The Raymonds of Cambridge – 100 Years
 

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

Tom Raymond, CCS Class of 1964

Editor’s Note: This chapter, the ninth of ten envisioned in the spring of 2018, was drafted beginning on Veteran’s Day, November 11, 2018, as bells tolled at 11 AM in France and in time zones following around the world, including EST in Cambridge at Hubbard Hall and the village churches.  This will be the last in the series, however, as Chapter 10 (1995-2020, Legacies and Echoes) is folded into this final entry.

     After 30 years on active duty in the U. S. Army (1931-61), Col. Charles W. Raymond II, Field Artillery, retired to Cambridge, his hometown since 1920, with his wife, Anita, and two younger sons. His father, Robert, an Army colonel as well, was on active duty a century ago, 1918, nearing the end of his career, with his unit scheduled for the Army Expeditionary Forces in Europe just before the end of “The Great War.”  A young Charles in the 1920s, therefore, deemed it his duty to make the Army his profession, as his father and grandfather before him, both West Pointers.  Charles was a combat veteran of WWII; from his campaigns in North Africa and Italy, he could tell us things we’d not want to hear, of which he rarely spoke. During the Korean War, he was a military attaché, and he performed senior officer duties during the Cold War.  His father had died in 1944 and his mother, Blossom, the previous autumn, 1960, so when Charles returned to Cambridge in January 1961, he assumed the mantle of Raymond family patriarch in the village, a role served for three decades. He quickly renewed old acquaintances from his years in and out of town, including with Bob McWhorter, Ken Gottry Sr., Charley Ackley, and others.

     This chapter is not an excerpt from any detailed biography of my father, as I’ve written none for him as I had earlier ancestors. Though I do have forty years of memories of him, from age three in 1949 in Cambridge, to 1989 when we laid him to rest at West Point, I leave the prospect to one or another of his grandkids who might be so inspired. What follows, though, is a look at his 28 years back home in Cambridge, from 1961 to 1989, and to 1995 when the colonel’s home was sold and briefly to the present. In 1961, Charles settled into a well-earned retirement after years in combat zones and tense diplomatic missions in South Korea and Central America. He was an active communicant at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church with multiple terms on the vestry. He wrote for The Washington County Post and served with the Cambridge Fire Department. He also took advantage of the GI Bill, pursuing two advanced degrees at Albany State, in American History and English Literature. He brought rich details of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and other battles into the Raymond household, as well as Beowulf and, forsooth, Macbeth.  He was a substitute teacher in the area and taught a year of junior high in Hoosick Falls, then decided on full-time retirement.

     New Year’s Day 1961 ushered in the Sixties—there was no calendar Year Zero—1960 was thus the last of the Fifties. Cambridge residents had just exchanged Christmas cards with a 4-cent stamp, the latest Madonna-and-Child or something of Santa. Elvis topped the charts with Are You Lonesome Tonight? and Ed Sullivan brought us Sunday night acts, pre-Beatles, pre-Rolling Stones. Grandma Moses passed at 101 after putting Washington County on the map. The 1960 Census registered 180 million (today 330M) and the new 50-star flag—Alaska and Hawaii just admitted—stood on the CCS auditorium stage.  Electricity-guzzling filament Christmas lights, suspended zig-zag over Main Street along the three business districts above the old yellow bricks, were soon to come down.  That pavement caused tire chains to sing in the winter air and reverberate off the white clapboard Colonials and Victorians that sported wrap-around porches and black or green shutters.  These were houses you’d pick up for $16K in 1961 in Cambridge, in mid-winter, in the middle of a recession; which the colonel did, at 1 Gilmore Avenue, off West Main Street.  

     1961 dawned with America at peace but on alert, seven years into the standoff across the Korean DMZ, entrenched in Europe and Japan, and with the US Fleet on patrol beneath the waves, on the seven seas, primarily a dozen flattops of five acres of sovereign American territory each (predecessors, if you will, of those of Top Gun.)  First part of the decade went swimmingly across America, while the second half blew in a socio-political hurricane.  Most of you know that, you were there. Charles watched it unfold through the local, national, and Army press, and shared the news with the family.  He was a faithful husband, twice it turns out, and a supportive, encouraging father, thanking God his sons continued the long family tradition of volunteering for the military—two Army, two Navy—and not slinking off to Canada. To Charles, “CO” meant Commanding Officer, not the too-often, rather convenient “Conscientious Objector.”

