49

It is a time for rebirth.

A time for growth. Population, cars, housing. A new beginning after the war. A war that was too close, really. We coulda lost it. We coulda got beat. Now we are back on track again. Oh, the good life.

Selectmen. Richard Farrar. Paul Giannetti and Warren Gilmore, chairman.

The Superintendant of Schools says in his report to the citizens in the town report;
"The birth rate in Wrentham from 1931 to 1941 averaged 28 a year. From 1941 to 1949 the average birth rate increased to 55, an increase of 27 or nearly 100% The highest birth rate was 75 in 1947 and in 1948 it wa 68."

Then ominously, makes the promise that "the pupils in our schools will continue to increase for several years." If something is not done about it, "the children will not be able to get the education that is their birthright in this democracy of ours."

The town report lists the men , so we know that Dexter Moore is a poultryman who lives at 363 Beech Street; is 42.

Blanche A. Goode of 922 South Street is 34 and a housewife.

The jury list is at the front of the report and states that Richard Farrar is an oil dealer, living at 199 East Street.

A memorial page is to Lewis F. Perry , born May 24, 1865 and died November 21, 1949. He served the town in a variety of offices.

One to Thomas M. Proctor, M.D. , who also served the town.

As is always the case, water is an issue. Article 18 in the warrant is for almost nine thousand dollars to extend the water system on Shears Street from Hemlock Road to the Norfolk town line, a distance of 1700 feet. It seems it is always water that draws attention.

In 1949, the inspector of Slaughtering was Fred C. Dart.

Counsel. Sydney G. Carpenter, Jr.

There is the list of dogs, licensed for the year. Sadly, they do not give us their names, as some other towns' reports do, but we find that Ralphina Wood lives at 295 Dedham Street and holds license number 36.

The selectmen's report states that they went through the year of 1949 without having to borrow money in anticipation of taxes.

The welfare roll went up, from fifty in the case load, as they say, to 85, "in all categories." "With 4 pending."

Police reports are always telling and interesting. "no really serious crime took place in Wrentham. There were no crimes reported against the person; such as murder, rape or assault."

"There is only one major case of breaking and entering and larceny in which the thief has not been apprehended."

27 automobile accidents. Two residents died. The police need a new police cruiser, as the "one we now have is a 1947 model and has been in use constantly 24 hours a day having registered a total of over 90,000 miles."

It seems the school people always take the most space in the town reports. They are but exercising their pens and their facile minds, tripping over the words they market as the purveyors of knowledge. In sum of their report, they need money , in all departments because the seats are filling fast. There is talk of the need for a "regional high school."

Perhaps I have said enough about the document that summarizes a year in the life, but it is so much fun to look back and I cannot resist the following before I close the tome and return it to the library. I especially enjoy the delicate sound that supervisor of music makes in describing the goals of the music program of Wrentham.

Says the representative for music;

"Rhythm games, recognition of instruments and a taste for the lighter classics would become a part of the child's daily living." This is a set of goals for the little ones in the grammar school. How nice it is.

There is hope for the future. Houses are being built. New jobs are coming to the town. The depression will not be repeated in the post-war period. It is just that the new life costs money and roads, water pipe, cruisers for the police and new schools are not cheap.

Fiore has kindly written a fine history of Wrentham through 1973; a readable work which begins with the quote he cites of his own favorite historian of the colonial period. "Every particle of historical truth is precious."

With that in mind Fiore goes on to tell us all sorts of interesting things about the town. He is not one of these heavy glossers. He does not overdo how the town he is descibing is the best town in the region because of this and that, and may be the best little place on the face of the earth. He glosses, but not a lot. He is a college professor at Bridgewater and explains the subject of his research in a relatively dispassionate manner, one befitting an historian of professional stature.

He does , however, start his book by telling us Wrentham is a "favored place." Nature is kind . The place is very pretty.

He has some nice pictures in his book. Here a few I especially like.

Sheldonville Baptist Church.

Wrentham classroom, 1893.

A very eerie photo labeled, " School in Plainville."

Former Center School. Was old town hall, 1896-1951. I am a sucker for any picture of the Center School. I look at the building and always think about all the kids who went there, what it was like when school got out. The bustle and the fun. You look at the empty lot and it makes you sad to think that so much life and energy is no longer there. Someplace else in town, but no longer there where the Center School was.

