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Interview Transcript of Ruth and David Partridge.  Ruth and David are descendants of Sarah Partridge for whom the East Middlebury Community Center is named.

INTERVIEW WITH RUTH AND DAVID PARTRIDGE

JULY 12, 2019

10 a.m. at Wake Robin Meeting Room

 (C)    Catherine Nichols

(D)    David Partridge

(R)    Ruth Partridge

(F)     Francis Favreau

(M)    Marilyn Barbato

(B)    Barbara Gerardi

(C)       We have a few questions the Historical Society asked that we ask you.  Just for your interest this is a transcription of Charles who had a long conversation with someone listening - in February 2000 -  

(D).  he died in September of that year - age 90 - we all made 90 -  

(R)   I’m 101 now  -  

(C).   so lets look at the first one - Sarah Ann Rice Partridge’s obituary says that she was born in Woodstock, Vt whereas our history says Stockbridge, VT.   

(D)   No idea.  The obituary says she was born in 1836 and our history says 1835.  Any idea?   

(R)  1835 to 1919.  

(C)   Was she a member of either, neither or both the Episcopal and or Methodist church in East Middlebury even though Charles Frank said his grandmother Sarah attended both churches when the opportunity allowed.   

(R)   I understand that she attended both so she could keep track of everything that was going on.    

(B)   Was that the Episcopal church we went to?    

(C)   No she is talking about the Episcopal church in Middlebury.   

(C)   The Episcopal church in East Middlebury was the cute chapel almost across from the Community House on the other side which was St. Barnabus and it was started by Saint Stephens church in Middlebury used as a chapel for East Middlebury and a Sunday school so children could have a school, and I think probably for the days it was open from 1860? until around 1945 or 1950.  The ministers from Middlebury would come out to East Middlebury the way the Methodist ministers did.  It was then deconsecrated and is a private home now and the Murphy’s lived there for a long time and both of them died and on the market for years but someone has bought it and is taking good care of it.   (M).   David do you have a lot of memories of that house”.   

(D).  No I don’t.  

(R) We spent one summer there after my grandmother died - I was probably 4 or 5 years old but don’t remember much.  After that my cousins lived there - the Coulters – 

(R) No the Wardens -  

(C)   But your father owned it so did he rent it –

(R)  I didn’t have any idea  about the arrangements.  

(C). He sold it to the boys Sanborn and Charles for a dollar in 1938 -   

(R)   We had various cousins - the Wardens and the Haydens -   

(C)   And then do you know what Sanborn and Charles did with it?   

(R)   No.   

(F)    David where did you live?  

(D)  Dad built a house in Proctor in 1910.  Mr. Licht was the architect for both the Community House and our home.   

(B)   Ruth where did you go to school?  

(R)   In Proctor and Emma Willard in Troy, N. Y., Mt. Holyoke -  

(D)  Emma Willard was in Middlebury and started the school there.   

(R)   Class of 1935.  Class of 1939 at Mt. Holyoke.  I went to my 75th class reunion, in 2014, and haven’t gone since. 

(D)   I am officially now a member of the class of 45 at MIT although I didn’t finish there and I was 46 when I was there and they went to three semesters a year and jumped everything up because of the war.  So I got moved up a class.  

(C)   Did you go off to the war?  

(D)  The navy.  And when I was getting out I went up to see the dean - I had not left in good straits - and I was very surprised - he said be here April 15th - I can’t I do not get out until June 30th - go to your home state and apply as an instate veteran.  I then went to UVM. majoring in Electrical Engineering and Business.  They fooled me.   I was supposed to be the class of 49 and they came up with a four year sequence of math that I could not deal with so I had to back off until 50 so I took a lot of business courses and got my degree in both.  

(C).  Then what business were you in? 

