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"Telling Our Stories" Series

for the Berlin Daily Sun

Becky has been collecting stories about the mills, the logging industry, and life in the Androscoggin Valley. Stories, she believes, reveal the heart of community. The project is sponsored by The Androscoggin Valley Community Partners, the United Way of Northern New Hampshire, the Family Resource Center at Gorham, and the Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire with financial support from the NH State Council on the Arts, the NH Humanities Council, and Public Service of NH.  

For information on upcoming Telling Our Stories events, visit the
Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire.

The Moose Had a Glazed Expression, the Buffalo Lost His Hide,
and Who Put Feathers in the Cupboard?

"I saw my first moose in Berlin," Grace Enman told me. She and her father visited a lawyer's office in downtown Berlin. They trudged up a flight or two of stairs, a long climb for a little girl of four. "We went into this big office. I was sitting with my legs dangling." On the wall across from her was "a moose head with a big rack of horns. I said to my father, 'What is that?'" She thought the unhappy moose had stuck his head through the wall and the rest of him was in the next room!

When Grace turned ninety, her brother remarked that she was the only ninety-year-old he knew who could remember what happened eighty-nine and a half years ago. "I really can," she said. "I asked my mother about this. I was in the crawling stage, not walking. Under the kitchen sink, that was my favorite place to poke around. I asked my mother, Was the kitchen in the old house painted blue?" Sure enough, it was. Grace recalled a startling experience in that blue kitchen. She opened the sink cupboard, "and there were some feathers in there moving around." She thought it was something alive, and shut the door quickly. "Mother said I was always getting in the cupboard, so to discourage me, she put some chicken feathers in there."

She also vividly remembers the end of World War I. "My sister was born in the night of Nov. 10, 1918. I was out playing at about 11 o'clock on November 11. I could hear the church bells. I thought they were ringing the bells and whistles for my sister." Grace was just three years old.

She grew up to be a teacher, educated at Keene Norman School and Boston University, and worked in that profession from 1933 through 1978. She taught in Jefferson and Lancaster, and for many years in Massachusetts, before coming home to Milan in retirement. "One of my greatest joys," she said, "is hearing from former students and teachers. Kind of good to (get a letter) from someone I had in third grade in 1940."

The Berlin Grace knew as a child was very different from Berlin now.

"When my parents were young," she said, "They were building the churches in Berlin -- and so many of them have closed during my lifetime." Oh, yes, and sometimes the sulfite fumes were so strong they'd choke you as you walked along Main Street. Still, "going downtown was quite a treat. . . . It just seemed like everyone was on the street, shopping, you know, and visiting. It felt like a big city. I remember Rexall Pharmacy was in the same block as Northway Bank now. When when we had company in the summer . . . one of my uncles used to take us into the Rexall for ice cream sundaes." Grace preferred strawberry, because it was pink.

Transportation to and from town was by horse and buggy. "My mother got to be a skilled horse lady. We had a spirited elderly horse (named Elsie). If a street car came along behind us, the horse seemed to think she had to race the street car. I remember my mother, straight as a ramrod, trying to keep the horse under control."

Much of Grace's time, through, was spent on the family farm in Milan. There was play. The children all had skis and sleds. But there were plenty of chores to do, too. "We didn't expect any pay," she said. "We'd come home from school and change our clothes," and do chores. When she was small chores included picking up eggs and feeding the hens. They had their own berry patch and picked wild berries. "We children worked. When father plowed, we pulled rocks. We didn't know any better. We thought it was fun!"

"My mother made all of our clothes. She knitted wool socks and caps and mittens. Her pride and joy was being able to show off her cupboard in the basement, with all her canned meat and fruits. I think all of us children had happy memories. We had devoted, hard working parents."

For several years, Grace's father worked nights for the Brown Company and farmed on the side. He drove a horse and buggy (in summer), a horse and sleigh (in winter) back and forth to Berlin every day. He said he could make the trip in 40 minutes. "People who saw the work he did, said he worked as much as three men put together. I think he must have given up his Berlin mill job in maybe 1917-1918." In 1929 or early 1930 "there was a big explosion in the Burgess Mill. I think a digester blew. If my father would have been working, he would have been in that department. A very good friend of his was missing. Tom Sullivan. My father dropped what he was doing and left and went down to help identify the body."

When her father drove the sleigh to work in winter, Grace recalls, he wore a fur coat, ear muffs and a gray fedora. When she rode in the sleigh, she kept warm under a "buffalo robe, made I suppose from a poor buffalo, lined with red felt. You had to sit still. The snow would go down the back of your neck if you did too much wiggling."

