HOUGHS NECK

When I was a kid "going to the beach" meant we were going
to visit my grandaunt and granduncle Peggy and Leo McCue
at their cottage on Hough's Neck. (pronounced How's Neck).
"The Neck" is part of Quincy, Ma. and juts out to form the
southern boundary of Quincy Harbor.


There were other nearby beaches but they were crowded
and the water wasn't too safe on some days, so for most of
my childhood we would drive out to see Aunt Peggy and
Uncle Leo. Their cottage sat at the end of the seawall on a
little dirt road named Nut Island Ave. but one of my earliest
memories of the place is of walking down a long flight of
wooden steps to the cottage from Island Ave which ran
along the hillside above it. There was brush on either side of
the stairs and walking down towards the building must have
made an impression on me because I've never forgotten it.

Aunt Peggy (Margaret) was the only surviving sister of
my grandmother Aggie. She and Uncle Leo had five
children, three boys and two girls. Four had already married
and started their own families so there were usually some
cousins around to play with when we visited. It was also great
when Peggy's youngest son Bobby was around because he was
my idea of a very cool guy: good looking, athletic, and he had
a driver's license. He was about 7 or 8 years older than me so
it was a classic case of a younger kid idealizing an older one!

The first picture is of my second cousin Margie, my Mom
on the right and oh, yeah, that's me in the middle. It's a bit
ragged like some of the old photos I have and one of these
days when I can afford the cost of Photoshop Elements I
hope to be able to fix this and others like it.

The dirt road ended at the cottage and beyond that was a
rocky beach. We used to toss rocks at the ground and watch
for the "squirt" of the steamer clams and dig them up. If you
went swimming, you either had really tough soles on your
feet or you wore old sneakers into the water.


One incident at the cottage I dreamed about for years. There
was a raft in the water made out of old planks and oil drums
and somehow or another I fell off it into the water. I must
have been around 5 or 6 years old and I swallowed a LOT of
water. The end result was that for years after, right into
college, I never put my face under the water while I swam.
We had swimming class as part of gym at college and that's
where I finally got over that fear, but I still prefer to keep my
head above water!

I have other memories of the cottage. One involves my first
taste of beer. The grownups were sitting around drinking
what I thought was ginger ale but when Uncle Leo gave me
a sip of his I didn't like it at all. My Mom told me I made
quite a face.


I've never forgotten the family dog, Lady, who was crawled
over, tugged at and pestered by grandchildren and cousins
and was always patient about it.

And the first place I ever saw "The Ernie Kovacs Show" and
The Nairobi Trio was on a tv at the cottage.

As you can see from the picture of the building, the cottage
wasn't some grand building and the atmosphere was laid back.
If you look closely, you can see somebody's leg resting on the
railing of the porch.

Uncle Leo passed sometime in the 1960's and Aunt Peggy in
1988. At some point the ownership of the cottage changed
hands but I don't know the particulars. Two of their children
had cottages in other Massachusetts towns and so my
younger brother (who is 17 years younger) has memories of
the visits to the Marshfield cottage.

I haven't been out to Hough's Neck in years and I think the
original cottage no longer stands.

But the memories live on.

AGGIE

I’m a child of mixed heritage. On one side I’m
descended from a long line of Yankee settlers.
On the other, I’m descended from Irish Catholic
immigrants who came to Boston in the late
19th century.

Meet my maternal grandmother, Agnes McFarland.
In the family she’s known as Aggie. I believe the
picture is for her Confirmation.

She was born in 1898, eighth child and third daughter
out of the ten children that would survive infancy. She
grew up in a Irish Catholic family, her father a laborer
on the Boston Elevated Railway.


She had rheumatic fever as a child in a time when it
was a deadly disease and although she'd survived it left
Aggie with a weak heart. In 1924 she married Edward F.
White Sr. They had two children before a third died, then
Edward walked out in the middle of the Great Depression
leaving Aggie to raise the children on her own.

Aggie divorced him in 1935.

It was hard for her; in those times the label "divorced"
was somewhat shameful for an Irish Catholic woman.


Work was hard to come by for a woman with children
so she scrimped and saved. Some nights dinner was
bread soaked in milk. My Mom and uncle were sent to
a nearby dental school to have their teeth worked on by
students. When Mom came down with what was known
as St. Vitus’ Dance in those days, Aggie somehow came
up with the money for the doctors and to buy liver to
serve at dinner to get Mom’s iron content up. I suspect
Aggie’s parents must have helped her out here and there
financially. My Mom once claimed that the legendary
Boston Mayor James Michael Curley helped out with
some problem as well.


But Aggie was no cream puff, either. One story my
Mom told was of the time she and Uncle Ed skipped
school to hang out at the cottage out on Houghs’ Neck
with their cousins. The place was owned by Aggie’s
younger sister Peggy and her husband Leo McCue and
was quite a distance away from the Jamaica Plain
neighborhood of Boston Aggie and her children lived
in.


Yet suddenly my grandmother was walking down the
beach towards them. She’d taken the trolley and two
different buses to get there. She stayed long enough
to let Mom and Ed get their things and then took
them home by the same route she’d used to get there.


Somehow she did it. She raised her children to adulthood
even though it meant sometimes ducking her rebellious
son's head in the sink when he used swears or nursing her
daughter through a case of scarlet fever. She survived
watching her son join the Navy at 18 to fight in WW2.
All this while living life as a divorced Catholic woman
whose husband had left her for another woman.


She never remarried.


I knew her as Nanny, my grandmother, and she lived
with us when I was a kid. My Dad and Uncle Ed had
bought a two family home after the war in Malden on
a GI loan and so Aggie saw all five of her grandchildren
everyday. But she spent most of the time with my sister
and I because my parents both worked fulltime.


I have memories of her.


She was a quiet woman, black haired with grey streaks
and usually wore those one piece housedresses. She’d eat
peas by rolling them down the blade of her knife into her
mouth and looking back I think she did it to amuse me
and tease my mom. She never yelled but I remember
her breaking up a knockdown fight between two Italian
ladies who lived in the houses to either side of ours and
doing it with a slightly louder than usual voice and a
disgusted tone at their behavior in front of children.


I remember her being upset when the goldfish got sucked
down the drain of the kitchen sink when she pulled the
sink plug by accident after cleaning the goldfish bowl. And
I recall how she kept me from looking out the window after
a worker fell off the roof when it was being reshingled.
(He survived by the way; he broke his back and narrowly
missed landing atop the picket fence that ran between our
house and our next door neighbor’s.)


As time went by her rheumatic heart got worse and she
needed an oxygen tank in her bedroom for when breathing
was hard.


Aggie died at age 58 on February 12th, 1957.


She lived a tough life but she always carried herself like
a lady.