The Way Things Used to Be: Tales From Our Elders
Eight resilient Rhode Islanders, between the ages of eighty-three and 108, reflect on what brought them to little Rhody, their own pasts and the way things were.
Mary Hebner, 108, East Greenwich. Photography by Alex Gagne.
Mary Hebner, 108, East Greenwich
As told to Samantha Labrecque, with assistance by her daughter, Mary Cassidy
I was born in the town of Lincoln in a house in Lincoln Woods. And we would skate on the pond during the winter. It was a large family. My grandfather, George Washington Olney, had his oxen help pull the pillars when the Arcade in Providence was being built.
Our family cemetery is actually also in Lincoln Woods. As children living near Lincoln Woods, my siblings and I were great swimmers and they would swim at Olney Pond and go canoeing and boating during the summertime. Champion swimmers who were affiliated with the Pawtucket Boys Club would swim laps at the pond and my sister, Florence, and I would jump right in and join them. I knew Lincoln Woods like the back of my hand and would romp around the woods like it was our playground, more or less.
We also had a lot of fun piano playing and dancing to the sounds from a phonograph. My sisters and I were singers too, and we would go around to local churches of different denominations and sing at them.
When we were kids, we went through the Depression and my brothers and I would stand in the bread lines. It was kind of tough, sometimes. Back then, there was no electricity. We used oil lamps. We had lamps in every room. And at night we used to heat stones and put them at the foot of the bed about an hour before we would go to sleep to stay warm. I remember we always had coal burning. We had a coal stove downstairs. It heated the house. Sometimes we slept with two people in one bed.
To use the bathroom, we had to go outside to the outhouse. If we had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and it was cold, we would use a chamber pot. We used to always have a can out in the hallway. It was like a big milk can and was cleaned out every day.
Growing up, there weren’t too many automobiles around. It was very seldom. However, the boy I was dating had a car. It was a Ford, I think. He had a motorcycle, too. I used to have to get permission from my mother to go on it. She always said she would have to use her good old foot-mobile, though — we would have to walk or run if we were late for work. Half of the time we were late.
I got as far as the eighth grade in school and then went to work at a mill in Pawtucket with my sister, Florence. It was the JP Coats mill. I was a teenager and I doffed there. I took the bobbins of thread and emptied them off the medium-height frames. It wasn’t an easy job.
As I got older, I worked at the Lincoln Downs Racetrack concession stands and she also worked in the service industry as a waitress in many places. I was a waitress at Crestwood Country Club in Rehoboth, too.
Even after retirement, I worked into my seventies. I really loved ballroom dancing and I would go to Moseley’s Ballroom with my friend Mary or the German Club in Pawtucket. We used to have a lot of fun. It was nice.
I remember seeing the first moon landing televised on TV. I didn’t think that I would have liked to be there. I was always very independent and loved to take off in my car and go on long trips. On a whim, I would just take off and it was quite often. As a matter of fact, I would even go into downtown Providence just as jobs were being let out and would get right into the traffic. I just loved the thrill, I guess.
I drove up until I was ninety-nine years old. Up until last year, when I was 107, I lived in my own apartment in Esmond Village and I even traveled to Florida from December through February. Lately, I get my hair done every Friday and get treated to having my nails done.
I hardly ever had a drink and didn’t smoke, though. I’ll tell you one of my secrets about having a good, healthy life: There was a young girl that lived next door to my childhood home in Lincoln Woods who convinced me to smoke cigarettes that she stole out of her brother’s drawer. People would come to Lincoln Woods to enjoy the pond and a man had walked by who was smoking a cigarette. I wanted to snatch the cigarette from the man’s hands because I felt like I was getting into the bad habit. I went down two times with her and I told her, “no more” because I felt like I was doing wrong. That was it and it was over for me.
