Under and Up Again

by Edith Noordewier Foley

  Other things were happening. Dick’s office in Roland Park became too small. We needed to hire more personnel. A popular area north of Baltimore was Towson. Traditionally, Baltimore residents would have summer residences there to get out of the heat of the Baltimore bowl. Towson was elevated and caught cooling breezes. It began to develop with many lovely homes, and then an extensive mall was built. We decided that we would be effective there and relocated to the Towson Mall.

  After a successful year or so, Dick had an idea, which I did not support. Next door to the travel agency was a large space, which he rented, and a travel boutique was developed. The display shelves arrived; they were beautiful in their elegance and simplicity. A person was hired to be the manager. I did not like her. Some items to be sold began to arrive. Then suddenly, the economy began to falter. The stock market plunged. It was 1973. There were long lines at gas stations to get gasoline, and the truckers struck nationwide. Our boutique was waiting for merchandise that did not arrive because of the truckers’ strike and stayed mostly empty, and it was time for Christmas shopping.

  Nobody was traveling. The management of the mall, all with Italian names from New York, was merciless in requiring the rent. What to do? The business was our livelihood and had to survive. We decided to sell the dream house, and the small business administration lent us $70,000. It helped to have a good reputation. We always had placed any profit back into the business. That included increases in staff salary and their insurances. We left the Towson Mall and moved to a small mall across the street owned by a good Jewish family who were very helpful, and that is where the office still strives.

  After the sale of the dream house, a house was rented in a pleasant established neighborhood off York Road, 818 Stoneleigh Road.

  After seven years, Dick paid off the $70,000 loan. He was working in Towson, and I at the Johns Hopkins office. I drove a small beige secondhand car and did not feel well after driving it for a while. What did I know, the muffler had a leak, and I was breathing pure exhaust. I think once in a while, I hung my head out the window. But I was not going to complain. It was finally fixed, of course.

  Several alumni from Washington College, Chestertown, lived in the Baltimore area. The Christmas party of the Baltimore branch of the Washington College Alumni Association was traditionally held at our house. I enjoyed decorating for this occasion. It put us in the mood for Christmas too. I prepared the food to be served, and Dick handled the drinks. About eight or ten persons participated. The fire was roaring in the fireplace. The alumni, with their spouses, had a good time remembering their lives and adventures at the college. It had started to snow heavily once, and it was not easy to make it out of the driveway. But everyone made it. Anne Burris lives now in Kennedyville, and Gail and Charles Waesche, who lived on Charles Street in Towson, have moved to Rock Hall.

  My back gave me a bad problem. I do not remember what brought it on, but it was so bad that I had to climb the stairs to the second floor on my hands and knees, up and down. To empty the dishwasher, I was lying on the floor, could not bend at all. I am mentioning this because that made it clear to me that one should, at a later date in life, be prepared and live in a one-floor house. I was fitted with a device, the word corset sort of does not sound nice, with metal bars supporting the spine and the ribcage in front. That gave the spine time to heal, and it did. The fact that I had to wear it for six months and that it was summertime left an impression.

  64

  Someone wanted to buy my business. The man was our accountant, his wife a teacher soon to be retired, and my agency seemed to be a good investment for them. Dick was intrigued. The place where he grew up always had a pull. His sister Birdie Ellen Virginia Richards, the one we visited every year in Augusta, Georgia, had lost her husband Cherry, sold the Buick Agency, and moved in 1975 back to Chestertown. The family had lived in the what we call now the Miller House on Water Street, and Birdie found a house two doors down on the river and moved in. I was there to help her. A sweet voice was calling from the open door, “I hear that pretty Birdie Foley is back.” That was Chestertown. Everybody knew each other well. The front doors were always open, and one could see through the living and dining room and the river room out to the Chester River. There was always a gentle breeze moving through the house.

  We had cocktails on the porch overlooking the river, and the neighbors greeted each other sitting on their porches. Roses liked the nearness of the river and bloomed in profusion in her river garden. The neighbor Bob Bryan had worked for DuPont and had all the right chemicals to help the flowers along.

  On the Fourth of July, the family was invited and crabs were consumed. Lots of beer helped the efforts along, and baked beans and potato salad and that sort of thing was offered to provide some substance to the meal. Susanne and Linda and Johnny were there, Birdie’s children and, later, Lara and Chip, Susanne’s children. We were a handsome and happy group sitting under the porch at the river’s edge, with newspapers on the table where the crabs were placed for their consumption after a rather complicated way of retrieving some meat from their innards.

  Dick asked me, “Would you be interested to move to Chestertown?” I knew that it meant the world to him. He considered Chestertown his real home. After our relationship took on a serious turn in 1962, he took me to Chestertown to see whether I could belong there. I was used to small towns in Holland and liked the place, although at that time, the town was sleepy and not in good shape.

  The plans began to take shape. The sale of my office would enable us to purchase a home in Chestertown.

  David Barroll took as around. I had specified “No dead-end, not in the woods, please.” We saw several places. “Where do you think we should live, David?” I asked, not knowing the lay of the land and where who lived. He showed us a very nice place in town. Dick did not like it; he preferred the country. So where did we end up? On a dead-end street in the woods surrounded by cornfields and Canadian geese, about two and a half miles south of town.

