He never went back there . . .they only got paid every other week and he didn’t tell my sister that he wasn’t working.  He’d get up every day and go to his mother’s house and she would give him enough money to get a few comic books and the price into a theater and then he could go into a theater and stay all day, I don’t know if you can anymore but you could then.  You could stay all day for ten cents, weekends fifteen cents, except the Capital, is the Capital still there – it was on Front Street?  It was the more expensive one – it was fifteen cents during the week and a whole quarter on Sunday.

And they just played . . .Did they play the same movie all day of different movies?

Same movie. . .

And you could just stay all day.

The first run movies – that’s what it would cost you a quarter to go in and see, but if they were just showing re-runs then it was cheaper.  Perhaps you should ask some questions? (laughing)

Sure, alright.  Well I guess we’ll start out with what was your maiden name?

Fournier. F - O – U – R – N – I – E – R.  That’s French – my father was all French and my mother was Irish and well English mostly because her mother was English, but her father was Irish, Scotch and English.  Ordinarily the English and the Irish didn’t get along but apparently they did. (laughing)  My parents met in Spencer.  My full name was Winifred Margaret Fournier, but everyone used to call me Winnie.  I was born in Shrewsbury. 

In Shrewsbury – ok.  

My oldest sister was born in Spencer.  And Jean was born in, geeh I wish I had written this down.  I think Jean was born in Spencer.  I know my brother was born in Catechuic.

Catechuic?

Know where Catechuic where it is?

No.  (laughing)

Its way down route 9 and I don’t know if it’s before or after Natick.

Ok.

You know where Natick is?

Yup.

And Paul was born in Worcester I am pretty sure.  And Jean was born in Spencer.  (laughing)  And I told you I was born in Shrewsbury, but Henry was born in Catechuic.
I was the forth one.

You were the forth one.

And Catherine was born in Worcester – in Reading Court.  That’s um, there is a cemetery on one side of the road and Institute, no it wasn’t Institute, it might be Cemetery Road I don’t know.

Cemetery?

Well I’m not sure, but you can look at a Worcester Map.

Yeah – oh absolutely.

And we lived in Redding Court.  There were three or four courts and then there would be about maybe five or six apartments in each court.  But each court had its own street and we lived on Redding Court.  

Redding Court?  How long did you live in Worcester?

Well I was born in Shrewsbury and I was three months old when we moved to Worcester.

Ok.  What year did you move to Worcester?  (pause)  If you remember?

I think I was only about three months.  I can remember my mother would say that she really hadn’t wanted to move there because she had met nice people when she came to Massachusetts in the place where we had been living.  The woman was so good, to my mother that was because she would say how she, my mother, didn’t know any body.  Because my father was working and she would be alone all day.  And this woman introduced herself to my mother.  There was a man that did work around the work around, she owned the property, and there was a man that did work around and he had only one arm.

Oh really?

One hand – he had lost one hand from here down.  (points to elbow)  He had lost one on a conveyor belt.  And this man made a cradle for me.  And he wouldn’t let her pay for the crib.  And she said it was the most beautiful thing she ever did see.  It was really nice and it’s probably still around because eh made it so well.  But I weighed two and a half pounds when I was born – no two pounds.  They said I would weigh two and a half after they got me dressed.  (laughing)  The doctor – my mother was short but she was heavy.  And she said that the doctor said to her while he was holding me – “a woman your size couldn’t produce anything bigger than this.”  (laughing)  And she said “he made me feel guilty”.  But then he said that her tubes must not have been working right and that I wasn’t getting enough nourishment.     

Oh ok.

Because I was born with the rickets.  So I couldn’t sit up alone until I was sixteen months old.  And my mother said she would tie me to the highchair with the diaper on so I could catch the other three children play.  And I never smiled or said a word either.  Everyone thought that there was something wrong and that she should take me to a doctor but she knew I was alright but I didn’t have a lung problem, I was healthy and intact.  The only thing that was different was that I was tiny.  She said she didn’t want doctors poking into me, maybe making things worse. 

What year were you born in?

1924 – now you making me tell my age.  (laughter)  Which I never really minded.   I’ll always tell people.  March 19, 1924.  My husband was a lot older than me but we got along so well.  When he asked me to marry him, he was always asking me to marry him, I used to say, I won’t marry you old Jimmy Dowd. (laughing)  And he’d say but why not – I’d be good to you.  And I’d say but you’re too old for me.  He was only six years younger than my mother.  

Wow.