In church, not so long ago, Grace was asked to tell stories of old time Christmases. Her brother Don owned a set of sleigh bells, which she put in a paper bag and brought with her. When she'd finished her storytelling, she took the sleigh bells out of the bag and hung them over one of the front pews. "You'd be surprised the old people who jingled those bells after church," she said, "and of course the children were open mouthed."

Hard Times, But We Survived

Lucy Nicoletti and her aunt and uncle, Josephine Fontaine and Mario Baldassare, welcomed me to Lucy's house on Champlain Street to talk about old times. They posed side by side on Lucy's couch for a photograph in a living room where the walls are never washed with water and detergent. Fifty years ago these walls were painted by Lucy's father, James Nicoletti, to look like rosy stucco. The one time Lucy tried washing them, some of the paint came off -- so that was the end of that.

Lucy's father, as a young man, helped Mr. Felix Pisani -- an accomplished artist and musician -- create the elaborate paintings that still adorn the ceilings of St. Kieran's Community Art Center, then St. Kieran's Church. This was in 1937 and Mario was in the sixth grade. After school he volunteered as an errand boy for the painters. "My job was to pick up as many rags as I could and collect empty cans, so they could mix the colors. I was proud in a way, because I could go way up to the staging. They had it pretty well covered up." Mr. Pisani didn't want the public to see his work until it was completed. To paint the ceilings, the men worked on their backs from high scaffolding. As the story goes, one day Lucy's father was quietly working away up high, when a woman came in to pray. As she was knelt, he thought he'd play a little trick. He called down to her, "Hello. It's me, God."

The woman snapped back, "Shut up, I'm talking to your mother."

Besides gathering rags and cans, Mario kept busy as an alter boy. "Father Walsh used to give us ten cents each after the service, and we'd all go to Plunkett's Drug Store (to buy a soda pop). We would be sometimes ten to fifteen boys going to vespers on a Sunday night, just because we knew we were going to get a dime."

Mario would later attend Berlin High School, but Josephine left school at age thirteen to work at the rectory -- doing dishes, scrubbing floors, washing toilets, serving the priests. Though they lived on the East Side near Angel Guardian, they attended St. Kieran's. Both Josephine and Mario started school on the East Side, but transferred the West Side when word came down from Father Bosquet that all Italians must stop going to Angel Guardian and go to St. Kieran's and St. Patrick's School. Angel Guardian would be for the French only. The change was hard on the children, and caused hard feelings in the community that persist today. "We were hurt," Josephine says.

Lucy says: "There are not many Italians now who lived through that. I haven't heard some of these stories myself."

Growing up Italian in a predominantly French neighborhood was not easy. Josephine remembers name-calling: "Macaroni, macaroni, eat the macaroni. I don't know how many times I went home crying. There's nights that I don't sleep, I go back to that, and I cry myself to sleep. Children can be mean."

Neighbor children broke the branches on their apple trees and once stole a crop of beans. "We depended on the garden for our livelihood," Mario says. When they found out who had stolen the beans and even found the beans in a basket under a neighbor's porch, "The man didn't say a darned thing."

"Did you get your beans back?" I asked.

"We wouldn't have taken them back," Mario says.

Shortly after emigrating from Sora, Italy, their father died, leaving their mother to raise seven children on her own. She catered weddings, held dinners at the house, sold peanuts. She'd buy the peanuts raw, then fry and salt them, package them up, and sell them to the stores. The children got to eat the burned ones. Mario was the delivery boy. "I wore out more shoes than what the peanuts were worth," he says. She sold them for twenty-five cents a pound. "She thought that was enough money. Same thing with the spaghetti dinners at home -- $1.25 for a plate with spaghetti, fresh Italian bread, salad."

Mario says, "We had people coming to the house to eat. Maybe somebody's birthday. They'd bring their own cake." He looks at Josephine: "Her and I, we made money. We played music for them on the old Victrola." The customers would give the children tips of a nickel or a dime. "We thought we were rich!"

For weddings, mother might make a hundred eggs of spaghetti. They measured the amount by the number of eggs mixed with the flour. A hundred eggs makes a lot of spaghetti. Between the cooking and Mother's Aid, $5 per child per month through age sixteen, the family pieced together a living.

The children would pick berries "all summer long," starting sometimes at six in the morning. "Mother would lead the parade," Josephine says. They'd hike to the fields, pick until noontime, then take the berries to the West Side to sell them to "the rich people, the doctors."

"The summer time we were supposed to be playing outside," Josephine says, "not us." They had many chores, including splitting wood. But "we never complained," Mario says. "We realized the poor woman could not do it alone."

Josephine adds, "We never beat each others up!"

The family pulled together then, as it does now.

"Those were hard times," Josephine says, "but we survived."

