Wickford Tales (June 1965 | Volume: 16, Issue: 4)

Wickford Tales

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Authors: Anita W. Hinckley

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June 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 4

According to the gazetteer, Wickford, Rhode Island (pop., 2,437), ” noted chiefly for its fine eighteenthcentury buildings, for its oyster and lobster fisheries, and for the manufacture of elastic braid. But a lady who has known the town well since 1885 has written for us a considerably more lively account of it. “I was always glad to get back from Europe,” she says, “to Wickford, where things were happening.”—The Editors

FATHER’S FAMILY

My father’s family were simple people. The men, most of them, followed the sea. For years my grandfather sailed the packet carrying the mail from Wickford, a village on Narragansett Bay, over to Newport, on the other side of the bay, and all his boys, as they grew old enough, helped him.

The boys were all very tall and fine looking. Nick, the oldest, grew fast and was always tired, as most overgrown boys are. One winter day he decided he had worked long enough and needed a rest. He told his father his foot hurt him, so he couldn’t make the trip. “Let’s see, Nicky. My, that is serious. You must not put your shoe on. But no one will notice. Come along just the same.” Captain Baker picked up poor Nicky’s shoe, and for two days Nick travelled one shoe off and one shoe on, in the bitter weather. Then he humbly begged his father for his shoe and grate- fully put it on. His brothers never let him forget that episode and many times in life asked him, “Where’s your shoe, Nick?”

Miss Willie Cotter, a cousin, who was very fond of Captain Baker, worried about his winter trips and finally called on him and said, “Captain David, I feel it is my duty to warn you to give up taking the mail to Newport. Something will happen to you. Your grandfather was lost at sea, your father was lost at sea, and your brother was lost at sea.”

“All right, Miss Willie, but don’t you ever go to bed again. Your mother died in bed, your father died in bed, and your grandfather died in bed.” Captain Baker kept on sailing, and he, bless his heart, also died in bed.

My father, David Sherman Baker, Jr., was a captain, with his papers from the customhouse, when he was thirteen years old. He was six foot three then and never grew after that. I grew with the same rapidity and reached five foot ten when I was thirteen. Thank God, I stopped growing. When I was a child and went to the public school in Wickford for one term, between governesses, I heard a visitor say, “What is that woman doing in the class with all those children?” I was eleven.

My father and his brother Ben, after they had finished school in Wickford, went to the East Greenwich Academy, seven miles away. They walked there in the fall when the term began, and soon grew very home- sick.