Late last night, I was putzing around the internet, as I do, and I stumbled upon a post on one of the "Growing up in Woonsocket" Facebook groups that I follow, where somebody had mentioned an old newspaper clipping they found on the Woonsocket Harris Public Library archive of The Woonsocket Call, the long-time town newspaper.
I checked out the site and sure enough, it looks like they have images of every page published from the late 1800s up to 1974. I'm figuring they stop at 1974 (for now?) since that would be 50 years ago and maybe that's when copyright laws put the publication into public domain? Not really sure. But here below are a few clippings that I found on their clunky UI archival site. (You'll see the name Chausse in blue and white stamped all over the place highlighting the search parameter I used.) The searches pulled up pages seemingly without any chronological order as it showed various years all over the place. I narrowed the search filters down to the years I was looking for as I dug deeper and deeper. And the deepness was real. I dug up shit I never knew:
This one I knew about of course. It's from the April 10th, 1964 edition and it's the announcement of my birth.
Here, from June 7, 1972, the town is told of my First Communion.
I never realized this was printed in the paper. It's a sad announcement of the death of my one day old sister from June 10th, 1970 (so her birthday and death day) was June 7, 1970.
Here's my grandfather's obit published the day after he died on June 18, 1970. Apparently my father had to deal with his newborn daughter and his father dying within a couple weeks of each other. Man, I never realized.
Here, many years before in July of 1939, my grandfather (as noted above) Armand married my grandmother Elizabeth. Note: The clipping says they were married July1st, 1939. My father was born March 31st, 1940. I think it's entirely likely that my father was conceived on his parents wedding night when the newlyweds got to their honeymoon destination in Quebec.
Here, the above couple celebrate their 25th anniversary in July of 1964. As it's mentioned in the article, they got, among other gifts, a silver platter, no doubt engraved, from the hosts. In 1988, I hosted (along with my aunt Ruth) my parents' 25th wedding anniversary. They never mentioned the similarity...and my grandmother was there.
So, remember the tragic dual deaths in June 1970 of my sister and my grandfather? My grieving father, as he often did, took to the bottle one night and wrapped his car around a telephone pole as he was driving home from the bars one night a few weeks later. Here's a very cryptic mention of his hospitalization from July 7th, 1970. Oddly enough, though I continued to search for it, no mention in the paper about the accident itself.
And in case you're wondering, no they had no problem back then printing horrific car accidents in the paper as seen in this captioned photo from the same time period. Yikes!
Here's the announcement of my parent's upcoming wedding from the August 20th, 1963 edition followed by announcements of their wedding in September of that year.
Here we have, yet again, a couple of obituaries. First, my great-grandfather from October of 1950 and my great-grandmother (the family called her Memere Chausse) from October 1965.
The clipping below is not the only one I found pertaining to the nuptials of my godmother/aunt Neuna but not to Bob, who I had always assumed was her first and only husband, but to this guy I never heard of. This article was published in October 1965 (the same month her grandmother Rose-Anna, listed above, passed away). I would have been only a baby so I don't remember this or ever hearing about this Frankie guy. I searched through the remaining years of the 60s to see if he died or something and there was nothing. Did she get a divorce? For a Catholic at the time, it was unthinkable. Very mysterious. And from the pic below, I do recognize her.
So here's a random clipping. It's from December 9th, 1970, mentioning a planning committee meeting of the Boy Scouts and listing my father as one of the committee members. Oddly enough one of my early memories is being dragged to the Boy Scout camp by my father in the summer of 1971. The details in my head are pretty murky but I do remember this older boy on crutches that kind of freaked me out and I remember Three Dog Nights singing Joy to the World on the radio. Why is my father involved with the Boy Scouts when I was only six or seven? I'm pretty sure that outing to the camp didn't go too well since I don't recall ever going back.
Now I can't be sure 100% but I think in the clipping below, from the very, very way back year of 1901, the young soldier serving in the Philippines is my great grandfather with a mention of his dad, perhaps my great great grandfather.
Here's a weird one. From January of 1974, it appears my mom called the police on a punk who stole gas from her car. Now the article says the theft occurred around 1:00 a.m. What's my mother doing up at 1:00 in the morning? This also was around the time that I was being targeted by the older kid punks of the neighborhood. Maybe it was in retaliation for my mom finking on one of them?
That's all for this post. I'm sure I'll have more as I found this Treasure Trove of the past very interesting. Hopefully they'll add newer dates more recent than 1974 as time goes on and we can get into things that directly deal with my life. Very interesting indeed.
