49 Sycamore Street
With Dan Kane’s help (he was President of the Cambridge Elders’ Quorum), we found our next home across Sycamore Street from Dan, Noretta, and their kids, in the Waverley neighborhood of Belmont. We had the top floor of the triple-decker at Number 49, above our new landlady Marie A Lewis (with her husband, on the ground floor) and their daughter Joanne, her husband Ralph Toscano, and their “Little Ralph,” on the second floor.

Except for our brief missionary months together in France, this would be our home until 1970. We enjoyed living in Waverley and would invest in the house out in Burlington only when three energetic boys in two third-floor bedrooms came to be a tight fit. A thin dime1 would pay our bus fare from Waverley Square to Harvard Square. In decent weather, my commute made a nice bike ride. Even in those days, we hardly ever drove into the congestion of The Square.
Belmont is a fancy address,2 and most of the town would have been beyond our financial reach. Tucked into a western corner, though, up against more working-class Watertown and Waltham, our neighborhood was genteel without discernible pretension. Our walk-up digs cost us less than $100 per month, for a good piece of our incumbency. A welcome change from $300 in Escondido Village.
1Made of silver in those days.     2Like Beacon Street. Kinda.
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