…I lived in Chicopee…12 Atwater Street...There were four of us kids…We had a Summer home at Groton-Longpoint in Connecticut…but we were up for the weekend for a family birthday party in Westfield…so…we left the cottage and went up to Westfield for the party…we had a lot of cousins up there… somebody had a birthday party… and we drove up, left everything at the Summer home…All our belongings were there, you know… because we were living there…My father used to go back to work after his two-week vacation…and mom used stay down there with us kids… and we got word the night of the hurricane that the cottage got washed out to sea…They just called us up and said, “You’re home is gone…don’t come back looking for it…" We still had our home in Chicopee…all the stuff we brought down there…totally gone…we went back to Chicopee.

And after that, my dad would never buy a Summer cottage again…he’d just rent a place for a couple of weeks…That just did him in…My dad was devastated. I remember asking him, ‘well dad, how much did a cottage cost back then…and I think it was like $5,000….where today it’d be …well…a ton more. We switched from Connecticut to Rhode Island…Lord’s Point…but always renting.

But what I do have…he was a great newspaper clipper, in a scrapbook at home I have pictures of the hurricane. The home was right along the water, you know, so, and even to this day I love to drive down to Groton-Longpoint…you know along the shore, and look back at them now and think...’what might have been’…”MINE”

…All of those houses there now were definitely built after 1938. I remember after Dad passed away I said to mom…let’s go into the Realtors Office and see what the houses are like down on the shoreline….well…those prices were ‘gas-tronomical’…this was probably in the 80’s…so any thoughts of having a Summer home there were dashed. A lot of our neighbors used to like to go down to the Connecticut beaches…the Cape was such a long drive… and I think some of them actually do still have a place down that way in Groton-Longpoint.

...so…lucky me…you bet your life lucky me…lucky all of us.

I imagine overtime we replaced what was lost. We weren’t on the richer side of society…he worked for Gilbert-Barker in West Springfield…he was a sales engineer…he used to design oil burners…and one story he told…St Joeseph’s convent…he put the first oil burner there…it was for free…it was going to be a test sight…It sprang a leak…caused a big fire in the night…so they called my dad, he tried to put the fire out…and the superior said ‘we don’t want anymore of these oil burners’ I mean…it didn’t destroy the convent, but it did do some damage…

We were lucky…it wasn’t our time…We had more work to do…and here we are…still workin!