The Raymonds of Cambridge – 100 Years
 

Chapter 8: 1950-1972, Robert’s Baby Boomers Frequent 120 West Main Street

Tom Raymond, CCS Class of 1964

     After three decades—the Roaring Twenties, Great Depression, Second World War and the immediate postwar—the Raymonds of Cambridge were carrying on without the family patriarch.  Retired Army Col. Robert R. Raymond, Sr., had died in early 1944 at the height of the war and missed the historic Allied victories later the next year. He missed the safe return home from harm’s way of two of his sons, a son-in-law, and several nephews, and wasn’t able to celebrate the glorious VE and VJ Days after the defeat of the Axis, who’d killed 450,000 Americans and Allies and slaughtered hundreds of millions across the globe.

     After Robert died, Blossom lived another 17 years, to 1960, ever mourning her husband of five decades, ever clad in her widow’s garb of black. Fifty-plus years also marked the Raymond presence at 120 West Main street, from 1920-72, occupied by Caroline for the next twelve years in trust for the other surviving siblings, Katherine, Clara, Dick, Charles, and Virginia.

The Thermonuclear Age

    In the postwar years, formative for many of today’s Cambridge Central alumni, the nation emerged as the foremost economic and military power on the planet under the two-term presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (R).  But the headlines were grabbed by the hot war in Korea and the emerging Cold War, and the birth of the Atomic Age, a radical step-function change in Earth’s history. Eras and ages mark the planet’s timeline but typically run seamlessly from one to the next. An occasional major displacement occurs as when the dinosaurs were extinguished 65 million YA by a meteor strike in the Yucatan, the last of a half dozen mass extinctions over the 4.6 billion-year history of our watery Goldilocks orb.  Scientists today mark the newest “Year Zero” at January 1, 1950, when unnaturally high traces of the isotope Carbon 14 were detected in the atmosphere over the northern Pacific, from Soviet testing of fission bombs in Central Asia in the late 1940s. (Archeologists use bits of decaying C14 to date ancient organics like fossils and firepits.)  Never before had our air tasted of this deadly radioactive stuff, traces of which likely settled in Cambridge. Mankind’s existence would never be the same with the birth of the Thermonuclear Age.

     Likewise consider the nested subsets, the Space Age and the Age of Rock n’ Roll. Bob Raymond (CCS 1958) liked to remind us that Sputnik I was launched on his 17th birthday, October 4, 1957, though, of course, he preferred we’d have beaten the Soviets into orbit. And his all-time 45 record was Little Darlin’ by the Diamonds (I still have his vinyl, still mint!)  Meanwhile, the younger kids (CCS64, plus/minus) found BB guns, electric trains, and Barbie Dolls under our Christmas trees in the Fifties, while sporting Coonskin Caps and Mickey Mouse Ears and consuming Fizzies and PEZ.  

     Yet a pall was cast over the nation with the threat of mutually assured destruction. In 1953-54, U.S. fusion testing in Nevada and the Pacific put us only steps ahead of the Russians—an iron hand for peace, if you will; a first strike, if you insist.  But by late 1955, the Soviets countered with their own hydrogen bomb.  While we kids were fascinated with plastic Revell models of fighter jets, the real ones were ever-upgraded and strategic B-52s were ever-present over Canada, a senior general aboard, the next President of the United States, should Washington and Cheyenne Mountain not survive a Ruskie onslaught.

Cambridge Culture, the All-American Way

     American exceptionalism matured in the Fifties and Sixties and found a home in Cambridge, in the small businesses of the village, in the Washington County Post, at Mary McClellan Hospital, at CCS where (most) teachers then, Maurice O’Connor and John Herbert among them, truly understood what it meant. After the war, Detroit automakers refashioned assembly lines from tanks and jeeps to cars and pickups. Though at peace now, GM, in an age lingering still with social stratification, marketed five automobile grades to officers’ ranks: Cadillac for generals, Buick for colonels, Oldsmobile, majors, Pontiac, captains, and Chevrolet for lieutenants.  Lt. Col. Charles W. Raymond was promoted to full colonel and purchased a gleaming new dark green 1949 Buick Super, with its signature grill-work of chrome, said to be the auto industry’s “Million-Dollar Grin” in America’s postwar celebratory mood. 

