BOXES 12-14: Ohio, Massachusetts, New York

The beach you see here, with the morning sun penetrating the sea mist, is at Fieldston, Massachusetts, a community just north of Plymouth Rock. A visit there, my first to an ocean shore, was a highlight of my summer in 1967.

The previous spring break I spent in Cleveland. This was an era when flights were quite cheap and hardly more complicated to take than hopping on a train or bus, so it took little effort to visit my family and to return twice more during the summer. But flying was still a new-enough experience for me to want to document takeoff, as you see below. I'm unsure whether this is from LaGuardia--my first guess because the water is so close by-- or Kennedy, because I returned to that airport, as you'll see.

My record of that family visit includes pictures of Heidi, my brother's dog--in stages from passive to active, seen here with Jim and Ellen:

I also took a couple of pictures of Ellen, Cousin Judi, and Judi's younger though taller sister, Sue. They look like they're posing for a mid-'60s record album cover:

And here's one of Ellen alone--I don't recall what she's so happy about or why she's wearing a granny nightcap.

In those years I often flew TWA, because I got to use their pavilion designed by Eero Sarinen and opened in 1962 (when each major airline had its own Kennedy terminal):

The above are shots from my arrival. But wait--I left out pics of taking off from Cleveland!

The next photos, taken on my first summer visit back in Ohio, will test your patience, since two of them (the "action" shots of my sister and two neighbor girls) are somewhat out of focus, and the one of a leafy tree doesn't convey the fact that this was an odd nectarine tree that produced fruit only the size of a cherry. The bottom pic shows my parents and the street they lived on, Patterson Parkway--a grand name for a street only one block long.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, I got to go to a Massachusetts beach later that summer. When I was a little boy my family made summer excursions to one or another of Northern Ohio's small lakes, and on rare occasions to Cedar Point on Lake Erie. But beaches to us were only for sand castles and splashing in the shallow shore waters; I'd never learned to swim, never been in a pool, and after the age of 10 or so never gone to a beach (my high school and college friends were dry-landers too, unless I just didn't get those beach party invitations). Even after moving East I never set foot in the Atlantic Ocean or even saw it beyond New York or Boston Harbor. Now David Hartwell was inviting me to join him on a weekend visit to his family's beach cottage in Massachusetts.

David had grown up in eastern Pennsylvania, if I remember rightly, but his parents had retired to the Boston area, and his mother must have come from around there, to judge by her strong New England accent. They had a summer cottage along the shore (I don't recall its having heating and insulation for winter, though maybe there was a fireplace), with beautiful bare-wood interiors and a porch opening up to the wide beach. The pictures I took of the interiors and of sunsets are way too dark for reproduction here, and unfortunately the whole boxful has turned magenta, but I'll share the better photos. In the shot of Fieldston Beach at the top of this post, I'm not sure if the Hartwell cottage is among the stretch of houses, but here are a couple of glimpses closer up:

We arrived after dark; to the right is my first view of the ocean, seen through my bedroom window screen. It was still early when we went out to the beach:

David's sister Janice was visiting as well. I'm not sure she was going for a Little Mermaid on the Rock pose here, but I think it's a nice picture:

There was a lot to explore among the tidal pools, especially since this was my first encounter, outside of an aquarium, with sea creatures or even seaweed:

At moments when I could bring myself to look up from the rocks and crabs, I took a few more photos of Janice and David and various folks along the beach:

We took a leisurely way back to New York--i.e., west to the Berkshires before heading south to the city, with a stop at Williams College, David's alma mater, in Williamstown, MA.

In the collage above, David is posing in front of the Williams campus auditorium, Chapin Hall. In the two other photos with buildings, the first showing a sculpture garden, I don't think we are at Williams College anymore, but I'd have to do more research to find out. The last pic is of the Hudson River Valley, as seen from the Taconic Parkway.

Later that summer my mother, sister and cousins Judi and Sue took a trip to visit me in New York. The one excursion I recorded on slide film was the Circle Line Cruise (still operating) around Manhattan. You can very easily find much better pictures of the shores of the island, but here are mine anyhow:

For anyone who doesn't know the sights, the top pic shows Grant's Tomb and Riverside Church, and the last one is of Ellis Island. The SS Raffaello was an Italian ocean liner, one of the last to be built for the Atlantic route--a strikingly graceful vessel that might be glimpsed by New Yorkers looking out at the Hudson or the Harbor from 1965 to 1975,

As for the rest of that summer, I see that I took a photo of part of the massive façade of St. John the Divine--something I passed nearly every day, since it was close to the Columbia campus.

And I made an excursion to the docks jutting out into the East River just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, looking across to Brooklyn Heights and back to the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. A photogenic sailing ship heading upriver conveniently posed for a couple of shots:

Then it was back to Cleveland, for a late-summer visit to our relatives in Western Pennsylvania. More on that, and fall in New York, in the next post.