by Colin Edmund Grant
January 12, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Colin Edmund Grant

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With the family home at Alpine Street bursting at the seems, and Marion now preparing for their eighth child, they needed a larger home. This was a real problem, because entrepreneur Paul had not gotten a meaningful raise in ten years, and large houses cost more than the family could afford. However, they managed to find a house that could fit the family and that they could pay for. It was a large house on a tiny lot of land, and the strange configuration kept the price lower than it might otherwise have been. There were nine rooms and two and a half bathrooms, along with a sun-porch that could be converted into year-round living space, and a large semi-finished basement that could serve as a playroom and, later on, bedroom.

The family sold 20 Alpine Street, bought 7 College Ave, and moved in.

This is 7 College Avenue on January 6, 2006.

(Click this image to enlarge.)

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

But the larger house brought larger money problems (there was never enough), and this was a continuing source of stress for Marion and Paul. Finally, Marion, who had been paying the bills and doing the family books since they were married, turned the books over to Paul, with the message, "You have got to get a raise."

On November 16, 1960, Andrew William Grant was born. As always, the baby was a welcome addition to the family, but Marion decided that finally, enough was enough. Although the church had taught her that it was a sin to do so, she asked the family doctor about birth control.

"I was wondering when you were going to ask!" was his reply. It seems that in those days in Massachusetts, birth control was legal, but doctors were not permitted to bring up the subject. The woman had to ask. And good, Catholic Marion had to be pushed to the breaking point before she had the wisdom to do what was right, whether the church thought it was right or not.

So the family did not get any larger, but it was already quite a gang, and the 60's was a wild time both inside and outside the Grant home. There were eight kids, and all of them seemed to be bright, aggressive, boisterous, busy, frantic, and endlessly inquisitive. While Carolyn was upstairs climbing out a window, Colin was downstairs shoving a fork into a 120 volt wall socket ("Mamma! It went BOOOOM!"). While Nancy was practicing the piano in the living room, trying to drown out Janet, who was playing records in the room immediately above Nancy and trying to drown HER out, and Dorothy was trying to study calculus in the next room, Peter, David and Andrew played street hockey in the basement, whacking each other with hockey sticks with frenzied delight. In the midst of all this, Marion was washing the floors, doing the laundry, mending the clothes, ironing the shirts, cooking the meals, breaking up fights, disciplining a misdeed, and starting all over again tomorrow.

To the uninitiated, it seemed like chaos, and maybe it was. Marion's sister Nancy, who had six kids of her own, remembers visiting on some Sundays. Her husband and children, rather quiet and proper, were quite a different strain of human from the Grants, and their memories of our home include such things as cats racing in and out of holes in the wall (it was actually a broken window, which was fixed later that day), bloody mayhem (somebody got a very bloody nose), masses of shouting children rushing about madly in all directions at once (this was completely accurate), and a tangle of flesh tumbling down the stairs in a mad pummel (this was typically some combination of Carolyn, Colin, Peter, David and Andrew rolling down the front stairs, pounding on one another over some hideous grievance).

Through it all, Marion managed to be politically active, being intimately involved with the PTA and the League of Women Voters and the Arlington Citizens for Youth, and to maintain some friendships. This was easy, because the world at that time was full of huge families, and full of mothers who were in the same boat as Marion. In the house behind us lived the Dunkerley family, which consisted of Professor Dunkerley (a professor at Tufts), Catherine "Kay" Dunkerley, and their six kids. The Dunkerleys served to make our house look tidy and sane by comparison, but Marion and Kay were close friends. Marie Mullally, a friend since the Alpine Street days, was a sometimes visitor. And the folks across the street, Peg and Doc (Matt) Derow (he was a renowned research MD at BU), were wonderful people, even if they were crazy enough to have up to 100 cats a time (the cats would periodically die in huge and horrible plagues).

The family relationships were both permanent and malleable. Daughter Janet (child #3) once observed that there were three distinct sets of offspring: the four girls, the three "little boys," and Colin, who was too old to mix much with the little boys, but uninterested in and definitely not one of the girls. The exact groupings and alliances changed from week to week, but when all was said and done, the kids stuck together when threatened by aliens.

The number of people, the amount of work, the challenge of raising such a high energy and high maintenance crew, and the never ending financial stress was hard on Marion. Five kids had been one thing, but eight was close to impossible. "Life was manageable with five kids, but the last three nearly broke my neck." And sometimes she nearly broke their necks, as she became quite adept with a penny-loafer, an always convenient and apt device for corporal punishment.