Moose Tales

If You Don't Know How to Get There . . .

The Moose has been on the road, telling stories in Unity, Bretton Woods, Canterbury and in Concord at my friend Mary Lamenzo's 60th birthday party. She invited relatives from Connecticut, so the Moose had some explaining to do -- What's a hornpout? What's a Boston Post Cane? What's a Selectman? Where's Rumney, and why is it funny when a lady from Lincoln says, about a big, hydraulic compactor, a.k.a. crusher, at the dump: "I seen it . . . in Rumney." I explained how Kermit pulled the lever from inside his little dumpmaster cottage, and the steel slabs of the compactor hydraulicked together, so everything got squished. Then I told how the lady from Lincoln said, in amazement and wonder, "I seen it . . . in Rumney." One of the Connecticut relatives quipped: "I thought you were going to say, 'I seen it at my mammogram.'"

Which reminded me of a story from "Priscilla in Canterbury." She said it was ok to repeat it as long as I didn't use her real name. I can't remember her name. (Hope it's not Priscilla.) She said: "Would you like to hear the story of the time my foot got stuck in my bra?"

Naturally, I said I would.

"Well," she said, " when I walk in the door to home, the first thing I do is take off my bra and hang it on the knob of the bedroom door. Which I did. My daughter and I were having coffee, and she wanted me to read something in the newspaper, so I took my coffee, walked to the bedroom, grabbed my reading glasses, and, as I was coming back out the door, I tried to kick it shut. My coffee went one way and my reading glasses went another, because my foot got stuck in my bra." She added, "If I was a 42 D instead of a 34 B, I'd still be swinging."

My visit to Unity reminded me of a story I heard last year, in nearby Plainfield about a couple that married late in life. At the ceremony the minister said to the groom: "Repeat after me. I vow to live with Margaret in peace and unity."

"I'll live in peace," the groom said, "but damned if I'll live in Unity."

In Unity, one of the town workers showed up on Lempster Mountain with a road grader and proceeded to clean out a ditch. In the process, he made quite a mess of an adjacent driveway. The owner come out. He says: "What are you doing making a mess of my driveway?"

The worker said: "The selectman told me to come up here and do this job. I'm here because Everett said so."

The owner said: "Are you telling me my father-in-law told you to come up here and make a mess of my driveway?"

One more Unity story, a family story. A woman admitted that she "married into the state of New Hampshire." At a gathering of the clan, she was complaining about all the back roads and no signs to guide her here and there. Uncle Lionel told her: "If you don't know how to get there, Charlotte, you shouldn't go."

I call that sound advice.

First Class to the Moon, Pretty Near

For my birthday, John Rule bought tickets to the moon. As the story goes, when the Cog Railway's builder Sylvester Marsh asked permission to build a railroad to the top of Mount Washington, the Legislators down to Concord thought his idea was so outlandish, they said: Go ahead -- build a railway to the moon for all we care.

The Cog doesn't go all the way to the moon, but it does climb the highest mountain in the East, and has done since its maiden chug on July 3, 1869.

Mount Washington is famous for being in the fog. Whether you go up on foot, drive the hair-raising auto road, or take the Cog, once you get to the top, you're lucky if you can see your hand in front of your face. We were lucky. Not only could we see our hands, but all over. On a clear day, you can see four states, Quebec, and the Atlantic Ocean. We couldn't see the ocean. Sometimes you can see the ocean. But pretty close. We got grand views of the Whites and way beyond. Martin, our brakeman, gave us a little history and answered our questions. A wiry young man, with a goatee, his railroad cap was dark with soot, as was his uniform -- dark work pants and shirt with his name embroidered on it. Soot floated in through the windows and dusted us all. (Note to self -- don't wear your favorite pink shirt next time you ride the Cog.)

"What was your most memorable trip?" I asked him, hoping maybe he'd had a hairy encounter with a bear or Martha Stewart. Nope. His most

memorable trips were "when we break down," he said. And, yankee-style, didn't elaborate.

Somebody asked did lightning strike the rails. (Three miles of explosed steel on the side of a mountain, what do you think?) "Yup," Martin said.

As we pulled to a side track to let another train pass, he advised, "Take pictures of the tourists taking pictures." Sure enough, the folks on the other train leaned out the windows to take pictures of us. And vice versa.

Someone asked Martin, if he saw wildlife on these trips. "Sure," Martin said. Then elaborated, a little. "Deer, foxes, coyotes, moose." The moose, he told us, will run along side the track, looking back every once in a while to see if the train is still chugging along behind them. They'll run and run, until they're frothing at the mouth. Then, and only then, does the idea bulb turn on: "I could run into the woods and get away from this great, noisy, smoke-belching monster." Then the moose runs into the woods. Moose aren't the wiliest of wild life.