     For a year he was a widower.  Anita died suddenly in September 1961, less than a year into their new life back in Cambridge. The older boys, men, Charles and Bob, were on their own, while the younger two attended CCS. Chuck began his own career path as an Army officer and started a family.  Bob returned home to set up shop at 1 Gilmore, and launched a successful career as a tool and die engineer.  He became a long-time friend of the monks of New Skete and was also a Cambridge historian of note, a strong voice to save the area covered bridges, a skilled model builder, and a detailed graphic artist.

     Sensing that Tom, a CCS sophomore, and Jon, grade school, could use a woman’s touch around the house, Charles soon remarried, to Marcia Clark of White Creek.  But not without asking the boys’ permissions, granted, and that of Anita’s brothers in Colorado, also seeking their approval to bring a “stranger” into their nephews’ home. “Life is for the living”, wrote one to his brother-in-law. Anita, of course, was sorely missed, never sharing her sons’ milestones, careers, adventures, marriages, grandchildren, successes, set-backs.

     Anita Cervi Raymond, 1930s Army Nurse, was buried at West Point with full military honors at the site reserved for Charles one day (1989), as well as Marcia (2008.)  The flag draped over Nita’s coffin was posted daily for years out front of 1 Gilmore. Interestingly, the USMA Commandant in 1961 was General William Westmoreland who invited the family to his quarters across the road from the WP Cemetery. Off to Vietnam soon, you recall that Westy was raked over the coals by our lefty politicians, who got us into the mess in the first place—JFK and LBJ—and our leftist press, no friends to America. (Heard on the street, then as now: Republicans defend the USA, the other side, their patriotism.)

     Once settled together, Charles and Marcia actively engaged in Cambridge community projects. Charles befriended Gardner Cullinan and Nick Mahoney and contributed to the WC Post with a column for the Cambridge Fire Department, CFD Sparks; he served also as a member of CFD Fire Police. For the Post under the pseudonym Miro Aloeste (Spanish “I look to the west”), he crafted high-jinked poetry, in limericks, sonnets and iambic, and otherwise sketchy, pentameter.  (Those who’ve been on safari may appreciate the tale of a famous poet who carelessly encountered a prized lioness named Laurie in an African National Park: He became the poet Laurie ate.) Marcia was herself an active member for years in the local Book Club and the Cambridge Farm and Garden Club.  Together they took a number of sojourns out of town, road trips to Florida, a tour boat up the Intracoastal Waterway from Miami to New York, to the West Coast and Hawaii, to Holland to see the tulips, and to the Canary Islands, where they rode camels to the top of a volcano.

     Through the years Marcia brought all the warmth and love to 1 Gilmore Avenue that a “substitute” wife, step-mom, grandma, with no prior experience, could be expected to offer. She wrote to me weekly for forty years with news of home.  Though the boys’ Aunt Kattie (Burlingame) and Uncle Charlie Jackson had moved to Florida, the extended family in Cambridge included Aunt Cang at 120 West Main, and Aunt Clara (Spangler) on East Main, who returned from the West Coast for a decade.  Bob and Nan Burlingame in Albany, the Clarks in White Creek, and Irwin and Sally Perry out in Coila were also regular guests at Easter, T-Day, and Xmas dinners. Charles and Marcia became grandparents in 1962 and 1963, as Chuck and Lucy brought Charles Walker Raymond IV and Peter Timothy Raymond into the fold.  (Four great-grandchildren would be born in the 1990s, two also volunteering for the Armed Forces.)

     Other highlights included Charles and the boys floating down the Battenkill in the Annual Predicted Log Race on rafts he made from Clorox Bleach bottles, The Unthinkable Bottleship and Claw Rocks, to name two. CWRII was also active in his Alumni Association (USMA 1931), and he and Marcia attended West Point football games down on the Hudson. While Bob and Jon lived in Cambridge over the years, Chuck and Tom frequently visited, CWRIII from duty stations around the country—he married Lorraine Santerre in 1976—and Tom from a computer chip engineering career out on the West Coast (1972-2012), in Silicon Desert (Mesa, AZ), Silicon Valley (San Jose, CA), Silicon Prairie (Austin, TX) and Silicon Forest (Portland, OR.)  

