Oral Histories with Salisbury’s Elders
Liza Buzzell
Excerpts from an Interview by Paul S. Shaw, MD., and Joy Chamberlain
Dec 6, 1988 Place: the New London Nursing Home
Liza attended South Road School
Joy Chamberlain- “There was a school at West Salisbury?”
Liza- “Yes, and there was a school at Salisbury Heights. And every Memorial Day, when I was a kid, they had a band come here, and they used to come down in one of those old coasters, and then they went around to all the cemeteries with flags. We kids were crazy to get a ride. You had to toe the mark to get along. You had to keep still. Then they had the exercises down in the Gallinger Grove. Senator Gallinger had a lane that went from Salisbury Heights over to Leander Sawyer’s. It was quite a celebration. They used to have a band, a ball game, and a dance in the evening.”
Isabel Eaton b. Salisbury 1907
Excerpts from an Interview by Paul S. Shaw, MD.
Date November 1992 Place: Greenville, NH
Isabel was a student at Smith’s Corner School
The cemetery referred to below is the Bean/Smith’s Corner Cemetery, which was moved adjacent to Maplewood off Route 4 during the creation of the Blackwater Flood Control area by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1940s.
Isabel- “Now what else about the school. We had good programs, too! Really! Wonderful for what we had to do with.”
Paul Shaw- “Such as?”
Isabel- “Plays. All of us spoke pieces at Christmas, of course, and especially at Memorial…at Memorial time we’d do our program, then we’d march down to the cemetery just beyond McAlister’s and march home again. That’s when you’d get stuff kicked in your shoes.
The boys were trying to figure out something they could do to plague the girls.”
Paul Shaw- “How long were your school days?”
Isabel- “We’d be in session at nine and wouldn’t get out until four. And for our lunch, we’d sit with our boxes at our desk and eat our lunch, start right in again, and we were busy until four.”
Paul Shaw- “At four o’clock in December it must have been…”
Isabel- “Dark, dark, yeah!”