     New ’Vettes and T-birds prowled the streets.  Icons like Elvis, Marilyn, and James Dean were born in the mid-fifties. The germanium transistor gave way to silicon, today’s workhorse semiconductor. Electronics became commonplace, table top AM radios, then FM, color television, tape recorders. The tube made its way into Cambridge living rooms gratis Charley Ackley and his store on West Main, among others.  By the late 1950s, a radio the size of a cigarette pack fit in your shirt pocket, the pack of weeds rolled up in your T-shirt sleeve (tobacco only, marijuana would “kill you”.) Radar was refined for passenger jets like Boeing’s new 707, and lasers were born in labs. First-gen computers, solar batteries, and polypropylene products were unveiled, along with TV dinners and Tang. Fans at Vitello’s barbershop chatted up Willie, Mickey and the Duke, yet the two NL teams, Ebetts Field and the Polo Grounds, fled to the Coast, breaking hearts from Ash Grove to South Cambridge.

     The U.S. dailies reported disasters like Hurricane Diane in New England, August 1955, which killed 200 with a billion dollars in damage.  Public transit was, still is, risky: Over the Grand Canyon, June 1956, a United Airlines DC-7 collided with a TWA Super Connie, killing all 128 aboard. The next month in the dark off Nantucket, the Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria plowed into the Swedish liner Stockholm, resulting in 51 deaths and sending the Doria to the depths. Britain and France freed the Suez Canal, an international waterway, from Egypt, but the way was paved for Russia to poke its nose into the region; Aswan Dam destroyed the Nile; environmentalists and Socialists take note. U.S. troops appeared at a Little Rock school to level the playing field for kids from Memphis to Miami, which commenced the march toward the 1964/65 Civil Rights/Voting Rights Acts, GOP measures, incidentally. On the upside, the polio vaccine was the drug of the decade and the double-helix of DNA was unraveled. The Raymonds heard all this on NBC Monitor, read all about it in U.S. News and World Report and in the NYT—when “All the News That’s Fit to Print” really was unbiased, fair and balanced.

Be Fruitful and Multiply

     Quite a time, the 1950s, experienced in wonder and awe by a gentle lady in her late seventies-early eighties, Blossom King Raymond, of 120 West Main Street.  Likewise, her grandkids, both adult and maturing, and her growing great-grands, most of whom visited on summer vacations and the larger family gatherings on the traditional Christian and American holidays, from 1950-1960, Blossom’s last year. Her DNA arrived from nearby New York venues, from New England and the Middle Atlantic, and from beyond E.S.T.

     Through 1960, Granny—as she was affectionally known by the long generation, 1918-1950, of 17 grandchildren who lived to adulthood—greeted two more grandsons (Tom, 1946; Jon, 1950), and 26 more great-grandchildren. In the years after she passed, 13 more great-grands greeted the dawn, for a total of 40 in this latest generation: Go forth, be ye fruitful and multiply. (Gen, 1:28, KJV.)  For the lineage narrative of the postwar Raymonds, the following could read like the lengthy begats of Genesis, but we spare the reader and truncate it. (“To truncate”, “to shorten”, for those in Rio Linda and Vly Summit.)

The Katherine Burlingames

     In the late Forties, Blossom’s daughter Katherine Burlingame, widowed by Cris in 1940, moved to Cambridge to be with her mother and sister. (Aunt Cang to her army of nephews and nieces and grands, likely got the moniker in her youth from siblings who fumbled with “Caroline”.)  Kattie had remarried, to Charles Jackson, a retired merchant seaman, Uncle Charlie to the grandkids. They lived, not at 120, but down the street on Academy, in a modest home they billed “Snug Harbor”. After the war, Kattie’s four Burlingame sons scattered about the country following careers and education, John to Nebraska, Fred to Iowa, Ed to Long Island, while Bob remained in upstate New York.  From the mid-1940s to the early ’60s, they made their mother, Kattie, smile fifteen times, a grandmother.  

     Bob and his wife Nancy were both CCS grads. He received degrees from Colgate in Physical Education, played semi-pro baseball in upstate New York with his long-time buddy Ray Luke, and forged a successfully career at Albany State as the varsity baseball and wrestling coach. For several decades, Cambridge was an hour away for Bob and Nan, as cousins Wendy (b. 1951) and Markie (1955) frequented the halls and playrooms of 120 West Main (later Guilderland High grads.) The other Burlingames and grandkids would also make it up to Grandma Moses Country, to see Granny Blossom and Cang, Kattie and Charles through those years.  Clara and Dick would also return to live briefly in Cambridge.

Robert R Raymond, Jr.

    Stepping back a generation, after 30 years of Army service, Blossom’s son, Robert R. Raymond, Jr. (USMA 1919), retired in 1949.  Uncle Bob, to the cousins, never married and spent his remaining years in Cambridge and a small town in Connecticut.  Too young, Bob died of a heart attack in 1953.  As nine years before, the widow Raymond stood graveside at West Point as her eldest son was buried. A mother should never have to outlive a child.

