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WE ALWAYS PLAYED BY THE RULES
By George Migre,
as told to Scott Smith
PEMBROKE, Mass. (March, 2006) – George
Migre has lived in Pembroke for most of his 85 years. He has been
married to Barbara for most of the past 60 years. They built their
Taylor Street home shortly after World War II. It seems that life
in Pembroke began to change after World War II.
“I started in first grade here,” Migre said, sitting
in the comfort of his favorite living room chair. You can sit
about anywhere in his and Barbara’s living room –
just not in his chair.
“I went to school where the senior citizens’ building
is now. In the fifth grade, I went to the Bryantville school,
there by the fire station. Then I went to the Hatch school, which
was built about 1935.
“I remember that when I graduated in 1939, our class was
one of the largest to graduate. We had about 25 or so students.
I do remember the new high school, including seventh and eighth
grades, had about 110 kids altogether. I don’t recall the
town’s population.”
Barbara did. “I think it was about 1,500 when we started
going together,” she said. “In 1944, we started going
together.”
“I don’t remember that, either,” George said
with a grin.
Pembroke was a small, rural town filled with old families, a
few newcomers and a cast of characters. Many Pembroke streets
were still unpaved when George Migre grew up. Life focused largely
on school, political banter around the post office, and forays
into neighboring towns. George and Barbara met in Norwell, at
Sergeant’s restaurant, where Barbara worked as a waitress.
“That was the hang-out,” Barbara said. “He and
Allen Sherman used to come in and drive me crazy. He was the flirt.
They’d come in around 1 o’clock. I was supposed to
get out at 2. When he asked me for a date, I said no!”
“Smart girl,” George said. “But she didn’t
stick with it.”
George hung around with Allen and Ted Sherman, and with Everett
Reed and Louie Wheeler, “my absolute best friend.”
“Everett was the first one of the gang to get a car,”
George said. “He got it from a family relative. It was a
1934 Chevrolet, a fine car. But he wasn’t old enough to
drive. Louie had his license, so he drove.”
The gang went on road trips. The farthest they ever went was
to New Hampshire, to what is now Clark’s Trading Post.
“My brother, Bill, and Everett and Louie and I drove to
New Hampshire for Columbus Day weekend,” George said. “We
had a lot of fun. We didn’t have any money. We were going
to sleep in tents, but it poured, so we slept in the car. When
it stopped raining, Louie and I tried to sleep on the running
boards while the other two slept in the car. All of a sudden,
we heard a hell of a noise. We had parked by a fence, next to
railroad tracks, but we didn’t know it. A train started
coming right through there and scared the life out of us. But
we had a lot of laughs.”
During the trip, the fellas stopped at The Longhorn restaurant
for a hamburger and coffee. “Everett discovered his coffee
was cold, so he called over the waitress,” George said.
“He grabbed her hand and stuck her finger in it! Everett
was a lot of fun.”
And fun was what life was largely about in those days. The kids
swam in the ponds in the summer and skated on them in the winter.
“We skated next to Hosea Benson’s,” George said.
“Hosea’s might have been a bar room, but we’d
go in for a hamburger. Hosea was good to all us kids and spent
a lot of time with us. He had a raft built for the beach, and
he kept floodlights on so we could skate at night and see. He
had the switch outside, under the eaves, so we could shut them
off when we went home. The kids were different then; he trusted
us. We always played by the rules. He treated kids like you couldn’t
believe.
“One of the things I remember about him, when we became
21, I remember going into his bar and ordering a beer –
but he wouldn’t serve us. ‘I remember you growing
up,’ he said. ‘You’re not drinking in here!’”
George said Hosea would often throw a party for departing soldiers
during the war. “He’d have a party for all the draft
that was going that month,” he said. “He would go
down and pass out cigarettes. It didn’t matter if one guy
was going or 20 guys were going. Everett Reed used to work for
him. One of his jobs was making popcorn.”
George, like most of his childhood buddies, joined the service.
He went into the Navy toward the end of the war and didn’t
see action. After the war, he went back to work for Marine Compass
Company, now E.S. Ritchie and Sons. It was owned by the Sherman
family, and he worked with brothers Ted, Allen, Charlie and Burton.
George is still the machine shop supervisor there. His hours are
fewer and more flexible now.
“I trained as a machinist under Ted Sherman,” George
said. “He taught me a lot, and I learned a lot in the Navy.
We did everything – built the compasses, packed them, shipped
them. During the war, if we turned out a hundred compasses, it
was a big run. Now we run in the thousands. It’s a little
mind boggling.”
George grew up in the house next to the old shop on Mattakeesett
Street.
After the war, things did indeed change. George and Barbara got
married and built their present house on Taylor Street, next to
his parents. They paid $400 for the land and $6,500 for the house,
which George built in 1950 with a lot of help from his friends,
builders Bruce and Ed Roberts (“I did what they told me
to do.”) The next year, he added a breezeway and garage
for another $1,000. It’s worked well for the Migres, so
far.
The Migres have seen a lot of change, from dirt roads to super
highways, from the good old days to the waves of newcomers. Many
old friends are gone now, friends such as Ted and Allen Sherman,
Louie Wheeler and Everett Reed. But throughout all the change,
the values that bound them remain, nestled into a comfortable
Cape on Taylor Street.
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