A guy walks into the shower at his home in the woods of Ashfield and everything is going fine, until it isn’t. The water shuts off mid-rinse and a shout to his wife confirms that it’s gone out everywhere in the house — a problem that’s even worse since the two of them have been searching for that wellhead since they bought the house. They’ve had surveyors and other specialists out, and nothing has reared its underground head.
And suddenly there’s no water.
A moan to a friend about the situation brings a new suggestion. “Call Norm Nye. He installed that well in the 1960s. Maybe he knows something.”
The man called Norm, who replied, “Go to the north end of the house and you’ll see a copper pipe shaped like a ‘U.’ Follow that pipe about 8 feet into the yard and there’s your well.”
And there it was.
While most 70-year-olds are trying to remember where they left their glasses, Norm at 99 remembered the pipe layout of nearly every house in Ashfield. As the town’s first plumber, the pipes he installed imprinted on his brain. I mentioned an issue I had in my bathroom, and he scrunched up his face, looked at the ceiling and said, “Now, your bathroom pipes form a ‘T’ just below the sink and then run into the laundry room …”
And it wasn’t just Norm’s brain that had the strength of a 20-year-old; at 95, while climbing his basement steps with an armload of wood, he stumbled and fell backwards down the stairs. His ever-alert brain screamed, “Get up now or you may never!” so he scrambled up the steps before collapsing into the reality of a broken pelvis.
On a dark evening two years later, Norm fell in his living room and couldn’t get up, but, able to reach a flashlight, he flashed out a morse code sort of ditty that caught the attention of his neighbor. The neighbor came over to see what kind of dance party Norm had going on in his living room and found the shindig that ended in a 911 call revealing new broken bones.
Born in Ashfield in 1926, Norm was rooted in a past that stretched far deeper into history than it would in most other areas of the United States. Norm remembered electricity coming to town in the late 1930s as part of the Rural Electrification Act that sought to bring towns like Ashfield into modern times. I asked Norm if anyone disagreed with the plan by declaring “analog is better” or “ugly wires mess up the landscape,” and he said no, people were tired of their cows kicking over kerosene lamps and setting the place on fire, and they looked forward to a better method to light the world. In fact, Norm’s dad became Ashfield’s first electrician.
Norm’s educational years were launched in the one-room schoolhouse on Baptist Corner Road where there’s a tale about someone burying a skeleton in the outhouse that I never got the details on, dang it, and now it’s too late.
Two weeks before Christmas, Norm fell again and, despite his insistence for two days that he was fine, his daughter Sue knew him well enough to suspect that may not be the case and finally took him to Cooley Dickinson Hospital. The staff found the 99-year-old had not only broken ribs, but a brain bleed, too. It was the bleeding brain that on Christmas Eve cradled Norm heavenward to reunite with, among others, my dad, the two of whom used to dine at my old restaurant, Elmer’s, every Monday morning, entertaining our staff and other regulars with their jocular wit.
So we don’t forget, I’ll bless you with some of Norm’s reminiscences from our area’s cherished past.
“Back in the day,” he told me, Dr. Rush was the dentist in Shelburne Falls whose office hours were 3 a.m. to 10 a.m. because “those were the only hours farmers had time to get their teeth worked on between the hayin,’ milkin,’ plantin’ and feedin’ they had to do.”
And, Norm shook his finger, “It only cost $2 to get your tooth pulled. Not like now; cost me $185 to get my tooth filled the other day. It’s just a shame what it’s gone up to!”
At one point in the middle of the 20th century, the tiny town of Ashfield supported seven gas stations, some located right next to each other. Norm reckoned it was a plan introduced by the oil companies to lure customers to town. “We’ll install a pump for free, it’ll bring you business, and we’ll make our money off the gas you sell.” And, Norm noted, gas at that time was seven gallons for $1.
He had fond memories of the arrival of Wonder Bread. It was sliced, the first pre-sliced bread he’d ever seen. “‘Course, it cost 15 cents a loaf; regular bread was still 5 cents a loaf.”
Despite the skyrocketing costs of the ongoing century, Ashfield is much, much poorer without Norm Nye and his bulging file cabinet of a fabulous brain, and truly, the place will never, ever be the same.
Nan Parati lives and works in Ashfield, where she found home and community following Hurricane Katrina. She can be reached at NanParati@aol.com.