Voices of the Past Record

Historic Preservation Committee

Oral History

Oral History -- Faith Witham Robertson and her sister Constance Witham Higgins. Interviewed by John Grossmann on May 3, 2008.

GROSSMANN:	We’re at 91 Kenilworth Road, the home of Chris and Bob Sheasby who have been gracious enough to invite former residents of the house -- Faith Witham Robertson and Constance Witham Higgins, who have just had a tour of the house they grew up in. Faith, let me start with you. What special memories of this Hapgood house came flooding back to you as you walked through it today?
FAITH WITHAM ROBERTSON:	Maybe not so much the house, but my first thought about it was when they put the paved roads in. I was fascinated. I must have been around seven, and before that, all the roads had been dirt. I watched these construction people come in and they put in ditches along the side to put in the boundary, the cement curbing. I especially liked the long spikes that they had. They were like mini crowbars. My father had a big crowbar. Now, I could have one, too, if I snuck one away from the construction people.
JG:	And did you sneak one away from the construction people?
FWR:	Oh, sure. I wanted a crowbar that fit my size. I think it was probably about four feet long.
JG:	What do you remember about the dirt roads?
FWR:	They got very muddy in the rainy weather. I don’t remember too much, except for Fanny Road, because that wasn’t paved when the rest of the streets in town were. I think it was a county road. So that stayed dirt and it would get so gutted, nobody ever really used it.
JG:	Let’s figure out what year the roads got paved. You said you were seven. You were born in what year?
FWR:	Nineteen twenty-two.
JG:	And Connie, you born in what year?
CONSTANCE WITHAM HIGGINS:	Nineteen nineteen, at the end of the year.
FWR:	My parents moved in here April of 1922 and I was born in September.
JG:	Where did they come from?
FWR:	They came from Richmond Hill, Queens, where Connie was born. And before that they were in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where our older sister, Frances, was born. And before that, they came from Worcester, Massachusetts, where my brother Tasker was born in 1914.
CWH:	Tasker is our mother’s maiden name. His actual name was William Tasker Witham.
JG:	Faith, you were not only born in Mountain Lakes, but you were born in this very house, right upstairs from the dining room where we’re sitting right now.
CWH:	She didn’t wait to go to the hospital.
FWR:	I didn’t wait for the doctor either. My father delivered me.
JG:	Connie, as the older sister, what do you remember as a young girl growing up here in Mountain Lakes?
CWH:	I remember walking to school on Kenilworth Road, then around to the lake to Lake Drive School. We’d walk along the dam, parallel to Glen Road, then on to Briarcliff Road, Larchdell Way, to Lake Drive, to what was then our only school in Mountain Lakes, on the corner of Lake Drive and the Boulevard.
JG:	So you’d walk along the dam in front of what is now Wildwood Elementary School. What was there then?
CWH:	Woods. Just woods. And all woods down Powerville. That’s where we used to play, in the woods. Whenever the weather permitted, we had our adventures.
JG:	What kind of adventures did you girls have?
CWH:	We didn’t worry about being girls. We could be pirates or explorers.
FWR:	One of the amazing things was that my brother and Henry Barton, who lived on Briarcliff, I think, south of Wildwood Lake, they went into the woods west of Powerville Road and they put ropes on a very tall tree in a clearing They were being Tarzans. And they also built platforms on trees at the edge of the clearing. They’d get a sympathetic swing going with the rope and it would go flying up and wrap around one of the branches that they had put in place to form the platform. And then you’d climb up the tree. Get on the rope. There was a knot on the bottom of the rope, and you’d swing down, back and forth across the clearing.
JG:	Did you two do this, too?
FWR:	I did. I was an outdoor, athletic, running around kind of person.
JG:	Tell us your memories of Lake Drive School.
CWH:	They didn’t have a kindergarten and you weren’t supposed to be allowed into school until you were five. I remember my birthday was at the end of December and when I was four, mother had taught me how to read. So the silly thing to me was, once I had my birthday I could go and be in the same class, but I was five then. And they didn’t have kindergarten, so that was first grade.
JG:	What do you remember of the building itself?
CWH:	I remember it was right next to the Club, so we could go next door and go up the steps to their kitchen and buy an ice cream cone for five cents, if we had the nickel.
JG:	At lunchtime?
