The fact that World War ll had been raging for the last three years and that the decisive battle of D-Day at Normandy had just occurred didn’t seem to really affected us much. We were kids. Even when the brother of one of our playmates was killed in action, the reality of it all was still obscure. 
We saw our share of war movies and watched the newsreels between feature films to keep up to date on how the Allies were beating the crap out of Hitler as well as the progress of the fierce fighting going on in the Pacific. But we were far more interested in Bud Abbott & Lou Costello, and those wonderful serials where the hero’s life was put in peril, if not wiped out for sure each and every Saturday. No matter how much it appeared that our hero could never get out of the situation the writers put him in at the end of each episode, he always found a way to triumph. In many ways we lived in a sort of make-believe world, where we could have adventures just by mutually inventing them. We often made up situations and pretended that we all believed the nonsense, allowing our active imaginations to entertain us, sometimes to the point of scaring ourselves.
Excerpts from “A Creative Odyssey – the Story of Floyd and Richie Walser” written by Richard L. Rotelli:We saw our share of war movies and watched the newsreels between feature films to keep up to date on how the Allies were beating the crap out of Hitler as well as the progress of the fierce fighting going on in the Pacific. But we were far more interested in Bud Abbott & Lou Costello, and those wonderful serials where the hero’s life was put in peril, if not wiped out for sure each and every Saturday. No matter how much it appeared that our hero could never get out of the situation the writers put him in at the end of each episode, he always found a way to triumph. In many ways we lived in a sort of make-believe world, where we could have adventures just by mutually inventing them. We often made up situations and pretended that we all believed the nonsense, allowing our active imaginations to entertain us, sometimes to the point of scaring ourselves.CHAPTER 1 – Summer 1944
It was summer again. Time for my friends and me to find new mischief and adventures. We were good kids. Kind of simple-minded and naive, especially compared to the high- octane, precocious youth of today. We didn’t have TV quite yet and the world certainly seemed simpler and slower paced.
Home for me and my Mom and Dad was the top floor of a two-family house on Dow Street in Framingham, Massachusetts. What a great location this was! What kid could have asked for a better place to grow up? Just down Nipmuc Road, which came right off Dow Street across from our house, was the sandy beach of a good-sized pond known as Lake Waushakum. Pronounced Wah-SHAKE-um, its name in the time of the Nipmuc Indians who had lived along its shores, had variously been recorded as Washakamaug or Shakum. lt meant “eel fishing place” evidently due to the abundance of those snake like fish that could be caught there. Over the years, for a variety of reasons, the eel population had dwindled so there were not too many of them squirming around in there. It was small compared with other lakes, at just under 90 acres in size, and really was classified as a pond. We always called it, “The Lake”. It was about a three-minute slow walk past Fair’s lce house; a place loaded with ice packed in hay. It was amazing that the ice could last all through the hot summers. We still used ice in those days in our iceboxes. Not too many folks had refrigerators yet, although this was just about to change dramatically, making the demand for ice diminish significantly. Unfortunately, Fair’s lce house burned to the ground one exciting night. I remember watching the inferno from the front porch of our house, feeling the heat on my face even from that distance, and wondering how a place loaded with frozen water could burn so ferociously. My folks were watching the spectacle with me, and my Dad said something about having seen this same fire I2 years earlier. I didn’t understand that at all.
If you walked along Dow Street at a right angle to Nipmuc Road, you would very soon come to Lake Avenue, which paralleled the lake. This street made a sharp right turn parallel to Dow Street, and became Cove Avenue, so named because the lake curved around into a cove just out behind this street. The concrete foundation of all that was left of The Cove Ice Company’s icehouse alter it met a similar fate as Fair’s, marred the view and gave us a place to roam around playing war games. If you ventured out behind the concrete pillars which used to support the Cove Ice Company’s long- gone icehouse, you came to the smallest part of the lake, not too surprisingly known as “the cove”. Out a little way from shore was a small island, which, for reasons that were never known to us was called “Monkey Island.” I once overheard a teenage boy say to his girl friend, “Let’s swim out there and monkey around.” But I’m sure they never did because the water was way too full of weeds, snakes, snapping turtles and lots of other stuff you wouldn’t want to tangle with. Continuing on Cove Avenue, you came to Winthrop Street, which headed off past the other end of Dow Street and got you to The Memorial School, where we went from first grade through Junior High, and to Hollis Street. From there, downtown Framingham (and the Hollis Theater) was easily within reach of a few more minutes of spirited walking. So that was our block, our turf, the area where we could play at practically anything.
One of the things that made it so terrific for us was that the Anna Murphy Playground was right there. It was on the comer of Lake Ave. and Cove Ave. and ran quite a distance, about half the way, along Cove. There was a chain link fence behind our house, which ran all along one side of this wonderful playground. We had our “secret” ways of defeating this fence, ways that got more creative as we grew up. At the Lake Avenue end of the playground was a clay tennis court enclosed by a tall fence. Not once did any of us attempt to play any tennis there. Nobody in our gang had a tennis racquet, or any idea about how the game was played. Besides, in our minds this was a sissy’s game. Not far from the tennis court was a shed where summer activities for small kids (like us) were conducted. There were swings on heavy metal pipes, a sliding board, seesaw, jungle gym, and a sandbox.
