When I got to transcribing letters later on in the chronology of things, I remembered that, quite often, people tell stories in letters. Helen didn’t have the final version of letters that she sent, but being such a detailed person (with foresight), she had drafted them first and kept the drafts (at least a few of them). And she had received some letters as well. There is one from her father, Frank Skinner, on wafer thin airmail paper, from 1940, about the family:

Unfortunately, what was enclosed in the letter is gone, but it was likely family tree related. The family tree that I have seen is a matrilineage, where the last names change every generation. But here we have Skinners going back to 1641, at some point having traveled over from Braintree, England. The evolution of Frank’s Skinner line, as he notes, ended with him, as he had two girls, but there are descendants if you follow Helen’s sister, who had three children (including my mom), and those children had a total six children (including moi), and those (not including moi) had a total of five. Matrilineage has just as much blood as patrilineage, so there!

I like her father’s non-sequitur self-disparagement about Braintree and a lack of brains on the tree (though it is more a family-disparagement than a self one). This is the only writing I have from her father, but as is common with our family, it is light on sentiment but replete with dry humor (our love language is self-deprecation).

And now onto more childhood stuff.

Draft Letter I (this letter doesn’t indicate to whom it was written or when, but based on the bit about Halley’s comment, it was after 1986, so she was at least 82)

From Helen to someone who knew of the town of Menands, New York (to paraphrase):

Only once have I met anyone who knew where MENANDS NY is located.... My parents, Gertrude and Frank Skinner, took their daughter Helen to live in New York City when I was six months old.... One summer in the early thirties I drove through Menands on the way to somewhere else. So much for one’s old home town.

Side note: Helen did not have a dislike of Menands, per se, but an ambivalence she did. Somewhat strange that they moved from a super small town upstate New York to the great big Manhattan with a six month old baby. Perhaps for a job? Family? Regardless, when I picture the little family in NYC, I envision people dressed up in complicated looking long black attire with big hats, scurrying about super fast, like in those old choppy black and white videos of yore

I have never known where or how long we were in NY but next we moved to Brooklyn. The Skinners occupied the second floor of a house and mother’s brother Jack Bunyan, his wife Jessie and their new baby Betty had the lower floor. Two things I remember: There was a dumbwaiter which could be pulled up or down between the two kitchens and at some point Betty and I rode up and down on it (well supervised) to visit each other; 2) one night I recall mother taking me to the bathroom, closing the toilet lid and standing me up on it so I could look out the window (it was the only window on that side of the house) where the sky was bright as day -- a blazing light. She said to me ‘remember this: you’ve seen Halley’s Comet, and it won’t be back for 75 years.” I regret that while I was still around for the comet’s next appearance, it was performing in the Southern Hemisphere, and I missed it.

Side notes: I’m not sure where the dumbwaiter duplex was exactly, but it was in Brooklyn somewhere, and if you can fit in a dumbwaiter, you should ride it (unless you’re not acquainted with whoever is above or below it). Haley’s comet made appearances in April 1910 and April 1986. She would have been seven for the first one, 82 for the next. The next next one is in 2061, fwiw. And I love the imagery of the comet ‘performing’ in the Southern Hemisphere, like it was on tour, hamming it up down there

The Bunyans and Skinners bought houses next to each other at XXX and XXX Stratford Rd. Our two backyards fenced around the outside made a wonderful playing space. The back of our lots faced on Coney Island Ave where streetcars went to that destination and in summer... Bathing suits were jumper like garments which came just below the knee, elbow length sleeves, black bloomers and black stockings and sneakers.

Side notes: An address! This was huge and I Googled and Zillowed immediately. Stratford Road is south of Prospect Park and is now the Flatbush/Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, about five miles from where I live. Zillow told me the house remaining (one was an empty lot) was still the original house, so the same one that she (or Betty) lived in. So they they moved from a tiny town to the big city and then swiftly to the burbs (Brooklyn was very much suburbs then — albeit dense ones, and very very different than upstate New York). Google showed me that Stratford Road does indeed run parallel to Coney Island Ave. What once was a horse and buggy route to the beach had become a streetcar line to the beach in the late 1800s. That line closed in 1955 and became (and still is) a bus line. Also, perhaps me typing “…garments which came just below the knee, elbow length sleeves, black bloomers and black stockings…’ is is why I’ve been getting ads for a Quaker-chic styles in my feeds?

I went to Kindergarten at PS 139 (rah rah rah the rose and the pine. Long live, long live 139).

Side note: This school exists and operates and is a few blocks north of the house on Stratford Road. Some sleuthing shows it was built in 1902. And I hope that is still their fight song.