CWH:	At lunchtime.
JG:	Did some students go to the Club and have lunch, instead of going home?
CWH:	I don’t know.
FWR:	This was the new Club. Not the one that burned down. We’d go up the outside stairs and put our order in, to have a hamburger; the only item on the menu.
JG:	So you would eat at the Club some days, instead of going home for lunch?
FWR:	Well, we couldn’t eat at the Club; there were no facilites for doing so since we got the hamburgers directly from the kitchen. We’d go back to the school and eat in the gym, which was used as a lunchroom; no tables or chairs -- we sat on the concrete steps. Usually we’d go home for lunch since the lunch period was an hour and a half long and it was enough time to travel home, eat lunch and return to school. When the weather was inclement or Mother had to be away during lunch time, we’d take lunch boxes. Going to the Club was a special occasion.
CWH:	That must have been after my time.
JG:	The other thing we’ve been told, but it’s good to confirm this, if possible, that there were actually swimming classes for gym held at the Club.
CWH:	Not that I remember.
FWR:	Me either, but it may have happened after we left. I finished eighth grade there in the spring of ’35. And then went up to St. John’s, currently Wilson School.
JG:	Anything else about Lake Drive School?
FWR:	I remember going out in the play yard after it had rained and frozen and there were all these little cup things from people’s footprints with ice across them. It made it very difficult to walk. And playing on the jungle gym and they didn’t care about the nuts and bolts that held the bars together on the jungle gym. If you scraped yourself, you scraped yourself.
JG:	There is the stage and the big room upstairs. Do you have recollections of musical performances or events held there?
FWR:	Assemblies were held there. On some Fridays several classes would gather there to listen to Walter Damrosch [host of NBC radio’s Music Appreciation Hour from 1928 to 1942] on the radio lecturing on music he’d present. Also sometimes a class would present a program. There was a play called "The Windmills of Holland" which I think was put on by the Junior High.
CWH:	[starts singing a line from a song from the show... "around and around and around..."]
JG:	After Lake Drive School, where did you go Connie?
CWH:	What is now Wilson School. It was then St. John’s. That was mid Depression. St. John’s needed enough students for the basic structure of their school, and I was given an offer to come tuition-free, just the cost of books, and join the class of ‘36.
JG:	So what grades was St. John’s back then?
CWH:	From kindergarten, and through eighth grade was boys and girls. That was the lower school, they called it. The upper school was just girls.
JG:	That’s where you went to high school?
CWH:	Yes. Most of the graduates of the Mountain Lakes school were bused to Morristown High. Some went to Boonton. But the majority in my class all went to Morristown, even though it was farther.
JG:	In the 20s, kids from Mountain Lakes actually took the trolley to high school. Do you have memories of the trolley?
FWR:	Very vaguely. By the time I was able to maybe make use of it, it was no longer running. There was the Public Service bus, that’s what it was called then. My brother and sister took it up to Denville and switched to another Public Service bus that took them over to Morristown, so it was kind of a complicated thing. At that time, Denville had a diner and that was it; there were none of the stores that are there now.
JG:	That raises the question of where your family did its shopping?
FWR:	In Boonton. They had three A&Ps. There was one up at the top of the hill on Main Street. I think that was maybe the original one. There was one kind of in the middle on the hill. And then there was one down on Mechanic Street or Division Street. And then that was replaced by an A&P Supermarket -- and that was wonderful, a great big store. Then they closed the one on the hill and then eventually they closed the one at the top of the hill.
JG:	Besides shopping for groceries, where did your family shop for clothes?
FWR:	Morristown, I think.
CWH:	Sometimes into the city.
FWR:	Maybe twice a year we’d gone into Manhattan.
CWH:	With all the commuters, on the Lackawanna Railroad, commuting.
JG:	Was your father a commuter to New York?
CWH:	Actually he went to Brooklyn. He worked for Sperry Gyroscope in Brooklyn. So that was a long commute. He’d come home tired.
JG:	Was there talk of moving to be closer to his job?
CWH:	They moved from Richmond Hill, in Queens, which was closer.
JG:	Do you know what brought them here then, because he moved farther from his job to come to Mountain Lakes?
CWH:	Hearing about this lovely Mountain Lakes community for white-collar commuters. So they tried it, and they liked it.