He was almost twenty years older than me.  And I’d say you’re too old for me and he’d say, but I’ll be good to you - I’ll always be good to you and I would say but you’re too old.  He kept after me, from the time I was fifteen and a half.  He’d come and get my girlfriend and me – the girl next store and he’d take us down to mass and then after mass he’d take us to breakfast and then he’d take us home.  One day he said do you know why I take you to mass every Sunday?  And I said because you like our company and he said, “because they say you marry the girl you take to mass.”  And so anyways he was so good to me and so good to her and I had boyfriends but they were so childish – I don’t know if 17 and 18 year olds - how they act today but we lived on Salem Street near Salem Square, where the Worcester Knitting was – my mother worked there, and all us kids would get together in the back alleyway behind the building and they were all so immature.  So well I don’t know where to go from here.

What year did you finally get married?

1942, I was eighteen and Jim was 37.  I was only 34 when he died. He was 53, my oldest son was 15, he turned 15 three weeks before his father died and the youngest was 4.  We would have been married 17 years that April.  (visibly upset)  All I have to do is shed a tear and my nose runs.  So my nose runs a lot.  My friends used to call me weeping Winnie.  
Henry joined the Navy when he was seventeen and so for twenty years we didn’t see much of him.  

Did he do a lot of traveling?

Yeah he was stationed at Pearl Harbor on the USS West Virginia when the attack hit.  

Oh really. . .

Yeah he had been there eight months.  From there he went to so many different places – his ship was torpedoed that day when the attack came on December 7, 1941.

Oh really . . . could you get in touch with him?

No - I was just going to tell you that –

Oh I’m sorry . . .

No, that’s alright, from December 7th until the day before Christmas we didn’t know whether he had survived or not (visibly upset).  And he had married a girl there, she was very beautiful, she came to visit us once, but my mother wasn’t home and they were only staying for the day and so they had to leave before my mother and father got home meet her.  Anyways seemed to be so much in love with my brother but right after the war ended she divorced him.  You heard of the same thing happening after the first World War, a lot of women married these soldiers in the hopes that they would die and then they would get the $50,000 for losing their husband during the war, plus if you had children for the rest of their lives they would get money from the Navy and free college and everything.  Well his ship got tornadoed and it was Christmas Eve when my mother got a telegram saying that he was alive.  And I can remember until we heard from him I would go everyday to Saint Anthony’s and light a candle and say a prayer.  And I promised Saint Anthony that if he found my brother and brought him home ok that I would name my sons after him.  And I did I have James Anthony and Dennis Anthony.  
Anyways my brother had been on the USS West Virginia and it didn’t get sunk, but it was badly damaged and he told me that there were 3,000 killed on his ship alone.  I couldn’t believe it I said 3,000, he said, Winnie there can be up to 15,000 on a battleship.      
After the war, when his wife divorced him he was so upset, but when he got back to Boston he met this woman and she had a southern drawl and he asked her where she was from and it turned out she was from West Virginia.  And he said he was on the USS West Virginia, and they got married, they had four children.  
After the war was over and of course they had ships stationed places for a long time to make sure our country was going to be alright, when Henry got home I had just bathed and dressed my son and when Henry walked in he said, “I saw lots on babies in Japan that looked just like you”  and ya know when my son was three months old everyone used to say to me – “how come he looks so Chinese” and I would say I don’t know why or Japanese – they said he looked Japanese.  My brother came back from the Navy – took one look at him and said I saw thoughts of babies in Japan that looked just like you and so he started calling him Yacki-Saki.  So we all did – when he was ten years old once and awhile I would forget and call him Yacki-Saki and he would answer.  It’s funny because when I was younger everyone used to call me chinky because when I smiled my eyes get so small.  He was good natured.
 
Did you have to work during the war?

I was too young.  I got married in ’42 but I was too young I was only 18.  You had to be 18 to work and you couldn’t get a job without a work permit until you were 18.  Anyway I was very, very shy and my mother knew that and my father would say, she’s sixteen, I could hear them talking, she’s sixteen she should be working, all the others went to work at sixteen.  My mother would say, I’m not going to have her work in the shop, the way those women in there talk, she said they are worse then men in the shops for swearing and telling jokes, dirty jokes, ya know.  She said I don’t want her subjected to that.  So she wouldn’t let me work.  I started working for my husband’s sister Dorothy watching her four year old child.  I started this around when I was fourteen or so.

Did your husband fight in the war?

No he had a bad heart.  He had to go to the recruitment office for a physical and the doctor the first thing he did was check his heart and then he just said – go home.

Did that upset your husband or was he happy about that?

Well he had mixed feeling about it.  He said that he wanted to go but he also said he sure didn’t want to leave you Winnie.  He said he knew that my mother and father would take me in but we were still newlyweds at that time.  

Right that’s true.  