Plans were excitedly made to visit Stratford Road and PS 139. The husband (who was by then invested in my caper) and I hopped on a bus heading south and turned and turned more until we ended up on Coney Island Avenue, just like it was called in yore. Note that there are parts of Brooklyn that have actual free standing houses of many shapes and sizes. Where we exited the bus, about a block from her house, was one of those neighborhoods. We walked up to the addresses she listed, and like Google maps showed, there was one house and one empty lot. I’m not sure which house she lived in, but I imagine both houses looked roughly the same in style. In historian mode, I took lots of pictures, including one of the fence she mentions, which in no way is the same fence, but I am thorough.

I was too chicken to ring the doorbell, and no one walked by that I could babble to about why I was standing in the middle of the street taking pictures of everything in a 360 degree radius, including the pavement.

I tried to picture the street how it might have looked in 1905ish but I had trouble erasing the modern garbage bins from my vision (it was trash day). And there is something about color that makes it hard for me to turn things old in my mind. I found myself squinting, like that might temporarily wish away color (it doesn’t). But photo editing tools do!

The house looked cosy and homey and seemed a very nice place to spend one’s formative years, especially with a best friend next door. I soaked in its essence as much as I could, and then we walked up a few blocks to PS 139 (everyone probably knows that PS means public school, but I didn’t until I moved to New York, so just in case you don’t, there you go). The school looks like an old East Coast educational facility, and one that I imagine is purported to be haunted. I snooped around the perimeter with my camera looking for markers or plaques with dates. Alas, but we do know it was built in 1902 and it looks old, so some of it must be original.

Draft Letter I was an excellent find. Next we will briefly explore Draft Letter II, then a thing that Googling found.

Draft Letter II – this letter was written by Helen to a Ray Winans (a relative who must have asked about the family) in the late 1970s.

The draft letter is five and a half handwritten pages and details family history from early 1800s – 1990s, but only a little is about her childhood and I’ll just include that (for now…). After a quick intro, she starts:

I never had the slightest interest in ancestors until most of the people died who might have helped to fill the family tree... However, if you prefer to have your ear bent, I’ll bring you up to date on the ones I know.

Side note: what you get for outliving everyone is that younger generations pester you for information. She does nicely provide detail though about generations of relatives in upstate New York, with names like Cavert, Mead, Bunyan, and Haywood, but I’ll only include detail directly about her (but if a Cavert, Mead, Bunyan, or Haywood would like more information, please just let me know)

In 1916-18 I went to St Paul Minn to stay with my mother’s half-sister Mary Mead Cavert, while I was in my first 2 years of high school. I then returned to Brooklyn to graduate from Erasmus Hall High in 1920.

Side note: Remember in her diary in 1919 when she mentions that Madison Square Garden was bigger than the Hippodrome? Her time in Minnesota is how she knew. Also, this was not a short trip. It’s an 18 hour drive by today’s standards.I’m not sure why our field trip didn’t include Erasmus Hall High, as the building is still there and from the pictures on Google it looks very old and cool. We have a new excuse to ride a bus south

I don’t know where you dreamed up ‘at college in Missouri’ for I went to Columbia in NYC - I admit I wasn’t home very much, for I lived in a dorm, camp in the summer, I was a counsellor at varsity camps.

Side note: this is the only time she mentioned Columbia, and I still think it’s strange she didn’t brag more about it

She says the family moved to Arlington, New Jersey in 1920, which is when Helen started college and never went back home to live. I’m not sure if the cousin’s family moved with them so they could continue being neighbors.

The letter picks up again in the late 1930s and everyone will have to wait to hear about that.

Online Account – a remembrance of things past

Through Googling, I found a bit more nostalgia about young Helen. The material is from Chapter 6 of a book called The Mead Family, written by Jane Mitchell (the names Mead, Cavert, and Bunyan all appear — all on the mother’s side). Helen contributed to the book, and writes about her time with her cousin and bestie Betty:

Betty was known to her best friends as Lizzie Smellie Onion (her full name was Elizabeth Smeallie Bunyan). We were brought up almost as twins. We would shout between our houses (we didn’t have a phone) “What are you going to wear?’ by way of starting the day. She was in our house as much as in her own. We spent many summers at the Mead farm until I was sent off to St. Paul for 2 years in 1917.1

Smellie Onion is a very fun nickname (Betty is the girl scowling in the pictures in the last post, but that she allowed her best friends to call her smelly onion indicates she did indeed like fun). The pictures of the kids in the last post were taken at this Mead farm in West Charlton, New York. Betty comes up later in Helen’s story as well, and it seems they stayed very close (not geographically though). I wish I could see the letters between the two of them. I suspect they were spicy and filled with self-deprecating jokes. Like her father, this was also her style.

I recommend that you to read the description of the Scotch church in the link above. It paints a picture of a colorful congregation in their Sunday best, crooning away to hymnals in a small old musty house of god, with Helen and Betty pilfering candies and trying not squirm. You can kind of picture it (and smell it).¹

And that is it for childhood! Now we will move onwards and upwards to the 1930s (literally upwards, as there are airplanes).

References

1 – http://charltonnyhs.org/2017_Mary%20Mead%20Cavert.pdf