Chapter 7: Gordon, Elizabeth and Jeannie Reid in America

Gordon, Elizabeth and Jeannie Reid in America

John A. Glennie, Annie's son, with Bob Duncan, husband of Lizzie Reid

Jeannie, Lizzie, and Annie with Annie's son, John
Above: Jeannie (Reid) and John Baskin (Feb. 1912)

Gordon, Lizzie and Jeannie Reid were the last in the Reid and Glennie families to immigrate to America, and they apparently did so with guidance from their elder sister, Annie[1]. All unmarried, they journeyed from Glasgow to New York City (Ellis Island) on the vessel, “Laurentian”[2], arriving in June 1902. Their destination was North Andover, Massachusetts, Annie’s home. Annie by this time was married to William Glennie and pregnant with Everett. Upon the arrival of Gordon, Lizzie and Jeannie, all those still surviving of the Glennie and Reid families from Lochrie and Tollafraick, respectively, who were to set out for the New World had been reunited in and around North Andover.

Unlike the Glennies, the Reids divided and re-settled, Annie (as we have seen) remaining in North Andover, Gordon migrating to New Hampshire, Lizzie to the Boston area, and Jeannie to Marion, the entrance way to Cape Cod in the southern peninsular of Massachusetts.

Gordon Reid

Among the Reids who migrated to the US, we know the least about Gordon but what is known reveals a life that was a trial throughout and ended in destitution. In the years immediately following his arrival in North America, he moved to Manchester, New Hampshire and married Charlotte Johnson. Charlotte became afflicted with a disease that weakened her, then rendered her bedridden and in relentless pain for the last 2 ½ hears of her life, which ended on April 1, 1919. They had no children.

Gordon eventually remarried and moved a few miles from Manchester to Auburn, NH. I remember visiting Gordon with my parents sometime in the late 1940s. Gordon then owned a chicken farm. I remember a tour he gave us to the hen houses and the noise and the smell of it all. Gordon and his wife, unlike his sisters, Lizzie and Jeannie, were seldom in touch and I do not recall them surfacing again until 1956, when Gordon called my father saying he and his wife would like to visit us. My father was troubled about their coming, but he welcomed them nevertheless. Mother served dinner, during which Gordon and his wife wept as they described their financial hardships and bleak future. Gordon subsequently wrote my father a letter, dated October 21, 1956, thanking him for his generosity. “It was so good of you to act so fast and generous. May God bless you, Jack (my father’s nick name)… You must have been very successful in your business… I would have done better had I stayed in the chemical business…” He signs off, saying the daylight is fading and his eyesight is poor, preventing him from reading (and writing) in artificial light.

Just over a week later, on October 30, Gordon wrote my father a follow-up message, and the news was shattering. “The Sheriff was here last Friday 26^th and served us with the final notice – a court order to sell us out, hen houses and equipment, all the hens, and last but not the least our home, in fact everything. The whole is to be sold by auction, Saturday, Nov. 24, 1956 at 10AM. Isn’t that discouraging? I have just told Everett, but not my sister Lizzie.”

I know nothing of Gordon after his property was liquidated, but at his age, then 83, death likely came soon thereafter.

Lizzie (Reid) Duncan

Lizzie married a fellow Scot, Robert Duncan whom she had known in Scotland, although not until both were settled in the US. Bob, at age 30, arrived at Ellis Island on July 1, 1903 on the same ship, the Laurentian, that the 3 Reids had sailed on a year earlier. The route was the same, from Glasgow to NY. The ship’s manifest shows Bob was to meet Charles Glennie at 35 Massachusetts Avenue, Lawrence, MA, a solid clue that Bob and Lizzie planned a life together before leaving their homeland separately.

Bob and Lizzie lived most of their working lives in the Boston Metropolitan area. Bob, who had listed his occupation as “farm laborer” on the Laurentian’s manifest, worked as a head gardener in a private estate in Chestnut Hill. I remember visiting them at their residence on the estate and thinking it comfortable and cozy. Upon retirement, they bought a new home at 73 Jady Hill Ave., Exeter, NH, the town where Everett and his family lived. Bob and Lizzie, like brother Gordon and sister Jeannie, had no children.

I remember Uncle Bob and Aunt Lizzie (as I called them) well. We visited back and forth during some holidays and other occasions. They stayed with us for an extended visit at a lakeside place of my parents during part of the summer of 1952. In a letter from Uncle Bob dated August 24, 1952 and which included me as well as each of my parents in the salutation, he related how much he and Aunt Lizzie had enjoyed their time at the lake. He wrote with fond memories of boating and other outdoor activities and devoted much of his letter to giving me sage advice.

