‘Newtown Was My Playground’—

The Back Roads Of David Egee’s Memory Wind Through Newtown

By Shannon Hicks

David Egee recalls his childhood very fondly. The Newtown native, now 73 and living in London, had boyhood friends that he spent hours of time with every day after school. They fished in neighbors’ ponds, swam in Curtis Pond, rode their bicycles everywhere… the things boys did in a farm community around the middle of the 20th Century.

David was raised and stayed in Newtown until 1950 or 51, when he was sent to Rumsey Hall School in Washington, Conn., at age 13. He did not attend Hawley School, but played in Taylor Field — behind the school across the road from his house — for countless hours.

David was born in 1936, one of five children to Dr Benton and Mrs Gladys Egee, and lived the first part of his life in a town he traveled back to visit earlier this month. David and his wife, Dale (Richardson) Egee, also a Newtown native, recently spent a few weeks in the United States visiting with three of their four children.

“He is writing his autobiography, and part of that, of course, is remembering his life in Newtown,” said Bart Smith, another Newtown native and a family friend of David’s. It was David, according to Bart, who helped introduce Bart’s parents to each other. “We see each other twice a year, and we had discussed his work, and decided that he should come back to Newtown and take a tour.”

“When I retired I knew I needed a project to fill my time,” David said. “My father gave me the best advice ever. He told me ‘When you retire, be out of the house by 10 every morning.’

“In other words, don’t be sitting around the house all day,” he continued. So David has rented an office in London, where he has begun his autobiography. “I have no experience in writing,” he admitted, “but I am now about halfway through the first draft.”

When he got to the point of wanting to review “in a little more detail” what he called “the most incredible childhood that anyone could have,” he said, he put a call in to Bart Smith.

“I wanted to retrace some steps, so I asked Bart to find a map of Newtown around 1952. He came up with one dated 1951, which worked, and he was a great help.”

On Saturday, November 8, the two men met for breakfast and began a day trip that covered nearly 100 miles over about six hours, all within Newtown and all bringing back plenty of memories for David. Even their choice of breakfast destination — The Sandy Hook Diner — started the memories rolling.

“We started our trip promptly at 9, following [the late milk deliveryman and bus driver] Al Boyson’s route, beginning with a visit to the diner for breakfast. The roof of that building is the same, the tiles behind you when you sit on the counter are just the same,” he said with a laugh. “The Sandy Hook Diner hasn’t changed a bit.”

David was also pleased to see that Sandy Hook Center seemed familiar as well. A blacksmith shop is long gone as is a First National, but it nevertheless “seemed very similar to what I remembered.”

For six years, David was something of an apprentice to Al Boyson, who many will remember for his decades of work on his family’s dairy farm.

“Al Boyson was my mentor, my surrogate uncle,” said David. “I started working for him when I was 8 years old. He delivered milk, and he picked me up on the milk truck, and together we would do part of the milk route, and then he would drop me off at home.”

To longtime residents, Mr Boyson was more than just a milkman. The lifetime resident worked on the family dairy farm run by his parents on West Street, where Mr Boyson grew up and lived until marrying Catherine Ragaini in 1954. The couple moved into a home on South Main Street, and Mr Boyson eventually took over the family farm and milk delivery business until selling the business to Marcus Dairy in 1968.

He delivered milk as far back as most people could remember, even making it through a February 1934 storm with his father, working through a weather event that left every road snowbound, mail halted, Hawleyville’s train tracks impassable, and every other milkman unable to move their cars. “…But Albert Boyson and his son, Albert Jr, with hand racks, delivered milk to homes where there were young children,” The Bee reported.

Mr Boyson was also a Newtown school bus driver from 1968 until his retirement. He worked for several area charter bus companies, as well, starting at age 18 until age 80, he plowed driveways countless times for friends and neighbors, and he was also the one who took care of mowing for years the loosestrife that grew like mad at Ram Pasture.

When he began working for Mr Boyson, David was paid 25 cents.

“At that time that made me the richest 8-year-old in town,” he said with a laugh. “I worked with him until I was 14, when he was paying me $14 a day, and then I was really rich.”

Working with Al Boyson meant not only riding along on the milk route, but also covering some of the farm’s behind-the-scenes work. David learned how to milk the cows (“I wasn’t very good, but Al kept showing me,” he said), and he worked with Al’s mother, Eva, washing out the bottles.

“Then we would deliver the milk, so people had milk either from the night before or that morning. We delivered quite a bit of it,” said David. “It was raw milk, and it was yellow. It was so thick you could stir your coffee and end up with whipped cream.”

“We spent a pretty fair amount of time at the Boyson farm,” said Bart, “and the gentleman who owns the house now, Charlie Fadus, he uses all the barns and has a lot of farm implements.

“We took a tour of the house and the barns, so we saw the room where they used to pasteurize the milk — which is now a washroom and bathrooms. He spent a lot of time talking with us. He and his wife could not have been nicer.”

The path that David and Bart followed that day included much of the old milk route David traversed with Al Boyson. They went from the old Boyson farm toward Main Street, down Church Hill Road, and around Sandy Hook.