FWR:	Many engineers, professional people, had been moving out here. Somewhere I read, possibly in a special publications celebrating Mountain Lakes’s 25th anniversary that in 1936 Mountain Lakes had the highest percentage of professional people per population than in any other place in the US.
CWH:	This is their silver anniversary edition and it lists the names, not only of all the people, but what colleges they graduated from. At this time, our sister and brother were in college -- they had a star by their name if they were still in school.
JG:	This is the time when the engineers and the professional people in town were very responsible for really setting the infrastructure of the community. Was your father involved in that, was he active in town government or assisting?
FWR:	Not that I remember. With a wife, four children, working three jobs and a home to maintain, he didn’t have much time for other things.. He was active in the Community Church. He was superintendent of the Sunday School for many years. Besides working full time at Sperry Gyroscope Company as the chief electrical engineer he taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and at Newark College of Engineering.
CWH:	In the Depression you needed all the sources of income you could find.
FWR:	That was night school, two evenings a week, one at each school.
CWH:	I don’t know how he did it all, but he did.
JG:	Speaking of the Depression. What are you childhood memories of the Depression hitting Mountain Lakes?
CWH:	It was a happy time for us. We didn’t worry about it.
FWR:	Daddy had a job.
CWH:	None of the other kids had a lot of stuff so we didn’t envy them.
FWR:	I think when you’re going through it you don’t realize...
CWH:	Not at our age. Maybe if you’re supporting a family you do.
JG:	Others have talked about how hard it was in town and houses being vacant, especially on the hill.
CWH:	I don’t remember families being unable to keep their homes, at least the ones we knew.
FWR:	On the hill, north of the Boulevrd there was a very large estate belonging to the Adams family, manufacturer of Chicklets, a candy coated gum. It was a big place. There was a main house, a guest house, they had a garage and servants quarters. I don’t recall any talk of the Depression affecting them. The father of one of my friends, who was a lawyer, Barent Vissher, had been sending her to St. John’s, but in fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, he sent her to the Lake Drive School. We were born on the same day. She was just up on Hanover. She was the youngest of three sisters. But that was maybe the only indication to me. I didn’t think about it then, but in retrospect, I realized that things were a little tough. He had two older daughters, one in college, maybe even two.
JG:	Describe what this dining room was like when you lived here as young girls.
FWR:	It had white wainscoting and brown cross beams on the ceiling.
CWH:	Didn’t they have wallpaper between the wainscoting, where it’s now painted green? I remember being so proud when they had the corner cabinet put in.
FWR:	I don’t remember there being wallpaper between the wainscoting. The carpenter built the corner cupboard on site. I don’t know if he also built the powder room. In the doorway [leading to the living room], we had drapes with rings at the top through which a rod passed so that we could draw them. But I don’t think there were any to the living room. Do you remember?
CWH:	Don’t remember.
JG:	How often would those drapes be drawn?
FWR:	Only when we were expecting someone to come or if the kids had to go out with someone, we’d draw the drapes only if we were eating; kind of a privacy thing. only for visitors. Family was family.
CWH:	In summer, I remember, we’d put a table on the porch and have our meals out there. We’d pass the food out through these windows.
FWR:	We had screens for the porch that we’d put up every summer, that maybe Mr.Banta, the carpenter, had also made, that fit all around the front porch.
JG:	These are six-over-one windows. Those are the same, right?
FWR:	Yes.
JG:	The kitchen you said is different. Tell us about your memories of the kitchen as a girl. Tell us first about the icebox.
FWR:	There was an iceman who would come along and there was a card that we would put in the ice room window. The card, I think, had four possibilities for poundage of ice: 25, 50, 75, 100. An industry or a business might need 100.
JG:	Was this a horse drawn vehicle?
CWH:	I don’t remember horse drawn.
FWR:	The only horse-drawn vehicle I remember was the garbage man, Ackerman. And that’s another story, because he had an entrance to his dump that was down Powerville, just behind the house that’s there now, the first house down the extension of Kenilworth, on the south side. He’d turn into the woods there. He would drive his horse over the curb and down through the woods. I don’t know how close his dump was to what used to be the Standard Fusee Company. It was quite a ways away, no problem with aroma or anything. He’d gone through the woods, down towards the intersection of Morris Avenue and Fanny Road, but not all the way down.
