Category: Family Stories

My daughter Terri arranged for us to talk about my mother Anna and her special way of caring for her kids on a Story Corps. Many thousands of these have been collected, and many thousands more will be collected. A very few will be broadcast. Most will be archived at the Library of Congress, and…

November 2020   In 1950, my older cousin, who had lived with my family for more than a decade, married a farmer from California who had been stationed at Newport while serving in the Navy. She immediately moved to his family farm, near Bakersfield, and started sending us clips from publications we had never heard…

October 2019 I don’t have many heroes, so I was particularly upset when one of them died this morning. My wife’s nephew, John Patrick Hayes departed this world at age 42 leaving behind a woman who should get sainthood right now, in my opinion, and two special needs foster kids. John had much to overcome…

January 2019 My mother, Anna Vinti Edmonston, would be 108 this week were she still alive. But she died (this time of year) at 90. She was agoraphobic. For most of my life she refused to ride in a car, or to walk beyond a three-block area of Allston. Since she became our family’s only…

August 2018 One day in winter in the mid-60s, my Uncle John Vinti put his books on the roof of his old Nash Rambler so he could unlock the door. He did that, got in, and drove off. His books fell into the parking lot. After recovering from a severe depression with ECT (shock treatments),…