On hot summer mornings you could hear high-pitched sounds coming from that part of our world. These were the sounds of excited kids having great fun, their happy shouts blending in with the rhythmic squeaking of the swings and seesaw. The largest part of the playground was taken up by a baseball field, complete with backstop, pitcher’s mound, and paths of clay to run the bases. Real bases were brought to the field by various teams and taken away with them when they left. We just used somebody’s glove, a piece of wood, a dead bird, or anything handy. Far off in distant left field was a smaller softball area, or at least that’s what we used it for. Only when the bigger kids where playing baseball was anybody at our “softball field” in any danger of getting conked on the head by a fly ball.
Floyd Walser (1950)
One of the most interesting things, and at the same time a little scary to me and my pals, about the area across Lake Avenue from the playground was that a strange, crippled old man who was an artist, lived in a big old house set back in the woods near the lake. He was known to us only as Mr. Walser, sometimes called “Tex”, and rarely called by his first name, Floyd by the adults in our neighborhood. The old house that he lived in was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Greene.
We knew that the Greenes were well-known musicians and that Mr. Roy Greene was the conductor of something known as The Civic League Orchestra. Mrs. Greene was reportedly a little strange, sick much of the time, but probably very famous. We rarely saw the Greenes, but occasionally, Mr. Greene would hire some of us to do odd jobs around his house. Little by little, we would get to know Mr. Walser, finding out that he sometimes gave art lessons to what we figured must be some of the bravest youngsters in town. It turned out that it seemed as though half the population of Framingham at one point or another took art lessons from him. We very quickly learned that we had nothing to fear from this remarkable man, and in fact, we enjoyed spending time with him.
Edith Greene at piano, circa 1924
The houses on Dow Street were close together and many people were related. Just about everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone else. The lion’s share of the population was made up of people who had immigrated to America from their homes in Italy to make a better life for their families.
Several of the oldest children in these families were born in the old country and made the long, slow passage to America by boat with their young parents. Italian was spoken in these households, although as soon as the kids started going to school and otherwise blending in with other neighbors, English began taking hold. Many of the “old folk” really didn’t want to speak anything other than their native tongue, and would go to great lengths to avoid using English words when it was so easy to stay with what was so familiar. Eventually, their kids would be the driving force which got them speaking broken English at first, then a very acceptable version with occasional Italian phrases or words thrown in for good measure. There were a lot of people who weren’t Italian, but there was no doubt that this was a neighborhood of people who really cared about one another and looked after each other’s needs. Just about every family, at least the Italian ones, had large vegetable gardens in their back yards. It seemed as if everyone was good at farming. I sometimes wondered if the name of our town might have been an accidental misspelling of “Farmingham”.
My cousins (a Belloli family) lived right next door in a stucco-sided house that their father, Joseph had built. They had five boys and one girl, but the ones I hung around with all the time were Henry, a few months younger than l was, and his brother, Sonny, who was about a year older. (l was 9, going on l0.) Eddie, nicknamed “Bananas”, was part of the big-guy group and whenever we tried to copy some of the things they did, we got in trouble. Bigger brothers Tony and Carlo were, as far as I was concerned, grown ups, as was big sister Corinne. One of the things l loved about my cousin’s house was the grape arbor in their back yard. We used to play in the sweet shade of that grape vine and when we thought no one was looking, we’d sneak a few of the ripest, juiciest grapes l’ve ever eaten. There were grape arbors at my house as well as my grandparent’s, but Henry and Sonny had the one I liked best.
On the first floor of our house lived the Bortolussi family, a family with the mother, Eureka who was called Rica, the father, Fred who worked at Dennison Mfg. Co. where my dad worked, and one child, a boy named Freddie. He was born just two days after l was. Although we were not related, Freddie and l were real pals. So the principal gang was Dickie, as l was known then, Freddie, Henry, and Sonny.
You didn’t often see one of this bunch without the others. There was one other full-time member of this gang who deserves to be mentioned. That was Henry’s faithful dog, Major. He always enjoyed being with any and all of us, but …. (to be continued)
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CHAPTER 14 – Lucky Point 1945 – 1949
All through the winter of I944, and on through the first half of I945, the talk around our kitchen table seemed to me to be always either about the progress of the war, or of us building a house. My dad was really almost obsessed with the house-building idea and l could tell that my mother was picking up on his enthusiasm for such a project. I would often hear them discussing this long alter l had gone to bed and I began to realize that, by golly we were going to be housebuilders. An additional exciting part for me was that the place they were talking about to build this house was the woods right next to where Mr. Walser lived with the Greenes – – the very place I had “discovered” just the previous summer.
House at Lucky Point (winter 1944-45)
World War ll was nearing its end with victory in Europe having just been declared on President Truman’s 61th birthday on May 8″‘, I945. There still were a lot of horrible things happening throughout the South Pacific and the Japanese showed a resolve to continue to battle at all costs. It seemed obvious to all the adults l came in contact with that the war would soon end, so in spite of the fact that a wartime economy was still in effect, things were looking brighter.
Watercolor of Waushakum by Floyd Walser
It was in this spirit of a forthcoming rebirth of freedoms that planning to build a house was so exciting. For several weeks, my dad had been talking seriously to Mr. Greene about buying a major chunk of his property. The land that Richie wanted to buy was right at the corner where Lake Ave. and Cove Ave. met. It was so densely wooded that most people who passed by never realized how much potential for a house lot it had. However, the intrinsic beauty of this portion of the Greene’s land was not missed by Richie, who had always been blessed with an uncanny ability to envision solutions to problems that others were hardly aware of. He had copyright material … (to be continued)