The only trouble will be going to school so make the best of the time that is left before that time comes next week. In my school days, summer play time was just six weeks, but I was kept at home twelve weeks by special permission as we had a lot of berry picking all that time. Strawberries began in June and other kinds of fruit came on which had to be picked for the market, but the strawberry season continued (into October). So if ice cream was unavailable (My father owned an ice cream business.), the strawberries were a real good substitute and I was very fond of packing them in me besides keeping the basket full. So you see good times have a limit and when school time comes it seems too bad but as you grow bigger and older you will come to see that it is necessary for you to do your figures and letters as well as swim and handle a boat so my wish for you is to do your best at all those things so your father and mother will be proud of their bigger boy as well as they are of you now.

I remember Uncle Bob as avuncular, always taking a keen interest in me and gifted in telling stories and dispensing wisdom gently and with humor. I happily listened to Uncle Bob and my father talk of earlier times, current events, and family matters as well as report on my own goings-on, in which they seemed just as interested as in their own, more adult, talk. One of the stories Uncle Bob told of himself as a young man in Scotland was taking an examination and undertaking the training to become a constable. He passed, but turned down the opportunity of a position on the force, telling his examiners he was only interested in seeing whether he could meet the requirements and had no interest in police work. They were irritated with him, but he laughed in telling the story at how pleased he was with himself.

I liked being with Uncle Bob immensely. My father seemed to be the more comfortable, more cheerful, and more engaging with Uncle Bob than with any of our other relatives. I liked Aunt Lizzie as well. She was friendly and took much interest in me, particularly in my progress in school. Aunt Lizzie, however, was reserved by nature and often chatted separately with my mother during our visits.

As I reflect on Uncle Bob and Aunt Lizzie, I find it remarkable that they valued my educational development as highly as they did. Like all those in the Reid and Glennie families who migrated to America, they had comparatively little formal schooling. They would have well known John and Charles Glennie and of their success in business and Alexander, an accomplished poet. None of these family luminaries had more than grade school backgrounds. Yet, Uncle Bob and Aunt Lizzie (as well as my parents) were prescient, knowing that my future rested on educational attainment.

I was 11 when Uncle Bob died in 1952 at age 81. His passing introduced me to the devastation of death, and it was traumatic. I had earlier viewed a dead body, that of my Godmother’s brother, John. John, whom I had seen only once or twice in life, appeared to me in death as only asleep. I was therefore not unduly uncomfortable with the thought of viewing someone who had died as I anticipated seeing Uncle Bob. All this changed when I saw him laid out in his coffin. He had been a tall, strapping, handsome man, even as he aged, and I had loved him. But in his coffin, he appeared wizened and ghastly. His journey to death had been a wrenching ordeal, as I later learned. There was nothing of the illusion of sleep here. Uncle Bob looked to be what he was - dead. He was lost forever to me, and I knew it. I sobbed inconsolably.

A close relationship between Aunt Lizzie and us continued after Uncle Bob’s death. In a letter addressed to my parents and me, she talked at length about how she described me and what she saw as my accomplishments to a pastor who visited her. (Poor man must have been bored silly.) The letter was filled with lots of chatting about activities and visits with Everett, his wife, Irene, and daughter, Ann. Aunt Lizzie wrote a final letter in my possession after her husband’s death, by which time she had moved to another residence, although still in Exeter. In this letter, dated April 21, 1957, she thanked my father for his gift of Easter chocolates, saying, “I hope you have done a good business. You deserve it. Everything you make tastes so good. If you want a loan any time, I shall be your banker.”

Aunt Lizzie’s death and its aftermath ruptured the relationship between my father and his brother, Everett. While the details have faded over time, the rupture was deep and irreversible, at least by them.

The next, and last, time I was with Everett and his family came at my father’s funeral in March 1976. Cousin George Glennie had called Everett to tell him of my father’s death and funeral plans. Everett, who by then had some degree of dementia, misunderstood, thinking that I, not his brother, had died. This time, they came to the wake and funeral. Irene and I had a long talk about the issues pertaining to Aunt Lizzie’s will and she said they regretted the “misunderstanding.” Everett grinned congenially, seeming to follow conversations around him, but saying nothing. I believe this silence signaled his mental decline. On the day of the funeral, at the grave site and after much ado about saying “goodbye to Granddad”, my son Reid, then 2 ½ years old, saw Everett, who bore a striking resemblance to my father. Reid went up to Everett, took his hand, and said, in a surprised tone, “Granddad.” And so, after years of estrangement, forgiveness if not reconciliation came by the word of a child.