The photo of the "Store and Post Office in Sheldonville, around World War I."

The "Interior scene at Winter Brothers Tap and Die Works."

"Milford, Attleboro and Woonsocket Street Railway Co., 1900."

Lastly, the remarkable photo; "Brass band and G.A. R. members before G.A.R. Hall in Plainville."

It is funny how much a picture can say. It always amazes me.

Fiore speaks of the later years of Wrentham, in his last few chapters. He tells us the place in growing and will still remain a nice place. We need to be assured of that and one has only to visit, as I do, on a regular basis to feel the niceness of the place . I hate to do this because I fear I will bore myself, but I must quote a paragraph of Fiore on page 221.

"After World War II many people discovered the little town with its convenient location and moved here. Once they came, the town's facilities were strained, and there was a greater need for local services. Wrentham's public expenses rose also, and the town was transformed from a pleasant, almost sleepy village to a thriving community as new houses were constructed, new stores developed and modern motels, shopping centers, restaurants, and other elements of a bustling community became a part of the Wrentham scene."

I hate to bring this up but to a person like the photographer, David Plowden who wrote a book called "Small Town America," this was the beginning of the end. For an accurate look at what really was happening in 1949, see Plowden. Here is where Fiore is doing a house job, a writing of a history that will praise a place without showing the deeper truth. This was really the time , around 1949, when Wrentham was ending as a small, tight, cocoon of a place. The old small town or village. Plowden tells this story in his book of text and high-minded photos. Please know his work. Please look in on my vid,
"Bat," a piece on the tv I did on the fate of the small town, as Plowden and I see it.

It ended. Fact. It ended. Something else came that wasn't as good. The suburb. They are all pretty aweful, according to me and Plowden.

Change hit hard. Being a selectman became a chore and less an honor. It became just hard work to manage a place that was growing in a frightful fashion. The old place was no longer there. Some new thing came about. What in heck was it? What would you call it? No-one knew. It would be necessary to build a new Municipal Building to manage all the growth. That would happen soon enough.

Obviously, the Planning Board was to have its hands full. The police and fire departments would have to grow to meet problems. So would the courts. The library expanded. Schools were built.

We learn that new motels were added "to take care of the tourist trade." Major highways would put the surgeon's knife through the sleepy town and change it forever, in ways Plowden and I would rue. A new kid in town after the war gave jobs. The Crosby-Ashton Valve and Gage Company moved to Wrentham. Many of them skilled jobs.

Now Fiore does his chamber of commerce routine and tells us what the town needs to keep growing, as if growth is the answer. He think so and I imagine others too. Especially real estate agents and merchants. The lot sizes are big enough, he tells us, "to avoid making Wrentham a bedroom town." This is an alternate word for suburb, I guess, or I would say it is a pejorative, a word for saying what is bad about a suburb. That the folks who sleep in the bedroom do just that and go to work elsewhere in the day, and come home to sleep in the bedroom at night and don't even know where the bedroom is located. This is a frightful word, bedroom , used as it is, because it accurately defines what history has given us. The traveler, the daily traveler, who rises in the night from the sleep of the bedroom and commutes in 1995, daily, to god knows where; is called a commuter and lives in a suburb like Wrentham. In a big house with a toxic green lawn and a new Japanese car and works for a corporation and is tired at night and falls asleep in front of the tv and shops at Walmart because it is close and neat and cheap. God, what have we come to?

Ominously, Fiore, on page 254 tells us, "The town is ideally located for industrial growth. " Roads as in the old days, converge in Wrentham . Good luck , I guess. Like in the old days, Wrentham was on the stage route to Providence and other big places.

Fiore. "Wrentham is a favored town."

The Grange left. The Wrentham Grange dissolved. Sad. The end of an era , a very long era of agriculture, growing things and small town life.

Gone. Here is how the historian ends his book on the town. He knows . He knows full well.

"But the recent changes in Wrentham have defied all of the efforts of prognosticators and should reveal how impossible is the task of predicing the town's future."

He says the town has gone on in a noble fashion. His words; "here is no stagnant New England village but a vibrant , daring , courageous town."

The buildings have gone up to serve the citizenry. The challenge of growth has been met. It was all beginning to start around the year, 1949, as the place would grow almost as to look unrecognizable to the old timers who trod the streets.

