John F Ward

It is tempting to believe that winter in New Jersey begins soon after Thanksgiving and that, by January, one is immersed in the coldest season. But really, November and December are just as likely to be mild, especially among the rolling hills and lakes of north-central New Jersey. And in some years, even January does not hold the knife’s-edge cold of true winter.

1932 was such a year. Only occasional snow had fallen by mid-January and each snowfall had been minor: enough to pique the interest of Kenneth Viard, who was four and a half, and his baby sister Grace, who would turn two in about six weeks, but not enough for sledding or snowmen or forts or even very serious snowball fights.

And although Wednesday, Jan. 13 was cloudy, the chance of snow was slim, with the high temperature hovering in the mid-40s. Rain was predicted for the afternoon and night, as well as for Thursday. And Thursday was predicted to be even warmer, perhaps as warm as the low-50s.

In a colder year, the Viards might have walked through Grace Lord Park to enjoy the sights of the frozen falls, and the ice along the shores of the Rockaway River, which flowed southwest at the bottom of the wooded bank just behind their home. Small foot bridges led across the river into Grace Lord Park proper. The whole area around the Viards’ home – from the park south across the river, past Rockaway Avenue and several blocks farther south, closer to the neighboring borough of Mountain Lakes – was referred to as “The Park.” Anyone living on Rockaway or Essex avenues, on Reserve Street, Fairview Avenue, on the tiny spurs, North and South streets, which crossed between Rockaway and Reserve like rungs on a crooked ladder, or within a short walk of those streets, could legitimately claim residence in The Park.

Grace Lord Park was a ravine that followed the river. It had an old arched ridge and a high rocky ledge at the foot of which was a cave. The park had a small waterfall on a spur of the river and was known by longtime residents as the site of the Old Iron Spring, which had stopped flowing after the river flooded in 1895. While the falls and cave had been enjoyed for generations, the park itself was very new, in 1932, as a center of recreation; it had been a conduit of commerce just 15 years before.

For much of the 19th century and a decade into the 20th century, the hills of northern New Jersey had been mined for their iron ore, which played a vital role in the fabrication of everything from railroad tracks to the engines that ran on them.

Although the spread of railroads helped maintain the demand for ore, the ore was not the carried on the rails. Instead, it was loaded into barges that were dragged by teams of horses along the Morris Canal, which linked the Delaware River with the Passaic River and the port of Newark.

In 1924, the year Helen and Carl bought their old schoolhouse on Rockaway Avenue, the canal and its plane were officially abandoned; the works were dismantled and portions of the canal were filled in.

The town of Boonton, at the urging of local and county officials and the Boonton Times’ editorial page, agreed in 1925, to take over the former canal area, making it into the park that Helen would let her children play in.

By 1932, Plane Street – the northern border of Grace Lord Park – had been widened to provide parking at the backs of some of the stores on Boonton’s Main Street. But until 1924, it had been the site of a great incline-plane: a water-powered railway that would convey the 70- and 80-ton canal boats up and down along train tracks in water-filled cradles that looked like giant, wheeled bathtubs shuttling between the lower elevations of the canal and the higher ones.

The incline-plane’s works had included a powerhouse and a large underground turbine. Water from the upper section of the canal was allowed to tumble almost 30 feet into a three-foot-wide, J-shaped pipe, where it would spin an 11-foot turbine that turned a shaft connected to a 10-foot wide iron cable reel at the top of the incline. Driven only by water power, the cable would inch the counterbalanced cradle and barge up the incline, or let it slowly down the rails.

To operate the works required at least one person and sometimes two. In the canal’s heyday, there were full-time works operators at all the inclines along the canal. But by 1920 there was so little canal traffic that the arrival of a boat was an event. By then, a plane operator would travel along with the canal boat, working each incline-plane as they went.

And in 1924, the canal boats went the way of horse and buggy, replaced by a more efficient motorized contrivance: the truck.

The Viards, who had arrived just in time to see that transition, were homesteading in Boonton. Helen and Carl were both lifelong residents of a large and thriving city, although the area of The Bronx where Helen had lived was far more rural in 1918 than many of New York City’s more distant suburbs are now.

Helen had borrowed $3,000 from Carl’s uncle Eugene, which they used to buy the house on Rockaway Avenue in late Autumn 1924. Soon after Nov. 1 that year she and Carl moved there from the Broad Street apartment they had rented in Newark since the day they were married in 1918.