One time, Martin told us, an engineer got into a bit of difficulty. When he went to suit up, the clean uniforms hadn't come back, so he had to put on yesterday's shirt and pants, dirty with oil and kerosene from maintenance work. It was a cold day -- gets awful cold on Mount Washington. Worst weather in the world! And proud of it. To warm himself, the engineer cosied right up to the fire box. As Martin's train passed the engineers', Martin noticed that the man's pants were on fire, and the engineer was doing his darnedest to extinguish his flaming bum. "That was funny," Martin said, and, remembering, I swear, he almost cracked a smile. "Lucky he had his long-johns on."

One of the traditions of the Cog, Martin warned us, is for hikers to moon the train. Near the top, the hiking trails pass right under the raised tracks. If this should happen he said, you've got two choices: "Look away. Or get out your camera."

I got out my camera.

Parmachenee Foxes and Missing Soxes
from the Telling Our Stories Series

The Berlin roots of Ola Oleson and his mother, Norma run deep and strong as a hundred-year-old oak's -- make that one-fifty to be safe. In their cozy kitchen on Denmark Street, Ola and Norma tell family stories illustrated with photographs, newspaper clippings, and one framed certificate for wood cutting, which reads:

The World's Record
of
221,319 Feet
Held by Berlin Mills Co.
Berlin, NH
Sawed by
Richard Royston

Dated September 8, 1900, the certificate lists the men who achieved this feat and their jobs: H.F. Wardwell, foreman; B. Perkins, millwright; Fred Oleson, filer; Edward Shupe, marker on slip; Joseph Welch, setter; P. Plant, behind saw; and many others, including Olaf Oleson, edger. It's a family treasure.

Olaf Oleson was a world class skier who held the patent for three-groove jumping skis. He emigrated from Norway in the late 1800s. Olaf's children -- Pearl, Clarence and Alton -- became famous as the Flying Oleson's, extraordinary ski jumpers who performed side-by-side-by-side jumps in the Boston Garden and Madison Square Garden. When Clarence was six months old, Olaf took him his arms and treated him to a ride down the big ski jump. Mother was waiting at the bottom, none too happy. "No wonder Clarence liked to jump," Norma says.

Pearl nearly didn't live to become a Flying Oleson. In those days, people would skate on the Androscoggin from Berlin to Milan and back. One morning Pearl, out skating, fell through and disappeared under the ice. Down river, a young man spotted her floating by. He broke the ice with his hockey stick and fished her out. They took her home, unconscious, warmed her up and "hoped for the best." Young Pearl didn't wake up until 8:00 that night.

The third Flying Oleson was Alton (Ola's father and Norma's husband). Alton carried on the family tradition of working in the woods. One of his jobs was river driver. If you don't want to make a river driver fight, Ola told me, never touch his pick pole, cant dog, or picaroon! If a river driver fell in, the sentiment was "Save the cant dog, to heck with the man."

When Ola was just a baby, the family lived among the loggers at Parmachenee Lake. Norma was the only woman for fourteen miles, and (I'm guessing), little Ola was the only baby. One moonlit night, Norma heard the foxes barking on the lake. Home alone but drawn by the sounds, she bundled Ola in a sleeping bag and put him on a sled. "We thought we'd take a little walk," she says.

When Alton got home, he found "No Norma. No Ola." He was quite upset. Still, it was a beautiful walk on a beautiful winter night.

Alton Oleson "did some awful work," Ola says. His first job in Bog Brook was loading logs that were bigger around than they were long, huge spruce and pine. In Kennebago, opening up Crowley Brook, the men found the King's stamp (mast trees) on some of the pines. This was in the 1950s.

Another of Alton's jobs was "picking rear." If the boom separated and "logs went in the wallows," it was his job to fetch them back. This was a task for rugged men. They carried out two logs at a time in a kind of knapsack contraption with a loop for each shoulder. Yes, Alton Oleson was rugged, but also sensitive. One night, trying to sleep in a cabin with many other river drivers, the smell became too much for him. All those dirty wet wool socks hung from the rafters to dry. He gathered them up and burned them all in the wood stove.

Sometimes Alton would pack Ola on his back and take him on the job. On an average day, he might walk 15 or 20 miles. Up in Lincoln Pond country, deep in the woods, Alton was spotting, marking trees. He set Ola down for less than two minutes. "I saw a chipmunk," Ola says. "Ended up at Aziscohos Lake."

"My dad found me, but he aged twenty years before he did. Where do you start looking when you're 17 miles from the nearest road." Of course, he adds, "There's nothing in the woods that's gonna bother you."