So in the end they didn’t take him.  And I was so worried all day and thankfully they didn’t take him.  And he said, you don’t have anything to worry about they don’t want me.  (laughing)  My poor father he couldn’t go to the First World War - he had gotten hit by a trolley one summer on Front Street and dragged from the side of City Hall all the way down to Kelley, no Washington Square.  And everyone was yelling at the trolley to stop, telling the driver he was dragging a little boy, by it didn’t until it got to Washington Square.  He was little for his age and he was 7 years old.  He spent four years in a hospital in bed and then it took him 2 years to learn to walk again.

Wow – that’s horrible.

He lost one eye.  When they found him his eye was out – it was on the road.  The doctor tried to put in back in his eye – of course he couldn’t see anything because it wasn’t connected to anything but when he got older they had to take it out because it started rotting and so they made him a glass eye.  He used to have to take the eye out when he went to bed and his eyelid never shut – not all the way.  

What did your dad do for work while you were living in Worcester?

He was a machinist; he worked at a small place, the Worcester Pressed Aluminum.  He had finally gotten on the WPA.

What’s the WPA?

That was a program that President Roosevelt started to make jobs for people.  Mostly they did road work, but my father worked in a shop called Worcester Pressed Aluminum.
Roosevelt was a great President, there was hardly anyone working when he took office, the Republicans were in and they had all the money.  Republicans never give you anything they really don’t they never give you anything.  They take things away from you, you live long enough you’ll know.  He started, it was a program to put people back in work, what they did was they opened the Worcester Knitting Company – that was closed.  And they gave them contracts and they made bathing suits there and they used to make or they started making, when they started doing government work they were making these parachutes.  And I didn’t know but they were made of pure silk.  But they also still made some bathing suits.  And my mom worked there and if there was something wrong with the bathing suit and if it would cost the boss more to fix it then my mother would ask if she could have it.  I had bathing suits in every color.  After the Knitting Company my mother went to work in another company, a little place on Front Street called Active Sportswear and it was run by this Jewish man and he had all Italian women working for him.  He had a really beautiful secretary working for him and she was really beautiful.  The boss was married with a family and she was his girlfriend.  All the other women were frightened of this man because he had a big voice and they were afraid to speak back to him but not my mother.  Her first day there he come over to her and accused her of making a mistake on something she made.  She looked at the work and said this isn’t mine and then she said let me see the number and so he gave it to her and she looked at the number and she stood up and screamed at him – this is not my number.  And all the other women were shocked and they said aren’t you afraid of him.  And my mother said, “Why should I be afraid of him he is only a man.”  But then he had so much respect for her.  And so was so quick with her hands.  She was so talented.  When she was working there, her Jewish boss would say to me, and to my mother, “Do you think she can model the dresses and the bathing suits?”  

Ohhh!  That’s  nice.

And my mother would say no way.  She didn’t want us modeling bathing suits.  She told me about it and I asked her what they paid.  She said, “Oh they pay very good money-you’d be making more than me for two hours work.”  And so then I said, “So why can’t I?”  She said that the men who go around buying the suits and ordering the suits just put their hands all over the seams and feel along the chest and crotch area.

Really!?

And my mother said, “There is no need for you to have to do that.”  And I agreed and said “no way.”  

That’s incredible.  Do you remember what your mother’s boss’ name was?

Mr. Sydner.  

How much, do you remember, did your mother get paid to work at this company?

Oh, they were getting like twenty cents an hour and they had to make a quota, most of the girls couldn’t make it and if they couldn’t they lost part of their salary.  They could lock you in the shop and keep you there all day and only pay you for the time you spent in front of the machine.  And I remember my mother saying that once for a whole week he kept them all in there and they were banging at the doors and he wouldn’t let us out and no work would come in and so they got paid nothing and if something did come in late in the day he would give it to one of his pets, but they would all have to stay there until the other one was done.  That’s one thing Roosevelt took care of, he asked people to let him know what abuses, if there were nay abuses and what they were.  That was one of the things he heard about, all shops would do this and make people stay whether there was work or not and so Roosevelt said that for every hour you keep someone in your employ you have to pay them a flat rate plus the money they got for doing their job.  And he said that you could not go down on the price of their job.  And you could not go down on the price of the job you still had to pay them for piece work.

Good good that’s excellent. . . 

Yes. And he started the WPA. . The Workman’s something. . . I was telling someone about it the other day and I remembered but hmmm. . .  Well it was started because after their was no WPA he had to work at the Worcester Pressed Aluminum

Your father did?

Yes, because he was a pressman – he could run those huge presses and when he went to work their; he had worked in a press shop for a long time and they look at your hands when you first go in and the manager looked at his hands and said, “you were never a pressman” and he said I certainly have been, that’s the job I just lost – they closed down.  And the man said – but you have all your fingers.

