Seventy years ago today, September 1, 1939, I was one month short of my eighth birthday. I was living with my family - father, mother, two sisters and two brothers - in a rented second story flat in a tenement house in the Lower Highlands section of Lowell, an old textile mill city about 25 miles from Boston.
The three-story tenement house had six flats in it. Today, fashionably, we would call it an apartment house with six apartments. If we owned instead of renting it might be called a condo. But in 1939 they were cold water flats and weekly rent was paid every Saturday night to the owner who never missed a collection day, rain or shine, sleet or snow. He was more reliable than the mailman. Three flats in the front of the house received the morning sun and the three back flats afforded their tenants a view in the late afternoon and early evening of the setting sun.
On a clear, warm September morning I was on the second floor back porch playing by myself like children sometimes do. The porch was square. On one side was the wall of the house and the kitchen door. To the right of this, at the edge of the porch, was a railing and to which our rotary clothes line was fastened. It was one of those iron and rope jobs and had four sides to it. Each side held five lines and these were inverted so that the shortest line was on the bottom and the longest on the top. The clothes line could be turned on its vertical axis by my mother as she hung out the wet clothes. When she had clothes on all four sides she used an attached long iron rod to push the clothes line frame out into the air and the sun. She hooked the end of the rod into an eye-bolt screwed into the railing so it held the clothes line away from the side of the railing and the house. Sometimes when it was windy the four-sided clothes line twirled around. This expedited the drying. When the drying was done she used this same metal rod to pull the clothes line close to the railing where she could lean over, reach out and take down the laundry. This side of the porch formed a right angle at the corner where it joined the far side of the porch. The railing continued along this far side and kept anyone from falling over the edge. The fourth (and last) side had a staircase leading up to the third floor and down to the first floor. I had draped a small rug over the railings where they formed a right angle and made a young boy’s version of a tent. I had some soldiers for toys and played there while my mother hung out the laundry.
The door bell rang and my mother put down her laundry and walked to the front door. She left the kitchen door open when she went into the house and I watched her walk through the kitchen, past the dining room on the left of the hallway and the living room on the right and then on by the three bedrooms on the left. At the end of the hall was the front door which opened into a three-storied hallway that gave each tenant access to the front stairs and the outside world. She talked for a few minutes with a man. I could hear their voices but could not make out the words. She thanked the man and closed the door and walked up the hallway to the porch. When she got to the porch she bent and picked some wet laundry out of the basket and resumed hanging it on the clothes line. I asked her what the man wanted and who he was. She said to me, without any emotion that I can recall, he told her a war had started in Europe and it was going to be terrible times again in Europe. My mother and the man were probably of the same generation and had been young teenagers during the First World War and now a second war had started and was likely to spread. I asked my mother if the war would come to Lowell, I had no idea of how far away Europe was, and she said she didn’t think so. With that I went back to my playing and my mother continued to hang out our laundry. Hitler had invaded Poland.
