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LENORE CHRISTEL MURDOCK SCHLICKE By Nancy A. Murdock The Murdock family moved to town when I was nine years old and in fourth grade. At recess, the two girls, Lenore and Dorothy, stood together against the fence, talking and sharing some snacks. They were dressed in one-piece beige plaid snowsuits, which no one in town wore after they were old enough to go to school. I was really excited to see them. A year or two before, I had seen two similar girls when I visited my cousin Jane Houston in Watertown. They had black, straight hair and brown eyes and a somewhat yellow complexion, and they wore odd clothes. Aunt Ethel told me they were Chinese and I shouldn’t stare at them. Wow! Now we had a Chinese family in Hubbardston!! I told my mother this big news when I got home. From “A Child’s Garden of Verses” by Robert Louis Stevenson, I knew China was a long way from Hubbardston. My Grandpa Mawhinnie had some Chinese coins with holes in the center, from his years of working on a merchant ship. He had also told me the coins came from far away. Now I was getting a chance to see someone from that mysterious place. “How do you know they’re Chinese?” my mother asked. When I explained, she asked, “What is their last name?” “Murdock,” I said. My mother hadn’t had such a good laugh in days! My Aunt Mildred had married a Murdock. Lennie became one of my best friends. She was a really nice girl and extremely popular. She was a good student and knew things that she had learned by living in the city of Gardner. Like several of the women and girls in her family, she was musically talented and had a very good alto voice. For several years we sang near each other in the choir for the Christmas presentation at school. This was in the days when a school could do the Christmas pageant, complete with a manger scene and St. Luke’s wonderful description of the event. In seventh or eighth grade, I got some eruptions on my face, which my mother diagnosed as hives. She had called the doctor for a similar problem Andy had a month or so before, and it was hives. Friday, during rehearsal, Lennie insisted it looked to her like chicken pox on my eyebrow. She said she remembered it from when she and others had chicken pox in Gardner. She even showed me the scar on her eyebrow. I tried to keep my hands off the spot, but it really itched. She said it sure looked like chicken pox, but I was adamant. During the weekend, it became glowingly apparent that Lennie was correct. I missed the pageant and Christmas at Grandma Howlett’s, and I developed a strong appreciation of Lennie’s knowledge, after secretly coming very close to blaming her for my misery. We were in 4-H together for many years. We made clothing in the colder months and canned vegetables and fruits in the summertime. Then in high school we had a 4-H Dramatic Club in Hubbardston, which we both enjoyed. After playing together at recess for many years in grammar school, we had separate classes in high school. The school bus rides kept us in touch to some extent, but we were having different sets of classmates and a different set of experiences. And then we got married a few months apart, and whether we were near each other or not, we were having similar experiences. She was my sister-in-law, so we saw each other when Bob and I were living or visiting anywhere near her and her Bob. Our first children (my Valerie and her Don) were close in age. One year we both canned unripe pears. There were three pear trees on their land, and she made good use of the pears before the worms got to them. She canned hers in pieces, raw. The man next door to us in Medford MA gave me some from his tree and taught me to peel them whole and cook them until they were a little pink before canning. For many years we were busy raising families of five children, each with three boys and two girls. She and her family stayed on the farm in Phillipston, and Bob and I moved around a lot, following in the tradition set by Bob ‘s and Lennie’s Charlton grandparents. It was always sort of a homecoming to see them when our paths crossed. In 1985 the Schlickes hosted a major event in our life, the Murdock Reunion, with its theme of “Come Alive in ‘85.” Bob, our daughter Meredith, and I flew from CA for that event, our first trip East in 12 years. The Schlickes cut the hay in a large field, and we all had plenty of space for our activities. I went into the house with Lennie at one point, and we had a little chance to talk. She told me she had to be careful of what she ate, because she had diabetes. That seemed really strange, because she always cooked lots of fresh, nutritious vegetables in the summer when we visited. Since she seemed as healthy as ever, I concluded that she was keeping her diabetes well under control. After we moved back East in 1987, we often drove up to visit our families in New England. We began to notice that Lennie sometimes didn’t come to family gatherings, which we didn’t understand. Looking back later, we realized that Bob brought her only places where he thought she could handle the excitement of being around so many people, and apparently she had some good days and some where she was more nervous. She could still come up with a humorous comment from time to time, but she didn’t really enter into the conversation a lot, and she didn’t recall some of the things I hoped she would. The two of them tended to be the last to arrive and first to leave. In 1999 we had our 50th anniversary of graduating from Gardner High School. I wanted to be sure Lennie would be attending, so I called Bob. Bob said vaguely that he would have to see how things went. Whereas we made sure not to miss out on anything, they came to only one event, the dinner party on the second night. We had a Hubbardston table, with Lennie and Bob, Selma and Rudy Mangs, Ruth Wells, and Bob and I. It was really good to see them all and to recall our old memories. Of course, for us it was the grammar school memories that we held most dear as a group. We even sang the song Lennie and Ruth had made up about being 49ers when we all rode the bus out of town to high school. Lennie retired from being Town Clerk while I was still going strong at the Social Security Administration headquarters. There was talk in the family that her children were becoming concerned about her memory failures. Eventually it was clear that she had Alzheimer’s Disease. Bob kept her at home as long as he could, and then she went into an excellent regional facility in Athol. At first we heard that she was crying a lot. We visited her there a few months later, on one of our trips north. She was in a really good mood, with sparkling eyes, and we went home feeling much better about her situation. We visited her twice more, each summer when we went to the Howlett Reunion in New Hampshire. On our second visit she had become very quiet. Her Bob came while we were there, as he did every day, and she perked up. She recognized him but not, of course, us. This last summer, July 2004, we saw her for the last time, although we had no idea we would not be driving over to see her again. She was in a common room with others, watching TV, and we managed to get her to allow us to move her to a seat against the other wall, where we could talk with her. We kept telling her this was her big brother Bob. Bob sat with his arm around her and recalled some quick stories from their childhood. A man came in and started picking out hymn tunes with one hand, and Lennie was interested and began to hum. I told her we used to sing in the choir together and she had a very nice voice. She looked very focused on what we were saying, but it wasn’t clear how much she understood. I kept telling her she was a good singer, and she seemed quite pleased. We left feeling good about her in that setting and planned to see her again the next time we went up to New England. But on December 8, 2004, we got the call that she had died of a heart attack. I said it was a blessing. Her son Don echoed my thoughts in saying that she was spared perhaps several years of a body that took a long time to finish dying. We will miss her, but we will remember her as clean, healthy looking, and contented, singing sweetly to the old hymn tunes. Goodbye, Lennie. I will always be glad that you, one of my best childhood friends, became my sister-in-law. |
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