“We went toward the Fabric Fire Hose factory and the bridge, and then turned around and went all through behind Riverside Road,” said David. “We used to deliver all along those houses there. And then toward Derby we [used to go] as far as Mrs Johnson’s; she had a beautiful old house on the corner of Berkshire, Johnson’s Farm.”

Much of the traveling time also took the David and Bart past homes where David’s father had visited while on his rounds.

“He went with his father, Benton Egee, on a lot of house calls and visits,” said Bart, “so some of what we retraced was places he went with his father, who was basically the town’s physician from probably the late 1930s until the mid 60s. His father was one of the doctors for Fairfield Hills [when it was a state hospital], so he used to go with him there, and on house calls when they used to do that.”

The Biggest Change

During the course of their day, David and Bart went to the top of Castle Hill, going over some of the things that can be seen from that vantage point, and David said he remembered as a kid the foundations of Castle Ronald. They visited the Palestine district, Dodgingtown, Holcombe Hill (Josephine Holcombe was another family friend), Zoar Cemetery, where David’s parents and some of Bart’s grandparents are buried, and SAC Park in Sandy Hook, of which David was a member.

“We toured the Boulevard, and down Rocky Glen, and he remembers Buttonball Drive, which was one of the first multihouse developments in Newtown,” said Bart. “They delivered milk there, and he said the houses seemed virtually unchanged.

“We looped around a lot, stopped and walked a little bit, driving around,” said Bart, who served as the driver for the day. “As things popped into his head we just sort of played it by ear.

“It was fun. It was really a lot of fun for both of us. I love this stuff. I’ve lived in Newtown my whole life, so this is all fun for me too.”

The two drove though the center of town, stopping at Edmond Town Hall. David remembered the town hall, and going to dances in the Alexandria Room.

“He remembered dancing with my aunt, Patty [Smith] Langdon,” said Bart, who also took David into the theater and the gymnasium, both of which seemed unchanged to David. “He was fascinated by the mural David Merrill had done. But he wanted to know where the bowling alley was. He didn’t know that had been closed up.”

When they visited Fairfield Hills, David “was pretty disappointed” with the look of the former hospital grounds, said Bart. “He understood what’s being done there, but for someone who hasn’t been in town for 40 years, he’ll always remember Fairfield Hills as being this pristine location.

“He understands the value of it to the town,” he continued. “But he remembers it as these immaculately maintained buildings.”

The two visited Hattertown, where one meaningful moment in David’s life occurred.

“I was staying overnight with a friend of mine, Brook Guttman, he was a school classmate,” recalled David. “I remember we were playing in the brook, it was the summer of ’45, and his mother came out and told us that World War II had ended.”

One transformation, however, took a moment to sink in.

“The biggest change,” David said this week from London, “was the disappearance of our house.”

The Egee family lived for nearly a quarter of a century at 28 Church Hill Road.

David and his family moved into the modest saltbox across the street from Hawley School in December 1941, “two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor,” David’s brother Paul told The Bee in August 2006 on the eve of the former home’s razing. The family — parents J. Benton and Gladys, sons David, Paul and John, and daughters Elaine and Leslie — lived in that house for 26 years before moving into a new home on Currituck Road.

The school grounds was one stop for David and Bart on November 8, and pulling out of the school driveway created quite a jolt for the former resident.

“What I noticed after a moment was, pulling out of Hawley School, would should have been directly across the street from where my house was,” said David. “But when [Bart and I] went to pull out of the school driveway, the house was gone.”

After the family moved out of their Church Hill Road house the building continued to be used as office space. (When it was constructed, Dr Egee moved his practice from Sandy Hook into the more central location near Queen Street.) In recent years, the house fell into disrepair. By 2006, new owners of the property decided to demolish the building before proceeding with plans to construct a new building. In the place of David Egee’s childhood home now stands the restaurant Toro.

David is still in touch with people in and around Newtown, and knew that the family home had been torn down, but it still took a moment to sink in.

“I must admit,” he added, “that while the old house has been replaced with a modern building, they did a good job.”

With all the changes he witnessed earlier this month, David Egee is still very happy that he made the trip back to Newtown.

“I told Bart: Newtown was my playground. Skippy [Harry] Greenman, who used to be manager of Lovell’s Garage, and Terry Johnson, whose father was the first dentist in town, Teddy Smith, Scudder [Smith]’s younger brother — we used to go ride our bicycles all over town, just going everywhere, up to the monument, at the town hall, just as kids would do, riding our bicycles everywhere. It was just great.

“We were in the days when children walked to school, and they could organize their own activity. There was no organized play, and we were busy every single day after school. Not like it is today.”

David Egee calls his childhood fantastic and idyllic.

“It was safe, we were free. We felt secure. There weren’t any dangers and we were unfretted by health and safety regulations. We could walk to school, we could fish in anybody’s brook that we wanted to, we could swim naked in Curtis Pond, we could race bikes without a helmet, and organize our own games.

“That was the thing: We could do what we wanted to. There were no after school activities, but we were always busy.

“It was a rural farm community, and the idea of our mothers driving us anywhere was unheard of. Most households had only one vehicle, for one thing.

“My parents had a positive attitude about the town, and that trickled down my way. I would have been, had I had the opportunity to show my grandchildren, I’d feel proud to show them that this was where I used to live, and here’s what I used to do.”