memories of growing up in Little Compton

an oral history by Avis Lawton, 1912-1998

Excerpted from:  Jonnycakes and Cream : Oral Histories of Little Compton, R.I.

Compiled and Edited by Lucy A. O'Connor

Printed by America House Design and Communications, Newport, R.I., 1993

Avis Lawton, mother of Debby (Lawton) Loomis, was our step-grandmother.  When Dad and Debby married in the early 1970s, Avis and Tubby Lawton opened their hearts and their home to three moody red-headed teenage girls and a blonde, irrepressible, energetic boy.  Here is Avis' story.

 

My parents were Isaac Bliss and Cora Bliss.  She was Cora Simmons.  They both went to the little schoolhouse on Long Highway.  It's a stone house up there painted white.  My brother bought it, the building, and made a house out of it.

The Simmonses, they've been here for generations with the Blisses.  The Blisses actually came from Tiverton because they started out in Rehoboth and then they moved down to Bliss' Four Corners.  And my great-great-grandfather ran Guimond's Store.  It was like a tavern.  I remember it had two big door.  The Blisses -- my grandfather I never even remember, he died before I was born and there were really no family gatherings.  And the Simmonses, there were so many of 'em they all took off to different places.  There are still quite a few and they're all related, more or less...  They owned the mill pond, my grandfather and great-grandfather, and it was called the Simmons Pond then.  I think it was lumber mostly.  And that was a big place where they cut ice, ice houses down there.  Wilbur's Store owned the ice houses.

I was born in what used to be the Nursing Association, the house there at the Commons across from the Brownell House.  Then, from there I went to Taylor Lane ... for about one summer.  Then I went to Warren's Point and lived on Mrs. McGowan's estate.  My father was foreman.  Yuh, he was like foreman; he took care of the place.

Well, they had their own laundry.  And they had a dairy cow and another creamery, too, where they made their own butter ad all that.  And there was a greenhouse with a gardener who would cut flowers for the Madam and big rose gardens.  Where Billy Nightingale's is -- it was the caretaker's house -- we lived in that house.  There were gardens ... for cut flowers, but the greenhouse had the roses and all the perishable ones.  It was really nice livin'!  And lots of nice, luscious vegetables, asparagus and all the fancy ones.  So they came and served us just the same as they did the Madam.  The gardener stopped every morning and gave us whatever we wanted.  Then there was an icehouse down there.  There's a pond and that was the ice pond and had an ice-house so every winter they cut ice.  We stayed there year 'round for eight or ten years, I was down there.

They brought a flock of servants.  And they had their own battery.  There was no electricity on Warren's Point so they had a Delco system and there was a whole building for nothing but batteries.  Well, that house was big, you know.  Only half of it is still there...  The garage had quarters in back for the chauffeur.  He was a Frenchman with a little mustache.  I used to ride with her [Mrs. McGowan] and she had a little phone that went to the chauffeur.   It was glassed in and he was separate from the back of the car, but I could tell him where I wanted to go.  I don't think he liked it either.  I was about five years old.  Yuh, she had a flock of servants.  She had a butler and chambermaids, cooks (first and second cooks).  One of the maids was a Hagland.  She was Swedish and she had a sister who worked with her and they lived on Long Island and they came up and they had two daughters.  So my sister and myself became friendly with the girls and that's who we played with summers... I liked swimming down at Philippi's beach.  An English butler taught me how to swim.  I guess he was bored to death and there wasn't much to do on Warren's Point in those days.

I went to---well, first of all, they closed the little school on the corner.  That was called #1 school.  But the year I started school (1917) they closed it, so I had to go up the West Road almost to ... #4.  And from there I cam back to the Meehan's driveway, that was another school and that was fourth, fifth, and sixth grades there, and from there I went up to the Commons to the Legion Hall for seventh and eighth and the High School was in the Town Hall ... and I was in the first graduating class from Josephine Wilbur School (1930).

Had to walk up Warren's Point Road to the schoolhouse that was up there ... my brother and John MacFarland used to build a little fire around the back and huddle around it till the bus came.  Now the bus was nothin' but a pickup truck with sort of sides on it.  We called it a calf cart.  It had curtains.  It didn't have any real sides.  And we all huddled in there.  And my brother and sister was dropped off at Meehan's driveway (across from Taylor's Lane) where the school was and then another bus took them up to the Commons.  Well, it worked all right.  When it rained we didn't like to get out and walk.  The roads got all muddy.  But Warren's Point, sure, it was mud.

