Granny D’s American Century

3 | The Birthplace of Liberty, Including My Own

The Birthplace of Liberty, Including My Own It was still pouring when I arrived at Boston’s North Station: 3:31 p.m. Sunday, January 6, 1929. This exactitude derives from old train schedules and not memory, though I do remember the journey clearly and can yet smell the cigar smoke in my hair. The sidewalks by the station were black-scaled with pumping wet umbrellas; the streets were a-splash with clattering Model T Fords liberally honking their oogah-oogah horns—which were a Laureland -Hardy comedy effect even then. There were also many of the new Fords—the Model As—and of course a mix of more exotic, sometimes even colorfully appointed cars known to me from their glamorous magazine ads: the Essex, Whippet, Studebaker, Auburn, Franklin, Plymouth, Pontiac, Hudson, Nash, Chevrolet, Cadillac, Hupmobile, Chrysler, Dodge Brothers, Buick, Oldsmobile, DeSoto, Packard. I was amazed by the utter wealth splashing by me every second. I saw what I thought must be a Duesenberg—so incredibly long and fancy—from which we took the term “a real duesy.” I couldn’t imagine what so many people were doing humping along on a Sunday, a day quite dead back home in Laconia. These people seemed grimly focused on their processions. They had jobs, I suppose, as the stock market crash—the opening act of the Great Depression—was nearly a year off. I decided not to be frightened by the utter chaos of the city before me. I looked upon the scene instead as an elaborately choreographed stage waiting just for me—its actors already in motion and expecting my entrance. The rain was for dramatic effect. I was free and eighteen—nearly nineteen. I had just escaped from the Scott & Williams silk stocking loom factory in Laconia, where I worked for a monotonous year and a half after high school. I got that job easily because I was a minor star in the well-attended plays produced by the high school and the community 3 12 granny d’s american century playhouse. In those days, the available town entertainment was entirely of that sort, plus motion pictures. The plant manager at Scott & Williams, a slightly hunched Mr. Woolridge—whose handsome son, a violin-playing poet I worshipped from afar—brought the weekly pay envelopes personally to each of the several hundred of us and always handed mine to me with a Shakespearean flourish. I never knew if he was genuinely impressed with my acting or if he was mocking my descent from local star to slave-wage factory girl. He probably did not know himself—just something amusing to stitch into the drab fabric of his week. That was all history. I was now in the big city of Boston, presenting as cutely as I could manage. My part in this day’s drama was to be comic. The rain increased; it would rain nearly an inch and a half in a short time, bringing unseasonable warmth to the city. Stepping in and out of the station, looking for my host, I was soon drenched. Black dye was streaming down my face from the little cloche hat my mother had bought for me. The long feather that had curled elegantly downward, Clara Bow style, from the top of the hat to just under my chin was now sagging like the dead bird it was. The black fur collar of my new long woolen coat, purchased from the same sharp gentleman in Laconia (who had winked at me even as he hoodwinked my mother) was revealed by the drench to be hardly the rainresistant rabbit fur as advertised, but the cheap fur of a smelly skunk. In the store, I had stood before a full-length mirror and seen myself for the first time as a grown woman, something of a flapper, a femme fatale. “A little doll!” the shopkeeper said. “Not bad,” my mother agreed. She had grown up just when motion pictures—silent ones—were coming onto the scene, and she had wished stardom of some sort for herself. She had absolutely no opportunity in that regard, but she could now pack her genes off in the person of me, and I was happy to oblige her dreams. I had my sights set on the New York stage, however, not “whorehouse Hollywood.” In any case, my mother was pleased to have a little doll to send forth, and I did look pretty good for at least the first half...