and the role of the army were discussed. In many ways, the problems that these men struggled with were exactly what American revolutionaries debated 100 years later. Alas, the Roundheads had no Thomas Jefferson, no John Marshall, no James Madison. As the nation slowly drifted into unrest, the Roundheads debated to no conclusion. The Parliamentarians had won power in the field of battle but had no vision of what to do about it.

Several political parties vied for control: the Presbyterians, the Levellers, the Fifth Monarch. As his struggle with these fringe groups developed, Cromwell, justifying himself in the name of public order, became as ruthless and intolerant as Charles - and then some. In the process Cromwell acquired more and more authority. On December 16, 1653, Oliver Cromwell became the “Protector.” In reality the office of Protector, while not formally defined, approached the traditional authority of Kings.

For the next five years Oliver Cromwell ruled England. His rule was filled with ironies. He waged war with the Protestant Dutch; he formed alliances with Catholic France. He ordered and led the most terrible genocide policies for Ireland; he overthrew the law that banned Jews from England and encouraged Jewish settlement in England. He waged war with the Spanish in the West Indies suffering his first and only military defeat in a failed and costly attempt to seize Hispaniola; he did succeed in acquiring Jamaica. Throughout he had great difficulty with his own Parliament. The “Rump” Parliament (so called because it was what was left after the purges of Charles I) had been sitting since the outbreak of Civil War. In 1653, Cromwell had the Rump dissolved because of party frictions. The new Parliament, known as the “Bare Bones” Parliament was packed with Cromwell’s cronies. Nevertheless, it too proved impossible to control and was dissolved by Cromwell in 1654. This pattern of “rigging” Parliament with loyal associates only to find dissent growing would dog Cromwell through several more Parliaments.

In 1655, Cromwell abandoned all vestiges of democracy. He removed virtually all existing government machinery and replaced it with the army. The country was divided into 11 sections,
each ruled by a Major General who reported to Cromwell alone. Cromwell was now a virtual military dictator. The effectiveness of this form of government varied considerably with the
personalities of the 11 Major Generals. Some sections were ruled with tact and diplomacy; other sections were ruled with callous disregard for human rights. By 1657, discontent with the Major Generals was becoming widespread. Cromwell was encouraged to become King and to return the country to the “old ways.” Cromwell agonized over this question for some time. In reality he already had most of the power of a king. Left unanswered was the question of succession. In the end Cromwell refused the title as well as the system of government. Instead, in 1657, Cromwell had himself named “Lord Protector,” a subtle change. In his new position as Lord


Protector, succession would not be hereditary, but the position was given the right to chose his successor. At least the process for determining succession had been established.

1658 saw Cromwell’s greatest foreign victory when, at the battle of the Dunes, the Anglo-French forces defeated Spain and chased them from the Netherlands. The victory gave Dunkirk to the British, giving England a foothold on the Continent. He did not have long to savor this triumph. On August 6, his favorite daughter, Bettie Claypole, died. Cromwell was devastated and fell into melancholia. His depression quickly advanced; within a few weeks he was on his death bed.

To his associates great worry Cromwell lay despondent and ill and had not named his successor. There was a slight problem. Cromwell had two surviving sons, Richard and Henry. Henry had proven himself an able administrator; he had been given total authority in Ireland and had ruled that country with skill and ability. Henry was, however, the “second son.” Richard was the eldest. Richard was anything but an experienced leader. Shy, almost retiring, Richard had never left home; he had played no role in his father’s government. Nevertheless, Cromwell could not bear to “skip” Richard and at the moment of his death, he whispered “Richard.” Accordingly, Richard Cromwell was named Lord Protector upon his father’s death on September 3, 1658. But he had no stomach for it and in a matter of months, Parliament passed the Declaration of Breda (May 1660) which recalled Charles II from his continental exile and proclaimed him King. The Commonwealth Government was over.

Upon acceding to the throne, Charles II announced a general amnesty to all involved in the civil wars, the death of his father, and the Commonwealth government. This good mood changed, however. Soon, after much jostling by his advisors who urged a purge of all Roundheads, Charles issued a warrant for the arrest and trial of only those 59 judges who had signed his father’s death warrant; the signers were now officially “Regicides, “ killers of the King.

