Growing up in a Vanishing New England

I have not visited my hometown, Holden, Massachusetts, for perhaps 20 years. Not since I drove past the old white farmhouse to show my son, Ethan, where it all began. And just because we happened to be in the area.

It isn’t lack of nostalgia, even abiding love; I recall feeding the hens on an icy late November morning, when I was eight—flipping over the galvanized water tray, a jumbo pie-shaped ice cube, and pouring in the steaming water—in detail more sensuous and vivid than I recall almost anything that happened five years ago.

No, I will not return—ever—because Holden isn’t there. Oh, it has prospered, grown and modernized; the gravel parking area of the hardware store is level, enlarged, and lined. But it isn’t remotely the town that exists in my memories, and I don’t want the new Holden to shove the old from my memory.

And yet, just six months ago I did visit Holden, visited as a thoroughly contemporary man, abreast of all that technology. I traveled to Holden every evening for a month or more–in cyberspace.

If you spend time on Facebook, as I do (“I do.” I’ve married it.), you may have encountered the “You’re Probably from…” phenomenon. Probably from Brooklyn, say, if you remember way back when people said: “Park Slope? What, is that some section of Brooklyn?”

I thought I might pin down this phenomenon for readers, statistically, but when I had entered “You’re probably from…” as a Facebook search, and had scrolled past 20 or more pages of listings—from Biloxi, Tennessee, to Manchester, New Hampshire, to Florence, Italy–I thought myself justified in labeling these Facebook pages a “phenomenon.”

Anyone can create one. When I came upon “You’re Probably from Holden, If…” (I don’t recall quite how), I noticed it had just over 1,000 members (to be a member you have to be “accepted” by the page administrators). And suddenly, down the page, sometimes in full color, but more often in an old black-and-white photograph, went my grammar school (we say, “elementary” today), Becklund’s old convenience store, a photograph of the 1961 Wachusett Regional High School basketball team… But in other posts that went sliding down the page so rapidly, into the oblivion of the now hours-old, I glimpsed a Holden threateningly new, change like encroaching dementia to blot all that I had loved.

I am not passive guy when it comes to words. I joined “the Holden page” and began to post—every night. You have to realize that those who post mostly share old photographs, or new, with just a line or two of text, if any. “Who remembers when we skinny dipped at Bigelow’s quarry?” “Who remembers the honey-dipped ‘donuts’ at Al’s Donut Kitchen?”

But I have been a writer for some four decades who has pumped pure waters of recall from the well of boyhood recollection–pumped gingerly, for these were precious resources. The response as I began to post on the Holden page changed all that. My posts were long because each evening, with my laptop and a glass of Chardonnay, I entered anew the trance of memory and wrote and wrote.

There was the big, dilapidated barn where dad raised three thousand chickens during World War II. There was my first library, at Chaffin’s school, where the inserted check-out card listed the name and date of everyone who borrowed the book. Oh…I see that Mrs. Fisher, my third-grade teacher, read this book two years ago…

The responses (“comments,” on Facebook) galvanized me: From Susan:

I just had to let you know that when I was in 6th grade I delivered the morning newspaper on the lower Brattle Street and Birchwood route. I was a skinny kid and sometimes I had to use two newspaper bags to hold the heavy newspapers and they would dig into my shoulders and sometimes I’d cry because it hurt. One day, your father must have seen me and came in the car and offered me a ride and drove me from house to house in the Birchwood area to deliver all of my newspapers. When I think about it, now, it was probably the nicest thing that anyone did for me in my whole life. Since I can’t thank him, I wanted to thank you and tell you that your father was an angel to me that day he drove me around to deliver papers on my paper route.

This, of course, is a powerful stimulant. I kept posting and memories poured out, in nightly posts, some very long, as I recklessly pumped dry that old well.

But recollections of childhood are loaded with antibodies against the infection of mere nostalgia. To recall days of sunlit summer bliss, beside the cow pond, catching those elusive orange salamanders, is to excite connections just as real of pain still fresh in memory.

