KEEPING COOL IN THE SUMMER

Field's Grove was a swimming spot in Nashua when I was growing up and when my children were young. It was occasionally condemned for swimming but I would go there when it wasn't condemned. My folks would bring us up to Silver Lake which would be a real treat on a hot, hot evening once in awhile. At other times we would go up to Baboosic Lake which was a favorite place. It was a real summer resort type of place where people had cottages and there was a dance hall at one end of the lake. It was quite popular back in those days. For a number of summers we rented a cottage on Baboosic Lake. My parents never went swimming but we kids did.

When it was really hot we would wear whatever we had that was the coolest and we had fans in the house. The fans would be scattered around where we would be. We had an icebox and loved to have the ice man come. We kids would run behind the ice truck and pick up the pieces that would fall off and suck on them. We wouldn't have ice cream at home but would go out in the evening to get some. I think we might have gone up Concord Street somewhere.

I don't think shorts as such had been invented so we wore bloomers which we could pull up above our knees if we got real daring. The bloomers were made out of a wool serge so they were not real cool. We wore midi blouses which looked like sailor's blouses with a wide collar. We wore sneakers on our feet with socks. It really wasn't a very cool outfit.

On several summers I was a camp counselor at Camp Sargeant. It was a day camp with a portion of it overnight. It was real exciting to be a counselor for a tent full of teenage girls. The sleeping arrangement was that the counselor had her bed in the middle of the floor and the girls slept in cots built around the edges. We did a lot of hiking and walking. The counselors had to come up with their own activities. We swam a lot, mornings and afternoons. The girls took lessons and learned the different strokes and how to dive. I remember one year they had horses. I had taken horseback riding before. We had to go into Nashua to pick up the horses and then ride them back at the end of the day. I took my girls to climb Mt. Monadnock. We slept at the foot of the mountain one night and then climbed the mountain in the morning.

Some years we would go to the beach for a week or two. Mostly when my father was leading the National Guard band he would have summer encampment somewhere around Rye so we would go along and have a cottage and see my Dad once in awhile.