Willimantic, Now & Then
But most of these people, whose mothers and fathers were my elders when I was a child, I see exactly, well, never. How different from a generation earlier when my uncles and aunts saw each other on a daily basis.
Now, I live my life in relative isolation. Oh, we have a potluck supper every now and then, this new family of mine. But on a daily basis, Sarah and I have only each other to share our burdens. My son is in New York City. My brother and his family are in Virginia. My mother is in Torrington. Sarah’s family is mostly in Massachusetts. What a different world.
How can we ever be sure when our personal circumstances reflect the larger world? Never the less, I think what I saw in those home movies represented a pretty widespread theme from 20th Century American life.
I think it has to do with the number of frames per second or something, but old movies always have that jerky, flickering quality. It is almost as though people then were unsure of their movements, like toddlers walking across rough ground.
The second DVD was a generation later, running all the way into the 60s, when my brother and I were school children. It consisted mostly of movies of one cousin, from birth to about 10 years old. It was mostly her being very cute in front of a camera. The Beatles accompanied these later movies.
In that generation – really just 20 years – my family had become the modern nuclear family.
History Lesson Found in Old Home Movies
A cousin I’ve never met gave me a short course in 20th Century Demographics the other day. And I bet he has no idea it happened.
It started with my mother telling me about a DVD player my Great Aunt Helen let her borrow. My mother had no idea how it worked, and I was lost in the anomaly of my mother having a DVD player. I gathered she wanted me to help her when we went to visit.
It turns out my cousin John, actually John is maybe my second cousin, once removed by marriage, had made these DVDs of home movies made by my Great Uncle Pete. John is married to Pete’s brother Henry’s (we all knew him as Uncle Fat) daughter Marilyn. They live in Alaska, and in a way, that’s the point of this story.
By Mark Svetz
It’s not that I think it all would have been wonderful, growing up in that earlier time. All those cousins and aunts and uncles watching, ready to tell you when you did something wrong. I shudder to think…
But it would have been different. All it would have taken was for one more generation to build houses for their families on that land in West Torrington. That would have been my father, although his mother was the Mella, and she died when he was a young boy. But it could have been us growing up with our family all around us.
There were cousins in those movies, close to my age it seemed, whom I’ve never met. The family I was born into was very different from the one my father had been born into.
I am grateful for having had a glimpse of that earlier family. My father kept a pretty close relationship with his aunts and uncles, maybe because his mother had died so young. Many of our cousins, in my father’s generation, have scattered themselves around the country. I’ve never met some of their children.
My great aunt Helen is still alive, and in her mid 90s, she’s my bridge to the family. Actually I hear the family news second- or third-hand, from my mother who has dinner with Aunt Helen every week.
I have thought before how my brother spent a year in the bosom of this big, extended family. We have a few photographs of him, as an infant being held by one cousin or another. By the time I was born we lived in an apartment, just our immediate family.
We still visited the family – Uncle Sam and Aunt Mary; Aunt Lena and Uncle Pete; Aunt Helen lived on the other side of town, but was usually there; Uncle Fat and Aunt Clara lived just over the hill, and of course “Big Grandma” Mella was still alive when I was very young – once a week, or so.
But mostly, I grew up in that second, more recent DVD. My brother and I had only each other for company.
Mark Svetz and Sarah Winter own Clothworks, a shop on Church Street in Downtown Willimantic, where they make and sell clothing and bags. Mark wouldn’t mind having a handful of grandchildren or nieces and nephews to help with the sewing.
WILLIMANTIC –April, 2008
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The long and the short of it is there were two DVDs, one with movies from the early 1940s. This was full of family picnics with all my great-aunts and great-uncles, hugging, dancing, drinking and laughing. There was a lot of laughing in those movies from the early 40s.
These early movies flickered on the tiny screen with Volaré, Amoré, Mambo Italiano, and other songs of the era. Everything was fast in these movies, as though there was too much life for normal speed. The old trucks plowing snow, the young boys skiing (was that my father on the same skis I used 20 years later?), everything was fast, like it was a 45 rpm movie played on 78.
My father and his brother and sister were in some of them. I recognized some of my great aunts and uncles, but there were a lot of people I didn’t know. Many my mother didn’t know. This was before she was part of the family.
This was a close family. My great-grandfather and his brothers bought land in West Torrington, along the Norfolk Road. They all built houses on the land, which they “lost in the Depression,” as my mother recalled the family stories. But apparently Great-Grandpa Mella held onto his house and some land, because his sons and daughters built houses again, some time after the Depression.
I think I we are missing something; all those uncles and aunts, in-laws and neighbors, hugging and dancing, drinking and laughing. Not to mention building our own houses and sharing cars and babysitting. It seems that many of us have given up the supports of the traditional, extended family for the bigger paychecks of the corporate world. Was it a good trade? I’m not so sure.
By the time I came along, my great-aunts and uncles were old and living in those houses, next door to one another, in a line from Great Grandma’s house. My brother, just 2 years older than I am, lived in “Big Grandma’s” house for a while before I was born.
In those earlier movies, most of the scenes were outside. It was as though the family had burst the seams of the houses, spilling out into the street or the backyard. There were many people, from my Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa Mella to my second cousins, many just young kids.
The Mella Family Torrington, CT 1938. front row left to right: the kids: Dotty, Junie, Billy, Charlie
back row left to right: Lorraine, Gail (baby), Aunt Lena, Uncle Pete, Uncle Sam, Aunt Helen,
Great Gramma Mella, Great Grampa Mella, Uncle Bill Aloise, Baby Lornie, Aunt Clara, Uncle Henry