The living room of their new home, which had once been a schoolhouse, measured nearly 40 feet long and just under 20 feet wide. There were two bedrooms and a kitchen along one side of the living room, a bedroom and bathroom on the other side. The attic was spacious, but unfinished. There was a small porch at the front of the house and a quaint front door shaped to follow the pointed arch in which it was placed. At the rear of the house, a picture window looked from the living room out over the ravine and the river to Grace Lord Park.

There were neighbors on one side of their property – the Ginders – but on the other side was a lightly wooded lot with no house. Carl’s mother bought that land in July 1925. By the time Ken was born two years later, Frida had made her lot look a little like Eden, transplanting trays of wildflowers and Lilies of the Valley, all from her mother’s summer home in New York’s Catskill Mountains. She hired George Migdall, a gardener from Boonton, to keep the property looking just right.

Just a few years after they moved to Boonton, Helen and Carl had begun their family. Ken was born in Manhattan in 1927 and baptized near Boonton at the Church of the Nazarene, a distinctly American Protestant denomination that arose out of the late 19th-century movement emphasizing scriptural holiness and “entire sanctification,” by which believers are freed from original sin and brought into "a state of entire devotement to God."

The group met in a home on Tower Hill Road in Mountain Lakes, the former home of St. John’s School, which in 1925 had built larger quarters just next door.

St. John’s had been founded in 1909 by the Rev. Henry B. Wilson and his wife, Theresa L. Wilson, at the Cornelia Street rectory of St. John’s Church in Boonton. That was the church Helen and Carl joined when they arrived in Boonton and where Grace was baptized two months after she was born on Feb. 28, 1930.

Despite its tiny classes – just four students in the graduating class in 1927 – St. John’s School had outgrown the rectory by 1916 and moved through a succession of larger quarters, until building its own facilities at the corner of Tower Hill Road and The Boulevard, which runs south from Rockaway Avenue in Boonton, through Mountain Lakes. By the time the Viards moved to Boonton, Henry Wilson had died and St. John’s Church was led by the Rev. Harold L. Hinricks.

Helen had first met Theresa Wilson at the House of the Nazarenes, at a talk Theresa gave on an inspirational book by Percy Dearmer, who had been co-editor, with Ralph Vaughan Williams, of the English Hymnal (published in 1906) and one of the editors of the 1928 Oxford Book of Hymns. Helen and Theresa became fast and close friends, exchanging letters for decades after the Viards moved away from Boonton around 1939.

Theresa Wilson and her school were magnets for enterprising and creative women like Helen. Some of them were dedicated and generous patrons; others became lifelong instructors there, sometimes working for little or no money whenever the school had financial trouble.

Helen, an able stenographer and typist, would help arrange publicity for the school – news releases for the area’s newspapers and flyers and such – and eventually worked in the office, in exchange for her children’s tuition.

The school also attracted a dedicated group of parents looking for a moral education for their children.

In fact, The Park section of Boonton was itself something of a magnet for unusual and creative people.

Just four houses up Rockaway Avenue from the Viards lived Othmar Ammann, chief engineer for New York City’s Port Authority, who had already designed San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and the George Washington Bridge, which, beginning just a few years after Grace was born, would accommodate motorized traffic across the Hudson River. Near the far end of Reserve Street lived Edward Kocher, who, in 1910, was an engineer with Thomas Edison at Edison’s West Orange laboratory, working to develop batteries for an electric car. Across Reserve from the Kochers lived Philip Wootton, an editor at Life magazine. And just past the park in Mountain Lakes lived Arthur Wynne, who created the first-ever crossword puzzle: a triangular arrangement which the New York World ran on Dec. 21, 1913.

But despite its celebrities, The Park was not exclusive or haughty; rather, it was a mix of classes and interests, although still racially segregated.

It was from there that Carl commuted to Newark for work, and to there that he returned home to his wife, and later to his wife and their son, smelling of the acrid chemicals the factory made. It was there that he held Ken on his lap, and later Ken and Grace, and read Uncle Wiggily, the story series about talking animals: Uncle Wiggily Longears, Miss Mouse, and Jackie Bow Wow, among others. Written by Howard R. Garis, and illustrated by the well-known children's illustrator Lansing Carter and others, the stories appeared in the Newark News six days a week.

It was in that calm park that Ken and Grace grew up, playing in the shadow of elms and pines planted two generations before along the sloping grade of Rockaway Avenue. They would roller skate in the warm sun, sledding whenever it snowed enough, making friends with the children of the Rossiters, the Kingslands, the vanDeusens, the van Arsdales and the Rhodeses.

