![]() Local food was abundant – there was a big vegetable garden every summer, lots of wild blueberries and blackberries for pies, slumps, and cobblers clams from Quicksand pond in the summer, herring from Tunipus creek in the spring and the occasional slaughter of a cow or some chickens. The kids, being out of school, would often traipse in and out of the house, bringing their friends and cousins, with wet bathingsuits and soggy sandy towels, or covered in hay, into the house looking for a meal or cold drink of homemade rootbeer. Summertime was particularly busy – besides tending to the beach customers the household would increase in size, as Hilda’s mother Stella and step-sister Irene would come to spend every summer with the family. She patiently listened and sent them on their way, not bothering to tell them that she was not the owner! This meant that Hilda would listen to their various complaints about the beach – the cost, the condition of the bathhouses, the rocks, the seaweed, the fog, etc. Since she only needed to step out the kitchen door to meet the cars and reach out for the cash, many customers assumed that the family owned the beach. Hilda will probably be best remembered, mostly by out-of-towners, for her job collecting the fees for customers to Goosewing Beach. Mom’s days were filled with the usual farm wife chores: cooking, doing laundry, raising children, and occasionally herding stray cows (although she claimed to be afraid of them, and preferred to be on the other side of the wall or fence) or driving a farm tractor or truck when hay or corn was being harvested. The dairy farming business grew in size, using both the Shaw Road property, and the Goosewing property for crops and pasture. She and Merrick had 4 children: Meredith 1943, Emerson 1945, Everett 1947, and Susan 1950. Hilda’s life was busy with farm and family. The farm and beach were all owned by the Truesdale family and Merrick and Hilda rented and farmed that property until it was sold in 1994. This was also the entrance to Goosewing Beach. (At that time, the southern end of Long Highway was known as Bixby Road). Hilda and Merrick first lived in a cottage/camp (a converted chicken coop!) on the Shaw property, then shared the main house with his mother and siblings before moving to the Sisson Farm at the corner of John Sisson road and Bixby Road in 1946. By this time, Merrick had moved with his mother and siblings to his mother’s Shaw family property in Little Compton, RI and had started dairy farming there, to support his mother and 5 younger siblings. Wildes, who she had first known in her Dartmouth school years. In 1943, at age 25, she married my father Merrick K. ![]() After graduation, she continued her studies at Kenyon Business School in New Bedford, MA and then worked in the secretarial field for several years. She attended Russells’ Mills Grammar School, and graduated from Dartmouth High School. Perry (1876-1924) and Stella Brownell Perry (1886-1966), and grew up in the Russells’ Mills area of Dartmouth, MA. My mother Hilda was the youngest of 3 children born to Chester C.
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