by Colin Edmund Grant
January 11, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Colin Edmund Grant

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It was late 1949. Paul was still working at the Harvard Lab, and Marion was home with the baby. Although they were happy, they were struggling financially.

Paul had a colleague at Harvard, David Humez, who, with his wife Glea (Gleason), owned a two family house in Arlington with an available apartment. It was much larger than the Park Drive place, and only $50 a month, although oil, water, and electricity were billed separately. Boston was definitely more convenient and generally preferable to the two young Bostonians, but they might be able to save some money, and they expected to need more room for more children, so in January of 1950, they moved to 15 Scituate Street in Arlington.

This is 15 Scituate Street on January 6, 2006.

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(Click this image to view a huge, extremely detailed version.)

There was a lot to be said for the Scituate Street address. David and Glea Humez were very nice people, and became life-long friends to Paul and Marion and some of the older Grant offspring. But Marion and Paul could not afford a car, and surviving without a car in the suburbs was an adventure. Just to go shopping at the Stop & Shop was a dangerous business. First, Marion had to steer the baby carriage down a long, steep hill, holding it back from flying down the incline. Then, after shopping (attended by anywhere from one to three children as the family grew) she had to push the carriage, filled with children and groceries, back up the hill. Getting to work was not bad -- Paul would either bicycle to work at Harvard or take the bus. But the Beaton family and Paul's mother were not nearby, and, to be honest, they were not much help even when they were nearby.

Yet things were generally pretty good. Dorothy Halcyon Grant was born on August 18, 1951, and Janet Marion Grant followed on November 17, 1952.

1953 was a wild year for the Grants, as Paul co-founded a company and Marion bought a house.

The company was called Flow Corporation. In his work at the Harvard lab, Paul and his colleagues were heavily involved in the business of instrumentation, which is the science and black art of devising ways and instruments to measure stuff. They needed to know how large something was, or how much it weighed, or what the barometric pressure was in a certain location, or how fast the air was moving, and so on. One thing they had invented and/or perfected was an instrument called the hot wire anemometer, which was used to measure wind velocity, and was extremely useful in certain situations. The principal of the hot wire anemometer was that they would pass some electricity through a fine wire (the "hot" wire), and measure the current. After careful calibration, they could, by measuring any change in current that accompanied a change in wind speed, measure wind velocity with great precision. (If you are completely out of your mind, see Hot Wire Theory for details.)

The Harvard lab guys had this hot wire anemometer thing down pat, and thought that between it and the ability to invent other superior instrumentation, they had the basis for a goldmine of a company. The Harvard administration agreed to let the boys have the intellectual property, so Paul, along with colleagues Dick Kronauer, Carl Pearson, Ed Boudreau, and Wayne Batteau, founded Flow Corporation, and tried to sell the products. Paul was the first to take the plunge and quit the Harvard gig, and became rich -- rich, that is, in Flow stock, which was, for now, worthless. Cash, however, was a problem.

Concurrently, David and Glea Humez decided to sell the house, and the new owner wanted the Grants out so he could move in his daughter. Marion found a nice place that was about a mile and a half away, and they purchased 20 Alpine Street in October of 1953.

This is 20 Alpine Street on January 6, 2006.

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(Click this image to view a huge, extremely detailed version.)

Barely three months after they moved in, on January 5, 1954, Carolyn Barbara Grant was born.

Alpine street worked out well. The street itself, technically a private road, was still unpaved when the Grants moved in, and Marion paid $200 to get it paved. This was a wise investment, as it greatly reduced the tonnage of mud that was introduced into the house each day, and made winter plowing workable. The family fit into the new house quite nicely, and the girls soon started to attend the nearby Pierce School, so Marion presently became president of the Pierce School PTA. Paul was working a lot of hours and was largely absent from the family, but Marion, having grown up with a father who had resigned a job and been unable to find another one for a decade, said little, hoping that Flow would pan out.

With a mere four children at that time, Marion was able to stay in touch with some of her old gang from Girls Latin and Teachers College and the Navy yard, especially "Coffee" (Shirley Coughlin) and Marion's best friend, Martha McGee McDonald. Martha, too, had a rapidly growing family, and was due to have her third child in January of 1955. However, during the pregnancy, Martha noticed lumps in her breasts. The doctor dismissed these as some side-effect of the pregnancy, but after the baby came, they realized it was breast cancer. Martha, 28, died in September, 1955. It was a great shock, and a big loss to both Marion and to her sister Nancy, who was also a close friend of Martha. This was certainly the most traumatic loss that Marion experienced between childhood and the loss of her own father in 1981. Marion "misses Martha to this day!"