The Clara Spanglers: Ranging from coast to coast

     Blossom’s three Spangler granddaughters married Navy personnel during mid-century. Barbara (Bob Kuhne, USNA 1949); Betty (Chick Ward, sailor); and Margot (Stan Krolczyk, Navy pilot, WWII Pacific vet), were stationed around the country. They bore Clara and Paul Spangler nine grandchildren. Al, the youngest (married later, no blood children), was appointed to West Point in 1955, though he withdrew in his sophomore year with a medical issue. He graduated from Univ. Wisconsin and pursued a respected engineering career in the hush-hush defense industry during the Cold War. The Spangler grandkids and great-grands visited 120 on occasion from the DC area, from Florida, Illinois, and California.

The Richard Raymonds: Virginia

     Richard (Dick) Raymond III—born at Mary McClellan in 1930 with early schooling in Cambridge—added to the rising “Raymond Regiment” or “Raymond Armada”, given that RR3 was USNA 1954, and other first cousins were or would be sailors.  He and his sister, Caroline King Raymond (Kelly)—Rob and Blos’s only granddaughter with the surname Raymond—presented their parents with a total of six grandchildren.

The Virginia Otts: Oregon, Germany

     The children of Virginia (Cambridge High 1929) and retired Col. Chester Ott (USMA 1931, Corps of Engineers)—Ginny, John, and Elizabeth (Buff)—bore eleven grandchildren for Virginia; many visited the old homestead in the Fifties through the Seventies while 120 was still in the family. In the Sixties, Chester directed Radio Free Europe in West Germany.

The Charles W. Raymonds: Fort Monroe

     In summer of 1947, Charles, lieut. colonel U.S. Artillery, received orders to historic Fort Monroe, which commands the southern waters of Chesapeake Bay and the entrance from the Atlantic. (Fortress Monroe was built in the 1820s after the Brits burned our nation’s capital during the War of 1812.)  Fast forward, April 4, 1950: Charles and Anita’s fourth son, Jonathan Wainwright, arrived at the post hospital and was named in the finest of military traditions, for Gen. Jonathan Wainwright. The general sent a letter of appreciation for the honor.  (Recall that in April-May 1942, Wainwright was left in command of the U.S. and Philippine forces by Gen. Douglas MacArthur: “I shall return”, which he did. The Allies, POWs of the invading Japanese, were subjected to the brutalities of the Bataan Death March.  So, in September 1945, Wainwright had stood at MacArthur’s side on the bridge of the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, as the Japs were ordered to sign the surrender.)

Travel Log, 1951-1960: Along the Atlantic Seaboard

     In the years shy of passenger jets and Eisenhower’s Interstate System, trains, lake ferries, and bayliners were the way to go long-distance, the car only if one could tolerate every little bump, burg and stoplight en route. In the Fifties, a trip of 500 miles between Cambridge and the southern Tidewater took all day by rail or auto, and overnight down the Chesapeake, a 12-hour trip today. The Old Baltimore Steam Packet Company (1840-1962) plied the waters with the Elisha Lee, The City of Richmond and others between Baltimore and Old Point Comfort on Hampton Roads across from Norfolk. In late 1950, Blossom and Cang made the trip to meet the last grandchild, Jonathan, transiting by NY Central to Manhattan, B&O to Baltimore, and overnight down the Bay. Through the end of 1951, the Charles Raymonds reversed the trip, with Buick aboard, to Balto and then the many miles of pavement up past NYC, and on to Cambridge, via Route 9W or Taconic State Parkway. But summers and holidays gave way to a beckoning call from the West Coast.

     New orders were cut for Charles from Monroe to Monterey and the Army Language School, where he’d study Korean for duty over there.  Our travel-log for the balance of the Fifties follows, as we sampled new cultures beyond the East Coast, those of the pioneers and Southwest Indians, our own California Dreamin’ and, at decade’s end, Latin America.

Monterey, CA (January 1952-December 1954): Three years from Cambridge.

     For the boys—Charles (15-17), Bob (12-14), Tom (6-8) and Jon (2-4)—two cross-country road trips drew American history and geography from the pages of texts and set them before marveling eyes along stretches of classic Route 66, through NM, AZ, NV, CA. The tourist draws were/are dramatic, Pike’s Peak, Painted Desert, Meteor Crater, Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam; and we found a quaint Las Vegas well before the Rat Pack!  El Camino Real and Steinbeck’s Cannery Row intrigued us as did a Great White attack in Monterey Bay in 1952, later referenced in 1975’s Jaws.

