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This is Jenna Barry at the Medford Public Library. I'm here with Kelly Hansen on July 19, 2024, and she's going to be talking a bit about raising kids in Medford. Um, Raising kids in Medford. I, my first memory of raising kids in Medford was actually coming

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home with my son. From the hospital. And finding that my neighbor had shoveled out the entire front of the house because he didn't want me to fall with the baby. That's the spirit of Medford. Um, They were, you know, people asking if there were things I

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needed, if things I could get done. Um, I liked. The neighborhood schools, I really did like. I looked forward to that because I had grown up going to a neighborhood school and so I looked forward to my boys doing that. Um, Peter went to the. Oh,

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let me get it right, the Franklin, the Franklin School, and I love that walking into school every day, that was. Just wonderful walking in. Medford neighborhoods is very different from walking in Boston neighborhoods. Um, Taking him to school. When he got there, I think the teachers

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were a little. Surprised at him because he was already reading. Had, you know, signed in cursive to get his library card when he was like 3. He talked about that um. And he was an avid reader. Like his mother, um, and had we had done a

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lot of things at home, so he was kind of ahead of the game there. Um, but he loved. The people in the school. And the the. The principal was amazing of the Franklin. She was an amazing woman and I kicked myself because I can't remember her

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name. I think it began with a Z, but it was, she was just an amazing person and she, she commanded respect. And I loved that, and it wasn't an overbearing respect. She would walk out into the, the common way and she would clap her hands and

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everybody would just like look up at her and, and I was just amazed, you know, she wasn't like a, you know, soft flowery woman, she Deserved the respect she had, but she also wasn't overbearing. The children weren't afraid of her, you know, and I really appreciated

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that, so I enjoyed. Peter going to school, Peter went to school at the Franklin for. 2 years. And then they closed the school. But, um, the second year. It's probably the most profound memory I have of the Franklin was uh Peter had forgotten his lunch and

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so I walked back with his lunch to bring it to him. And I walked in the door and all of the teachers were standing around the television and said, what's going on, you know, where are the kids? What's what's happening? And One of the. Teacher said,

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my daughter was on that flight and turned and ran into the other room. I'm like, what flight? What are you talking about? And it was the day the Twin Towers got hit. And The principal walked out and she said, The children will not know about this.

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You will go back to your classes. You will hold school, she said. Do not tell the children what's happening. And all of the teachers just like collected themselves. And and I had to walk in and hand Peter his lunch and I was like she said they're

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not gonna know you gotta get it together, mom, you know, and I had Josh in a stroller. So I went in and I gave this lunch and you know, a little plastic smile. I really, I was fighting for it because I was so shook up and

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I walked out. I went back home. I don't really know how I got there. I don't remember walking through the streets and I walked into my living room and turned on the television set and saw what happened and I was just standing there like this has

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got to be a dream, this has gotta be a movie this cannot be real. And I don't know how long I stood there. Fortunately, Josh had fallen asleep in the stroller, and I just stood there looking at it like, in total disbelief, you know. But it

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it was. You know, a day that rocked the world. For sure. But it was. Different. In Medford And it's it's, I know that that that must sound so strange, but it was different in Medford because Medford was almost like. A safe place. I had grown up

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in Boston. I knew what it was like to be around those skyscrapers. You know, and I had actually gone in to watch an implosion of one that my sister's company insured. And watched it go down and so I had a point of reference. And It was

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just like I was so grateful to be in Medford at that point because I felt like my kids were out of the combat zone. And they were gonna be all right. You know? So that was. That was a very powerful memory. Of my kids growing up

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in Medford, I was sorry that Josh didn't get to go to the neighborhood schools when they combined all of the schools, although I was grateful. For where they put the Roberts School because it was literally around the corner. And by that time my illness progressed because

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I am disabled. Um, my illness had progressed to the point where walking them to school was difficult. So I I walked them because that's what I wanted them to do, but it was. A trial and it had its funny moments too, because um. I used to

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wear these really long T-shirts. And um. There was one day I got them all ready for school and I'm like, OK, guys, ready to go, and they're like, um, mom, do you wanna put some pants on? So I'm like, OK, um, yeah, OK, I thought I

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was, you know, but that, you know, that was part of the, the whole memory thing. Um, We gonna talk about the library and the phones. Yeah, uh, from the time Peter was little we were here, we were at the library, we would come in, we would

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get our pile of books, and we would go sit in the corner and read or we'd go sit outside and read or. We were always reading, always reading, and then sometimes we pick up a couple of videos, you know, stuff like that, but. We loved. The

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story time. Peter loves story time from the very beginning. Um, He liked the crafts. He liked the reading. We were here almost every week. Almost every week. And uh when Josh was born. We just doubled up, you know, twice as much and through. Being here constantly.

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We got to know about the Babes in the Woods program. Where they took toddlers for walks in around the lake in the fells and it was just long enough for the kids and I thought that was wonderful that somebody took the time to figure out how

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long can a toddler walk before they get worn out or cranky or the parents end up having to carry them, you know, and so we would meet there and we got to know people and the kids got to know each other. And they would walk halfway

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around the lake. They'd stop and have a snack, and then they'd walk the other half of the lake, and by then the kids were done. You know? And so we did that for a very long time until the boys got, you know, bigger, and then we

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started branching off to some of the different routes through the fells. um. There was a place that there is a place actually on the in the fells where there are like two giant blueberry bushes. And my husband being from Germany, he had blueberry combs, not something

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a lot of people have, but they actually scooped through the bush and pulled the blueberries off. So we would go up there and we'd scoop blueberries off the bush and um. And then we'd walk and the boys always wanted to go up to the lookout tower.

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You know, I didn't know what the tower was for until I had a friend who actually knew the history and told me about, you know, the armed, the army type thing that used to go up and man the tower, but the boys, I, you know, I

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don't remember. I know he told me the story, but I, I, I didn't retain it, but. The boys always wanted to go up to the tower. And eventually they had to close the inside because it got old and, you know, wasn't safe enough, but they would

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go up and you could just look out over the entire city. And sometimes they find photographers up there taking pictures and they talk to the photographers and you know from that Pete got interested in photography and you know so they would uh. They loved walking the

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fells. I loved walking the fells. It was so peaceful and, you know, you didn't have to worry about animal life at that point. Although we did have a moose that came down every year and walked down Salem Street. Yeah, every year he would come down and

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the police would just like sit on the sidelines to make sure, you know, kind of lead him through. He was an old guy, big, and he would walk right down Salem Street through the middle of Salem Street. I don't know where he was going, but they

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got him there, you know, and that was, that was, it was a beautiful thing to see. You know, And over by the sheepfold, also you see the deer coming out. So they got to see that. And Wright's Pond, they used to go swimming in Wright's Pond.

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Until They got E. coli a couple of times. Going to Wright's pond and the woman in the office actually said don't go there, she said they pull like 200 dirty diapers out of that pond every year. She said don't go there. And so we stopped going

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to writes spot. It was a shame because the kids, their their father was a fish, he was like a scuba diver and everything, so they learned how to swim. I'm not a strong swimmer by any means. But They loved to swim, so that was kind of

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a loss. But you know, as they got older, then I took the places where they could swim and things like that.