Curtis Hall was still there; we used to go swimming in the pool in the basement. We called it “the tank.” No bathing suit for the guys, but the girls wore city-issued one-piece suits.
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In the section of Jamaica Plain on the Roxbury line bounded by the train tracks and Centre, Heath and Bickford Streets, lived some of my friends that had fathers and uncles that were a little left of center with the law.
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Back in the 1940s, the city and the schools kept us kids pretty occupied during school vacation. While the parents were planting Victory Gardens such as the big one on the Jamaicaway at Daisy Field, the city provided small plots for kids, and supplied the seeds, tools, and the teachers to show us how to grow vegetables. They had about an acre of land on Paul Gore Street for us to plant. Everything we grew we took home.
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Anyone remember before television existed? We had this thing called radio. It was kind of like TV. There was sound but you supplied your own pictures in your mind. After school I’d run home and turn on the big parlor Philco radio. At four o’clock the programs started.
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The Ross ledgers run from 1926 to 1941. Thomas Ross took his son Wallace Ross with him on his jobs, and in March 1933 Wallace took over from his father. Happily the names of his father’s clients continue to appear on the accounts.
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Jamaica Plain was visited by one of the most disastrous fires in its history early yesterday morning. It was in the extensive blower works of the R.F. Sturtevant Company, a three-story brick building covering a large area off Green St. and extending down nearly to the Jamaica Plain Station of the Providence Division of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad.
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Michael Guignard shares his story...At our first meeting after the revelation, I learned that my birth mother had spent five months in 1946 at a home for unwed mothers called Talitha Cumi (a phrase from the Bible meaning “Arise, young woman”) in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston.
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Three firemen were hurt at the fire that destroyed the residence of Rudolph F. Haffenreffer on Mt. Walley Ave., Jamaica Plain, near Pond St., at the Brookline line, at 4 am yesterday.
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The long-standing impulse of housing reformers to build workingmen’s homes in the suburbs was joined at the beginning of the 20th century by the nascent city planning movement which advocated for public policies that would relieve the overcrowding of central cities.
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