Charles Vernon Nye (my father)-- Part 1 of Childhood Memories

One day, on one of my trips to Rhode Island, I sat down with my father, who was in his 70s, and, with pen and notebook in hand, I asked him a hundred million questions.  He patiently answered them, and said I should have been a reporter. I'm glad I took the time, because he never wrote down his life story or kept a personal journal. My gift to my father is that future generations will never forget him.

Part 1--the home of his childhood and teenage years

83 Carver Ave., Newton, Massachusetts (photo taken 1925. Left to right: Grandmother Bailey, my father, my father's parents and his younger brother, Ed)

When my father was a year old, his family bought this home on 83 Carver Ave. in Newton, Massachusetts. They lived in that home from 1914 to 1930.  In the back yard were big pine trees and his father's vegetable garden with beans and corn.  As a boy, Charles Vernon, or "Vern", would sleep, in the summer, on the second floor porch, with his younger brother, Ed.  In that home there were many happy times, as well as sad times.  My father never heard a harsh word or argument in that home.  Two widowed grandmothers would live with the family in that house.  In those days my father said they didn't put the elderly in nursing homes. They were a cherished, important part of the family unit.  There would be two deaths in that home, his Grandmother Nye and the untimely death of his older brother Paul. In that home, the family would be dealt the harsh blow of the Great Depression, with the father, Ira Charles Nye, losing his business and the small fortune he had in the Stock Market. They would then move to Rhode Island for employment.

Newton is a bedroom community of Boston. My father has memories of going into Boston numerous times with his mother when he was a child.  In the early 1900s there were very few cars, mainly horses and buggies.  He remembers the rumble of large horse drawn wagons over the cobblestone streets.  When he was 4 or 5 years old, he was going for a walk in a brand new pair of shiny Sunday shoes.   How disgusted everyone was when he stepped off the curb right onto a pile of horse manure, ruining those new shoes.

At that time, America had entered World War I.  People were always talking about how bad the Kaiser was.  My father remembers walking in downtown Boston with his mother, pointing up at a lightning rod (each building had one on top of the roof) and saying, "I wish the Kaiser would fall down from the sky onto one of these".

the year my father was born

My father, Charles Vernon Nye, was born on Dec. 17, 1913, at home (12 Webster St.), in Malden, Massachusetts.

He was born the second son of Ira Charles Nye and Elizabeth Bailey. He is pictured here with his older brother, Paul.

 

That was almost a century ago, when baby boys wore dresses for their formal pictures. It was a year after the Titanic sunk. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was elected President. That same year, the Federal Reserve Act was passed, providing a more flexible system of credit and currency, and proper banking facilities. Congress also created the Department of Labor.  Meanwhile, the winds of World War I were sweeping across Europe.

In New York City, the Woolworth Building, nicknamed the Cathedral of Commerce, stood as the world's tallest building.  The Wright brothers had already flown nearly 100 miles.  The daring French aeronaut, Adolphe Pegoud, made the first parachute jump from his plane, and did the first loop-the-loop.  Advances in aviation were rapid, with airplanes being used in World War I as the new deadly weapon.

In 1913, Harriet Tubman, born into slavery and heroine of the Underground Railroad, died.  The Women's Suffrage Movement was in full swing.  It was the year the crossword puzzle and the modern zipper were invented.  A new candy was invented by Clarence Crane in the hot summer of 1913 when he needed to find a substitute for chocolates which would melt during shipment.  Using a machine designed for making medicine pills, Crane produced small circular candies with a hole in the middle. He named them "Lifesavers".  In 1913, Albert Einstein was thinking about his General Theory of Relativity.  In 1913, Henry Ford added the first motorized assembly line to his plant, producing the Model T. The mass production of these cars made them affordable to more than just the very rich.  In 1913, Thomas Edison invented a different version of his Kinetophone.  It was the beginning of "talking pictures", where sound was made to synchronize with a motion picture projected onto a screen.  1913 was a good year, with unforeseen changes lying ahead.  My father was born in favorable circumstances, surrounded by a loving family.