CWH:	I don’t remember the garbage man, but about the iceman, what I remember is we went after the truck and he’d chip off a little piece of ice for each of us to suck on.
FWR:	He’d have to weigh the blocks of ice. He had a scale and he’d pick up a piece of ice with his big ice tongs that he figured was about right for the poundage he saw we wanted by way of the card in our window.
JG:	The icebox was in the corner of the kitchen?
FWR:	Not in the kitchen. The northwest corner of the house has been remodeled on the first floor. There was an entrance to the kitchen, facing Powerville, by way of a small open porch with a short flight of steps. Besides the door to the kitchen, there was a door facing south which was the entrance to the small icebox room. The porch and the icebox room were where part of the breakfast nook is now, a space that the iceman had access to. He could read the card from his truck.
JG:	Do you remember when you switched to a refrigerator instead of the icebox?
FWR:	I don’t know, but it was a Frigidaire.
JG:	Was that a happy day in your household?
CWH:	Oh yes.
FWR:	It was in the kitchen.
JG:	And was your family ahead of the curve? Behind the curve?
FWR:	We were on the curve.
CWH:	And it was also exciting when we got an electric stove instead of the coal burning one.
FWR:	I don’t remember that. In the kitchen?
JG:	Do you remember the house being heated by coal?
CWH:	Oh yes, there was a coal furnace in the basement. You had to bank it every night.
FWR:	The coal truck would back into the driveway. Maybe that was one reason for having it (the driveway) off Powerville because the truck could back into the driveway and they had a chute that went right into the corner room, which was a coal bin. But we also had a little pot bellied stove that was for heating our water.
CWH:	And mother wouldn’t say pot belly, because in Victorian times they weren’t supposed to mention parts of the body. She’d say, "Pot stove."
JG:	And were these table limbs, instead of legs, back then, too?
FWR:	She’d say second joint, instead of thigh.
CWH:	With chicken, you didn’t say the leg or the thigh. You said the drumstick or the second joint.
JG:	And what did she say for the white meat part of the chicken?
FWR:	White meat, I think. [laughs]
JG:	Also tell us about the kitchen sink.
FWR:	It was right under the window, the west window. And to the left of that was the drain board, which in a way was good, because it was right over the radiator and the heat from the radiator would help dry the dishes.
JG:	Maybe intentional.
FWR:	And then we also had a roller towel there.
JG:	For drying your hands?
FWR:	Right. And to the right of the sink were the washtubs. I don’t know what they were made out of. Maybe some kind of stone. It was more substantial than metal. But there were two sinks.
CWH:	You had your soapy side and your rinse water.
FWR:	And there was a ringer mounted on the partition between the two tubs. You’d soak the clothes and then scrub them on the washboard. I still have the washboard. You could mount the wringer on the partition and wring the clothes out before rinsing them in the other tub. We had clotheslines outside and some lines down in the basement for rainy weather. In the basement besides the coal bin, were a wood bin and a preserve closet to put homemade jams, jellies and jars of canned vegetables. Under the dining room was where my dad had his workbench. In the center was the pot-bellied stove.
JG:	At what age did you girls start helping with the wash and how difficult a job was that?
CWH:	We didn’t do much of the wash. We helped with the dishes, of course. Made the beds, swept the porch.
FWR:	Set the table. There was a linen service called Little Falls laundry that came by with a box truck and picked up our table linen, bed linen, and towels. Mother would fill out the printed laundry list with the number of items being send to the laundry and attach it to the big white laundry bag. Sometimes we’d get in the back of the truck and ride on the soft bags of laundry.
JG:	We’ve got you up through Lake Drive School. We don’t have you yet as teenagers in Mountain Lakes, now in the 30s. Learning to drive, should we ask that question?
CWH:	I think Faith did first.
JG:	Why was that, you’re older.
CWH:	I think I was in college when Faith learned.
JG:	What was the driving age back then?
FWR:	Seventeen.
CWH:	Of course, no teenagers had cars. Very seldom did a teenager have a car of their own in those days.
FWR:	And you went to college at 16.
CWH:	Yes. I think I was 19 when I learned to drive. My dad was the one who taught us.
