Sandy Hook Memories

 

By Jan Howard

A lifelong resident’s memories of growing up in Sandy Hook are intertwined with those about members of the Curtis family and an author who lived here in the early 1930s.

Aloise “Lucy” Mulvihill now resides in the home in which she grew up, the home of her late parents, Stephen and Anna Heller.

Her parents were living in Passaic, N.J., at the time Mr Heller was urged by Joseph Retz, his cousin, to move to Sandy Hook to take a job as caretaker for Newton Curtis. Mr Curtis was a longtime state representative for Newtown and a relative of Nelson and Gould Curtis of what was then known as the Curtis Box Company.

“My mother didn’t want to leave Passaic,” Mrs Mulvihill said. However, her father agreed, was hired as a caretaker by Mr Curtis in 1916, and remained in his employ until the 1970s.

 “He took care of Mr Curtis’ estate. Mr Curtis was known as the Peach King of Newtown. He owned over 500 acres of land,” Mrs Mulvihill noted.

Her father pruned fruit trees and helped load the baskets of peaches into a horse-drawn wagon. The fruit would then be sold at the Warner store in Sandy Hook and the general store in the Borough. In the spring, he picked strawberries for sale at local markets.

In the winter, Mr Curtis and her father would take horses down to Lake Zoar and cut ice, which they would then pack in sawdust. “Winters then were not like now. The ice would cover the lake,” Mrs Mulvihill said. “Mr Curtis had a big icehouse behind the barns.”

When author James Thurber and his wife, Althea, rented the former Wheeler house on Riverside Road, Mrs Mulvihill’s father worked part time for him doing yard work in addition to his job with Mr Curtis.

Her father is mentioned in The Thurber Carnival, in a chapter entitled “The Black Magic of Barney Haller.” Mrs Mulvihill said no one was fooled by the change in name. “Those of us who knew my father knew he spoke with an accent, and the way he was described, knew it was him.”

Mrs Mulvihill remembers her family taking care of Mr and Mrs Thurber’s two dogs when they would go away on a trip. “Their names were Jennie and Tessie. I was a little kid, and we always had a dog that was an outside dog. I loved these two Scotties. They stayed in the house. It was great.”

Despite her father’s connection to Mr Thurber, Mrs Mulvihill said she has no photographs of the author. “I never saw one in Mrs Curtis’ house, either.”

A picture of her father working at Mr Thurber’s has the words “Very good of you, Steve! J. Thurber” on the back of it.

She said after the house Mr Thurber had lived in was sold several years ago, remodeling of the attic revealed a surprise behind the wallpaper – cartoon drawings by Mr Thurber.

“A company was brought in that cut out the slabs in the wall,” Mrs Mulvihill said. The drawings are now part of a collection of Thurber memorabilia in a museum in Ohio.

Mrs Mulvihill’s parents acquired their 39-acre property on Pole Bridge Road from Newton Curtis in 1916 for $1 and other considerations. “With a promise and a handshake, my father agreed to stay with them and care for the place. They were very good to my father, mother, and me,” she said. “I became a teacher because of Mrs Blanche Curtis, who encouraged me. She was very generous, and helped with my education.” 

Mrs Mulvihill’s parents and her sister, Stephanie, lived with Mr and Mrs Retz while they cleared the wooded property for their house. “Mr Curtis had no practical use for the 39 acres,” Mrs Mulvihill said. “He was ensuring that he would have somebody to work for him as long as was needed. Years ago a handshake and a promise were the accepted thing.”

Mrs Mulvihill’s father and three other men built the house in two years. The Hellers and Stephanie moved into the house in 1918. Mrs Mulvihill was born in 1924 at Danbury Hospital.

Newtown has changed a great deal since Mrs Mulvihill was a child. “A farming community has changed into a community of homes,” she said. “Roads are being improved, and there’s an influx of people.”

Pole Bridge was a dirt road when she was growing up, as were many other roads in Newtown and Sandy Hook. “This area was all open land,” Mrs Mulvihill said. “Stanley Northrop had a dairy farm. There were cows grazing and horses.”