And it was even worse when you went over Swamp Road.  You mired right down there.  Some of the roads were just impassable, that's all.  Taylor's Lane was bad.  When we lived down there my father left his car up by Meehan's, that little road, you know (there used to be just the back road).  And he walked the rest of the way down.  And in the winter you put the groceries on a sled or a cart.

[Teachers]  One, especially was Edith Pierce Wordell...one of my favorite teachers.  She was down there in my fourth, fifth and sixth grade.  And then it was kind of muddled up in the seventh and eighth.  They brought in some teacher from the city and they weren't used to using wood stoves.  We did play some bad tricks on them -- put some rubber in there.  Terrible smell and course we all had to go outside.  We had the old wood stove with a wood house out back and instead of punishing those that didn't want to learn, we put 'em out in the wood house and made 'em chop the wood.  So that took care of that -- work off a little of that energy...  Three grades in a school, I guess you'd have between thirty and forty students.  I always had wanted to be a teacher so I was supposed to drill 'em in the spelling words and the multiplication tables.  

And ... we all had nothin' but coal stoves, that's all.  We didn't have any furnaces.  It wasn't that bad.  Well, you didn't heat the whole house.  The bedrooms weren't heated.  But you had a stove in the middle of the living room and another big one in the kitchen and when you got those things going they'd drive you out!  And when you had coal, you see, you banked it during the night so it ran all night so the house didn't get cooled down.

It was bleak.  And we didn't have the [snow] plowing.  That was a dirt road and it was hand shoveled.  And there'd be lots of men out of work in the winter and there was no unemployment compensation so they were glad to get a job.  And it always drifted up by the Philippi's driveway.  But we were in there almost two weeks at one point.  And there was a little store over at Sakonnet Point.  Charlie Gray ran it.  And he had staples, at least.  So my father took a sled and walked over there.  We ate lots of scalloped potatoes that week, and jonnycakes...there was butter and nice thick cream.  Yes, nice thick cream you put your spoon in and it stayed right up there, it didn't bend over.  Good cholesterol!

Dr. Lloyd [Henry Demarest, Jr., owner of Watch House at Sakonnet Point] was a very charitable person.  He helped a great many of those fishermen down there get started in a house of some kind.  And then the Hurricane (1938) took some of those, but he did help some of them build 'em back.  The only thing, he insisted they get married.  He wouldn't help if they didn't get married!  Because quite a few were living together.  That goes way back, don't think it's just in these times.  We used to call 'em "housekeepers."  You had to have a housekeeper.  

Yes, my father did a lot of work down there.  Yuh, he was down there most of the winter when it was warm enough.  He was a contractor before, and after he left down at Warren's Point, he went back into building, carpentering and painting.  Everybody was building in those days.  And they were all nice people.  You know, they weren't the new type.  They were very considerate of people who worked for them.  They didn't try to push you nor did they try to say you were overcharging.  They had the money and they were willing to spend it.

I went to what used to be called the Clam Pavilion.  And Mike Rogers showed the movies.  And sometimes we had to sit a long while because the movies came down on the mail.  The mail came down at seven o'clock at night.  Well, if there was trouble getting through they were usually late.  Well, it was not too boring because there would be liquor.  It was during prohibition so we could watch and see who was doin' that.  But the only trouble was they stuffed the seats with sand.  Well, they were loaded with sand fleas!

Then, of course, the old Lyman Hotel, that was famous.  What a beautiful spot.  Hunters used to come out from Newport, my husband used to come out, and they would have breakfast at the Lyman Hotel, breakfast and a few drinks.  They used to get quite loaded, I guess, and fall into the food half the time but no one minded.

I met him [husband Charles "Tubby" Lawton] at the Stone Bridge Inn.  I was coming home from New York.  I had been down to visit my sister and I stopped in there because I wanted a ride from Stone Bridge down home.  I met him and he gave me the rides from then on.  That was it.  We were married in 1943.  And he had a cabin cruiser.  We had lots of fun on it.