Everett’s dementia progressed. He died several years later. I read a newspaper notice of Irene’s death in 2000. Ann, who married, took her husband’s surname, one I do not know, so that link is severed as well.

Postscript: Several years after writing this story of the break-up of the brothers, I received a call out of the blue from Bill Chapman, Ann's son and Everett and Irene's grandson. The call came just a day short of the 35th anniversary of my father's death. Bill and I, along with his siblings and cousin Cressida, are planning a reunion this coming summer (2011). With reconciliation in place and with bygones having become bygones all the way around, we are set to become united again as a family.

Jeannie (Reid) Baskin

John Baskin and Jeannie Reid were married sometime during the years following her immigration, but surely by 1912. Jeannie and John became naturalized US citizens on the same day, August 29, 1927. John, like Jeannie, had been a British subject, although from Ireland. He was 4 years younger than she. They had no children.

I know little of John, apart from his being Jeannie’s husband. A family story was that his cousin wrote the then famous song, South of the Border, but, if true, no gift for music had been passed to John, so far as I am aware. His early photos show him as a tall, robust man of good appearance if not handsome. I remember him differently, however, during the last few years of his life by which time he was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and had become crippled. His height of 5’9” as stated on his naturalization document must have effectively diminished to no more than 5’. He was gaunt, with a weak, raspy voice, and yet a pleasant demeanor. One time, when I was 5 or 6, he gave me a gift of $100. I had not seen so much in cash before, nor did I until some years later.

On one visit to their house, I observed that Aunt Jeannie had a heavy wooden bar rigged to barricade the door to her bedroom from the inside. (John slept in a separate room.) I asked my father why, and he told me that John’s pain was so severe that he sometimes acted in “peculiar” ways. Aunt Jeannie needed to feel secure. John fell down the basement stairs to his death in 1952, when he was 70.

The Baskins apparently enjoyed affluence in their early years as a married couple. By 1912, they had bought their own residence on Converse Road in Marion, Massachusetts, about 80 miles from North Andover. Their house, a detached structure of 2 stories plus the basement, was located in a pleasant, suburban neighborhood. They furnished their new home principally from Houghton & Dutton Co. and Drake & Hersey Co., both in Boston – hardly the least expensive of the choices they must have had. (The prices in today’s world seem hilarious[3]: Oak dining room table @ $11; 4 dining room chairs @ $2.20 each; 3 piece “Parlor Suite” @ $43; iron bed @ $14; one pair of silk pillows @ $5.) Based on the receipts I have, it appears they did the whole house, from major items of furniture to curtains, shades and sheets. The furniture they then bought lasted them the rest of their lives.

It only got better. In 1923, John bought a new Ford Coupe from J. E. Stinson, the Ford dealer in Marion, for $585, in today’s value about $7,000. The Stinson letterhead reveals as much about the times as do the terms of sale. The Stinson dealership retailed Lincoln as well as Ford cars as well as Fordson tractors. At the top of the stationery is a sketch of a Ford Motor Company manufacturing facility with the caption, “Capacity One Million Cars a Year.” The slogan on the letterhead exhorts, “Buy a Ford and Spend the Difference.” A telephone number (“Marion 32”) for the Stinson dealership was given. The industrial revolution, not to mention the consumerist culture, was well underway. Life had sure changed for Jeannie from her days at Tollafraick.

Aunt Jeannie maintained close relationships with her sisters and their families. Photos from the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s frequently include Jeannie with Annie and sometimes Lizzie and Bob. John is seldom seen in these pictures, although there was, among Annie’s materials, a wonderful photo of John and Jennie, looking elated, reading the headlines of a newspaper announcing the end of World War I.

Sometime during the 1930s or 1940s, the halcyon days for the Baskins came to an end. The causes might have included the Great Depression and John’s eroding health. In a letter dated April 25, 1950 to my parents, Aunt Jeannie tells of being happy to be able to get out of the house (a trip to Wareham, MA on the bus). While away, the neighbors visited John, who was, on that day, able to shave himself! She invites my parents to visit, saying, “John is able to talk and likes to have callers.” She assures them that they need not think of doing anything to help, they are “getting along fine” and my parents have ‘done so much for us already.” On the very next day, Aunt Jeannie again wrote, this time just to my father, saying that she and husband John have been talking “real business this morning” and expressing the hope that he will take charge of their financial affairs if John were to outlive her. She emphasizes, “This is strictly private, no one else will know. I am very glad that John said this morning it was his wish to have John A. Glennie in charge. It was always my wish. We want to live in our own home among our own friends as long as I am able to keep it going.” She invites us to visit them the next week.