Neighbors helped each other, and respected each other’s property, she said. Mrs Mulvihill remembers Sunday visits with neighbors on Jeremiah Road. The family would walk through the Northrop property, but only after asking permission to do so. She also remembers asking permission to pick the mushrooms that abounded in the Northrop farm’s fields in August. “The Northrops were like family to us,” she said.

Self-Sufficiency

Her family was very self sufficient, she said. They raised vegetables, had cows, chickens, and a hog, and her mother baked bread and canned pickles, vegetables, and fruit. “We only had to buy staples, such as sugar and flour,” she said. Once a month a man with a van would drive around the town selling dry goods, such as towels, underwear, and aprons.

She said her parents never had a car until she started teaching. “I remember my father walking up to the town hall to pay the taxes. We all walked and thought nothing of it.”

Mrs Mulvihill said she often felt isolated as a child. “There were no other kids except my cousins who lived at the end of Pole Bridge Road,” she said. The hardest part of living so far away from the center of town was being unable to participate in activities with other young people, she added.

Sandy Hook was always considered the poor section of town, she said. “People who lived here didn’t have the means of those in the Borough. This was a farming part of Newtown.”

Despite the rural isolation, on Saturday nights, even if it were cold or snowy, she and her parents would walk to a neighbor’s. “They would play cards, and if there were other children, we might play a board game while the adults were chatting. Then we would walk home.”

Mrs Mulvihill’s parents were of Austrian-Hungarian ancestry and spoke only German at home. “They were naturalized in the 1930s,” she said. “When I started school, I helped them to learn to read in English.”

Mr Curtis encouraged her father to become a naturalized citizen, but could not be his witness because he went to Florida every year, she said, so Hobart Curtis served as witness.

Mrs Mulvihill remembers walking down Pole Bridge Road to Route 34 to catch the school bus. “There were no snow days. I remember plowing through snow above my knees.”

She attended school in Sandy Hook through sixth grade and Hawley School for seventh and eighth grades and high school.

 She and her family belonged to St Rose Church. Through sixth grade, she said, “On Friday afternoons we were picked up by a bus at Sandy Hook school to attend religious education classes at St Rose. The bus would bring us back to school, where we were dismissed.” When she attended Hawley, she would walk down to St Rose for religious instructions during school hours.

After school there were chores to do at home. “You knew what you had to do and you did it,” she said.

When she was a teenager, Mrs Mulvihill often helped Mrs Curtis with dinner parties or picnics.  “I’d help prepare things and serve. I wore a little organdie apron and a cap. She taught me the proper way of serving. It was fun. I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot.”

She also babysat for Dr Benton Egee’s children and cleaned house for a neighbor during the summer while also helping her parents take care of their crops.

She served as class secretary at Hawley High School and has helped organize class reunions. Among her 30 classmates who graduated in 1941 were William Honan and his sister, Eleanor. Mrs Mulvihill, Mr Honan, and Mary Bresson Maye are the only class members that still live in town. Their 50th year reunion was held in 1991 at the Hawley Manor Inn.

Mrs Mulvihill graduated from Danbury Teachers College (now Western Connecticut State University) in the class of 1945. Because of lack of teachers due to of World War II, members of her class completed their training in three and a half years, graduating in December 1944 without a summer vacation. “I completed my training at the end of October and was hired by the beginning of November. Those of us who began working before graduation were called cadet teachers.

“I taught sixth grade in Huntingtown School, a one-room schoolhouse that was opened because of overcrowding at Hawley School,” she said. “I was there for four years until the addition at Hawley was completed.”

The property where Mrs Mulvihill grew up and still lives has changed through the years. The house was enlarged to accommodate her family, and the once 39 acres has decreased to a little less than three.

Mrs Mulvihill and her husband, William, who grew up in Danbury, were married for 44 years at the time of his death five years ago. They had three children, Rita Oravecz and Maureen Pennarola of Newtown, and John, who lives in Trumbull. She has seven grandchildren.

She keeps busy working in her yard, doing housework, volunteering for the church, and helping out the children and grandchildren. She also works part-time for Union Carbide updating their tax books.

Mrs Mulvihill sums up her growing up years in Sandy Hook as “lonely and busy. It was lonely in that I didn’t have interaction with other kids my age,” she said. “It was busy because I had a lot of responsibilities.”