[He was from] Newport.  But he went away when he was fourteen.  Between that and World War I and working in New York (at Banker's Trust) he never really did get back there.  But he liked it out here.  Yuh, he worked in the post office as a postal clerk.  They'd come in and say they wanted ten stamps but they didn't say whether they wanted tens, twenties, thirteens ... it's the same then when you're dealing with the public, I guess.  I worked at Wilbur's.  I remember Tiny Mosher.  He was a wonderful guy and what grief he used to put up with!  A woman would say "I want a steak for four people."  and he'd say "A pound, two pounds?"  "Oh, I don't know," she'd say.  "Well, are they good eaters?"  "Well, Joe's quite good but Mary doesn't eat anything," and she'd go on and on and one and the poor guy is standin' there, with his knife in his hand.  But that isn't half as bad as when the older people came in, Mrs. Harris, Mrs. Reynolds ...  They were tartars!  If that order didn't get down there right away they were hot on the phone and came right up to the store.  Went the whole length, stopped in the post office and bawled them out, came to Wilbur's Store and chewed us up.

... During the war I worked in Newport... I worked at the Naval Operating Base.  Well, I actually started working for a contractor over on Gould Island.  Well, there was a ferry that ran us across, and the first morning I went to work it was 9 degrees below zero and both ends were open but you could get in the middle and huddle like a bunch of cattle.  And going up the old hill.  Oh!  It was cold!  And there was no heat.  It was a summer house we were operatin' from, no heat in it, stoves and coffee pots all over the place.  And you didn't wear any fancy shoes; you just wore overshoes (and they WERE overshoes in those days) and knee socks.  It was cold sittin' there tryin' to type.  I stayed there about a year and a half, and then I went over to the Naval Operating Base.

People went to the first war but not as much as the second.  And of course, we had the fort down here, too.  And that caused a great deal of fuss.  'Cause when they brought the eighteen-inch guns.  Oh!  If you think G.W.E.N. (Ground Wave Emergency Network) was bad, that was ten times worse.  Oh, yes, they were going to ruin the road, the road bed was going to collapse and end of the world was coming.  Course the only unfortunate thing was there were obsolete before they got here.  Came on big trucks.  "Cause I remember watching them go by Taylor's Lane.  But everyone was waitin' for the road to cave in.  Wasn't going to have it in Little Compton!

...I went on the New York boat from Newport or Fall River, the Fall River Line.  When I was in college I went on that back to New York.  That was fun, nice dinner and dancing, great fun!  Well, of course, automobiles spoiled all that.  

Well, my father believed strongly in college and he wanted me to get out of town.  He said "Look, you've grown up in a small country town long enough.  Go to the big city and see the other side."  He encouraged me to.  It was time to get out, that's all...  But the others, they think you're high hat.  But I don't think they even wanted to go.  They didn't want to leave.

I went to New York University, starting in 1930.  I attended the School of Education, which, at that time, was in Washington Square.  I studied to be a teacher and I didn't want to teach in New York City.  I couldn't have gotten a job in New York City anyway because you had to pay about $900 to get into the school department.  They were not going to take in an outsider.  This was during the Depression.  But you had to know someone to get in.  You had to get a job in your own home town.  So that was impossible for me because they didn't consider that I had been to the Normal School here in Rhode Island, so you couldn't get any certification.  They placed those first.  And another thing, when I came back here, married women couldn't teach...  So I went into private school.  And I went and first taught in Tiverton.  Then after that (I was living in Little Compton on West Road by that time) I started a little nursery-kindergarten school in the old Methodist Church.  Well, that had a wood stove in one room and no bathroom, just a little place out to the side there that nobody went to much, I guess.  It was during the war and they were building the fort so there was lots of children.  I got a good class, over twenty-five.  But then we got a gas shortage.  The gas did it.  Nobody wanted to use the gasoline to bring the children to school so from there I went to -- Eva Lewis had that little house, the #1 schoolhouse, by the road where John Sylvia had had his store.  Well, that was the school that was at the Warren's Point intersection and they moved it up here.  And she had a little gift shop in there.  Well, she rented it to me.  And it had a wood stove again.  And they had that and they had a sand box.  It was very cozy in there.  Then after that they started taking married women and that's when I applied to New Bedford.  I liked Friends (Academy) very much and I hated to leave it but the pay was low and you knew it was never going to get any better and no pension and no contract.  You had nothing to protect you.  

