Grandpa Davis

I remember Grandpa Davis. He smoked a pipe or a cigar and always had a spitoon beside him. Grandpa Davis was born in Massachusetts and moved up Maine to live with his grandparents after his parents died. He travelled out to the Dakotas (he was a travelling man) where he met my Grandmother. She had come from Norway to live her brothers. They got married in the Dakotas and they had my Autie Vic there and then moved to Nashua where my mother was born. He worked for Avery's Furniture Store first as a tin whacker and eventually as part owner. My cousin Doris and I were allowed to play in the store window where we would make believe we were manequins.

Grandpa Davis was just plain nice - not cutesey nice. He had a bad stutter when he spoke so you had to be a very careful listener. No body every made fun of him and he was a good business man. When he was sitting down in his chair he smoked his cigar or his pipe. It is amazing that my grandma allowed that in her house. He and my grandmother loved to go for rides on Sunday. My father would drive and I would go along. He loved to go the the beach and have a shore dinner - everything fishy. Chowder and a lot of fried food. I would eat a slice of sword fish. I didn't like the bones in haddock and other fish. He would have us drive him to the beach, we would go up to York, there was a special place he liked to go and he treated everyone with a good dinner. He liked to go to the ocean, I always think of him as an old man so I don't know if he liked to sit on the beach or swim.

Granpa Davis was just average height and Grandma Davis was short. He was a thin man with long thin fingers. They lived down in the South end and I remember one Christmas we celebrated Christmas Eve at their house and it was close to the church. They lived in a very nice apartment house and had a very nice Victrola. Grammy Davis loved music. She was very active in the church. My sister was a real buddy to my Grammy Davis. I didn't get in on a lot of stuff because I was too young. Grammy Davis use to take the kids to Canobie Lake and to Hampton Beach but I couldn't go because if I rode on trolly cars I would throw up and nobody wanted me with them. I was no addition to the playful gang. I could hardly ride in a regular car as we would have to stop a half dozen times to throw up. Once I could drive I never got sick in a car again.

I think of Grandpa Davis travelling a lot by himself. He always liked to go places. Once in awhile he would take Grandma Davis to church somewhere around Boston, Cambridge I believe, because there was not Lutheran church in New Hampshire. Grandma Davis would often pick up a Norwegian newspaper - she had the cutest accent. I don't know if she ever had any contact with her brothers or other family after she moved to Nashua. Weston and I went out to Wolcott, North Dakota once and hunted up some people who knew of the family.