Moving to Wolcott in 1946

In an earlier posting (The Nomadic Life of Vernon Russell), I wrote the following – “That summer he bought a home and land and when they married in September of that year that’s where they began their married life.”

I was thinking earlier today how much of a bold move that was. My parents were not even dating before my father went off to serve in WWII in the summer of 1944. My mother was just the younger sister of my father’s best friend. But she was also part of a group of young people at Mill Plain Union Church who wrote letters to the boys overseas. They began a long series of letters to each other over the next two years. When he returned in late April of 1946 he proposed to her. He had a few weeks yet to serve at the Brooklyn Navy Yard before he was finally discharged at the end of May 1946. They married in September of 1946 and after a brief honeymoon moved into the house that they had purchased in Wolcott and where they would live until passing away 60 and 66 years later respectively.

Although the north end of Wolcott was not that far geographically from Waterbury, in many ways it was a world away. Consider the following:

·         Wolcott had no post office, so mail in the southern part of town was delivered from Waterbury but mail in the northern part of town was an RFD Bristol address.

·         Wolcott had no phone exchange, so while phones in the southern part of town were from Waterbury, phones in the northern part of town were from Bristol. It was a long distance phone call to everyone in Waterbury – to all their friends and relatives, my father’s work, etc.

·         Unlike the well-developed school system in Waterbury with multiple high schools, Wolcott was just beginning to think about something other than one-room elementary schools. The first such school, Alcott School, had been approved by the voters the previous year (1945), but at the time that my parents bought their property the students were likely still going to the old North School. And a high school was over a decade in the future with high school students having to take a bus to Waterbury.

·         The population of the entire town was perhaps 2500 people, most of whom lived in the southern half of town.

·         Although Wolcott Road had been completed (as the first paved road in town) in 1935, traffic on it was quite light. (My father often mentioned that in those early years it was not unusual that he could drive all the way to Waterbury in the morning without seeing another car.)

The house and land that they purchased was on a dirt road a short distance from Wolcott Road. There were only two homes on that dirt road – theirs which had been built five years previously (in 1941), and a much smaller house which had been built in 1943.

The price of the house and the accompanying 23 acres of land was around $7,000. I’m sure that the relative isolation of living in the north end of Wolcott was some of the reason for that price. But while that seems like such a small amount of money today, it was still three times my father’s annual salary back in 1946, so the mortgage seemed like a huge amount of money! Here are some statistics from that year:

·         Federal minimum wage - $0.40/hour

·         Average annual income - $2600

·         Average home cost - $5150

·         Monthly apartment rental - $35

·         New car - $1125

·         First class stamp - $0.03

·         One year tuition at Harvard - $420

·         Milk/eggs/bread - $0.67/gallon, $0.59/dozen, $0.10/loaf

My father’s separation pay from the Navy went toward the down payment on the house and a few items of furniture. Some of the other items of furniture were donations from family and friends.

I wonder what their family and friends thought about them buying a house “so far out”. A place with an RFD Bristol address, a place where a phone call to them was long distance, a place in a town with mostly one-room schools and no high school, and a big piece of property that cost three times my father’s salary.

Truly that was a bold move for them. But as the years (and decades) passed, as the town grew and as their family grew with it, it was a move that they never regretted. Maybe they were just ahead of their time!