Well, they [farmers] could get gas.  Sure, they were alright.  They could say they had to get gas for their tractor.  Who's gonna check to see whether they put it in the tractor or not?  And the fishermen, they got plenty of gas.  If you were a fisherman, you were all right... I never felt badly about it after working at the Naval Base.  The waste that went on there -- and the stealing!  I never felt badly if I got a little extra gas.  Well, and the mechanics stole all kinds of parts for their cars.  It was a way of doing things, that's all, operating a business, only the Navy was paying.

[Prohibition]  Well... Warren's Point was one of the dumping grounds.  It was beautiful!  What would happen was they'd get wind that there was a load of liquor over there.  See, it was in bags.  The blacksmiths got rich and retired in New Jersey because they made these grappling irons with hooks in them.  So you'd put one of those over [the side of your boat] and hopefully you'd hook into a case of liquor.  And it was wrapped in heavy burlap so it didn't break or anything.  It wasn't bottles floatin' around.  It was all in cases.  So even the farmers -- they had a skiff and they'd all rush down and it was just too bad if the cows didn't get milked that night!  That was big money.  And they all had big Packards, Cadillacs... well, you could carry a lot of liquor in those.  And one of the best things, there was an A&P van that came down through here.  There were no A&Ps but that was loaded. And they had another truck that had a white horse in it.  That poor horse!  I don't know how many miles they transported him.  But it was all loaded with liquor around him.  But they came in there at Warren's Point, they came in Philippi's Beach, South Shore, up the West Road at Sherer's.  And everybody who lived on the place got so much a case.  And I've been told that they came up this back road and the barn out here was full of liquor.  Yuh, the old man let 'em.  Well, sure, for a couple of hundred dollars.  After all, that was much better than tryin' to pull a few potatoes.

[West Island] Well, the buildings were there.  I remember those.  And you know, I've lived here all my life and I've never been on West Island.  And in the summer they were very busy.  It was a bass fishing club and they came from all over.  They would come down on trains.  There was a train station in Tiverton.  And they'd have someone meet them there and there was a launch which I remember.  It was stored at West Island and they sold it to a man named Wilkie.  And it had all fringe made from string and they took them from Sakonnet Point to West Island.  President Arthur, he was a member, and there were rumors about how many times a day he changed his shirt.  The natives thought that was kind of unnecessary...  Bert Taylor, Kempton Clark's great-uncle, his wife lived out there.  She was a Carton.  And they lived there year round, she and her family, as caretakers.  And they had a cow on East Island because there was some grass over there and they could pasture it.  I don't know what they did in the winter.  I guess they would keep it in.  And she went to school at Warren's Point Road at the intersection there.  And what she did, he father would row her across, she and her sister, and they would lay flat in the skiff if it was rough from West Island to Lloyd's Beach, and then walk up to school.  And if it was really bad they stayed at the Bundy house because they were all related.  The Bundy House was on Warren's Point Road down before you get to the old Lisle house, in that area.  And that was a boarding house. So they would stay overnight there and do to school the next morning.

Now, you know where the Nannaquaket Bridge is? [Tiverton].  They call that the "Gut" up there.  And Metcalf, who was a U.S. Senator, had a big, big steam yacht, the "Felicia." and that was docked there the year 'round except when it was out cruising.  The boats were huge.  I can remember J-Boats when we went out there, and those big Arthur Curtis James' boats; one was the "Aloha."  They were just like palaces on the water with big afterdecks all glassed in with palm trees.  And we had a boat and we used to go to Newport when the races were on and see these boats.  You couldn't go aboard but you could look at them.  They were palaces!

[Common's] ...there was a store there.  Ogden ran it.  We used to get up there, oh, not too often, and we'd go in and get candy.  I remember the greatest thing.  My brother and sister were going to school at the Commons and they came home and raved about these beautiful Eskimo pies.  And I thought "Oh, I've got to get up there."  So I talked my father into taking me in the car to the Commons.  He had to find something he had to go up there for, I'm sure.  And I went in and said I wanted an Eskimo pie.  Well, this tiny thing -- I thought a pie was a pie and this little tiny thing came out!  Two bites and it was gone!  I was shattered!  