"The location is ideal for the city worker, who can drive to Boston or Providence in a short time or who can work in a number of industrial cities and towns equally close, and for the businessman or manufacturer who wants to locate near good roads and a source of supply of good workers." You read this and look at Chilson circa 1949 and it is hard to visualize what Fiore is talking about. But the big roads would create the changes Fiore saw in the '70's. Wrentham changed, is all. But that is all. The place changed in ways the earlier ones who lived there would find hard to accept. I mean it in the spiritual, psychologica sense of the word. In the daily sense. Their lives changed in the daily sense. It would never be the same as in the old days.

He tells us the town has aged gracefully like a person may. He anthroporphizes a thing to make it more palatable for the reader. The town is a lady whose wrinkles are not so bad. She does not look her age. I wonder. I prefer the 1949 people and their lives over the modern thing.

I shall finish with a few pictures of life around town and the world, in Indonesia, Israel, Washington. The period was full of events. Also some new products that would change our very psyches. Tv, soap powders, machines, cars, suburban homes. Of course, people in the U.S. and other countries were just as heroic or nasty then, as they are in any other year we may choose. We had Shweitzer ministering to the poor of Africa while at the same time, mass murderers and public villains did their thing.

I was a young one, around 12. Cousin John was in Alabama and sent me a baseball glove. He told my aunt for me not to lose it, as it cost a lot and was a good one. John, whose family helped raise me, was in the army and would soon go abroad to serve in Germany.

I was a sixie, a seventh grader at the latin school. It is to say I was in the sixth form or some such thing and would be in that infernal place for a full six years until I would be turned out or loose on the world. I would be there from 49 to 55. They addressed you as Mister there. Mr. Pagliarulo, Mr. Stacks, Mr. Collias, Mr. Palmieri, Mr. Cogan. My classmates and pals. Gone on to better things as they say. Imagine calling a snotty little kid, Mister, but they did. I always wanted to look behind me and say who are you talking to ? Not me, but there it was. They were gettting the dire little kids ready to assume leadership of the known Western world, even then , in seventh grade. The school had this misguided notion that it could educate the next generation of leaders, all men of course, better than anyone else. A public school no less.

The nation shook off the dollar doldrums with come-ons to get the loose change out of the buyers's handbags and pockets. Look at this photo. Part of the caption goes; "Tri-Boro Motors allowed $300 for any horse, mule or goat traded in on a new Ford truck. Filene's of Boston advertised men's suits for $11 dollars, sold out over 7500 in half an hour."

Harry promised. And people bought it.

Government waste.

The Klan was active, but losing members, we are told.

Please see here the thriving community of Los Alamos, New Mexico.

China goes communist.

Russia and America joust. The middle east is eyed enviously by the powes, as new pipe lines are being contemplated. Germany cleared the rubble and a new West German government was moving into place. Tito defies Russia. Oh, Yugoslavia. Britain had candy in abundance once again.

Israel was new. Japan was in its fourth year of occupation and building. India saw Nehru govern as Prime Minister. Peron in Argentina. And here,

life is a beach. One of the hottest summers on record.

Square dancing was back. We gambled a lot, as always. Ukuleles. The shmoo that Al Capp created. Tv. Rooms in the home were being created by the architects to house this strange new machine. Optometrists were treating cases new in their experience. Eyes were being strained by the picture in the living room or should I say the den. Chiropractors had new cases of folks who were out of synch from unusual postures caused by hours of slumping or craning to see the screen.

Cars. Smiling faces always sell.

Please, draw your own.

Suntan. Breatholator. With this new product, even onions can be removed from the breath.

Joe Lewis. Teddy.

Let's picnic. Maine. See America first. From coast to coast hotels are resorts were full. Some eighty-two percent of the folks went by the family car.

Gee, have you seen the new Cele-bra? The scented brassiere.

Miltie?

Bing? and Rhonda Fleming.

Bob Hope and Jane Russell.

Rita and Aly.

It was a year, 1949 , as Americans worked hard and played just as hard. They appeared to have troubles. Half of them, if given another chance, said they would marry differently. Nearly half a million got college degrees that year. Men's pajamas suffered in sales. No-one knew why but only half as many were sold this year as opposed to a few years back. Hard to figure, these Americans.