  The house had been built for Alex Rasin and his family, which was a recommendation. We knew the family well and trusted Alex, who was a lawyer and still is. We managed to buy it at a reasonable price. The Rasins, then having small children, wanted to be closer to town to cut down commuting time. Mr. Fiorilli, on the corner of Franklin and Calvert Street in Baltimore, recovered some of our chairs with raw silk.

  The house has three bedrooms, two full baths, a living room with fireplace, dining room, kitchen, den, and a porch at the front entrance. All doors are made of sturdy solid wood. This was good. The furniture fit well, just the dining room’s red Heriz clashed with the yellow wallpaper and curtains. That design had brown nests on it, with crocuses and their roots. Later I changed all that.

  65

  I knew Mr. Wilbur Hubbard. He was the richest man in town, living at Wide Hall on the river on the end of High Street. He was of small stature, with a benign round face and sparse blond hair. Horses were the center of his life. He owned several, stabled on Airy Hill Road across from Brownie’s house. Brownie looked after his horses and the forty-some hounds who lived next to his house.

  Wilbur was a master of the hunt. What a delight it was to see him and his friends galloping through the fields, jumping over hedges dressed in their what is known as “pinks,” but actually were bright-red jackets. They followed on their horses, the baying forty hounds that were in hot pursuit of a fox. Well, you may have seen the English prints of a fox chase. This was just like it, wonderful to see. Later he was the oldest master of the hunt in his nineties.

  I had the experience of dancing with him at a hunt party in Monkton, the Baltimore horsey area. The top of his head reached just under my chin.

  He was not married and never would. A man lived with him, considered to be his butler type.

  I attended a meeting of the Chestertown Historical Society where Wilbur gave a talk about his growing up in Chesterto
n. His experiences reached way back into the time of his parent’s life, a wonderful picture about what Chestertown was like. I had heard from Dick that Chestertown was a busy Maryland harbor, even before Baltimore.

  Wilbur, whose parents owned a fertilizer company, explains that the railroad played an important role. There were no cars and no streets in town, just dirt roads with ditches to carry off the rainwater. The farms produced peaches in abundance until blight killed the trees. The wheat farming was done by hand and horsepower. The threshing with the one machine around was a community effort. The resulting straw inspired a cardboard factory on the corner of High Street and the bypass.

  He remembered well when the first horseless carriages were brought to Chestertown from Baltimore on the Chester River steamboat, which landed at the foot of High Street about 7:00 pm in late spring, about 1903 or ’04. They were pushed off the steamboat, cranked up, and after spitting and sputtering a bit, they went chug chug chug up High Street with a crowd of boys following and shouting with glee.

  This curious contraption was then called by most people a horseless carriage, and it literally looked like a buggy without the horse. It had high wheels with wooden spokes and little narrow rubber tires like those on expensive carriages. There was a dashboard like a buggy, but no windshield and no steering wheel—only a rod with which to steer. It was a single-seated vehicle. The motor was under the seat with a crank on the side. There was a sprocket wheel from the motor and a chain drive to the rear wheels nearby.

  Another worthwhile part of Wilbur’s presentation concerns the history of the Vickers family. There is a historical marker right near the telephone office on Washington Avenue about Senator George Vickers, who was a very prominent political figure in the middle of the nineteenth century. He was born in 1801, nearly sixty years old at the outbreak of the Civil War. He opposed secession for Maryland in 1861. He assisted Governor Hicks in raising an Eastern Shore regiment and attained the rank of major general in the militia. The son of this man became a lawyer living on High Street, also interested in local politics.

  “Mr. Vickers,” a man asked him, “could you please lend me $5? I will pay you back on Saturday.” Well, in those days, $5 was quite an amount of money, and he thought that he might not be repaid. He, however, wanted the man’s goodwill for political reasons. To his surprise, the man came in on Saturday and repaid the $5. “That is a lucky $5. I am going to send it to the Louisiana Lottery.” It turned out that it was the winning ticket, and Mr. Vickers won $75,000. He went to New Orleans to collect.

  Mr. Vickers was an ardent Methodist. In those days, the Methodists thought it was sinful to drink, gamble, and dance. Mrs. Vickers did not want her husband to refuse the money, but she was so embarrassed, she would not admit that it was acquired by gambling. She and her daughters would never talk about it, not even to their children. Mr. Vickers was not as churchly as his wife. The Methodist preacher came to him and said, “This money you have won is tainted money. You should redeem yourself with the Lord by making a large contribution to the church.” Mr. Vickers replied, “You think this money is so tainted, I will relieve your conscience. I won’t contaminate you or the church. I won’t give you or the church one damn red cent.”

  This is the atmosphere I felt when Chestertown became my home. Dick had grown up here on the river on Water Street as a boy, and I was becoming a part of it. Mentioning to his contemporaries “I am Dickie Foley’s wife,” I was met with an understanding smile of recognition.

  The time, driving over the Chester River bridge, when it became clear that Chestertown was going to be my new home, I happily felt that I had arrived in my life, leaving behind all that had been in the past, and recently, the hard work at my travel agency on Broadway in Baltimore. I felt the peace of this small old town on the river. It filled me with joy. I had survived.