But that building is the same original building where the old store was.  Now, let's see, George Thayer who lived over at Sakonnet next to Mack's...he had a lunch that he used to serve to the high school kids.  Oh, it was American chop suey and he had quite a menu.  And he used to get drunk so his wife used to have to take over.  And upstairs he'd be clunking the floor with his bottle and she'd say "George is drunk again."

The post office was up there too, you know.  And a blacksmith shop was where the post office is now.  That's where they made the grappling irons.  I remember the blacksmith shop right on the side near the house.  Otis Brown was the blacksmith and he'd sort of baby-sit me.

[Adamsville] It's kind of like a different neighborhood altogether, really kind of a separate little town.  And see, Adamsville had to come over to Little Compton High School and we used to be mean to 'em and said they had to come over to the Capitol to get educated.  I think Adamsville, however, is gettin' a rough deal.  Very few have been represented from Adamsville in the Town Council.  I think they feel pushed out and if they don't I should think they would.  But all the old families are gone from there mostly.  Grace Simmons was the last institution.  I loved her dearly, she was great.

Yuh, John (Hart) is still walkin' to the post office (Adamsville) and gettin' his mail.  Comes down and mows my field.  He's eighty-seven and he never stops.  And I think "John, why don't you stop and have a drink of water or something?"  I've tried to give him a Coke or something.  No, no, he had a drink before he left home.  Then he'll some up and say  "Well, I dunno, I'm awful tired."  And I'll say "John, why don't you rest?"  Well that old Yankee isn't resting on anyone else's time.  You come to do something, you work.  You don't have coffee breaks and those kinds of things.

...There was a hen farm up in back here (on John Dyer Road).  Well, there was a cookhouse.  What they did was they took mash and cooked it in big kettles and they had this house where they built the fire underneath and cooked the mash and then in there they had garbage and all that, they threw that in.  They took it up and fed the hens with that.  Sort of like meal.   And they put it in barrels and took it up to the stone drag.  Do you know what a stone drag is?  Well, it's a flat piece of heavy wood and it has lots of metal on it 'cause it gets tough wear and they hitch it to the horse and he drags it.  They used 'em for almost everything.  They didn't have any trucks or anything like that.  They carried the pan food up on that and the man who lived across the way (Clifton Carter) had one and when his well went dry he'd come over with his two barrels and get his barrels filled with water and used a drag.  That's the last one I've seen.

Well, the Clark family owned the beach (Warren's Point).  That's where these beach privileges come from.  They rented out bathhouses and they were over by the big beach, the original bathhouses were.  They went out in the Hurricane ['38].  They were built back again in the same spot and they went out in the '44...when the '44 came there was no more money to build them back.  That's when they formed the club and people bought shares of stock and got it going again.  So when they went out the next time, that's when they built 'em up on the rock where they are now.

I was manager of the beach before it was a club.  I worked for the Clarks.  At that time they closed between one and three o'clock 'cause everyone went home to lunch at one o'clock.  They all had maids and they bathed in the morning.  In the afternoon, that's when the nannies came down with the maids.  So you didn't want to be seen there after one o'clock if you had any social standing.

They had a rope out there which was marvelous...mostly for the children because you didn't have to watch them that carefully.  They didn't go beyond the rope.  It's still a wonderful place for little children, that part of the beach, even though people don't seem to use it.  But we all sat over there and watched the children.  Well, it was so rocky after the hurricanes that we all gave up on it.  It was terrible.

You never knew Mrs. Lloyd Goodrich, Edith Goodrich, did you?  Well, she, of course, was New York and she came with Lloyd to visit the Goodriches here and she brought a bathing suit from New York which she thought was very nice.  She got here and found out everyone else had stockings on and high white sneakers.  "Oh," she thought, "I'm doomed.  Lloyd's mother will never approve of me.  I'll never get anywhere."  So I don't know where she got the stockings, she never did tell me that...Well, she made it, but she thought "This is it, this is it!"  She was a delightful, a nice person.

Well, there used to be a group at "Little Beach"; there was a group of Providence people that sat in their group and you didn't venture in.  You didn't go over and sit down with 'em at all.  You had to be asked to come in over there.  Oh, no they wouldn't hobnob with everybody that came along.  Then there was the New Jersey/New York group.  They said you had to be on Warren's Point for seven years before anyone would speak to you.  It had that reputation.  I mean you just didn't go and sit down by someone and say "I'm so-and-so."  Never!