But Marion didn't really have time to do much but soldier on. She was pregnant through the first half of 1955 and, on June 14, 1955, gave birth to their first boy, Colin Edmund Grant. His birth was a combination of high drama and high humor.

In those days, the doctors wisely drugged the mother throughout the childbirth process so that the she was conscious and able to assist, but recalled nothing later. (This was, I decree, a wonderful system, and they should go back to it.) After Colin was born, and after Marion woke up, a nurse came in and explained to Marion that she had a son. The conversation went something like this:

Nurse:	You have a son!
Marion:	No, I don't. I only have girls. I have FOUR -- now FIVE -- of them!
Nurse:	No really, we are quite sure that this is a boy!
Marion:	That would be very nice, but I don't believe you.
Nurse:	Let me get the baby. I'll show you.
	[Nurse exits, stage left, and returns holding a small, possibly human figure, wrapped in a pink blanket.]
Marion:	Ah, HAAA!! It's pink! It's a girl!
Nurse:	No, we've just run out of blue blankets.

Marion and the nurse undressed the young exhibitionist-in-training and determined, without making any size jokes, that this young creature was, after all, a boy.

However, it soon developed that the baby was in serious trouble. Marion was Rh negative and the baby was Rh positive, and their blood had mixed during the pregnancy, as is common with 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, etc. children. Marion's Rh negative antibodies were killing off the baby's Rh positives, and he was not expected to live. They transfused 100% of the baby's blood supply (then still a fairly new procedure), but did not announce the child's birth in the local papers, since his survival was anything but certain. There was a tense wait over several days.

I lived.

Marion, and eventually the baby, came home to a large but well functioning family. Marion's oldest daughter, Nancy, was, in typical oldest daughter fashion, and in the same way that Marion had done a generation before, helping to raise her younger sisters. While shopping with the kids in tow, Marion would often assign Nancy to keep an eye Dorothy, and assign Dorothy to watch Janet, and assign Janet to watch Carolyn. Colin, a mere lump, was not of concern. However, often it seemed like Nancy was doing most of the watching, which created some stress for the young manager.

Nonetheless, the years at Alpine Street were, for the most part, calm, happy, and well organized. This witness has few memories of those years other than that every meal was a huge production, and was attended by everybody. Large and complex systems of responsibility were developed, so that before each meal, one child might set the table, and after each meal, various children were responsible for clearing the tables, washing the dishes, drying and putting away the dishes, and sweeping the kitchen floor, all on a rotating basis. Later, after the family moved to College Ave, these systems were perfected (and ultimately adopted by the US armed forces). But things at Alpine Street were relatively well organized and peaceful.

This was to change, as we'll see.

For a few years after the Rh scare that came with Colin's birth, there were no more babies. At various times, this baby drought has been explained as a decision to stop having babies since they might well die from the Rh problem, and as a decision to stop having babies because, well, five is quite a lot of children anyway. Marion's most recent statement on the subject was, "Probably both because five was enough and because there was the Rh problem."

In 1957, some much needed help arrived in the form of Noreen Reen. Noreen, three month's Marion's senior, was the niece of an Alpine Street neighbor and lived nearby. She was disabled by various challenges and lived on a small disability pension, but was permitted to work part-time when her health permitted, as long as she did not earn so much money that it affected her pension eligibility. Marion hired Noreen to help out one day a week.

That day was Monday, and Mondays became the day when Marion could take the kids to the dentist, or to the doctor, or go to the hairdresser, or attend a parent-teacher conference, or do any number of things that she could not do with five children in hand. She would return home from these errands to a clean house, at least some washed and ironed laundry, and a happy group of little kids, who adored Noreen. Noreen was paid the spectacular amount of $5 a day (that's about $35 in 2006 dollars), and would never accept more for fear of screwing up her disability pension. She became a regular fixture in our home, even going on several summer vacations with us, until the early 60's, when her health problems necessitated that she stop working entirely.

Meanwhile, back in the late 50's, the baby drought did not last for long, since, as Marion once observed, "I could get pregnant just from being in the same room with Paul!" Peter Scott Grant was born on April 7, 1958. David Alexander Grant followed on July 26, 1959. The house at Alpine Street seemed to be shrinking, and when Marion became pregnant in 1960, it was obvious that the family needed more space.

Click Part 7 below to continue.

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