FWR:	He taught me first. I’ll show you a picture of the car my father had first, but it’s not the one I learned to drive on. [she passes around some photos] This is a 1924 Buick. It had isinglass windows that you had to snap in place. It had running boards, a spare tire on the back. We drove to Maine in the summer of 1927 in that. It took two days to go 360 miles. We’d watch the mercury rise in the temperature gauge on the radiator cap of the car, as we were chugging up the hills, hoping the water wouldn’t boil out of the radiator. In those days the radiator was not under the hood. The hood didn’t open in front of the car -- instead, it consisted of two joined pieces of sheet metal connected by a hinge and attached to the car at its centerline, one piece covering a side of the engine. The radiator was mounted in front of the hood and access for adding water and/or anti freeze was by an opening, topped by a radiator cap, which contained a thermometer and/or a logo of the car company which became collector items.
JG:	This was obviously a stick shift. What street did you learn on? There are so many hills here.
CWH:	I remember doing a lot of it on the driveway.
JG:	That’s right, you had a circular driveway.
CWH:	And I think we went to the schoolyard.
FWR:	The first car that we were driving, I don’t know if that was the 1927 Buick. He always got them when they were a couple years old. The first two cars he got from Mr. Cooper, who used to live on Kenilworth Road, two houses away from the Fliflets.
JG:	Tell us some more about teenage times here.
FWR:	I rode my bike a lot. I used to ride out Old Powerville Road to Kinelon and my dog would follow me.
CWH:	I remember in ninth grade, some of us girls had a bridge club. Our parents didn’t belong to the Mountain Lakes Club.
FWR:	But I do remember when the Club burned and we all went to watch.
CWH:	We used to go swimming up in the little lake (Wildwood Lake) here, just walk up Kenilworth Road.
JG:	What was Leonard’s Beach like?
FWR:	I liked it, because it was nice and sandy -- for a ways out into the water, but if you got beyond that, it was yucky.
JG:	If I was standing on the dam, with my back to Wildwood School, where was Leonard’s Beach?
FWR:	Leonard’s Beach was at the north end of the dam. There was a driveway to the beach almost opposite the western terminus of Kenilworth where it intersects with Glen Road.
JG:	Would I look right or left?
FWR:	You’d look right.
JG:	There was a fee for the beach, right?
FWR:	You got a tag with the year on it. It said Wildwood Beach. It was always exciting when it got warm enough when we could go to the beach and pay our fee for the year. I don’t know if our parents ever got tags, but we did. There was a retaining wall and benches attached to that, wood slat benches, and nice, white sand.
CWH:	I used to love to swim, ever since I was two or three. I loved the water up there.
JG:	There were roped off areas?
FWR:	Yes, about to where the sand stopped. And I think there was a raft out a way from the shore. And there was also a high structure with steps leading up to a platform from which one could jump or dive and below, off to the side, was a diving board.
CWH:	I think you just jumped off the edge.
FWR:	It was exciting the first time you dared to jump off the top.
JG:	Would you walk to the Market?
CWH:	We didn’t do that. What we did for fun, we’d go down Hanover Road, then over the hill toward Boonton and then walk to the little park where the falls are.
FWR:	It was much more rustic then. Then go across the little bridge and to what we called the Giant’s Cave -- a humungous rock just off of where the bridge crosses over the Rockaway River. Sometimes we’d go and get chunks of chocolate at the Woolworth’s store on Main Street and then come back to the "cave", climb up it, and eat the chocolate and read our books. Imagination took over.
JG:	You had good times, didn’t you?
CWH:	Oh, sure.
FWR:	Then there’s that big stone retaining wall by Main Street that has the three, we called them Giant Steps, and one of them continues all the way up to Main Street, but you have to pick the right one.
JG:	Was there a favorite place in Mountain Lakes that you’d go to?
FWR:	Just the beach.
CWH:	And The Tourne.
FWR:	You’d go up Powerville Road, might be a couple of miles round trip. [she searches for a photo of a fire tower they’d climb] Originally it was made of wood.
JG:	We haven’t talked about the lakes in winter. Were you ice skaters?
FWR:	Somewhat, when the lake was frozen enough.
JG:	You did want to tell us about the Blizzard of ’47. [they reach for a photo]
FWR:	It was the day after Christmas. It was 26 inches of snow. And a week later we had an ice storm on top of it.
JG:	Did you lose power?