I began to post about the pain, bewilderment—the hard lessons that made me what I am. And so the day, returning across the schoolyard from shop class, located away from the junior high school, when the boys (no girls in shop class) decided they would “pants me.” To this sort of thing, the comments became mixed. But one said “There are things better not recalled.”

And then, in high school, when I won the first prize in biology at the science fair, proudly announced on the PA system, the “big guys” in the back of the bus celebrated by tossing my notebooks and textbooks into the rear well of the bus and lighting them on fire.

And I recalled so much bafflement when the high school art teacher, a gentle, soft-spoken, talented man, was humiliated, day after day, in class, by the “big guys”–actually adults who had failed to graduate, year after year—who made mysterious comments such as “Are you going to shave it for the big date?” Only many years later did it come to me that our art teacher had been gay and dared not call the bullies to account.

In no sense did I post such things with malice. I was recalling in a kind of transport every vivid scene that came to me. And much was beautiful with the beauty of childhood’s openness to mesmerizing sensuous delight and sheer discovery. But still, I would not, could not, return to this other world and faithlessly distort what I knew had happened.

The angry buzz of comments increased, always couched in hints and subtle signals. Until, one evening, laptop on my lap, I tried to click on the “Holden page.” I had been “blocked,” “unfriended.” For Facebook, the “Holden page” did not exist for Walter Donway. Fiery angels blocking my return to Eden.

It hurt a bit but, hey, it’s only a Facebook page. I had posted by then some 250 pages of memories as urgent as your itchy woolen pants on Sundays heading off to church. With prose that stored so many memories, and with perhaps 300 comments that cheered, disputed, and elaborated my memories, I decided that I had a book.

But could I published a book that included some 300 poignant comments on my posts by people helping me to tell my story–people writing their own and their town’s history, for the first time—without getting sued? To get permission to publish 300 individual comments would have been impossible. But a quick check on Facebook revealed that users had yielded every conceivable right to their posts and comments. If you post or comment on Facebook, you concede to Facebook or anyone else the right to republished your words, with or without credit, anywhere.

I could object to that, in principle. But it cleared the way for my book, You’re Probably from Holden, If…, in which all the people who commented on my posts became named co-authors of a new book.

Only with the whole story before me did I realize that this was more, much more, than recollections of one farm boy, born at the end of WWII, coming of age in the ’40’s and ’50’s. More than the story of his contemporaries, now scattered around the country and the world, who cheered, corrected, and elaborated on his account.

I realized that I had grown up in a vanishing New England. That my New England, in the years immediately following WWII, had been similar in many ways to New England even a century earlier—a garden behind every house, an easy ethnic melding of people only white, a restraining expectation of innocence in young men and women. A freedom to burn your autumn in the street, neighbors chatting, tending the little fires and chatting with one another…

I had one other asset. My dad, from 1940 to 1946, when the four Donway children were being born, took hundreds of black-and-white photos.

And so I made a book and called it: You’re Probably from Holden, If…: Growing Up in A Vanishing New England. It tells not only my family’s story, but how the little town I knew, and much of the character of New England itself, was being swept away in the wake of WWII. What I wrote, and considerable research I did to fill out my own reminiscences, tried to evoke that sunlit scene even as it accelerated into a very different future.

That is the future that I self-indulgently decline to visit. It is not the Holden that made me what I am, today. It means little more to me than all the changing towns recorded on their Facebook pages. The Holden that no longer exists, except in my memory, and I hope in my book, means everything to me.
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You’re Probably from Holden, If…: Growing Up in a Vanishing New England,” by Walter Donway (East Hampton, NY: Romantic Revolution Books, 2013), pp. 263.

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About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway contributes to Savvy Street on political economy, science, and trends in fiction, film, and culture. Walter Donway’s most recent book is Donald Trump and His Enemies: How the Media Put Trump in Office (Romantic Revolution Books: New York, September 2017). His Amazon profile can be found here