Growing up in Boston during the Great Depression-a memoir
FOREWORD AND DEDICATION
My mother joined us for Thanksgiving dinner in November 1982. She was getting forgetful. She lapsed into periods when she imagined my father was still alive even though he had died five years before. “Yes, Pa will be here tonight to take me home”—or, after a pause, “I think he’s got another woman on the side.”
But, most of the time she was quiet and she had a gentle smile on her face. She liked to stand on the shore of Bolton Lake and look at the water. That year the town had lowered the lake a few feet so that people could repair their docks and clean their beaches. The water had receded about 50 feet from the high water mark. My mother stood on the shore, smiled, and said, “Ah, I see the tide has gone out.”
“No, Ma, this is a lake. It doesn’t have tides.” She’d just smile. “Oh, no, it’s gone out.”
A few months later, Ma’s own tide would go out. She died in January 1983. She would have been 83 in May. She had a long life, starting in St. Mary’s Road near Montague on the East corner of Prince Edward Island, the smallest of Canada’s provinces. She came to Boston and met my father, Felix Ahearn, who was from Tignish in the westernmost part of PEI. Everybody called him Phil.
They had eight kids together, brought them up through the worst part of the Depression—the “Hard Times” that saw up to 25 percent of Americans unemployed, breadlines blocks long, and people literally starving in the streets. They survived the Hard Times. They did it with courage, hard work, perseverance, and an indomitable spirit—a spirit that was part of the heritage they brought with them from the wonderful little island of Prince Edward.
As we sat around the Thanksgiving table that last year, I could see that my mother was lost in her thoughts—a faraway look in her eye, a half-smile on her face. I tried to bring her back to us.
“Ma, we had it pretty tough during the Depression, didn’t we?”
She looked at me, a bright light in her eyes and a sad smile on her face. “Oh, my dear,” she said, “there were lots of people who had it a lot worse than we did.” Then the light went out of her eyes, and she turned back to her private dream. Once in a while, she’d smile at something we said, but I didn’t press her anymore.
My mother was right. In her eyes, we didn’t have it so bad during the Depression. We had love and joy and laughter. We may have gone without eating at times, and we wore hand-me-down used clothes, and sometimes we begged for food, and there was never enough money to buy the necessities of life, let alone the luxuries. But you couldn’t tell my mother that we had it “bad.” They were happy days for her. She had a good, hard-working husband and eight healthy kids. She had friends from PEI who had settled as neighbors in Massachusetts and Maine. She had never lost a child or seen the tragedy of a long illness darken our family.
Yes, Ma was right, bless her dear heart. This is the story of the Ahearns—Felix and Annie—and their eight kids who survived the Depression. It was tough but, as Ma would say, “There were a lot more who had it a lot tougher than we did.” I dedicate this work to all the hardy immigrants from PEI who survived the hard times of the Depression, but especially to my father and mother, Pa and Ma, for giving us eight Ahearn kids—Aloysius, Helen, Raymond, Francis, James, Eugene, Joseph, and Arlene—the love and courage to enjoy life and to laugh—even through the tears.
Read more about From Rags To Patches and Aloysius Ahearn HERE.
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