FWR:	Not that I remember. On the day after the snow storm, I was scheduled for surgery and was able to get to the hospital so I was out of the house when the ice storm came. I got home a couple days after. But that was a monstrous storm. The ice was so thick, you can see how it’s bending the branches down. [looking at another photo] ...and how the church interior has changed... it’s all light wood now, before it was dark.
JG:	That’s where you were married.
FWR:	All three of us girls were married there.
JG:	We’ve got a lot of missing years to cover. We’ve got you still at the St. John’s school. What was that like?
CWH:	Two in our class, it was almost like being tutored.
JG:	You had one classmate?
CWH:	Yes. Faith’s was a big class. She had what, eight?
FWR:	Ten. We were the largest class they ever had.
CWH:	It was Depression time. Most people couldn’t afford tuition.
JG:	You went to college at 16.
CWH:	I went to Tusculum College in east Tennessee. A small, Presbyterian college.
JG:	And you studied what?
CWH:	I studied English as my major and at that time, a lot of high school graduates from this area were going South because during the Depression they had to watch costs and people found out that the Southern colleges were much less expensive. Another Mountain Lakes girl, Mary Beth Shuey, was my roommate the first year.
FWR:	Wasn’t she a year older, and that’s how you found out about Tusculum?
CWH:	No, we went down together. We were in the same class. She went to Morristown High and I went to St. John’s. We used to have representatives from the colleges come up, proselytizing, telling us what a good school it was. That was one reason some of the residents went down there.
JG:	After you graduated, did you come back to town?
CWH:	I came back after I graduated in 1940 and lived in the house and tried to find a job. Then I got married to someone I had met, a New Brunswick boy who had gone to the same college. We married in August of 1941. Then a few months later was Pearl Harbor, so he knew he’d be called to serve. We had had an apartment. He had a job as a YMCA secretary in Morris County and we had an apartment here on the third floor in Mountain Lakes in another house, on Hanover, I think it was. Then after Pearl Harbor, we came back here and lived in this house. We came too soon. He wasn’t called for a while. He decided he’d rather fight on shipboard than in foxholes, so he joined the naval reserve and went to duty in the spring of ’42. I stayed on here and got a job in the city.
FWR:	When did you go to art school? Before that?
CWH:	That’s right. I forgot about that. After Tusculum, I had some drawing ability, and our sister, Frances, had gone to this art career school in Manhattan -- top of the Flatiron building -- and so she had been there. When I graduated, our parents let me go there and part of my tuition there was my helping out. I spent a year there. I could have gone back for a second year, tuition free, but the war was coming and we felt, we’ll get married.
JG:	And when the war was over, what happened?
CWH:	My husband found a job teaching in Somerville, New Jersey, and so we took an apartment, at least a bedroom and a shared kitchen there. Then I didn’t live in Mountain Lakes anymore.
JG:	Faith, what about you?
FWR:	I graduated from eighth grade at Lake Drive School in 1935. Our class was to be the first to go completely through the new high school.
JG:	But you never went to that building on Briarcliff.
FWR:	I made out my schedule to go there. I was going to be in the orchestra and all these neat things. And then that summer my parents told me I was going to St. John’s. I was very disappointed. I wasn’t going to get to be in the first class to go all the way through the new school.
JG:	Why did they want you to go to St. John’s?
FWR:	Well, Connie was there.
CWH:	You get a lot of special attention in such a small school.
FWR:	I was kind of naive anyway, having skipped first grade and therefore a year younger than most of my classmates. Perhaps our parents thought that my teen years would be better served in private school. It didn’t occur to me to question their decision. As it turned out, as a result of their decision, I had the great experience of spending a lot of quality time with my Dad. A prerequisite of attending SJS was that I learn some very basic Latin. My Dad had had Latin in high school and had even taught it before going to college, so, he taught me. He was a very good teacher and I was an eager pupil; it was a wonderful summer.
CWH:	He was kept on at the high school as a teacher’s assistant.
FWR:	I graduated from high school at 16 as well, just a few months older than my sister was when she graduated. They skipped me in the first grade. That was another thing about the public school. I went there in kindergarten, there was one by then. The school skipped me to the second grade. Second grade was held over in the Community Church, because evidently there were too many baby boomers to accommodate us all in the Briarcliff School.
