Friends & Relations circa 1944
During the war, at about this time, both Pappy and Mammy were working at the Ogden Arsenal (shipping munitions to and from the Watertown Arsenal, as they liked to tell us, later on). So I got what we’d now call family day-care from the Poulter family. Their Vern and I took turns talking on a toy telephone, out in their yard. Vern was older than I; the interval of four years sticks in my slippery memory. He doesn’t look that old here, but maybe I was just cosmetically precocious.

Not sure how long this arrangement lasted; I believe that Mammy’s pregnancy put an end to her employment in the spring or summer of 1945. But I remember it as a happy, rural time, and some of my subsequent play identified a set of farm-figure toys as the Poulter Farm.

A quarter of a century later, in 1970, we moved to Burlington, Massachusetts, which was just over the line in the Billerica Ward of the Merrimack Stake, headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire. Among our fellow ward members were Vern and Mary Poulter, then residing on Main Street in Westford (a Middlesex County town with some significance for our family). We did musical things with Mary, who was quite celebrated for her lovely soprano voice. And we made the old connection when Vern’s mother came for a visit.
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