I wish the newcomers who come in here would stop tryin' to push for town sewerage and town garbage collections.  They don't care what they pay for taxes, but we do.  We've lived here a long while and when you're on a set income I think it's just going up too fast.  We don't need all those things.  We've gotten by for years.  And think what it would cost to put a sewerage system in Little Compton!  It's such a big area.  And another thing that irks me is that "all water is contaminated if you have a dug well" idea.  It isn't contaminated.  You go to one of these conservation and environmental things and they want all the water tested.  And they even call you on the phone.  But they come here from Dover and those places that have everything and they pay big taxes, but we don't need that.  They want to make it a suburbia just like where they came from.  They go to a cocktail party or somethin' and everyone condemns everything here and it's "no good!"  If you want that kind of thing don't come here, that's how I feel.

They used to come down to the Beach Club and say "Ugh.  Can you drink this water?"  And I'd take 'em over and show 'em where the state had come down and tested it, but because it's in the country it's contaminated.  And you've got a group at Chace Point and I went to one meeting and they're too much.  I just feel "Why don't you leave us alone?"  And too, the politics!  How did we ever live and how did we run the town without all these lovely people who came here to show us how to do it.  We're doing' it all wrong!

Well, they want to make it another Palm Beach or the other clubs.  Well, they did the same thing to Warren's Point.  It was never a bathhouse, it was a "cabana." And "Don't you have chairs in there?" and "Does somebody come and put up the umbrellas?"  They called me on the phone and asked "Do you have seaweed?"  I said "Yes we do, quite a bit."  "Oh, well, my family doesn't like seaweed."  "Well, we usually have it in August."  "But we're going to come down for a picnic.  Do you think it will be gone by one o'clock?"

I have to tell you about my "Black Democrats."  Jessie [O'Connor] has a group down (a multi-racial political action group from Providence).  And you know everyone was so nice.  Some of the kids had never been on a beach, maybe a pool in the city but never a beach and a walk in the sand.  And I felt so happy for them.  Well, one man insisted that I owned the beach, and he couldn't thank me enough.  He said he'd never been to a place like this.  And I thought that was nice that he could come here and enjoy himself.  And as far as the children behaving -- one little fella ran across the deck.  Wow!  His father put him away and said "Don't move," and that kid didn't move.  I thought "I wish you were going to be here for awhile!"  Anyway, one little boy went down and he peed in the water.  The life guards said they saw it but by the time they got there it was too late anyway.  So they just asked him to next time use the bathrooms, that there were bathrooms up here.  So at the end of the day, about three o'clock, this woman who lives up in town came up and she said "Well, I would have been ashamed to have guests on the beach today.  There are black people down there."  I said "Well yes there are, lots of places, and I think you're probably going to see more of them."  She said "Well, not here!" And then she said, "They're black, AND they're Democrats!"  I mean, what's worse in Little Compton than being a Democrat?  

But I like Little Compton, yes.  Course in the summer it's too crowded.  But you go to the Vineyard, it's worse.  Well, it's all changed, yes, of course.  Used to be you married someone from Providence, mostly, maybe a few from New York, but mostly Providence.  Providence married Providence.  Well, I guess they all went to the same schools and the same dancing classes and everything and all lined up to get married ... but you know you get to a certain age and they've died.  I haven't any close relatives in Little Compton anymore.  I have a nephew in New Jersey (Donald Bliss) and my daughter Debby is in Maryland.  She works at Johns Hopkins.

Is this all recorded?  I hope it isn't like Duffield...he got lots of the old-timers to go up to his house to visit him and they were rather suspicious.  Well, he got them talking and recorded their speech.  He had a bridge lamp with a microphone.  They never forgave him.  And they printed it in the New York Herald.  It was very unfair.  It was like making fun of people.  And one was, again, Kempton Clark's great-Uncle, Bert Taylor.  He resented it.  "Why should he take advantage?  We went up there because we thought he was inviting us socially and instead of that he's making a story of this for the New York Times."  That was pretty crummy, I think.  I have clippings somewhere of the articles that were in the paper.  They ran for quite a while.

(The articles Avis refers to were printed in the Providence Sunday Herald on August 18, 1935 and the New York Herald on December 2, 1936.)

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