     Colonel Raymond was a lifetime Republican; the reasons are clear: his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were likewise.  Indeed, Robert Raikes Raymond was an antebellum founder of the GOP, a pastor and fiery abolitionist who rubbed elbows with Frederick Douglass while running an Underground Railroad through Syracuse. During his career, Charles naturally supported General, then President Dwight D. Eisenhower (USMA 1915, “The Class the Stars Fell Upon.”)  When Ike retired from the White House in 1960, he warned of a continuing threat, stark lessons Charles passed along to his sons.  Said Ike, “We face a hostile ideology–global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.”  The threat, of course, Communism/Socialism.  So sad that neither DDE (d. March 1969) nor CWRII (d. March 1989) lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 and the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union by 1991, engineered by—it says in my (unrevised) history book—none other than Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and George Bush 41.

     Charles missed several major family events after his passing.  In May 1993, the largest Raymond family reunion in years kicked off in Cambridge as cousins from near and far visited the village of their grandparents. Some were given a tour of 120 West Main (sold in 1972), inside and out, by the owners, allowing fond and maybe haunting memories from the ’40s and ’50s to come rushing back.  We mustered the next day at West Point, more of us, two dozen perhaps, on the occasion of the 100-Year Commemoration of the Class of 1893 of Robert R. Raymond Sr. His last surviving child, Virginia Raymond Ott (Cambridge Union 1929), spoke for her father and his progeny, coincident also with the graduation in June of the Class of 1993, that of Carl Raymond Ott, Virginia’s grandson and the latest in the Long Grey Line of Raymonds.  (There are more Raymonds in the WP Cemetery than any other family name, descendants of Charles W. Raymond, USMA 1865, #1 in his class.)

     Two years later, in April 1995, Charles’ second son, Bob, died and was interred in the shadow of Two Tops, at New Skete Monastery. As a Navy veteran, Bob received full military honors by the local American Legion.

     Then in June 1999, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and the newly reopened Cambridge Hotel—refurbished by a group of dedicated local citizens who highly prized the icon that the hotel was for well over a century—hosted the family on the occasion of the 50th wedding anniversary of Bob and Nan Burlingame, living then in Sarasota, Florida. Sadly, we reconvened at St. Luke’s just two years later in the summer of 2001 for a requiem for Bob who, as a Navy veteran, was interred at the National Cemetery in Saratoga Springs. Son Mark also arranged for a surprise 50th birthday party for his sister Wendy with a large contingent of Burlingame cousins from Boston in attendance.

     Three months later the Twin Towers fell, the Pentagon was attacked, heroes died in a Pennsylvania field….

Wrap-up

     This nine-month excursion in the CCS Indians Alumni website was initially conceived to reflect on a century of Raymond presence in Cambridge, as well as the 100th anniversary of the Armistice of WWI (1914-18), trusting it adequately did so.  The Eagle Press just ran a couple of supplementary and highly detailed accounts on the “War to End all Wars”, by Al Cormier of Salem and Ken Gottry of Cambridge. (The cynic says WWII began on November 12, 1918, since Germany was not compelled to sign a surrender with future “no-nos” spelled out.) America entered the fray late, in early 1917, yet by the end of the next year we had two million doughboys and medical staff “Over There”, with another two million staged to go, including Col. Robert R. Raymond Sr., U.S Army Corps of Engineers.

     It’s said that one billion shells fell on France during those four years. WWI was launched, though, by a centuries-old clash of egos between France and Germany with roots not only in the Franco-Prussian War of 1880, but much earlier with the French Revolution of 1789, Napoleon’s First Republic. He calculated that his nation’s newly enlightened mood of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—albeit engineered with the guillotine—morally, ethically authorized France’s expansion across Europe. Yet not once, but twice in the 20th century, did we, Uncle Sam, bail the French out through our spilled blood; Normandy might as well be sovereign American and Commonwealth territory. And we’re poised to pull them out of the frying pan again, anytime. One of the Raymond boys once observed that it’s no coincidence that the colors of the U.S., the U.K., and France are identical: red, white, and blue; bleu, blanc, rouge; and we three would stand back-to-back-to-back to take on all comers. Yet while the French can be fierce fighters, and we do thank them for Lafayette and the French Navy of 1781, every so now and then we Yanks have to lean over and smack our sometimes-petulant brother upside the head, for their own good, of course.

