When we arrived in Baltimore, the rectory was not ready for us, so we spent most of the summer at Mrs. McCann's boarding house in Towson, a suburb of Baltimore and the home of Goucher College. Having meals prepared and served by someone else was sort of a vacation for the ladies of the family; for the children there was a large screened veranda, a huge lawn with playground equipment, and a park-like environment.
One vivid recollection is of being awakened one morning by a loud buzzing sound from outdoors. Inquiry showed it to be the result of the emergence of a brood of 17-year cicadas. These large insects emerge from the ground still in their cocoons, which they leave on the bark of the nearest tree. They spread their wings, which are still soft but quickly harden. They fly off emitting their call to mate. The females lay eggs in the tender tips of tree branches and die. The emergences continue over a period of a week to ten days. Egg-laying results in the death of the branch tip, which falls to the ground. In midsummer the eggs hatch, and each small nymph burrows into the ground to mature. Seventeen years later the process repeats. Fascinating to an almost seven-year-old child.
The rectory was ready for us in late August, and we moved to our new home at 16 East Biddle Street in time for me to start school. The house was a typical Baltimore four-story brick home with a basement kitchen and a dumb-waiter for transporting food from the kitchen to the first-floor serving pantry, which adjoined the dining room. Very different from our Cheyenne home, it couldn't have been more than twenty feet wide and shared common side walls with our neighbors. Entry was by way of traditional Baltimore white stone steps. Each floor consisted essentially of two rooms. On the first floor were a formal parlor in front and the dining room in back, separated by a short hall and staircase. The second floor had a family sitting room in front, the master bedroom and bath to the rear. The third and fourth floors were essentially bed and bath. The lighting fixtures had originally been fueled by gas. They had recently been rewired for electricity, but their gaslight origin was obvious. The Pennsylvania Railroad, then with coal-fired locomotives, was only a few blocks away. Soot was a daily fact of life. My grandmother's self-appointed chore was to take a dust cloth to her room each night so that when she came down in the morning she could dust the stair railings of their nightly accumulation of soot. Since our heating system, as well as the railroad propulsion system, was coal-fired we may well have been the origin of our own soot, but the Pennsylvania was the popular whipping boy of the period.
In Baltimore we had a maid, a first for Mother since she had married and a real gem. She was an expert with a famous Maryland specialty, beaten biscuit. She was also very good with oysters. My dad loved oysters. In Cheyenne he had them once a year. On the annual occasion when the butcher shop had imported oysters, he had brought home a quart, and Mother had fixed them, some in stew, some fried. We children had turned up our noses, but our parents were not too insistent. After all, only once a year!
School turned out to be the Calvert School, only three blocks away. Calvert was famous, then as now, not only for its Day School, but also for its home schooling by correspondence that was popular with missionary, diplomatic, and military families stationed in remote corners of the world where educational facilities were frequently limited. Calvert had customarily offered a scholarship to the children of rectors of Christ Church, and our family was no exception. My parents had expressed a preference for public schooling. Such expressions were greeted with horror by members of my father's congregation. “Oh, no, nobody sends their children to public schools” was the usual reaction. Since I would be seven shortly after the first day of school, my parents' reservations were explained away by the principal, Mr. Hilliard: “We can do the first three years in two since we have a more mature child.”
Maybe they did do more. I remember daily readings by the teacher from Bulfinch's Mythology and Hurlburt's Stories from the Bible. We were reading pretty well by the middle of the first year. I remember that our first reader was in script, which made it easier. I don't remember any pain at changing over to typescript. We didn't go to school in the afternoons, but rather long mornings were interrupted by a break for a glass of milk and a slice of zwieback. When we left for the day, Mr. Hilliard stood at the foot of the stairs and greeted each student by name as he or she left.
Classes at Calvert were small, as I remember it, 25 to 30, not more. My special friend was a boy named Elihu Howland. My parents said that his health wasn't very good, but I never saw any evidence of that. His father was a distinguished physician, and he lived in an exclusive residential area called Roland Park. The streetcar that stopped a half block from my house had its terminus a block from Elihu's. For two cents each way I could go out to play with Elihu, and in good weather I did it once or twice a week. Elihu (and perhaps his father) was an aviation enthusiast. He had access to an inexhaustible supply of a British aviation magazine. Playing with Elihu consisted chiefly of each of us maintaining a notebook into which we each pasted pictures of aircraft culled from the magazines and writing our cosmic thoughts on the subject of aviation.
During the latter half of second grade, my sister Dorothea came down with spinal meningitis. She had had a mastoidectomy when she was about two. Whether there is any connection I know not, but needless to say the family was devastated. Johns Hopkins Hospital pediatricians did their best, but in those pre-penicillin days their best was not enough, and she died on January 2, 1921. My chief recollection of those days is of my father hugging me and crying as he gave me the news. Aside from that, I think I was insulated from the facts of death. Rather than the funeral service, one of my father's parishioners invited me out for a big outdoor game event that his children were having. I have no memory of where my sister was buried. [Dorothea is buried in the Brotherton family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit, Michigan.]
Dorothea's death and its aftermath were, I suppose, somewhat ameliorated by the birth of my sister Ann on February 24. In those days mothers came home from maternity hospitals on stretchers and were treated like invalids for a week, a period during which, of course, grandmothers shone. Another distraction was a call from the vestry of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in San Antonio, Texas. I am sure my father would not have put it this way, but it is my private opinion that any call would have been a relief from the associations with my sister's death. As soon as school was out, we left for Texas. The maid cried and wanted us to take her with us, but my parents believed that she could not be happy in the South of that period and didn't think they should undertake the responsibility for her move.
Copyright © 2002 by
Wilber B. Huston.
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Inquiries to
Herb Huston
<herb_huston@yahoo.com>.