Born 1962

Gert was Out Airing

Gertrude [Magnuski’s] mom passed, I think it was just a couple of weeks after she gave birth to Gert.  Howard, of course, wasn’t prepped to take care of a baby so she went to her mom’s mom which is Elizabeth from Adamsville, in the home that we’re in now. Back then they used to put the babies out on the lawn to air. And I guess there had been some contention between Howard and the grandmother. At one point he had remarried, and they wanted to take the baby back, but the grandmother wanted to keep her. All of the grandmother’s children passed, most of them very young. Gertrude’s mom was the one that lived the longest at thirty-one. So one day Gert was out airing and her father and her step-mother happened to be going by and they grabbed her. She didn’t see her grandmother until, I think she said, she was almost eight years old. Snatched her from the lawn. 

Paving the Roads

The guys as they were paving used to stay at whatever house they were near at the end of the day.

Based on an oral history interview with Rhonda Antonsen Magnuski.

First published in “Remembering Adamsville” by the Little Compton Historical Society, 2013.

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