West Hartford, CT (January 1955-September 1957): Frequent visits to Cambridge.

     After three years in mild Monterey—the colonel traded his 1949 Buick for a 1952 model—we spent Christmas 1954 back home in the warmth of 120.  But Tom was next dropped down in Hartford, in January, in 20 degrees, in the icy wind, cruel and unusual punishment (for one who thought he was now a California boy, a notion soon faded.) After Navaho and Hopi, Spanish friars and conquistadors, NE Indians, Pilgrims and Puritans were the study in third-sixth in West Hartford. Frequent trips to Cambridge, 1955-57, allowed me to meet future CCS64 classmates, in particular the Academy Street Gang, sweet gals all.  We also spent good time out in Coila at Cousin Irwin and Sally Perry’s sheep and alfalfa farm, bailing hay and bagging oats in summer, skating in winter.

Change of Duty Station (October 1957-July 1958): In-transit.

     With new orders, we took nine months in-transit to Nicaragua via Cambridge (one month) and Washington, DC (eight.)  Tom attended Patrician Hall for all of October in 6th grade, and still cherishes a memorable Halloween party in Joe and Dottie Canzeri’s basement, which featured a Wurlitzer spinning the 45s! In DC, the colonel’s mission brief and Spanish brush-up prepped him for assignment to U.S. Southern Command, HQ Canal Zone. With assignment to Managua, Charles would be El Jefe, Chief, U.S Army Mission, a contingent of US soldiers, tactical advisors to La Guardia National, Gen. Tachito Somosa, commanding (El Vampiro, aka butcher.)  From Brooklyn Navy Yard, the route took us to San Juan, Gitmo, the Canal Zone, going and coming.  Bob, at Navy boot camp, began a 3-year hitch, including being stationed in San Juan where we linked up one day. Chuck joined us southbound, later northbound, and visited us briefly in mid-tour, while attending UCONN, 1957-60.

Managua (July 1958-April 60): Temperatures were hot and hotter.

     For two years we had no AC, yet fans and lake breezes made it a bit bearable. Jon and Tom attended the American School, rubbing elbows with U.S. military dependents and those of Embassy officials, plus Nica-Europeans and Nica elites, including a couple of Samosa kids. Active stratovolcanoes and tremblors, and third-world barrios opened eyes to banana republic land and culture, and Latin American politics.  Placid the first year, not so the next, when Castro grabbed Cuba in 1959.

     That year, 1959, came in like an iguana and went out like a macaw, bold colors, loud squawks (yeah, yeah, sorry, akin to “dark and stormy night.”)  The New Year, the new decade of the Sixties, was ushered in with Tom a guest of a classmate in San Juan del Sur, a sleepy little Pacific fishing village with plenty of history. In 1866, a young Samuel Clemens passed through from Hawaii en route to fame as Mark Twain. In the 1980s, the Ruskies sought to build a sub base there aimed at America’s underbelly. Ronald Reagan said nyet!  San Juan, no longer recognizable by ’60s standards, is featured on TV real estate shows.

     In Spring 1960, Col. Raymond received papers to report Stateside, to Columbus, OH, for his last duty station after 30 years. Chuck, Cadet Colonel, UCONN ROTC, pinned on his second lieutenant bars in June 1960, to begin his own career.  Bob was in the third year of his Navy enlistment in San Juan, and Tom and Jon entered school in Columbus, just for the fall semester.  We’d be back in Cambridge for good in the winter of 1961.

BKR: God Bless and Rest in Peace

     During early 1960, Blossom was up the hill at Mary McClellan. Then on November 25, age 84, at home and in the care of daughters Caroline and Clara, she passed into the presence of the Lord. By virtue of her father, her husband, father-in-law and sons and offspring, she was the quintessential Army daughter.  Mrs. Robert R. Raymond Sr. was thus interred in the West Point Cemetery with Robert, near the gravesites of other family members, and a stone’s throw from that of George Custer, Yellow-Hair … another story for another time.

     This chapter runs through 1972, only because that was the very last year that 120 West Main Street was in the family. Charles retired from the Army to Cambridge in January 1961 and purchased a home of his own down the street.  The next chapter, picking up the 1960s again, will unpack that decade only a little because, to many readers, those were “current events” rather than “history.” And that’s why we have class reunions.

Next Time - Chapter 9: 1961-1995, The Charles W. Raymond Family at 1 Gilmore Avenue