Several, like Cromwell, had passed away peacefully during the Commonwealth. In a dark rage, bodies were exhumed, abused, and put on mock trial. Twenty four of the living were indeed arrested, tried, convicted, and put to death or disappeared into dungeons. A few went into hiding. Twelve managed to flee the country. Three of the Regicides made it to the American Colonies.

THE REGICIDES IN AMERICA

Edward Whalley was Cromwell’s cousin and one of his closest associates. Whalley had been a general under Cromwell during the civil wars; he had been instrumental at virtually every major battle. Whalley had attended the meetings on the “Settlement of the Nation;” like Cromwell, he was a devout Puritan, frequently taken to outbursts of prayer. Whalley had been given direct responsibility over the security of the King during the trial and was appointed by Cromwell as one of the eleven Major Generals (for the Midlands). Whalley had served as a
commissioner for the trial of Charles I, signing the King’s death warrant in fourth place, just after the signature of Oliver Cromwell.

William Goffe was a general in the New Model Army. His status in the Commonwealth leadership took a big step forward when he married Edward Whalley’s daughter. Like his father-in-law, Goffe was one of the eleven Major Generals (for the Southern Counties from Southampton to Kent). Like his father-in-law, Goffe was a passionate Puritan, frequently prone to fervent prayer and such. Goffe had also served as a commissioner for the King’s trial and signed the warrant in fourteenth place. Whalley and Goffe had seen the writing on the wall. On May 4, 1660, before the new King singed the warrant for their arrest, Whalley and Goffe left England on the ship Prudent Mary, bound for Boston. From the day they left England Goffe kept

a diary. It is largely from this diary and Goffe’s correspondence home, that posterity has such remarkably complete information about their adventures.

Less is known about the third Regicide to escape to the American Colonies. John Dixwell had sat in three Parliaments and was a member of the Council of State when the King went on trial. Dixwell was never a distinguished soldier and was made a colonel in a Kentish troop only after the war. There is some evidence that Dixwell was unenthusiastic about the execution of Charles, but he did attend the trial and signed the death warrant in the thirty-eighth position. Dixwell remained hopeful in England until he was actually named personally as a Regicide. He then sent word that he was too ill to attend a trial and quietly slipped across the Channel, eventually making it to Hanau in Prussia. He appeared in the American Colonies five years later.

Whalley and Goffe, traveling under the names of Edward Richardson and William Stephenson, arrived in Boston on July 27, 1660. They obviously felt they were safer in the Colonies though they were still in domains under British control. There was good reason for their confidence. The Puritan Revolution, known as the Great Experiment, had spread to the Colonies. The hope of starting a New Society, based on God’s Word, free from the “established” corruption of England, had attracted many of the most extreme believers in the Puritan cause; Cromwell himself had frequently contemplated starting over in America. The Revolution was over in England but not necessarily in the Colonies.

On the passage over they met two fellow travelers who were to help them on their journeys: Daniel Gookin, who was a prominent member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and William Jones, who was married to the daughter of a leading citizen in New Haven. After a cordial reception in Boston by no less than Governor John Endicott, they proceeded to Cambridge, guests of Mr. Gookin, where they were introduced to the Bay area society. Here they remained for several months, living the lives of heroes.

Their comfortable circumstances were shaken a bit when a ship from England arrived with the “Pardon and Oblivion” documents specifically exempting from pardon thirty men, including Whalley, Goffe, and Dixon. News later arrived that an explicit warrant for their arrest had been issued promising 100 pounds to anyone who helped bring the Regicides to justice. This glum news was followed by the even bleaker news that Regicides who had been caught had been treated harshly; first they were hanged until not quite dead, and then, still alive, drawn and quartered. Nevertheless, the authorities in Boston did not respond until February 22, 1661 when the Court of Assistants, the upper chamber in Massachusetts, met to discuss what to do about the Regicides. Gookin was a member of the Court; opinion was divided and no decision was reached.

Prudence held sway, however, and Whalley and Goffe left Boston on February 26 through heavy snows for New Haven. They traveled 160 miles by foot with an Indian guide, first to
Springfield, then to Hartford and on to New Haven. Once they were out of the Commonwealth, Governor Endicott issued a warrant for their arrest.