Still, the family more-or-less worked. The kids all came home reliably, and no one flunked out of school (god knows I tried), and there was plenty of food to eat, often some glop (American chop suey, pot roast, beef stew, Spanish rice, chili) that would last for days on the stove and feed a large family on the cheap. Marion, now universally known as Ma!! (because a quiet, restrained, "Oh, mother, dear?" would not serve to get her attention in the general hubbub), did her best to make each of her children feel like a favorite. Each of my brothers has, at one time or another, confidentially told me that he was a little embarrassed to have been so obviously Ma's favorite. I am not sure about my sisters, but I bet they feel the same way. They are all wrong -- I was.

Both on Alpine Street and on College Ave, Sunday was a special day. After church, we would, on most Sundays, pile the entire family into a big old station wagon (at some point we had finally gotten a car) and head off to some adventure. The adventure might be a visit to Marion's parents, or Paul's mother, or some uncles and aunt and cousins, but more often was a trip to the Science Museum or the Bunker Hill Monument or the USS Constitution or Fort McClary (in Kittery, Maine) or the Peabody Museum or the Harvard Museum or the Museum of Fine Arts (we loved the mummies) or any one of several other educational activities. Education, we learned, was to be held in the highest esteem, and was not just something that you did in school.

At Marion's behest, Paul made an effort to be a bigger presence in his young sons' lives than he had been in his daughters', and he was at least somewhat successful at that.

And for all the financial worry, it's not like the family was naked or starving. The family had a membership in the Winchester Boat Club, which was barely a mile from the house, and which provided a swimming pool and a supervised place for the kids to hang around. Paul managed to acquire and maintain a 16' racing class sail boat called a Snipe, which he kept at the Boat Club and raced (with various offspring as the one-man crew) up to six races each weekend during the summer. Most of the kids played and owned a musical instrument, and at one time, you would find the following instruments stored in cases under the baby grand piano that was in the living room: flute, clarinet, bassoon, Eb horn, trumpet, French horn, guitar, trombone, euphonium, bass guitar, banjo (banjo!?!), sousaphone, and tuba. The family had a one- or two-week vacation almost every summer, staying at various places on Cape Cod and in Maine, notably the Humez's (old friends from Scituate Street) huge and ancient house on the ocean in Ellsworth, Maine. Everybody, from Paul and Marion to little Andy and the two cats, had friends and activities that made the house an upbeat place to be. All in all, those were happy years.

But money continued to be a problem. Now and then, something good would happen, like the time when Paul managed to sell a bunch of Flow stock and cut the mortgage on 7 College Avenue from $18,000 to $9,000. Some years, Marion worked full time as a teacher to help out, but it was impossible to do that and run the house for long. Other years, she would work as a substitute teacher for a few extra dollars. Some summers, she worked at Project Head Start for a few more dollars.

But just as the older kids were preparing to head off to various colleges and universities, Flow Corporation, by now called Datametrics after various mergers, and a wholly owned subsidiary of CGS Scientific Corporation, was victimized by a fraud perpetuated by the CGS management. The family's stock in Datametrics, illiquid but on paper worth over $200,000, and earmarked for college and retirement, was suddenly worthless. On top of everything else, what with the long series of mergers and acquisitions, and having discovered that he liked engineering much more than managing, Paul was by then just another engineer there, running a tiny department, and working for people for whom he had little professional regard.

As the family entered the 70's, things were bleak, although the kids were, for the most part, blissfully unaware of the situation. Two and then three and then four kids were in college, which had to be paid for. Marion was teaching again, which was good for the finances and bad for the home. The observant might have been able to tell that things were getting desperate when Paul sold the Snipe, his 16' racing class sailboat, for $1,500 to pay bills, and his hair turned white almost overnight.

To make matters even worse, by 1973 the Massachusetts economy was a complete disaster, in large part because Nixon, having lost the election in exactly one state (Massachusetts), managed to close down NASA in Cambridge. This directly cost Bay Staters thousands of jobs, and indirectly cost thousands more. The state, desperate to come up with the cash to cover massive unemployment costs and make up for plummeting income tax collections, passed along numerous expenses to the towns, who raised property taxes to dizzying heights. For the privilege of living at 7 College Ave, a property worth perhaps $25,000, the Grants were paying over $2,000 a year in property taxes, well more than the mortgage payment itself.

Marion offered to go back to work permanently, but qualified that if she were to do that, she'd need some hired help around the house.

No raise was in sight. The numbers did not work. Marion was unhappy at home, and Paul was unhappy at work. Something had to give.

Click Part 8 below to continue.

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