CWH:	They used to let the kids skip a class much more often than they do now. I think from first grade I was skipped up to second grade, because my mother had taught me to read and my dad had taught me to add and subtract.
FWR:	So after high school, I too, went down to Tusculum, which was very strict. If we wanted to go to the library we had to sign out of our dorm and then sign in, I think, when we got to the library, so our time was accounted for.
CWH:	They really felt responsible for these girls. We girls were not supposed to go the little town of Greeneville, Tennessee, which has the closest to Tusculum College on a Saturday. It was tobacco farmland and the farmers would be there on the sidewalks, chawin’ and spittin’.
JG:	You studied what in college, Faith?
FWR:	I studied math, sociology and economics, and I also had minors, I think, in religion and education
JG:	You graduated in what year?
FWR:	Actually, I got my degree in 1944. I left in January of 1943 because my father had found an ad that the Curtiss Wright Corporation, a maker of engines, propellers, etc was having a program to educate women college math majors at, I think it was eight universities across the U.S., one hundred to go into each university, to replace the fellows who were in the war, sort of paraprofessional aeronautical engineers. So I applied and was accepted at Cornell. I asked the Tusculum people if I completed the course, which was a 10-month course, satisfactorily, could I get my degree. And after some hemming and hawing, they agreed. So I left Tusculum, I think, in January, after finishing the first semester. I think it was February 10th I was due up at Cornell. Curtiss Wright wanted us to put in 40 hours a week in classes. If you studied two hours for each hour...Of course, they had a meeting of the minds and accepted a little less intense schedule. But I enjoyed it.
JG:	This would have been your senior year?
FWR:	It was like the last half of my senior year. I finished up at Cornell. I put in 10 months there and it was much more arduous than one semester of regular college, because I had calculus and drafting and strength of materials, metal shop--both hard and sheet metals with a lathe shaping tools for the former and stamping presses for the latter.
JG:	This was all war oriented?
FWR:	Exactly, and also aeronautics.
JG:	So what followed this?
FWR:	They placed me at the Buffalo division for Curtiss Wright, which was the airplane division. After months and months--and it seemed like years--of drafting, tracing over old blueprints they finally assigned me to be a liaison between the engineering department and the shop. And that I really, really, really enjoyed. The engineering department would make a plan for solving some kind of a problem. I would take the solution down to the shop. They’d see if it was applicable or not. And they might say, could you move it before the firewall, instead of behind it. So I’d take that back -- and, "Yeah, we can accommodate that."
JG:	How many years did you stay in Buffalo doing that?
FWR:	About eight months. Not because I wanted to, but my mother was lonesome, so I came down here.
JG:	And you were the youngest?
FWR:	I was the youngest. Everyone else was out of the house and married. So I came back to Mountain Lakes in August of 1944 and then worked for the Curtiss propeller division of Curtiss Wright, which was in Caldwell, N.J., near by the airport. And then the war was over and I felt like, I don’t really want to do engineering all my life. I thought, well, since I have an interest in helping people, a social work setting, such as the Goodwill Industries and the Children’s Aid Society would be places where I could volunteer to see if I’d feel comfortable doing that kind of work. So I went to Newark and joined the Goodwill group and Children’s Aid. Some times I took the bus and some times my Dad took me to Newark. I did that for a while. Somehow it wasn’t what I wanted.
JG:	How many years did your parents continue to live here?
FWR:	They lived here until 1964. My father passed away in October; my mother stayed on, down-sizing the contents of the house and preparing it for sale. It was sold, or possibly taken over by a realtor; she moved to Deer Park, Long Island, New York, some time in or before April of 1965.
JG:	How many years did you live in the house after you came back in 1944?
FWR:	I lived here until 1950, I think. Or 1949. I worked down in Princeton for a month, at the Education Testing Service. But that didn’t work out too well.
JG:	As an adult, did you still like living here?
FWR:	Yeah, but you want to leave home sometime. I lived here and then I lived out in Huntington, Long Island, for a while. I worked for Grumman Aircraft in Bethpage, L.I.. Before that I worked for Bendix Aviation in a small office. I gave up on being a social worker. My heart wasn’t that much in it. So I worked for Bendix, which did aircraft parts. That was in Manhattan. I was living at home for a while, but it was kind of a chore, the 30 miles by train.
