During the 1936 flood, I was just about to turn 17… I had just gotten engaged…I got married at 17…right here in Springfield…I was born in Malden, MA…and I met my husband after I moved here for a while…and my future in-laws lived at 19 Margaret Street…where I live now…I am living in the house that my husband literally grew up  in…My parents were living on Bradford Street in the North End…which was a very nice neighborhood…very well kept and everything at that time…

The time of the flood, my inlaws had to move everything from the first floor to the second floor…but that didn’t do any good…they had to get out…My father was very nice person, and he said…”tell your husband Joe to come here”…course they were 11 people in that family …a couple of them were in the service…Some of them were all young…anyway, my parents put blankets and pillows across…we had a big big room…dining and living room together…borrowed more blankets from somewhere…some of the slept on couches…some on the floor…stayed there overnight until the flood was over…

I can remember distinctly my husband and his friend going out on boats…he wasn’t my husband at the time..but they lived in the South End…and they knew a lot of people…and he would pick them up and bring them to safety…It was a very very hard thing for my parents to do…and his family was very very grateful…because we had just gotten engaged…and I was a little bit shy of it then…being so young…I was still in school…the 11^th grade when my husband wanted to get married…my father was going to kill me…I was one of 11 children, and my father always said ‘the youngest two are going to college’…none of the others did because we couldn’t afford it...so I was afraid to tell him I wanted to get married…we needed his permission because I was so young…my boyfriend at the time said “ask his permission”…and I said “I’m not telling him…you tell him…”…fortunately my father did give his permission and we got married…and part of that was because he really got to know my husband through the flood and the hurricane…how they helped all those people…and my husband was a real likeable man…a wonderful man…He would help my father with the bookkeeping part of his contracting business…

My husband/boyfriend was watching the flood water rise…they didn’t come back at night…they were just watching all that…my father wouldn’t let me out the door…It rained and rained and rained…my mother-in-law wouldn’t move…she just kept saying ‘move this stuff upstairs’…she wouldn’t leave…she wouldn’t go on a boat…that’s when my father came down…told my boyfriend ‘go tell your parents…if you want…I can bring down my sons’…see I come from a family of 11 children also…but most of my family was all grown…married and everything…it was just me and 2 others at home at the time…so my father came down back and forth until he got everyone out…and over to his place…I don’t know why Bradford Street was any safer…but it was, because we were on the second floor… 

They stayed a couple of nights…then the water started to recede…A lot of people lost a lot of stuff…my inlaws’s basement was a mess…they lost a lot of stuff on the first floor…my family was concerned…but because we were on the second floor we didn’t lose anything.

The Hurricane of 1938…I remember that distinctly…The wind was blowing and it was crazy…real crazy…at that time I was married…and pregnant with our first child…and he worked for the Orr Cadillac Company out there on the corner of Mill Street…where they had all glass there…and all the glass got all blown in…and my husband had to go there and get all the cars out there…my husband got to drive all those best cars…He used to pick me up from Congress (School) in a Cadillac, or an Oldsmobile…and bring me home…and all my friends were jealous…Anyway, he used to transport them…I remember him being out in it…and I was pregnant with my first child…I was only 18…He was working…it was early afternoon when we had the storm…the radio kept announcing…’we’re going to have a storm…we’re going to have a storm’…and I went downstairs and told my mother-in-law ‘we’re going to have a storm’ and she said ‘don’t get nervous’…but I was okay…my husband called a little later saying ‘we’ve got a problem, I can’t come home yet…all the glass is blown in and I have to stay’…and I kept looking outside…we had a front porch with all windows…and it was all closed in…and I was getting nervous that all the wind was going to blow our windows in…then my husband called again later and said “I’m not coming home…I’m going to be here all night…we gotta get all this stuff cleaned up…” 

I was nervous…it was a quick storm…it was all over in the night…but it did a lot of damage…My sister lived up in Hungry Hill…and they had a lot of damage up there…lots of trees down…they lost power…I don’t think we lost power…even till this day now, Hungry Hill loses power…and we somehow don’t in storms…I had better knock on wood now…

You’d think at my age at 87 that I would have forgotten them…but those stories are always on my mind…I was young…one storm I’m getting married…another storm I’m having my first child…It was a very bad experience for me…but I’m glad we lived through it…We were married for over 50 years…we had a wonderful 50^th anniversary…and I had 7 children…we have 8 grandchildren…and 7 great-grandchildren…so that’s it (laughs).