“Would you like to take this home? Mom kept it on her dresser.”

It’s been more than a year since Dad showed me this souvenir:

As I squinted to read the small print (the tiny dish measures four inches across), a familiar city name caught my eye.

Pittsfield?

“Her parents honeymooned there in 1929. They stayed at the Hotel Wendell. Mom was born nine months later.”

And 32 years after Mom’s birth, our family moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts. We lived there – on Pomeroy Avenue – from 1962 until 1970.

I think everyone in our family has a soft spot in their hearts for Pittsfield. Mom and Dad completed their family in 1964, with the birth of Billy. We older three survived Catholic grammar school, Scouts, piano lessons, nature camp, swimming lessons, and bicycle rides.

My three brothers replied quickly when I asked for individual recollections of Pittsfield.

We’ll start with one of the “naughty Daddy” stories Harry used to delight his son, Andy, with:

I remember my up-and-down friendship with Gary Niarchos, who dared me to swing out on the rope under the bridge over the Housatonic River on Pomeroy Ave.

No fool, I said: “After you, Niarchos.”

I then had the satisfaction of watching him lose his grip at the peak of his swing and fall up to his chin in the slimy oil-slicked water. Knowing now that in those days General Electric was allowing PCBs to spill into the river, I was pleased to learn recently that Gary is alive and well.

It was under the same bridge, and maybe on the same day, that Gary, Dave, and I decided it would be really cool to throw rocks over the bridge and watch them go plunk in the river on the other side. We’d been enjoying that activity for a few minutes when an elderly (i.e., at least 35 or 40) couple leaned over the railing of the bridge and looked down at us.

“Are you boys throwing rocks over the bridge?”

Huh? Who, us? Gee whiz!

“Well, if you were you’d better stop it right away. A rock just hit the windshield of a car and cracked it, and the driver isn’t too happy.”

No doubt it was a white lie in a good cause, but my 10-year-old self took it literally and seriously. I walked home with Dave thinking Mom and Dad need not be the wiser, but as soon as we got home Dave was overcome with remorse and confessed all. As a good keeper of secrets but an incompetent liar, I admitted my complicity. I forget our punishment but I expect we got grounded and deprived of Gary’s company for a week or two.    

Next, Dave‘s recollections:

Pittsfield’s proximity to nature made it a wonderful place to grow up. A hundred feet or so west of our house was Warwick Street; walk up it a couple of blocks and it dead-ended, with a beautiful field on the right and woods beyond. The meadow had an excellent sledding hill, which – for a reason I never learned – was called Cate’s Hill. (On Hallowe’en, the older couple who lived at the dead end of Warwick invited trick-or-treaters on their spookily-lit porch for cider and doughnuts.)

If you kept going on Pomeroy Avenue beyond Warwick, in five minutes you’d get to the Pumping Station; the attraction there wasn’t so much the old station itself as the area behind it: a gravel road, patches of meadows and woods, and sundry detritus of times when the area must have been more actively used. It was paradise for kids letting our imaginations run free.  

If you walked east rather than west on Pomeroy, in a little while you’d get to a T intersection, and after crossing the intersecting road you could descend into a patch of forest that included a pond covered in gorgeous bright-green algae; it made such a smooth, solid-looking surface that I thought it was moss until I tossed a rock at it and heard a plunk!

When I visited Pittsfield again last year, half a century after we’d moved away, the pumping station had been replaced by a neighborhood athletic field.

… but the nearness of the natural world was still strong. 

While in the old neighborhood, I walked up Noblehurst, the first street on the opposite side of our house from Warwick, charmed by all the bird calls in the forest just beyond the houses at the far end. Indeed, except when I was downtown, almost every walk I took wound up in a dead end overlooking forest. A state park, a ski slope, and a sylvan lake are all right on the edge of town. I made the trip to get a sense as to whether Pittsfield might be a good place to relocate, and its coexistence with nature is a strong selling point.

I’ll continue the outdoorsy story line with memories of walks with Mom.

Holding hands with Mom always made me feel safe.

As the only daughter, it was wonderful to have Mom all to myself once in a while. We strolled a block away and circled Wellesley Park. No swings, no ball diamonds, just grass and trees.

The houses along the way sometimes offered a treat. Their window shutters featured a charming cutout. One house had heart cutouts, another had pine trees, yet another featured sailboats.

Mom and I would play a game to see which one of us noticed the shutters first. We took the same route, passed the same houses, and called out the same shutters each time, but it was fun.

Years later, Gary had these made for our house as a sweet gift to me.

Youngest sibling Bill, meanwhile, was born in Pittsfield.

He was only six when we moved away, but has several strong memories, including the day Mom called the paper.

Yes, Billy dragged out the push mower in late March, when there was still snow on the ground.

Dad fondly recollects our house on Pomeroy Avenue. “It was built for an engineer,” he remembers, “with little windows on either side of the fireplace, the little entryway, and the stairway.”

We’ll end with Harry’s musing about a possible four-generation Pittsfield connection:

I remember Mom telling me years ago about her parents’ honeymoon at the Hotel Wendell in downtown Pittsfield. I don’t remember their wedding date but I believe it was late June 1929. Given Mom’s birth date of April 6, 1930, it seems probable that she was conceived in Pittsfield.

Fast forward 57 years: on the Fourth of July 1986, Claire and I were camping on the shore of Berry Pond at Pittsfield State Forest. Nine months later almost to the day, on April 6, 1987, Andy was born!

I love to think Andy and his grandma not only shared a birthday, but were also both conceived in my hometown.

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