When they reached New Haven on March 7, Whalley and Goffe sought out William Jones (whom they met on their voyage across the Atlantic). Jones introduced them to John Davenport, pastor of the New Haven church. Davenport was a happy choice of contact. In his early career he had served under the infamous William Laud. Davenport was a committed Puritan Roundhead and was forced to flee England when Laud became Archbishop. Davenport first went to Europe, then on to one of the most remote parishes in the Colonies, New Haven. The first sermon that Reverend Davenport gave in New Haven prepared his congregation for further refugees from England; “Hide the outcasts, betray not him that Wandereth” from Isaiah was the text for his sermon.


At this point, private enterprise entered the picture. Two men in Boston decided to go for the reward. Thomas Kellond was an out of work merchant and Thomas Kirke was an out of work ship’s captain. 100 pounds was a lot of money in the 1660’s. Together, they lit out for the two Regicides traveling at the brisk pace of 40 miles per day. By May 10, they were in Hartford asking a lot of questions. By May 11, they were in Guilford, confronting the Deputy Governor, William Lette. Lette slowed them down, first claiming he had to call a meeting before he could give them any information or assistance, then claiming that he could not find horses for them. Meanwhile, Lette dispatched a messenger, one John Meggs, to warn the Regicides.

Lette had managed to stall the bounty hunters in Guilford until May 13. By the time they arrived in New Haven, the Regicides had left; in fact, they left on the 11th when Meggs gave the alarm. Nevertheless, the magistrates in New Haven debated for another four days before permission to search for the Regicides was given.

Whalley and Goffe were hidden in a cave in the New Haven hills. There they remained for months; food was provided every day by a local farmer. They named their new home “Providence Hill.” The news from England got even worse. The King had declared that anyone caught harboring a Regicide would suffer the same fate, hanging, to be followed by worse horrors. While Whalley and Goffe considered giving up, sparing their helpers the risk, their benefactors encouraged them to remain in hiding. Eventually, they were smuggled out of their cave to the private home of Micah Thompkins in Milford, Connecticut where they lived, quite secretly, for the next three years - “without so much as going into the orchard.”

In the spring of 1664, Charles II sent a small force of officers, four ships, and 450 men to Boston. The expedition had two objectives: to “liberate” New Amsterdam and to capture the Regicides. This small army arrived in the Colonies on April 23, 1664. They headed immediately to Southern Connecticut. Forewarned again, Whalley and Goffe once again returned to their cave on Providence Hill. They remained in their cave through the summer and fall. As winter approached, desperation set in. It was still not safe in New Haven. The decision was taken to head for Hadley, Massachusetts. Why Hadley?

Hadley was a brand new town founded just 5 years before in 1659. It was about as far “out there” as you could get and still have a few white people around. Hadley had been founded by a group from Wethersfield who had split with the church of Hartford over a “friendly ecclesiastical dispute.” One of the principal founders of Hadley was John Russell. Russell was born in England but moved to the Colonies as a child. He was educated at Harvard, fourteenth to graduate from that college. The dispute with Hartford really was friendly; Russell would later marry the daughter of the pastor of the Hartford church. Russell was another radical Roundhead supporter and a friend of William Davenport. Russell was the first preacher in Hadley and the
town’s leading citizen. It was to John Russell that the Regicides traveled, 80 miles north, moving only at night.

The area of the township of Hadley was larger than today, bordered by the Hadley Falls to the south and Sugarbush Mountain to the north. The town itself was built within a long,
lazy bend in the Connecticut river. The town proper consisted of two parallel streets forming a center “commons” which began at the bend across from present day Hatfield and ending just across the river from Northampton. Indeed, for years, Hatfield was formally a part of Hadley and shared the same meeting house and church in the commons. Some fifty families lived in houses arranged along the commons.

Until King Philip’s War, Nonotuck Indians lived peaceably in the commons in a symbiotic relationship with the townspeople; the Indians supplied the whites with fish and game while the townspeople gave the Indians produce from their gardens. The great meadows between the town and the river were divided amongst the townspeople into gardens. Animals were pastured on the

other side of town, in what is now the Hockenum Valley. The first homes built in 1659 were rough, single room log cabins; proper houses were not long in coming, however.

