Mapping Norwood: An Irish-American Memoir

Acknowledgments

327 Acknowledgments My thanks to the William R. Perkins Library at Duke University for permission to quote from the Letters of Private Fisher A. Cleaveland of Company I, 35th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and to Mark Farrell for his permission to quote from his great-grandfather’s diary, the Civil War Diary of Sergeant Henry W. Tisdale, Co. I, 35th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry 1862–1865. Thanks also to the following institutions for their permission to publish photographs: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Boston Public Library Print Department; the Estate of Dino Buzzati, author of The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily; the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Historical Commission; the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University; the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; the Norwood Historical Society; and Bryant F. Tolles, author of Norwood: The Centennial History of a Massachusetts Town. Detailed citations for these accompany the captions of the pictures. All photographs without citation have been provided by members of our family, to whom great thanks are due for having preserved these pictures. Three colleagues at Southern Illinois University Carbondale have been instrumental in this project. My thanks go to Richard “Pete” Peterson for his early exhortation and connection to the world of creative nonfiction, and for the example of his own autobiographical writing; to Beth Lordan for her steadfast encouragement of my non-academic writing over many years and for her helpful reading of this manuscript; and to Ed O’Day for his clarifying perspectives on Irish American studies and his guidance in the wilderness of genealogical research. Thanks also to Jim Rogers, editor of New Hibernia Review and my good friend, for encouraging my work with the example of his own, and for publishing part of chapter 6 as the essay “Lodestone: Following the Emly Shrine” (New Hibernia Review 13 [1]: 9–19). I am also grateful to the edi- 328 Acknowledgments tors of Creative Non-Fiction for publishing the essay that contained the kernel of this book, “I Haven’t Been That Far, But I’ve Been to Norwood” (Creative Non-Fiction 14 [2000]: 56–70). My first cousins Francis Fanning and Margaret Fanning have been the most diligent historians that any family could wish for. Ellen MacDonald has been similarly astute in discovering the details of our shared German ancestry. I thank them for their generosity. I owe my acquaintance with Patrick J. Pendergast’s poems and Frank L. Sweetser’s demographic study, The Social Ecology of Metropolitan Boston: 1950 (Boston: Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, 1961), to Jim Callahan. And thanks go also to my best and oldest Norwood friends, Dan Callahan, Steve Callahan, and Lorin Maloney, for their encouragement of this work and the contribution of their own memories of our shared childhood and adolescence. My brother Geoffrey has provided a valuable perspective and many crucial memories I would certainly have missed. My sister Patti has been greatly encouraging of this project and tireless in her gathering and passing on of countless gems of her own impeccable research into family, Norwood, and Massachusetts history. My great thanks to both. I am grateful every day for the love and support of my wife Fran and our son and daughter, Stephen and Ellen. This book is for them. ...