Grammie and Grampie

We lived a couple of houses from Grammie Muriel and Grampie Ellery, so I saw them a lot. This picture of them was taken at Grammie Ruth's and Grampie Jim's wedding reception (June 16, 1961) -- the day after I graduated from high school.

Grammie was quite a story-teller. We loved to hear her talk about the "olden days" and her childhood adventures. We loved to hear about those old days because life was so different then. And the world was changing very fast.

Grampie was born in 1895. Back then and during the early part of his marriage, people went everywhere by horse and wagon or buggy. He owned the first truck in the town of Littleton, Maine. Actually, the truck he bought had no cab and no body. Those, he built for himself out of wood. There was a wooden bench in the cab for the driver and passenger and a bench on each side of the body for more passengers. In later years, it had a place of honor in the pasture behind the hen house. We loved to sit in it and dream of great adventures, a bit akin to Robert Lewis Stevenson's poems. You may have seen the drawing that Grammie Ruth did of that truck. I think most of your parents have a copy of it.

When I was a little kid, my grandparents' house was heated with wood. There was no bathroom inside. But they had a handpump at the sink for pumping in cold water. Water was kept hot in a tank on the wood stove and they had to hand dip that out for doing dishes and for taking a bath in a tin tub that was filled by hand and had to be carried outside to dump out! (Sorry, no showers! And baths were for Saturday nights.)

There was no TV but we loved the stories that were broadcast by radio. There were telephones and when I was really young my grandparents got electricity and no longer had to use oil lamps at night.