When the Regicides reached Hadley, they moved into an upstairs chamber in John Russell’s house. Conveniently, the room had a secret compartment under the floor boards near the fireplace. They remained in this room for the next ten years. It is not known how many of the town’s citizens shared John Russell’s secret. It seems inconceivable that someone did not go for the 100 pounds reward. It is known that John Russell never left his charges, never attended the usual conventions of ministers, never took positions offered him that would have required him to leave town, even for a few days. For a decade, John Russell cared for his guests and kept them safe - an amazing achievement and an awesome sacrifice.

Shortly after Whalley and Goffe arrived in Hadley, they were visited by John Dixon. Dixon had been living in Prussia but had traveled to the Colonies under the name of James Davids. He appeared in Hadley on February 10, 1665, spent a few days with his comrades in arms and quietly left, not to be heard of again for years.

In 1667, Goffe abandoned keeping his diary. He kept his correspondence with his wife and family, writing letters under the name of Walter Goldsmith. His letters were smuggled into England by Increase Mather. In 1674, he wrote that Whalley was ill; it is likely that Whalley died before the year was out. During this time, rumors abounded about the whereabouts of the Regicides. One prominent rumor had it that Whalley and Goffe had been killed at the same time the Regicide John Lisle was shot in Lausanne.

According to Goffe’s letters, the years with John Russell passed slowly, with boredom and isolation dominating their lives. These were, after all, worldly men, accustomed to high office and great adventure. Their years in hiding were a torture for them. They were confined to their room, except when the town was at meeting or church service, when they came out for a brief glimpse of the outside world and a bit of sunshine.

The peace of this world, if not the monotony of life for General Goffe, was disturbed by news of Indian unrest in the east. As the stories of trouble moved west, the settlers became nervous. They were made a lot more nervous when they awoke one morning in late August, 1675 to find that the Nonotucks had moved out of the village commons.

News of the “massacre” at Deerfield brought the entire town to meeting on September 1. According to the legend, Goffe, who was enjoying his customary moment in the sun, saw the Indians approaching and, grabbing his broadsword - badge of his former office - abandoned his
hideout to warn the citizens. Ezra Stiles makes much of the fact that General Goffe had extensive war experience as a commanding officer; it was natural for him to immediately take command of the villagers and to promptly seize the offensive against the Indian attackers. Whether the event happened or not, the Indian uprising in the Connecticut Valley brought troops
from the east, turning Hadley into a garrison town. For a fugitive, the situation became extremely dangerous. Goffe left Hadley, though it is not known exactly when. It is known that he was in Hartford by September 1676. The last known letter to his wife was dated April 2, 1679; in this letter he was obviously depressed and tired of hiding, pleading for news from his family.

In 1680, a man name John London attempted to inform authorities in Hartford that Goffe was living with a man named Captain Bull. For his trouble, London was harassed by the Hartford authorities and told to keep quiet and remain in the county. London got away anyway, went to New York (recently “liberated” by the same force hunting the Regicides), and reported his knowledge of Goffe to Governor Edmund Andros. Andros was a committed Royalist. He dispatched an effort, the sixth, to find the Regicides. No further word was ever heard of William

Goffe. There is some evidence that Goffe made it back to Hadley after Andros dispatched his forces to Connecticut in pursuit. Letters that Goffe had received while living in Hartford were found among John Russell’s papers. It, therefore, seems likely that Goffe found his Last Reward back in the loving care of John Russell.

In 1673, James Dixwell, living in New haven under the name of James Davids and posing as a retired merchant, married a Mrs. Benjamin Ling. Dixwell was 66. His new wife died within a month. Four years later, Dixwell married Bathsheba How, age 31; by her he had three children. He died peacefully on March 18, 1688; his marker simply said: “J.D. Remember.” In 1776, during the American Revolution, British forces (wearing the traditional Redcoats, of course) found Dixwell’s grave and defaced it with spit. That was the extent of the King’s revenge on the Regicides in America.

But did the Angle story really happen? Did William Goffe leap out of hiding to turn the tides on the Indians and then simply vanish back to his secret room? In his introduction to the reprinting of the classic “History of Hadley” by Sylvester Judd, George Sheldon advances the argument that the Angel story is merely a romanticized myth. Sheldon traces the Angel story back to a family tale of the Leveretts, told in print for the first time by Governor Thomas Hutchinson in his “History of Massachusetts,” published in 1764. Hutchinson was in possession of Goffe’s diary when he wrote his history (the diary was later lost in a fire). Hutchinson was the first to report the presence of the Regicides in Hadley. However, he only mentioned the Angel story in a footnote, admitting that it was an unsubstantiated “anecdote.” According to Sheldon, the Angel story was later embellished and presented as fact by Styles, in his book “History of the Three Judges.” Since few were willing to take on a Yale president, later historians have simply repeated the story without verifying the facts.