JG:	Let me ask you both. You both spent a lot of years here in town -- Faith you ended up spending more and have an adult perspective on it as well, but what about Mountain Lakes seemed special to you -- and maybe still does, as you drive around now looking at things in the present.
FWR:	It’s so nice and green and homey and fresh, seeing the old familiar houses.
CWH:	Right; having the lakes here and the woods.
FWR:	One thing I do remember from growing us was when they had fireworks over the lake on 4th of July.
JG:	Where would you watch?
FWR:	We had a canoe that we put at the Wildwood entrance area to the canal. We’d go through the canal up to the big lake. When the fireworks went off you could feel the canoe vibrate from the explosions and see the lights coming at you and it would be so exciting.
CWH:	I remember we’d take turns with the Visscher family on Hanover -- one 4th of July we’d have the fireworks at our house; the next would be at the Visscher’s house. We kids had sparklers.
FWR:	We’d put them up the sides of the front walk and light them.
JG:	What year did you get married?
FWR:	1952. Eleven years after Connie.
CWH:	You had more of a working career than I ever did.
JG:	What do you notice that’s different? If you close your eyes and try to think of what it was like.
CWH:	Of course there are all these one-way streets.
FWR:	There were not as many bushes around the house then.
JG:	Another way of asking the question would be when you come back now, so many years later, are you surprised at how much is the same or are you surprised at how much is different?
CWH:	Some is the same and some is very different.
JG:	What are you happy to see that is the same?
FWR:	The woods. And the houses still have their Hapgood look. And I think some of the new ones are kind of a la mode of Hapgood.
JG:	Was this a homey house to grow up in?
CWH:	Nice fires in the fireplace. We loved sitting around the fireplace.
FWR:	I was going to bring out a poem that we had on the mantelpiece by Maurine Hathaway. I believe I have it in my head: Tis the sweet associations Of the friendly books and chairs, The pit-a-pat of little feet Resounding on the stairs. The cheer and love that twinkle With the bright lights through the gloam Reflecting happiness within That makes a house a home.
CWH:	Our mother was great finding those verses.
FWR:	I still have it. It’s framed. It has a little stand. It sat right on the mantelpiece.
CWH:	There was another poem framed about Maine, because both our parents came from Maine.
JG:	Your parents were the first owners of the house.
FWR:	Yes. They moved in 1922. But the garage was built later. I think maybe 1925. Because the first car that we had was a 1924 and I think Mr. Cooper who sold it to my dad did so in 1926.
JG:	Your dad had a vegetable garden.
FWR:	He grew rhubarb, sting beans, asparagus and tomatoes. We had three apple trees, two peach trees, one pear tree -- all in the back yard.
JG:	And they all bore great fruit?
FWR:	Not really. Along the west side of the house, the length of the side porch, my mother had a rock garden. She had a wildflower garden in the southwest corner of the front yard and two great oak trees in the southeast section of the front yard, which are still here. Also in the front yard were a small ironwood tree and some Rose of Sharon bushes all at the corner of Kenilworth and Powerville. In the back yard was a rose ring in which each one of us four children had a special bush besides other bushes. There was a bird bath in the center of the ring. Mother had another small garden opposite the back door of the house; Mother loved flowers
JG:	Tell me what you remember of the phone service as a girl?
FWR:	I remember when it first came in, we had the number 570J, which was the same number, 57, as the house number. I don’t know if it was in sequence when the number was changed to 91 Kenilworth. But we had a new number of 823J. The letter at the end of the number was to signify it was a party line. For instance, a family on Melrose, one block up, was 823R. You’d pick up the receiver and you’d hear voices. And you’d think, "Oh, that must be the Randall’s." It was interesting.
JG:	You often have to wait a good while before you could make your call?
FWR:	I think people were fairly considerate and didn’t go on for hours at least. But you’d get the kids, especially teenagers. We always had a party line, as I remember, for as long as our family lived in the house.
JG:	Even when you came back as an adult?
FWR:	As far as I remember. Yes, through the 40s. I finally left in 1952, when I got married.
JG:	I thank you both and I think you’ll join me in thanking the Sheasbys for opening the doors of what was once your house to all of us today. Now I’d like to take a photo of you both in front of the fireplace that you enjoyed so much when you lived here.

End of Interview

Oral Histories and Recollections