It was there that they lived in the lap not of luxury but of comfort and safety in a place and time during which safety was not considered a luxury, in which their mother – a woman of substantial fears – nevertheless allowed them to wander from their home and play in the ravine unaccompanied.

Helen thrived on her family life. She had been profoundly impressed by her father’s model and she emulated him. He had sung to her and her sister each Sunday after dinner, hymns that she remembered and tried to sing to her own children, she wrote later; she drank in the joys of her life with Carl and their children.

But the place she went for even deeper drinks was church.

Helen had been active in the Episcopal church women’s group in Newark. When she arrived in Boonton, she turned her spiritual energy toward St. John’s, the Episcopal Church at 226 Cornelia St. While Carl sang in the choir, Helen helped with children’s groups, even before she and Carl had children of their own. In 1927, the year Ken was born, she wrote and directed a devotional play that was performed by the members of the Girls’ Friendly Society, a youth group at the church, raising money for construction of the children’s arch at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Throughout their time together, Helen and Carl faced crisis with faith: “Well, you know this will work out because this is God’s will,” they told their children. It was not a passive response, and it was never an excuse for laziness or inaction – it was simply an explanation of how their world worked. And it was a reminder that they would prevail by their faithfulness to God.

They made sure to expose their children to prayer, gathering each night to speak their litany of “God blesses” and thanksgivings. They made sure their children attended church and Sunday school. They lived among the behaviors and artifacts of a life guided by religion: offering their children a model for their lives the way Helen’s father, James Davis, a U.S. Navy veteran who had served on the USS Constitution, had offered his children a model to follow.

But despite the depth of her beliefs, there was a time in Helen’s life when her faith could not compensate for something else.

Perhaps it was the demands of parenthood. Although she loved her family dearly, she was nevertheless self-conscious and awkward as a young parent, taking advice at face value from people who had no more experience than she, but more confidence.

Perhaps it was the strain of the Depression. Her husband had lost his job just when their future was finally laid out before them and when their financial obligations were reaching their peak, with a new home and two children.

Or perhaps it was simply an emotional fatigue that had been building for years. As the daughter of an alcoholic mother, Helen had spent her life providing for others – quitting high school after just 2 years, running her family’s home when her mother could not, working while her sister was in high school, handling the topsy-turvy finances of her own family after she was married – with little time for herself.

Whatever the reason, in March 1931 Helen had what her children, as adults, would call a nervous breakdown.

She spent a couple of months at a Seventh-Day Adventist sanitarium in Washington, D.C. There, a doctor told her that all life has sadness; it is up to us, he said, to cope with the sadness and to find the happiness that is all around us. There were no antidepressant medications available in 1932. Instead, Helen’s doctor “prescribed” a newspaper each day. But he told her not to read the news – the sadness and tragedy faced by the world. He told her to read just the comics, such as Uncle Wiggily.

It now sounds like a simplistic prescription, but at the time, there were very few mainstream alternatives to the classical psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. One of those points of view was expressed by the behaviorist John Watson who, in the late 1920s, was showing that a fear response could be conditioned in a small child through association and that a phobia could be diminished the same way. Perhaps Helen’s doctor was trying to re-establish in Helen an association between her daily life and happiness.

While Helen was away, Carl’s sister, Frida, helped care for Ken and Grace, as did a nurse, Mrs. Foley, who would become infamous in family lore for her lack of humor or patience. A stout and unsmiling woman, she developed a reputation for cramming food into the mouth of Grace – a finicky eater at 14 months old – until Grace would gag. The children missed their mother.

Helen’s separation from her family might have proved to be therapeutic in a way not envisioned by her doctor. Having that time away might have given her a vacation from the daily demands of providing for people. But it also might have given her the longing she needed to rejoin the family.

Despite her many talents – and her faith – Helen was a sometimes fragile woman who often viewed the world in terms of how it affected her. Hers was an odd mix of optimism and faith, and a kind of scorekeeping that sometimes brought Helen to sound almost resentful, such as over the change of ownership at the family factory. And the last thing she ever wanted was to be left out of anything.

Perhaps her breakdown was Helen’s own moment in Gesthemane, her moment of doubt in the process, her questioning of whether she could really manage it all, and maybe it just took a couple of months to restore her confidence in her faith.

Whatever the case, before the spring was over, she had returned to her home and family, where she continued to be active in her community, in her church, in her parents’ complex family, in her own young family.

Indications are that when Helen returned to her family, her life was back in order. By the drizzly morning of Jan. 13, 1932, the cards were back in order in the game of Solitaire that Helen never played alone.