Sheldon argues that attempts to discover evidence of the Angel story have failed to uncover any references to the event prior to Hutchinson’s footnote. It is this lack of contemporary references of the event in the diaries, articles, and other sources from the same period that compels skepticism. In fact, Sheldon argues that there is no real evidence of an actual Indian attach on Hadley on that day. Increase Mather reported an “alarm” at Hadley on September 1, 1675; he does not mention a fight. Given what happened in Deerfield, an “alarm” would have been in order. Solomon Stoddard, preacher for Northampton, wrote detailed descriptions of the attacks on Deerfield, Northfield, and Northampton. He never mentions Hadley. Sheldon believe that this absence of contemporary evidence of the Angel story is sufficient to discard the story as myth.

Given of gulf of three hundred plus years, we will probably never know exactly what happened in Hadley that fall day. I would, however, propose a theory of my own, based on resolving two questions. To begin with, if Hadley were not attacked on September 1, we might ask why not. After all, every other town in the valley was attacked. Why not Hadley? It would be years before the town was barricaded. Hadley was as vulnerable to Indian attack as any other frontier town. And second, if the town was never attached and Goffe did not jump from his hiding place to warn the villagers, what prompted the story in the first place?

I suggest the following explanation behind the legend. As news of Indian attacks came to Hadley, the elders of the town - those who knew of the General’s presence - turned to Goffe for advice. Goffe was a military man with extensive experience in warfare. Goffe instructed the elders on how to deploy their forces in such a way as to discourage an Indian attack. His strategy worked, and the Indians passed by Hadley to attack other settlements on their way to Canada. After the threat of attack passed, the explanation given to the general people was that an angel saved the town. Later, the story was embellished as it passed from generation to generation, until no less than the president of Yale wrote a story which had General Goffe leaping to the rescue, broadsword in hand.


AFTERTHOUGHT

The age of Cromwell fell between the crack in time that separated the Elizabethan world from the Age of Enlightenment. The ordered, hierarchical world view of the Elizabethans was clearly under challenge; the Roundheads dared to kill the King, and so disturb the universe. Cromwell was willing to attack the old paradigm of the world but he did not have a replacement. The great leaps of understanding that were to transform the world had not happened in time to guide him. Newton was born in 1642, the year the Civil War began. It would be forty years before his writings on cause and effect and the rational “laws” of nature would usher in a new world view, a new paradigm. When next British citizens took arms against the King, the result would be very different. By the middle of the Eighteenth Century, the intellectual underpinnings of the Enlightenment were well in place. In the “Settlement of the Nation” after the American Revolution, men would assume the moral neutrality of nature which is at the heart of Newtonian thought as they spoke of all men being created equal.

And yet, these two “Great Experiments” were connected. Cromwell unleashed a powerful spirit when he dispatched the King. Discontent with Royalty would smolder on past the Restoration. The Regicides in America were like precious seeds, tended, protected, and finally planted in the soil itself, to one day bring forth new life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


1. Cromwell: The Lord Protector: by Antonia Fraser. Alfred A. Knopf. 1973

2. “The Hunt for the Regicides”: by Alexander Winston. American Heritage. December,
1964.

3. History of Hadley: by Sylvester Judd, with an introduction by George Sheldon. H.R.
Huntting & Co. 1905.

4. The Diary of General William Goffe: by Jack Dunn. The Book Press.

5. The Columbia History of the World. Edited by John Garraty and Peter Gay. Harper
& Row. 1972.

6. Historic Hampshire in the Connecticut Valley: by Clifton Johnson. Milton Bradley
Company. 1932.

7. A History of Three Judges of King Charles I by Ezra Stiles. Printed by Elisha Babcock.
1794.

8. “Angel of Hadley: Legend or Fact”: by George A. Snook, M.D. An unpublished essay
catalogued at the Forbes Library in Northampton.

9. The Guardians of the New World: Pioneering in the Connecticut Valley: by Doris H.
Wackerbarth. The Country Squire; Winchester Center, CT.