     It’s said our history is truly written, not in the history books, but in our homes at the kitchen and dining room tables, lessons taught of character and citizenship.  This was the case at 1 Gilmore Avenue, truthful, fact-filled discussions of American patriotism and nationalism. Which, by the way, are not “opposites”, not mutually exclusive, as heard recently from France’s Emmanuel Macron (smack!), but are natural complements. Furthermore, American nationalism does not imply “white nationalism”, which is inferred purely by petty partisan political pandering and posturing.  (Sorry, alliteration run amuck.)

     Robert and Charles were faithful to Jesus Christ, to the Episcopal Church and to Holy Scripture. Charles, in particular, advised his sons, each in turn, that when ordered to the field or fleet, to be sure to check in with the chaplain and plan to attend mass every week, whether in a chapel, a tent, or on a ship’s forecastle.  Charles was also a reader of the Book of Common Prayer.  Passages from the 1928 BCP, below, are reflective of the 20th century conflicts faced by the Raymonds, the Burlingames, Spanglers and Otts, and other kin. Charles surely uttered these over the years for himself, for his troops, and his family facing hostile fire on land, at sea, in the air.

From the Book of Common Prayer

In Time of War and Tumults

O Almighty God, the Supreme Governor of all things, whose power no creature is able to resist, to whom it belongeth justly to punish sinners, and to be merciful to those who truly repent; Save and deliver us, we humbly beseech thee, from the hands of our enemies; that we, being armed with thy defense, may be preserved evermore from all perils, to glorify thee, who are the only giver of all victory; through the merits of thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.   

For the Army, for Robert’s Soldiers and Airmen:

Robert R. Raymond Jr., Cris Burlingame, Charles W. Raymond II, Chester W. Ott, Richard Raymond II, John H. Burlingame, Alfred W. Burlingame, Edwin C. Burlingame, Paul A. Spangler, John Skelton Ott, Floyd K. Nolen, Charles W. Raymond III, Jonathan W. Raymond, Carl R. Ott, Kaitlynn M. Raymond.  

O Lord God of Hosts, stretch forth, we pray thee, thine almighty arm to strengthen and protect the soldiers of our country. Support them in the day of battle, and in time of peace keep them safe from all evil; endue them with courage and loyalty; and grant them in all things they may serve without reproach; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

For the Navy, for Robert’s Sailors and Marines:

Paul E. Spangler, Robert R. Burlingame, Richard Raymond III, Robert Kuhne, Margaret Spangler Krolzcyk, Stanley P. Krolzcyk, Elizabeth Spangler Nolen, Charles E. Ward, Robert W. Raymond, Thomas M. Raymond, Peter T. Raymond, Michael P. Raymond.  

O Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens and rulest the raging of the sea; Vouchsafe to take into thy almighty and most gracious protection our country’s Navy, and all who serve therein. Preserve them from the dangers of the sea, and from the violence of the enemy; that they may be a safeguard unto the United States of America, and a security for such a pass on the seas upon their lawful occasions; that the inhabitants of our land may in peace and quietness serve thee our God; to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Afterword

     In a little over twelve months, the calendar flips to the year 2020.  It’ll arrive in mid-winter to mark precisely one hundred years since the Raymonds set down in Cambridge. Though Robert and Blossom had seven children, three had left the nest, Katherine, Robert Jr., and Clara.  Thus, 120 West Main Street would be safe haven in the 1920s on a daily basis initially for six, Mother and Father, Caroline, Richard, Charles, and Virginia.  The decades flew and the family grew.  Most would catch the four winds to carry them thither and yon, so today, not ten, not eight nor six, but just four members of the bloodline reside in the village or within minutes down in the Capital District: two Raymonds, Charles III and Jonathan, and two Burlingames, Jason and Cara (of Mark, of Bob and Nancy.)  Education and careers, and likely for some the embracing winter weather, drove them beyond the horizons.  Perhaps, though, a bit of Grandma Moses Country lives yet in the hearts, a bit of Granny Blossom and Grandfather Robert’s homestead dwells in the souls of the wandering blood and bones of the cousins of Raymond, Burlingame, Spangler, and Ott.

Fernandina Beach, Florida

Thanksgiving 2018