In a letter dated September 17, 1951, Aunt Jeannie conveys urgency in having my father formally take charge of matters. As she says, “John is now so helpless he will need you to take charge of him in my place (should I die first).” She discusses various administrative details concerning insurance, bank accounts and investments and the like, and then sketches out their wishes in an informal will: Whatever is left in their estate after their deaths, she hopes, “will be enough to pay you for all your trouble and kind thoughtfulness of us.” Anything left over is to be equally divided between him and Everett, with a “remembrance” to Lizzie and Gordon, should they still be living. She signs off, “We have appreciated your kindness to us in so many ways.”

Her next letter to us, dated August 24, 1952, follows John’s death. She is effusive in her thanks for my parents having her to their summer place, saying “It was such a good change to be so highly entertained, and it’s so many years since I’ve had a vacation and not having to think about housekeeping. It meant a lot to me and loneliness and sorrow do not come to me nearly so much.” She says she likes to “visit lonely women and try to cheer them up, and that helps myself.”

Aunt Jeannie outlived John by nearly 2 decades. We spent Thanksgiving holidays thereafter with her in Marion, my mother preparing dinner at home in Lowell and bringing it with us on the 80 mile journey to Marion. One Thanksgiving, when my father was hospitalized with a thrombosis in his leg, at his insistence mother and I nevertheless trucked to Aunt Jeannie’s house with cooked Thanksgiving Day turkey traveling in the trunk of the car.

On my father’s and my first visit to her after my mother’s death, I remember Aunt Jeannie as more philosophical than empathetic about her passing. I would not say she was insensitive about mother’s death, but she seemed to view death in general as a normal part of life. Also, by this time in her life, she had seen so much of death and is affects on survivors that she may no longer have completely connected with the profound sadness that often accompanies the deaths of loved ones. A letter she wrote to my father about mothers’ dying was much the same in tone. “Sorry to know that Olive has passed on. She is now enjoying her heavenly home where so many of our loved ones are. You did all you could to keep her well but her time had come.” P.S. If flowers are given order some and I will pay for them.”

In the years following my mother’s death for as long as Aunt Jeannie lived, my father made her well-being a focus of his life. He was doing his best to be a good nephew to his mother’s sister. They corresponded frequently (Years later after his death, I was astonished to see the many letters in his files from her during this period.), he made numerous visits to Marion, and he and I thoroughly investigated possible nursing homes for her when she could no longer live by herself. My father supported her nursing home care financially when government support (Medicaid) stopped. Her handwriting, once clear with firm strokes, deteriorated, as did her mind, during her last few years.

As with the Glennies of that generation, the youngest of the Reid siblings was the one blessed in the greatest measure with longevity. Aunt Jeannie died in 1971, aged 93. By coincidence, I was in Boston on a business trip when she died. My father called me, distraught at her death and frustrated at not having been able to reach me earlier during the day, when I was with clients. The following day, a Saturday, I took the train to Marion, where Dad and I planned the wake and funeral. It was a simple task, although as I thought back to it, one that helped me prepare for my father’s wake and funeral when he died 5 years later. Dad, the undertaker and his assistant, a minister and I were the only ones in attendance for Aunt Jeannie’s farewell. She is buried in Ridgewood Cemetery, next to husband John and by Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Bob and my parents. The epitaph on the Baskin tombstone reads, “Wise in the ways of nature, seeking the ways of God.” That sums up their life well.

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[1] For Annie Reid’s story in America, see the section on William and Annie Glennie.

[2] The history of the Laurentian is worth a footnote. Originally christened, Polynesian, she was fitted with both engine and sails, and sailed on her maiden voyage in October 1872. She had a reputation for rolling. Sailors said this ship would "roll on wet grass" and called her "Rolling Poly." In 1893 she was refitted, converted to engine powered only, and renamed the Laurentian. The vessel frequently sailed from Liverpool and Glasgow to Canada and the USA. She was fitted to carry 36 first class and 1000 third class passengers. The Laurentian was owned by the Allen Line, which served a niche market of emigrant children as well as regular passengers. She was wrecked near Cape Race, Newfoundland, Canada in 1909.

[3] According to BLS data, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has climbed from 9.8 (January 1913) to 208 (June 2007), or about 21 times. Their payment in 1912 of $11.00 for the oak dining room table would come to about $230 in today’s values.