(D)   I went to work for GE as an engineer in the Aviation and Ordnance Systems (ANOS) for 4 years in Burlington.   The Korean war ended and my position became downgraded - section leader called the other group leader and me in and said we can’t have both of you any more but your pay will not change and I decided to leave.   I decided to go out west skiing and when I got back I was looking for something to do in Stowe and there were only two possibilities - one was insurance which my partner in the house  where we lived had started up a business - so that took care of that.  The other was the local oil man and I didn’t see any generational people in his family at all so I called him up one day and said I would like to meet with you some day - and he said he would see me tomorrow at breakfast downtown so I went - got there - he said I didn’t ask you what you wanted to see me about - but I think I know - and the answer is very simple - I cannot afford to sell the business - if I sold the business I would starve - but I have a supplier in Montpelier who is 62 and his wife has cancer and he wants out.  Another guy and I bought the business, petroleum equipment - service stations - bulk tanks- tank trucks etc.  I did that for 22 years and my partner left after 3 years and I stayed living in Stowe.

(C)   How long have you lived at Wake Robin?   

(D)  11 years.  The last of the siblings to move in.  The other 4 were all moved in right at the beginning.   

(R)   I pried my sister out of her place in Connecticut and we moved in December  1993.  

(C). In the same apartment you’re in now? 

(R) Yes.  Frances died in 2007.   

(C)   It is very interesting to me how people meander through their business life.  Your story about wanting to ski - going out west then coming back and wanting to be in Stowe … sometimes almost a flip of a coin.  Its much less so now because jobs are harder to come by.  Ruth when you finished at Mt. holyoke had you majored in chemistry?   

(R).   I majored in chemistry and stayed on 2 more years and got a masters degree.   

(C) Did you work for Lederle? 

(R)  I worked for American Cyanamid the whole time and first I was in Stamford, Conn. and then I moved to the Calco Chemical Division and from there to Lederle, but it was all part of American Cyanamid.   

(C)   What were the particular products that you were working on that made you move?   

(R)   I originally worked with one of their bosses - my chem professor knew him - that’s how I got the job.  I gradually moved from chemistry to a biology.  I did more work with animals than I did with chemical analysis.  Worked with rats.   

(C)    What took you to Pearl River where Lederle is?   

(R).  Still American Cyanamid.    

(C)   Which of the three places you lived was your favorite?   

(R)   They were each all right in their time.   

(B)   Were you doing research all the time?   

(R)  yes.  

(B)   How many women were in chemistry majors in your class when you graduated?   

(R)  There were 8 or 9 majors and this was a woman’s college.  Smith, Mt. Holyoke and Wellesley are still women’s colleges.  

(M)   It sounds that you were not entirely satisfied with your living situation?  Did you always want to get back to Vermont?   

(R)   Yes, I was in exile all those years.  So Sanborn let me know they were working on CCRC (continuing Care Community) in Vermont and that was for me.  

(C)   Did you take early retirement.   

(R)    No.   

(C)    Did you come up here for vacations? 

(R) Yes.  Proctor was always home.   

(C)   How old were you when your father died?  

(R)   I was already working -   

(C)   You were born in ‘17 

(D).  he died in ‘43 age 82.   

(R)   I was born in  ‘16.  

(C)   After Frank died Sarah lived on another 10 years at home.   

(D)   Sandy moved up here to Wake Robin-  

(R)   he was the resident dragon.  He stayed at the house until he moved here.  The house was sold.   

(F)   David, were you aboard a ship in the Navy?  

(D). I was assigned to the USS Albany but the day it got commissioned in Four Rivers I went for discharge.  i never saw that ship.   

(R)   Father was appointed to fill the vacant position and then they had an election in the spring and that is when Warren Austin got - he was much younger - father was fairly old at that time - and he was defeated in the primary -   

(C).   So at that point you were living in Boundbrook, N. J..  

(R)  Yes.   

(C).   Sandy was in Amhurst?   

(D).   He was teaching geology there a couple of years.  He taught at the University of Kansas first for two years.   

(C)   What town is the university of Kansas in?  

(D)  Lawrence.   

(C)   Yes, Lawrence - I was just reading a book about Amos Lawrence who was for a brief time the treasurer of Harvard University and also lived there of the Lawrence Mills of Lawrence, Mass.  He started the University of Kansas in Lawrence and also the Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin .   

(M)   Did you ask for the birth dates.   

