1897

In the last several months the family statistics of most of our classmates have been compiled for the Magazine. My own family status briefly listed is: Residence 118 Brooklawn Ave., Bridgeport 4, Conn., in an old house built as a farm house at two stages, the large central part about 130 years old. It has heavy timber frame and there are four fireplaces, one of these in the cellar formerly used for keeping the potatoes from freezing. The architectural details were influenced by the Adam Period, 1762-1792. I live alone with a longtime faithful servant who knows my likes and dislikes and caters to my heeds.

My daughter Clara, Mrs. Harvey Hubbell, lives at the Hubbell Homestead in Long Hill known as Brootside. The old house on the main highway is surrounded by farm buildings and gardens and a greenhouse and a very large windmill. There is a summer house on the property which has a beautiful view many miles across the Sound to the shores of Long Island. Here the family summers from June to November.

Here in this jumpy, modern life come and go my grandchildren two grandsons, Harvey Hubbell 4th and William Ham Hubbell and one granddaughter Elizabeth Lorraine, called Betsy.

Come and go is typical of the age we live in. My grandson Harvey, 23 years old, is a Lieutenant in the Marines now at Camp Pendleton, Calif. His fiancee is Laure Stauffer of Rochester, N. Y. The wedding is scheduled for June if Uncle Sam can spare the time of one Marine officer for the event which Laure and Harvey feel is important.

William, sometimes called Willie Hot-Rod, is 21 years old and lives at home. He was eliminated from the Seabees because of a serious accident while test driving his second home-built hot rod last June. His recovery is nearly complete, but not sufficient for Seabee service. Bill is a natural mechanic, having his own machine shop at home. He was given his classification as machinist before finishing his first year at Lehigh. Now he has nearly finished his toolmaker's classification at his father's factory, The Harvey Hubbell Cos. Bill has qualified as an air pilot with passenger license, but has been grounded since June. He is studying navigation in his spare time.

Betsy is 18 years old and in her last year in the Master's School at Dobbs Ferry. As this is being written, she is en route to Bermuda by air with 15 girls from Dobbs. Betsy is like her late grandmother, Elizabeth, and is able with her natural responsiveness to bring lots of joy to her grandfather with many letters keeping me in touch with the modern school girl's interests and the new boy who is "tops" at the time.

My hobbies are salmon fishing, handicraft work in the textiles using a machine for which I received a patent in the U.S., Canada and England; and also baseball for boys ages 8 through 15 years. This last hobby has given me a lot of satisfaction, and the 30 teams now playing on four complete baseball diamonds built under my direction showed a surplus of $1500 for the 1952 Season. This gives me a chance to feel that the new big movement in guiding youth has in it something that a man 77 years old can have a part in. Some of my classmates don't like me to write about baseball and weaving. Perhaps they will accept the new effort I've just started to work on which is to teach children to drink more milk. This is a part of the campaign to help the farmers of New England, who have a large surplus of both milk and butter. While at the same time our health authorities are sure that children do not have enough milk in their diet. We hope this will popularize the use of chocolate milk instead of too much coca cola and other kinds of pop. This program has just started in Little League.

As the years add up, with less of the activities of a social kind in our lives, I think we come to consider quite a lot the forces that are pushing us around. Yesterday our local paper carried an item about the Government tenements just across the avenue from our most successful city village.

This item in the paper appeared because of an autocratic order for all rabbit-ear antenna which people have put up at small cost to themselves to be removed because the high and mighty force controlling the Government so-called low rent tenements, which are not really low rent although highly subsidized, want to have a centralized antenna used at much more expense to the tenants; and I question who shall say to the free American family that these children shall not have the right to enjoy the puppet shows in their own tenement if the advertisers of children's food and clothing will pay for these smart marionette programs.

Hop-a-long Cassidy is in my opinion the most influential of all of our youth movements, but down must come the rabbit-ear antenna just at a time when these low rent workers who are looked down upon by my tenants just across the avenue, are to be given high frequency wave length broadcasting starting in April. But of course Uncle Sam thinks he knows best.

Some of my classmates may criticize my baseball notes, but when X drive through town and hundreds of kids wave to me, I feel repaid for my efforts and forget that I am old. Some of these boys are now almost ready to enter college. I'd like to see a lot of them go to Dartmouth.

Secretary and Treasurer 886 Main St., Bridgeport 3, Conn. Class Agent, 862 Park Square Bldg., Boston 16, Mass,