Wow!

Then my mother told me – those presses reached to the ceiling they were so big and those presses would come down with a big bang.  Yeah because they had to press out different things, for awhile he was making little kits for the Boy Scouts.

Oh, really?

And they were aluminum, and there was a dish on the top and a dish on the bottom and you opened it up and there was a cup and a spoon and knife and a fork on the inside.  So of course he brought one home for me, so I got to take my lunch in it and they all wanted one and I had to say – I’m sorry my father brought one home for me.  

So what did your husband do during the War since they “didn’t want him”?

He was a cab driver.  

What was the name of the Cab Company that he worked for?

I always called it by its initials, Independent Taxi Drivers’ Association.  

Independent Taxi Drivers’ Association?

Independent, now they just call them Independent I think, then again they called them Independent then too.

Was that a union?

Yes.

Oh he was part of a union.  Do you be any chance remember how much he made during the war when you first got married?

Not much, he never made much because he couldn’t work in a shop because of his heart.

Oh ok.

The most that he ever earned in a year was $2000 and people were making $6000 then.  But he couldn’t work at anything else and he felt so bad and I’d say, “Jim – don’t worry about it”  and I would make clothes and knit for my own family on a single thread machine.  It did a chain stitch.  I had that machine and I made a gown and I made a dress for my daughter Catherine.  

Did, um, a lot of the kids that you played with or were in the neighborhood have to get jobs when the war broke out?

Well most of us were too young.

Most of you were too young?  Yeah. . . 

Well Martha, Martha – she was my age and she was lazy like my sister, but my sister was a good person although there was one thing about her that I knew  that I really didn’t:  When we were at Auntie Dot’s one day she said, Auntie Dot said to me.  Well I told that my husband was a lot older, so well Dot was his youngest sister.  He had a brother who was younger than her but she was the youngest of the girls.  So Dot said to me one day when I was taking care of her, her children, because she had asked Jim if he knew anyone that could baby-sit, cause she and her sisters liked to gamble and they’d go – I don’t know where they’d go, there was no gambling around here, I think its Boston where they’d go.  Anyway they’d go twice a week and I would baby-sit.

How old were you?

Twelve, when I first started – babysitting for her.  The girl could be kind of cute but she could be kind of fresh, but anyways.  Dottie knew my sister Jean and they became friends and so one day when I was at Dottie’s place and I was really surprised when she said to me, “Your sister Jean isn’t very nice to you is she?”  And I hadn’t thought she had ever noticed.  And she really liked Jean.  And I said, “No she isn’t.”  And she said, “But you aren’t mean to her.”  And I said “well she is my sister and I am her sister so I just turn the other cheek.”  That’s what God says to do and if it’s good enough for him.  And she said, “I guess you’re right.”  But she said, “You know what her trouble is – she is jealous of you.”  And I said, “Why should she be jealous of me.  Jim makes less than $2000 a year and we have six children.  And they have three children and together they make over $6000 a year.”  And Dot said, “She’s jealous of you because you are happy and she is not.”  

Oh, wow.

And I said I really don’t think Jean can ever be happy, she always demanded the most and appreciated everything the least.

Wow – isn’t that amazing.

Jean thought that she could buy happiness – she didn’t realize that happiness doesn’t come from money.  I anyways felt sorry for the way she was.  And Dot didn’t understand why or how I could feel sorry for her and I would say, “I feel sorry for her because of the way she is – she is making herself unhappy.  She doesn’t realize all she has to be happy about.”  

Do you remember, I was talking to someone earlier and they mentioned that when World War II ended there was a huge celebration in downtown Worcester.  Do you remember that all?

Sure, sure.  It was so crowded and my mother and I were there down there and like I said she was short and heavy.  You couldn’t walk on the roads/sidewalks – you were pushed everywhere you went, you got pushed there.  And I think that the old theater was there and they were celebrating in the theaters and everything.  But my mother said, “Winnie, lets go home.”  She was afraid the two of us would get trampled.  It was awful. Like First Night.   

What is one of your favorite places still in Worcester?

Coney Island.  I love Coney Island hot dogs.  You used to be able to go there and you would always see someone or run into someone that you knew.  And everything was a lot cheaper then.  You could get a hot dog and a soda for a dime.  I remember you couldn’t eat meat on Fridays and so on Thursday nights my husband would go to Coney Island when he got off of work and rush home right before midnight to give me hot dogs before it became Friday and you couldn’t have meat.  

I like that story – I think that is probably a good time to end for now.  Thank you very much.  It was very nice meeting you.