(C)    I have them - Charles 1911 to 2001 - well Frances was the oldest - right?   

(D)   Yes.  

(C).   1909 - 2007 (R) I lost track of the later dates.   

(C).   Sanborn 1915 - 2013 - Ruth 1917 and David 1925. Frances daughter Sally -   

(R).   Teaching at Castleton -   

(C).  and Margaret is the one you are closest to - correct?   

(R).  well - Sally lives in Vermont now and Margaret lives in Ohio.  

(C) Is she a doctor?   

(R)   yes.   

(C).   Frances son Allen teaches in Middlebury Union high school - he lives in Waybridge -   

(R).   He works for Outward Bound - he is getting past that age and I think he hates to admit it.  

(C)   His wife has a different name now because she is a Buddhist, Mittra.  

(C).  Read a letter from Frances in 1987 when she was in Bridgeport, Conn., which are at the Historical Society office.  

Dear Mr. Curtis - thank you for your very nice letter, I wish I could be in Middlebury to hear your talk but expect to be here in Conn. to hear the Opera on the 16th of May.   My memories of East Middlebury as I knew it as I visited my grandmother as a child are not many but those I have are vivid.  East Middlebury, as I recall, was one long main with a few cross streets.  Most of the houses were well kept and the lawns were neat and attractive.  

(C)   That’s nice to hear because in the seventies East Middlebury was going down Hill some and when the church bought the house I now own as the rectory, in ’71 because they could afford it - I think things were much more run down.  Now they are being bought up and fixed up because people can afford East Middlebury than Middlebury.  Continue with the letter.   

(C).  I recall my grandmother’s neighbors - the Tisdales, Mrs. Enos, better yet Mrs. Dewey, the Middlebury river directly back of my grandmothers house was a wonderful playground with its rocks and pools.  My brother Charles speaks of the fish, trout, etc., that could be caught there.  I remember playing in the woods on the bank across from grandmother’s house.  

(D).  where the spring was.  

(C)   right across the river from the house-that is where Doug Anderson lives.  

(D)   Top of the hill there -  

(C).   across rte 125  - that is why there was a water barrel up there when I first moved in that rusted out - no spring there when I came along - continuing on - we pretended we were indians looking for birds and animals.  My grandfather died in 1905, before my day, but I remember the story about him that he liked to sit on his front porch looking at the bank across the road from his home and remarking happily that he owned the land as far as he could see.  This was after my father had bought the land across the street,[for Sarah and Charles] but what he could see was very little because a steep bank caught off the view.  The drinking water at my grandmothers came from a spring farther up the road toward Ripton  and was so clear and good that we often took bottles of it home with us to enjoy later.  I Remember the Inn, Mrs. Baker’s Annex across the street, the little Episcopal church where my father was christened, the Methodist church where he attended Sunday school, the Days store, the post office.  After my grandmothers death in 1919 we spent part of two summers in my grandmothers home which my father owned until he died in 1943 and left to his two older sons.  Interrupted -    

(D).  I was drafted in the navy at 19.  I went to see if I could get a position in the signal corps because i was an electrical engineer - they said no - go see the navy and I went home and my brother Charles said you should consider it because you would have a nice dry bed unless its very wet.  I went from Great Lakes to Right Junior Collage in Chicago, to Texas A & M, to Corpus Cristi, at that point I graduated from the radar school and then went to Norfolk and there I got assigned to the Albany then moved to Floyd Bennett, then Quonset  and then went home.  Continuing on with letter -   

(C)   At that time a year after my grandmothers death we took at least one meal a day at the Inn where the cooking was good and the meals served family style.  To me as a child it seemed to me that all East Middlebury women were good cooks, certainly my grandmother was and so was her housekeeper companion Louise Manning.  Interrupted -   

(C).  This is something I want to ask you - Louise Manning came the last two years of your grandfather’s life and then he died.  After that she stayed as grandmother’s companion and housekeeper and she was African American and I wonder if that was any kind of a deal in East Middlebury in the early twenty century?   

