Wednesday, Oct. 27, was Norm Nye’s 95th birthday, and he’s happy to report that he is now officially closer to being 100 than he is to 90.
Norm isn’t the oldest person in town; Mary Leue holds that title by six years, but he doesn’t mind. There’s no real prize in being the oldest. “It all ends with the same outcome,” he said with a smile.
Born in Ashfield in 1926, Norm has never lived anywhere else. Arriving in 1912, his parents bought a house on Main Street large enough that when Norm’s grandparents moved here, they lopped the back of the house off and created a new, smaller home for them, set in the raspberry patch next door. Later, Norm bought the sawed-off house from his parents, he and his wife Betty moved in and Norm’s lived there ever since.
I asked Norm if he’d noticed many changes around town since 1926 and he said he’d seen a few. Electricity coming to town, running water, too. Automobiles surpassing horses as the preferred method of travel. Back in the day you could get a tooth pulled for $2, and bread was 5 cents. Wonder Bread then came to town, pre-sliced. It cost 15 cents, though, for that luxury.
Dr. Rush, the dentist in Shelburne, used to keep office hours from 3 a.m. to 10 a.m. because all his patients were farmers, and that was the only time slot farmers had for dental appointments.
At one time, seven businesses in tiny Ashfield had gas pumps, some right next door to each other. Norm thinks it was something the oil producers sold businesses on in the early days of automobiles: “We’ll install a pump for free, it’ll bring you business and we’ll make our money off the gas you sell.” In those days, Norm said, gas was 7 gallons for a dollar.
Norm’s dad, Robert Nye, was Ashfield’s first electrician and he helped usher the town into the age of the Delco Generator, the 1916 predecessor of wired-in electricity and the happy replacement of the kerosene lantern. I asked Norm if people had issues with leaving the old ways behind, and he said, “No, generators meant your cow couldn’t kick the lantern over and burn the house down. People didn’t understand how to charge those batteries in the generators, though. It was just like me with a computer.”
His dad ran a booming business installing generators, charging batteries, and then, hard-wiring houses after President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, when Norm was 10. At that time, only about 10% of rural communities had access to electricity, and Norm’s dad followed the electric poles up from Shelburne Falls and started wiring the town.
Ashfield was populated with one-room schoolhouses. Norm launched his education at the Ashfield Plain Schoolhouse, graduating in eighth grade to Sanderson Academy.
His talent lay in baseball. “There wasn’t much else for a kid in town to do outside of fishing, but every town around here had a baseball team. Greenfield had four,” he recalled. Norm was good enough that he was offered an athletic scholarship to Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, but by that time he’d met his sweetheart Betty Crowell, and had no interest in leaving her that long for any reason.
He’d also started working for the town by then, driving machinery at the going pay-rate of 70 cents an hour, until he got offered a job driving trucks at CW Ward’s, with a raise to 75 cents an hour.
His dad got hired to wire the school in Chesterfield and, since it was a state job, it paid $1.04 an hour. Norm dropped old CW and went to work for his dad. Now married, Norm’s wife Betty worked as a draftsman for General Electric in Pittsfield, making the trip from Ashfield, every day.
“She was a draftsman? Back then?” I asked. “Where’d she attend college?”
“She didn’t go to college for that. In those days you started out as a secretary and if you were smart, they’d teach you what they wanted you to know. But yes, she helped design the lights at Fenway Park.”
Norm became a licensed plumber and plumbed the town as his father had electrified it. When he was getting started, water entered houses from an uphill spring and, in Ashfield Plain, the wastewater (and everything in it) dumped into “Sewer Brook,” the stream that runs beside Main Street. Whenever the incoming water stream dried up, “people went down to Bert Howes’ house and filled their buckets there. Bert had a well that always overflowed, so he didn’t mind.”
Even now, Norm can close his eyes and trace the plumbing system for most any house around.
He said his old friend Walt Zalenski doesn’t come around anymore — he’s heard Walt’s quit driving.
“Walt’s pretty old,” I ventured.
“He’s only five months older than I am!” Norm replied. Indeed, Norm still drives, though he got pulled over recently for weaving over the line in front of Mohawk Trail Regional School.
“My son had driven my car,” said Norm. “He changed all the mirrors and I had to change ’em back. The policeman only gave me a warning though, which was real nice of him.”
So nice, that when Norm saw the officer sitting at the school again, he stopped to thank him for his friendly pull-over. It turned out the two had friends in common, so Norm enjoyed the visit.
Most of Norm’s stories work their ways around to “how nice people here have always been. I’ve always enjoyed people and I still do.”
“What advice would you give your 20-year-old self now?” I asked. Without needing to think, Norm said, “Get yourself a job with a good pension! You’re gonna need it when you get old, and I thank everyone for paying their taxes and keeping me going!”
Happy Birthday Norm! Paying my taxes to keep you going is indeed a pleasure.
Nan Parati lives and works in Ashfield, where she found home and community following Hurricane Katrina. She can be reached at NanParati@aol.com.