Mildred Lewis in a Kinder, Gentler Belmont
The town was saddened by the death of Mildred Lewis at the age of 102 after a period of declining health. A few years ago Viktoria Haase and Helen Blakelock visited Miss Lewis at her home on Willow Street to record a conversation with her for the living history series they are collecting for the Historical Society. Miss Lewis shared some events from her lifetime that serve as a reminder of the kinder gentler Belmont of days gone by.
Mildred Lewis, an only child, came to Belmont in 1908 at the age of four. She was the daughter of the late Arthur F. and Etta F. Lewis, born in Cambridge near Central Square and Magazine Beach on the Charles River. "You know what a magazine is, don't you?" she queried. "It's where you store ammunition." Her first home in Belmont was on the west side of Park Road. Her most vivid memory of that time was being quarantined with scarlet fever.
She said that her story really began when the family moved to an apartment across Park Road on the east side. Her house backed up to the last parcel of the Learned Estate that ran through to Grove Street and then to Marion Road beyond. "It was quite big," she remembers. The house was on Belmont Street at the junction of Grove and Belmont Streets. Living there was "Aunt" Lily Learned, her maid, Hannah and a cat named Laddie. Across Belmont Street on a little rise in Watertown was the Coolidge house.
Mildred visited Aunt Lily Learned often. A friendship developed that lasted for the rest of Miss Learned's life, the last of which was spent in a retirement home for the elderly run by a family named Webster in the former Cushing farmhouse. Miss Lewis recalls several people living there. It was then on Trapelo Road, later moved to Oakley Road where it stands today.
Young Mildred began her fondness for animals with the hop toads she would unearth around the foundation of the Park Road house. "They lost a lot of water when you first picked them up, but then you could play with them," she remembered.
She started school at Payson Park School when she lived on Park Road. "It was a long walk. There was an orchard on the right, Skahan's, I think, and the Stultz property on the left. We (a group of children) walked toward Hittinger's on School Street, then up Elm Street hill to school." A fire destroyed the school in 1971and it was razed in 1976. Miss Lewis gave a rescued door frame corner to the Historical Society.
The reliable Miss Lewis took great pride in the fact that she rang the bells at school. She went in the teacher's door and into the teacher's room to press the bell button summoning the students into the building. "The boys came in one end, and the girls, the other," she explained. Then she went to the head of the stairs and waited for the principal to give the signal that the students were settled down so she could ring the bell permitting them to come up stairs. She confided that a boy had been the first bell ringer but both he and a male successor were unreliable so the principal gave her a chance. She didn't let him down.
While Mildred was still a student at Payson Park School the Lewis family moved once more, this time to a place on Townsend Road. The road wasn't finished yet and there were only five houses on it. Behind her house there was a pasture where a horse and a cow grazed. The property belonged to Col. Benton's Bellmont. "There was a barn over there, too. I went over once after my cat. I was amazed at the large fancy stalls." There was a balcony upstairs from which little rooms opened. These were most likely quarters for the help. The horse and the cow lived in the barn. The cow fell off the ramp leading into the barn once and Col. Benton came out and made some very spicy remarks to the herdsman," she confided.
As she continued with her memories, she murmured slyly, "I saw an automobile climb a stone wall, you know." There was a pause. "I was in Sunday school at the congregational church on Common Street. It happened across the street and it frightened me. It was an electric car, a sort of box on wheels, and it steered with a tiller. The lady lost control and it climbed the wall so the front wheels were up on top and the people inside were lying on their backs."
For grades seven and eight Mildred attended the Wellington School across the street from today's Wellington School. "Middle school was invented when I was in school," she observed with a twinkle. "Students stayed in the same room and the teachers moved around. It (the school) had been designed as an elementary school, you see, so the corridors weren't wide enough for large groups to go back and forth," she continued. Mr. Nickerson was the principal. For cooking classes, the girls crossed the street to the high school. "It was girls only then, the boys had manual training."
Grades 9-12 were attended at the high school across School Street from the Wellington School of grades 7 and 8. She graduated with the class of 1922, the first class to publish a yearbook. (The Historical Society was the recipient of her's.) She remembers the Leonard twins, members of her class at Belmont High. Her favorite teacher was Miss Gertrude Miller, who taught English. Miss Miller instilled a life-long love of memorizing poetry in Miss Lewis. To prove the point, she drew herself up and recited "The Owl and the Pussy Cat", a charming nonsense 'poem', with appropriate dramatic expression and humor.
"I didn't get along well with Miss Burbank (Mary Lee Burbank), though," Mildred confessed. "She was a math teacher and I was good at math when it was taught right. Miss Burbank was quite old at the time and not at her best any longer." Miss Stone, the other math teacher, certified Mildred Lewis for college entrance.
During the school years, the family lived for a while on Warwick Road. At the time there was a real estate office on Raleigh Road. The property in the vicinity had been cleared and divided into house lots that were on the market. Then, in 1920, Mildred's father bought the land on Willow Street (where she still lived at the time of the interview) and had a house built. The builder was Alonzo Allen, a Belmont carpenter, who also built the Payson Park Church. The original home had five rooms then two more were added to accommodate grandparents from Cape Cod, who spent their last years with the family.
Mr. Lewis was on the committee that organized the Payson Park Congregational Church. (Those meetings were held in the chapel, now the Benton Branch Library.) Miss Lewis joined the church in 1919 and served as Assistant Treasurer since 1972.
After high school Miss Lewis went to Boston University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts. She was voted most talented in her college class. "Well, I decorated for all the college events, you see," she explained. She attended the Museum School of Fine Arts and other art schools where she concentrated in commercial art. She purchased a music mimeograph business from Mr. Briggs of Briggs and Briggs Music Co. in Cambridge. She cut the stencils and printed the music for a number of years until she could no longer keep up with the demand. She cited recurrent instances when her music for the Harvard Band was blown away during games and replacements were need the next day.
She also designed and painted notepaper and the boxes for it and 3D religious plaques. In later years, Miss Lewis did some babysitting and some cat sitting. She had always been an animal lover. She maintained a correspondence with ten "pen pals" long into her 90's. One of those "pen pals" was her childhood friend, Doris Fellows, a kindergarten teacher. "I like to write and, I like even more, to receive letters," she maintained.
A gray squirrel landing with a crash on the screen of Miss Lewis' door brought the conversation to an abrupt halt. It seems that he was a regular afternoon visitor. A can of peanuts still in their shells stood handy. The squirrel daintily accepted a treat from Miss Lewis and additional offerings from the interviewers. His antics between rewards were very entertaining and provided an unusual ending to the afternoon.