(R).  I don’t know but after grandmother died father sent her to podiatry school or something like that in Boston and had a house at 25 1/2 south street.  She was accepted there and some colored college student lived with her.   

(C) Do you know know how your grandmother would have found her to come and help her?   

(R)   I don’t know how but we discovered many years later that she had a child before she came as her son appeared out of nowhere and many years later her granddaughter turned up and probably that’s why she was available to leave.   

(C).   Charles Partridge died in 1905, Louise Manning came in 1903-04 and helped out and is buried in the family plot in Middlebury.   

(D).   When Louise died she passed her house on to Frances Coulter.   

(C).  And that is how Frances came back to Middlebury because in this letter she says she always wanted to live in Middlebury. Back to letter -   I recall our visit to East Middlebury with fond pleasure and continue to feel first that I wanted to feel I belong to the Middlebury area and later that I actually did.  Fourteen years of living in Middlebury from 1965 to 1979 only added to my affection and enthusiasm for East Middlebury and the environment.    Now my son who grew up away from Vermont lives in Waybridge and teaches in Middlebury high school.  Cordially Frances Partridge Coulter.   

(D).  I know Wesley, her husband, died in Middlebury.   

(C).   What got her down to Conn. do you know?   

(R)   She had a friend down there.  Her friend died and that was how I got her back here.   

(C)    I know what I wanted to ask!  I am not sure of the wording - but did you find it difficult to grow up in a family with such an emminent father?  

(R)    Well we knew he was distinguished and president of the Marble Company which is what everyone worked for.  This is probably the time when I should tell you - when I was due father said I will call you (Sarah) when the baby gets here and tell you what it is.  She said don’t call, its a party line and everybody will be listening in and I won’t be able to tell anyone about it.  He said just tell me and I will come down and see.    Father said we will work out a code - I will tell you I have a barrel of apples - and if its a girl it will be “macintosh Red” and if its a boy it will be “northern spies” so I was duly announced as a “barrel of macintosh red apples”.  This was in 1917.  

(D)   I had a fraternity brother who married up in Newport and it turned out that he was marrying a cousin of mine and when I got up to the wedding the gal’s mother greeted me and said how she had to go to East Middlebury and get the husband approved for her wedding, by Sarah who ran a strict course on the relatives.  This was Carl Webster’s wife was a Guardine and Mrs. Guardine was a Rice.  And Rice is Sarah Ann Rice Partridge.   

(C).   When Charles Partridge and Sarah moved to East Middlebury, I’m suspecting they rented that house, because it wasn’t bought way after 1860 which hadn’t surfaced and one of the legends is that when Frank bought it that he raised the roof and when you look at the picture of the house I wonder if he added the wing, which is to the left of the old part of the house and maybe even moved an old building we recently pulled out an old book case in the living room which is that wing and found it to be post and beam, so we kept one vertical beam in the new smaller book case so the piano was fit in that space, but I was wondering whether they moved another building there and built the attic which is over it cause there is a little bedroom over the living room which is where my granddaughters stay and an attic off behind and maybe that is what this legend or story of raising the roof is all about.    

(C)   Was Frank part of the cow activities that Proctor did at Middlebury that got Fletcher Proctor thrown out, Redfield’s son? -   

(D).   father was not part of that -   

(C)   he was too upstanding.   

(R)   He was more of a student than Fletcher.   

(R)    Fletcher was his best man when he got married -   

(C)    and he was the Governor at the time.   

(R)    I have got clippings saying about the Governor carrying off one of our beautiful gals from Ohio -   

(C)   Sarah Sanborn she was a school teacher 

(D)  Illinois   

(C)   and she taught school in Proctor then went back out west and your father pursued her and brought her back and married her, and she was some younger than your father -  

(D)  18 years -  

(R)   I found a letter from her principal of one of her schools she fled back to Illinois to think it over I guess, and when he heard that she was going to be married he said “I’m not surprised that you are getting married but I had thought Mr. Partridge was a confirmed Batchelor.  

(F)   David, what year did you live in Stowe?  

(D)   From the fall of 1953 until I moved to Wake Robin in 2008.  We had to start paying in November but didn’t move until January.    55 years in Stowe.   

