CASSIE

George’s parents were Fred and Cassie.  I had never met either one of my paternal grandparents as they were both dead by my recollections.

Cassie Chamberlain had begun life as Cassie Kinney in Lubec, Maine somewhere around August 1889.  Her father, Millard, was born in Maine and her mother, Mary, was born in Canada.  There were at least 10 children born to Mary and Millard.  Four of those children had died by the 1900 census.  Herbert, Lettia, Cassie, Nellie, Lizzie and Dorice remained.  I can remember visiting Herbert and his wife Arlene in Maine.    Lubec was a lengthy drive so we did not visit often.  I only remember visiting Lubec one time to visit with Uncle Herbert and Aunt Arlene.  I remember being impressed by their pet parakeet.  The bird was allowed out of the cage all the time and would eat out of their hands and fly around the house landing wherever he felt like.  He even landed on top of my father’s head.  By this time George had already begun to lose most of his hair and the bird was sliding around up there.  Apparently the trauma caused the bird to get excited and the bird took a dump on my father’s head.  The rest of us thought that this was so funny and the adults were claiming that it was good luck to have been chosen by a bird as a bathroom.   But it must have felt pretty uncomfortable and my father did not share in our amusement.  Later, when I was in my teens, Herbert had died and his wife moved not far from us to Clinton, Massachusetts.  She hinted that she might like to live with our family but by that time my father had taken in so many of my mother’s relatives that he had to say no to the one relative of his own who was looking for family to stay with.  Aunt Arlene did come to visit all the time and she was the one who first cooked dandy lion greens for us.  She had been insisting that they were actually good to eat and cooked some for dinner one day to prove it.  But they really didn’t tast very good and were so bitter that I wouldn’t eat them.  Maybe they are good and my aunt was just a bad cook, but I never ate them again.

Lettia Daley was the only other one of Cassie’s siblings that I ever met.  Aunt Let, as my father called her, was the one that he always referred to as his favorite aunt.  She always took him shopping for Christmas and Birthdays.  Aunt Let would buy him what he wanted and help him pick something for his parents.  One time he had taken money he had saved for his parents Christmas gifts and he and aunt Let went to Boston to shop.  During the course of the trip, which probably included a trolley trip and lunch, he apparently lost his wallet with his money.  I think it was meant as a lesson in taking care of my belongings and be aware of my surroundings because he always claimed that someone picked his pocket and stole his money.  But he never went into any detail about that part of the story.  But he did admit that he was very upset and crying.  Aunt Let replaced the money for him and he never forgot it.

Cassie, it seems, was a fairly sensitive woman.  She was very active in civic groups and in her church, Glendale Baptist.  Like her father, Cassie seemed to aspire to be a poet.

I was told that Cassie was a woman of small stature who wore glasses and frequently walked determinedly with her head down.  According to one favorite story I was told, the elastic in her underwear broke one day while she was coming out of a store and down some stairs.  Since her head was down, she saw them fall.  But she was so focused on what she had to do, she merely bent down, picked them  up, stuffed them in her purse and kept on walking.

Cassie was married in 1907 to a man named John McMahon.  That marriage did not last and they were divorced.  August 1, 1914 she married Fred S. Chamberlain and they  lived in Everett, Massachusetts by 1920 when George was born.  Cassie was always supportive to my father, writing constantly while he was in WWII.  When my father was discharged and bought the house on Reed Avenue, Cassie went to live with him.  She attended my parent’s wedding in 1947 and continued to live there until she died.

Cassie died quite suddenly on March 3, 1951 while she was hosting a church supper.  Some records assume have Cassie born in 1889 while others suggest that she was born in 1890 or 1891.  Apparently the woman in her was good at keeping everyone guessing about her age.  But calculating the fact that she was 59 years, 6 months and 15 days old when she died suggest that Cassie was probably born in August 1891.