While rummaging through things I’d tucked away at my South Deerfield home, the same house I grew up in as a child, I happened across an old postcard that brought back a flood of memories.
The colorful postcard with worn, crumpling corners depicts the Deerfield Valley Motel off of Routes 5 and 10, which was where the Tibetan Plaza housing Hillside Pizza, Sheep & Shawl and the Tibetan Inn of Deerfield is located today. There it sat as it had in the 1960s: the small hotel with the U-shaped driveway, the clear pool in the center lawn, the swing set to the right of the building.
The crisp font on the back of the card states the hotel’s name, phone number and owners, Dorothy and Scoop Knoop; its location six miles south of Greenfield and 12 miles north of Northampton; and its amenities such as the pool, air conditioned rooms, television and a continental breakfast.
Seeing the hotel again brought back a lot of memories of both work and play for me. My mother used to be a housekeeper at the Deerfield Valley Motel. While she was cleaning rooms, I was given plenty of projects to keep me out of trouble, starting it 1964 or ’65, when I would have been 9 or 10.
My primary duties involved mowing the lawn with a small push mower and cleaning the pool. I remember one particular day when I was mowing the lawn and happened across a hive of bees living in the ground. All of a sudden, the bees came swarming up out of the ground and my flight response kicked in. I ran and jumped in the nearby pool as fast as I could, though upon telling the story later, the adults told me I should have just stayed put.
Aside from pulling my weight at the hotel, I also had a Greenfield Recorder newspaper route, delivering newspapers to about 80 customers by bicycle every day after school (it was an afternoon paper back then). The cost for home delivery at the time was about $1.80 per week. Oftentimes, people would give me $2 and I’d get to keep the change, a swell deal indeed.
All of this work was necessary to earn not only money, but also a good rapport with my dad. To get a dollar out of my dad was hard. You had to work for it.
In return, though, one of the greatest pleasures from working alongside my mom at the hotel came from the vending machine. I could put a nickel in the machine on a hot summer’s day after mowing the lawn and cleaning the pool, and get a cold, refreshing soda — my reward for a long day’s work.
One of the simple pleasures back then came not just from drinking the soda, but from saving the bottle cap. The logos of different football teams were printed on the back sides of the bottle caps, and it was a challenge to collect them all. I remember gluing all my caps onto a large sheet of poster board. Like the postcard, I probably have that squirreled away somewhere, too!