(C).   Did you know the Trapp family when they moved here?  

(D).   Not when they moved but have known the children since.  I did not know Maria but she was around when I was there.  

(C). Maria was a lot like Sarah Partridge.   

(D).   I know my partner and I had the Yoadler in town and the Trapp family was way up on the hill and come the weekend and everyone would go home and Maria would notice that we had more people than she did and she came down to find out why.  

(C)   When I was a little girl I remember going to a community concert and the Trapp family singers and evidently that is how they made it at first when they arrived in the states, and all the children walked up on the stage before fire laws with lit candles in the high school auditorium  to sing.  

(C)   Deacon Edmund Rice  1594 to 1663 where was he England?   

(R)   Massachusetts  

(D). Interesting enough one day I received a phone call and he said “ Mr. Partridge - Yes - this is so and so Partridge my secretary just returned to England from a vacation in Stowe and noticed your name in the phone book so I was calling and we talked for 20 minutes and could not get any tie in at all.  Then he sent me this great big sheet his father made up - up in the corner unconnected to all the rest was the Partridges of Essex, England and there was father, mother and four kids - no before and no afters.  

(C)   Do you have the Partridges of Mass.? Medfield, Mass. yes.  

(R). Ruth said they oozed up the Conn. River either married or got married.  Margaret will get all of this information later on.   

(C).   David what are your memories of East Middlebury?   

(D).   Lou and Anna Worden were occupying the house and Anna’s sister Minnie Hayden was there a lot.    Lou was a pattern maker for Remington Rand and my understanding is he built the first noiseless typewriter.    Anyway he made a beautiful little locomotive and when I was small it was in our garage in Proctor on a piece  of track and there was an air pump in the Cadillac and my brothers used to run the engine and pump the thing up and they could work the throttle and go forward or backwards.  Uncle Lou took it back to East Middlebury before I went in the service.  My understanding was it was supposed to come back to me but when I got out of the service Lou and Anna had gone and the word I got was she sent it out to Cal Tech.  I have written them and never got an answer.   

(C).   What was the locomotive powered by - Steam?  

(D)  Yes, it had a fire box and everything but they just pumped up the steam area with compressed air.  Lou put an electric motor in it and he could make the wheels go around.    

(D).   Anna was a Hayden and they are connected.  Anna married a Worden.  

(C).   We don’t seem to remember when we are 1 year old.  

(R). We spent one summer there when I was 3 or 4, a rain barrel next to the house.   

(C)    Do you remember an outdoor kitchen?  

(R). No, but I remember an outhouse.  

(D).   It was in the back shed.  

(C).   A three holer in 1925.   You go thru what is the current kitchen - the back porch - and into the woodshed and behind it was a three holer.  

(D).   I remember Lou had a freezer - he had this thing - it was like a dumb bell - and you put one end of it in the freezer and when it ran out you turned it around and put it over a kerosene lamp  and it would boil the refrigerant back over to the other side and turned it around and put it back in the box.  That was the first food freezer I ever saw.  

(C).   Did he design it?  

(D).   No, I think he bought it.  

(C).   And where was it in the woodshed?  

(D).  It was in the back shed.  

C). Past which was the three holer.  

(D).  You went out a door in the kitchen and it was at the right.  

(C).  That was a back porch and then a woodshed on the left unless the outhouse was moved.  

(D).  It was enclosed, not on a porch.  

(R).   Was it one of your friends David that had a two holer outhouse and when they sat down it would say - “Please move over, I’m down here working.”  

(D)  That was in Lake Placid.   

(F).   Some outhouses had different size holes - as a child you did not want to use the bigger holes - you might slide down.  We had covers to put over the holes that they didn’t want you to use.  

(C).   I bet you are right - when you stepped out of the kitchen that would have been a room, but perhaps not a finished room.  

(D).   It was unfinished.  

(C).   And now a screened porch,  which we live in all summer.  You can hear the river and the screens let the air through and it’s lovely without mosquitos. 

(C)  Thanks for your time.