By Linda Ibbitson Hurd
Special to The Express
I have many memories of my mother and an overall pride in her accomplishments as a woman and as our mother. After her high school graduation, she worked as a long-distance telephone operator in Burlington, Vt., where she grew up. During WWII, Treasure Island, Calif., needed long distance operators and Mom signed up, holding the rank of Petty Officer First Class while serving in the WAVES. Dad was in the Seabees when they met at Treasure Island.
When the war ended, they were married in the Hanson Baptist Church and by the time I was born, they had a house on Elm Street where my three siblings and I were raised along with mom’s dog, a dalmatian named Dietz they got while on their honeymoon.
Mom was a Methodist and after she married Dad she joined the Baptist church in Hanson that he belonged to. She taught Sunday school when I was little and also when my siblings were young. It was nice having her there with us. She got involved with the church and groups within the church that were helpful to others and to the community.
When I was in my teens and began to lose interest in church, Mom talked me into joining BYF; Baptist Youth Fellowship at our church. It was a group of friends and peers I had grown up with in Sunday school. I’m glad I listened to her; I learned so much from the minister who ran it, Rev. Gil McCurdy and Rae Usher, the woman who helped him. He knew how to listen, hear, talk to and deal with young people and the things he pointed out to us made us think and to be more aware of how to keep ourselves safe out in the world.
The first thing I became aware of about Mom when I was very small was her love for animals. One of my first memories was her finding abandoned baby bunnies in our back yard near the field behind our house. She asked dad if he would make a cage strong enough to keep away other animals, which he did. Mom fed the bunnies with a glass doll bottle I had that was made exactly like real baby bottles, only much smaller. She taught me how to feed them so I could help. When they were old enough, Mom always found good homes for them.
Mom was as good with us as she was with the animals. When I was 6 and my sister Penny was 3, Mom was 6 months along with our brother, David. One day we went to Martha Brine’s farm stand to buy a watermelon. Penny was a plump little kid and loved to eat. She reached for a small piece of watermelon covered with seeds and was about to stuff the whole thing in her mouth when Martha took it away, telling her she needed the seeds to grow more watermelons. Penny just stared at her. Later that night, mom was cutting watermelon slices and bit into one with seeds and grabbed a cup of water to swallow it down. Penny started crying, the crying turned to sobbing. Mom asked her why she was crying and Penny kept pointing to mom’s tummy.
“I told you there’s a baby in there,” mom said.
“NO!!! Watermelon!” Penny sobbed, holding out her plump little hand full of seeds. Mom calmed her down, but whenever we had watermelon that summer, she collected the seeds and threw them away until David was born that August and then she could see he was a baby and not a watermelon.
Three years after our brother David was born, our sister Barbara was born on his birthday. We still celebrate them together. As we got older mom tried to get us kids to call her “Mother.” We all looked at each other but didn’t say anything. When that didn’t work she tried “Mom.” She gave up when the only thing that worked was “Ma.”
It’s never changed. It was nice having a stay-at-home mom but as we got older, she ventured out and started working again. I was proud of the things she did. She got her Class 3 license to drive a school bus. Some years later she took a job as dispatcher for the Hanson Police. When she’d been there a few years Brockton Hospital hired her to be their switchboard operator. She stayed there until her retirement.
Mom wasn’t much over five feet tall and had a nice figure. One December near Christmas when I was about 12, mom asked me and Penny, who was then 9, to keep an eye on the kids and the supper that was baking in the oven; she had one last errand to run at the five and dime store, J.J. Newberry’s in Whitman. About an hour later when she came back grinning from ear to ear, her arms full of packages, Dad was coming in the back door. They met in the dining room where I was, kissed and she rushed into their bedroom to put the bags away.
When she came back out still grinning, Dad started to smile, asking her what was going on. She broke into full laughter, trying to calm down to tell us. When David and Barb heard her laughing, they came into the dining room to listen.
“Well, when I was at Newberry’s and finished my shopping, I was walking towards the cash register line to pay and a big rat ran out in front of me and when I screamed, all my bags flew into the air and fell onto the cash register belt. I jumped and a man beside me caught me and I was in his arms screaming and then laughing when I realized I jumped into his arms and then he was laughing!
We were all laughing except Barb who kept asking, “What is a rat?”
“Why didn’t you bring him home to supper?” Dad kidded her. “He wished me a Merry Christmas and I thanked him for catching me and he said he was glad to be of service.”
Growing up in Vermont, Mom had been an avid skier and before they were married, so had Dad. They both loved the outdoors and, in their 50s, they began to research how to create a small wildlife preserve. There was a spacious field between our backyard and the brook beyond. Dad was a bulldozer and heavy equipment operator and with a dozer and an excavator he was able to push the shale and dirt uphill towards the back side of the brook. By the time he was done, the brook was dead center, fifteen to eighteen feet deep which hit natural Springs that created its own water source.
My brother Dave stocked the pond with bluegills, perch, shiners, horn pout and more. There were all kinds of migrating birds that came to the pond at different times of the year, many returning annually such as great blue heron, wild mallard ducks and a kind of sandpiper with markings called a solitary sandpiper that always came alone.
Dad got Mom an inflatable boat to row around the pond. She gave all our kids rides in it at different times, which they loved. Dad built a small dock to make the preserve complete. It was a dream come true for Mom and the first Mother’s Day after the preserve was created was a celebration for our whole family.