~

Helen’s father, James Davis, had retired in June 1931 after an astounding 46 years with the post office. After his retirement, James and his wife spent nearly two months visiting with their younger daughter, Grace, who was living in Bridgeport with her three children: Jimmy, Olive (known as Billy), and Jane.

In Autumn 1931, after James retired from the Post Office, the couple spent six weeks visiting their youngest daughter, Grace, at her home, and then went to visit the Viards in Boonton.

It was a special time for Helen, she would say later in her life. She worshipped her father, was devoted to him – words she herself used to describe her love for him – and tried her best to follow his model of parenting.

James Davis was known by his descendants as a demanding father and a strictly moral man. The two stories Helen told most often about him were his reminders to his children to be true to their own consciences and their morals.

Whenever anyone in his family was tempted to be selfish, James would straighten up his five-foot-four-and-three-quarter-inch frame and announce: “I’m up. Pull up the ladder. The hell with the next man!”

That was a reference to his seafaring days and to the Jacob’s ladder – a broad grid of crosswise-tied lines forming a net that sailors would use to scramble up the side of a ship when they were rescued from the sea or from a lifeboat. The ladder is not supposed to be hauled back up on deck until everyone is rescued, but since those rescues can take place during battles or dangerous sea conditions, it is a hazard to leave the ladder down for too long.

It was the idea of abandoning the community, of thinking only of oneself, of being selfish – of hauling the ladder back up because you were rescued – that James Davis despised and wanted his children to despise.

Helen’s other story about her father’s moral instructions concerned her growing up.

“‘Daughter,’” Helen recounted her father as saying, “ ‘You are about to go out into the world. I want you to be a part of it, but always keep yourself apart from it.’ ”

“I didn’t know what he meant by that,” Helen would often say, “but I learned later that he meant I should go out into the world, but never be swayed by what other people were doing or saying.”

More than likely, James told those lessons and others during that winter of 1931. It would have been a full house: Helen, Carl, James, Elizabeth, four-year-old Ken, Grace, who would turn two in February, and Lassie, the Airedale dog.

But full houses were something Helen and Carl loved. In Boonton, they were very used to moving Ken out of his bedroom to accommodate some family member or other. In their subsequent homes they would become host to family and visitors from all over the world, offering simple and big-hearted feasts and all-night or weekend-long parties for their friends and their children’s friends.

For the Viards and the Davises, Christmas in 1931 would have been a magical holiday, like a scene painted by the renowned illustrator of Americana, Norman Rockwell.

But the happiness was not to last.

On that drizzly, mild Jan. 13 evening, just a few days less than six months since he retired, James Davis sat at the table in the kitchen of Helen and Carl’s home in Boonton – very likely smoking his Meerschaum pipe, perhaps playing a hand of Solitaire, perhaps reading the Boonton Times. Grace remembers that as the family sat at the dining room table one evening, James Frederick Davis slumped over at the table at the age of 67, felled by a cerebral hemorrhage. He died and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, after services at the Boonton house that were led by the Viards’ minister and by their family friend, the Rev. Harold Hinricks of St. John's in Boonton. The Woodlawn Cemetery is just a few blocks from the couple's last residence on Perry Avenue.

It was the end of a long tale that had begun with a woman widowed with two small boys in Columbus, Miss., who had returned to her sons’ birthplace, New York City. It had continued with the older son lying about his age to join the Navy, where he excelled in gunnery and taught a dozen of his shipmates to read. It had continued further with that son’s appointment as a clerk at the City Hall post office and his marriage to Elizabeth Fife, and later with the births of their three precious daughters and those Sunday evenings of hymns and prayers with the two daughters who survived. And the tale had wound up here, where his daughter was doing her best to perpetuate the model.

Once the initial shock of James’ death had dissipated, Helen and Grace arranged to take their mother on a trip, to Washington, D.C. It was planned as a distraction, something to take their minds off their loss and to get their lives going again.

Near the end of February, they packed their bags and headed south to the nation’s capital. On Feb. 24, just six weeks after her husband’s death, Elizabeth Smith Fife Davis suffered a stroke while in her hotel room.

Helen held her mother’s hand while her mother was dying. Years later she would recall how terrified she was, how she wanted to help but all she could do was hold her mother close and tell her not to be afraid, that she was safe. She would remember that her mother seemed to relax, but by then she was in a coma: peaceful, but near death.

Helen’s game of Solitaire was playing out; two more cards were in place.