Plainfield Today ponders Christmas(es) on the cusp

The family matriarch, Effie Mae Starr Damon,
direct descendant of Puritan settlers of Scituate, Mass.
and Dr. Comfort Starr (a founder of Harvard University),
with her surviving children, Christmas 1946. My dad, 'Bus' is on the left.

A (somewhat) snowy Christmas in Plainfield puts me in mind of another Christmas, the cusp on which it stood and the cusp on which Plainfield stands at this Christmas holiday of 2009.

That Christmas was 1946 in Laona, a hamlet in western New York's Chautauqua County.

It was the annual gathering of my father's mother's children and their children for a family Christmas in the tiny home of one of the daughters.

World War II was over, but families were still converting to a postwar existence (women being driven from the workplace back into the kitchen), and the long postwar boom had yet to really get under way.

The flood of cars, refrigerators, TVs and new homes was still off in the future. In a way, this was one of the last of the Depression-era Christmases -- the youngest grandchildren all got gifts of clothing as well as a small toy or game; the older ones got neckties and sweater vests for the boys, sweaters, scarves and gloves for the girls. Every stocking contained an orange, an apple and some walnuts in the shell as well as a trinket or little game.

The women squeezed into the little kitchen and finished preparing the feast, while Norris, Grandma Damon's oldest son, tended to the turkey and its carving.

The men played pinochle around the dining room table, taking a discreet nip of whisky now and then (Grandma Damon was a teetotaling Methodist) or stepped out to the shed where Irene's husband Ben, who worked in the local sawmill, had stashed a couple of cases of beer.

The smaller kids entertained themselves in the living room with what we now call age-appropriate card and board games.

My dad (the baby in the family) and mother had recently bought the old Moon farmstead and the four of us (including my younger brother Billy) were roughing it -- coal stove, well water, kerosene lamps and chemical toilet (the changing of which was one of my chores). Baths were in a galvanized wash tub filled with water heated on the stove.

The grandchildren, except for three yet to arrive.
That's me on the couch with my 'Keep America Strong' sweatshirt.

Living less than a mile from Irene and Ben's, we were among the first to arrive soon after noon. Marjorie and Clarence would come from Buffalo. Blanche and Jack would drive up from Jamestown. Howard and Helen had the farthest to come, from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where Howard had gone to start a business paving driveways (some thought him crazy, but not when he eventually became one of the largest paving contractors in the Cleveland area). Norris, Grandma Damon's eldest and Dunkirk's postmaster, and his wife Ellen, a schoolteacher, only had a few miles to come. Always the last to arrive was Deward, with his wife Aldine and their seven kids (my favorite cousins) -- dairy and Concord grape farming were demanding on a daily basis, even in the dead of winter.

To a wide-eyed little boy who had just turned 7, it was a scene of warmth, fun, feasting and family. It seemed perfect and permanent.

But it was a world on the cusp.

Within a few short years, it would scarcely seem recognizable.

The family's roots were in farming, but the pressures of the Depression had already started to change that. Marjorie had become the cook to a wealthy family in Buffalo. Norris had a career in the Post Office. Howard started a business in another state. Irene made a good, but busy, living as a paperhanger in great demand. My dad, known to all as 'Bus', was a welder at the American Locomotive plant.

Blanche was the only child to become a housewife not working outside the home -- her husband took pride in his good job with the electric company. (Theirs was a true romance; he had met her when he came to her parent's farmstead to tell her that her fiancé, a lineman, had been electrocuted. His kindness during her grieving led to their falling in love, a match which lasted the rest of their lives.)

Deward was the only child to keep on farming, with his 50 or so cows and perhaps 30 acres of Concord grapes, which he was under contract to sell to the Welch's factory in Westfield. In those days, one could make a living doing it. Today, hardly.

But the opportunities unleashed after the war would take the next generation -- that of my older cousins and myself -- far, far from the tiny hamlet of Laona in the rural township of Pomfret, in the still mostly agricultural county of Chautauqua.

College -- everywhere from the Normal School at Fredonia to Columbia University to Georgia Tech to my alma mater Albright -- would disperse our generation to the far reaches of the country and beyond.

We would become city and suburban dwellers, farm life would recede to a distant and nostalgic memory (though I was most thankful for getting city water and indoor plumbing, and getting rid of the hated chemical toilet chore).

Cars would allow us to get everywhere, quickly and in style. Soon, having more than one vehicle in the family would seem almost a necessity.

The solid WASP Protestant facade was also rent -- first, actually, by Grandma Damon's daughter Blanche, whose romance led her to marry an Irish Roman Catholic; their 'solution' being that neither practiced any religion.

But in the next generation, it was almost common -- my brother Bill marrying a beauty of Portuguese descent; my cousin George falling in love with a Puerto Rican woman and moving to the Commonwealth, where he lives to this day. Bill would convert to Catholicism, Ana would become a Protestant.

There were other, less welcome, changes too -- within a few short years, my folks divorced, as did two of dad's siblings; and one of his siblings was caught in flagrante delicto in the back seat of the Game Warden's car.

Grandma Damon would have been more than dismayed if she had lived to see the changes in her Ladies Aid Society world!

By the time I graduated from high school a less than a decade later, the family had grown so large and was so dispersed that an annual reunion was started on July 4th weekend. Summer had the advantage that the weather was more pleasant (understatement!), we could use an outdoor pavilion at Lake Erie State Park, and the most dramatic change of all, folks could use their newly-minted 'vacation' time to set aside a few days for the get-together. (Thanks to the labor unions, vacations became a general phenomenon, as did the 40-hour work week, which had replaced the five-and-a-half or six day work week.)

Within ten years of the end of World War II, America -- and the tight-knit Damon clan -- was becoming college-educated, urbanized, and dispersed to the four winds. The stresses of these changes also took a negative toll with divorce, infidelity and brushes with the law (don't ask about my cousin Neil and his escapades!).

Some of my generation became involved in the great social movement of the postwar years -- civil rights -- leading to even more changes and diversity in the family, mirroring those in the country as a whole (my first experience was street corner fundraising in support of the Montgomery bus boycott).

Looking at those old family photos reminds me of all that appeared, but was not, solid and unchanging.

And looking at Plainfield today through that lens lets me know that what appears so solid and unchanging about Plainfield is illusory. Plainfield also stands on a cusp.

Changes of a previously unknown magnitude are on our doorstep.

My nose-to-the-grindstone focus on Plainfield's (often petty) politics means it is possible to overlook the changes on her horizon.

But their advance is relentless.

What good will they bring us in 2010?

And what ill?

And what will be the balance?

---

-- Dan Damon [follow]

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