by Jim Forest

Just before 4 in the morning, December 8, 2001, Marguerite Hendrickson Forest died in her home on the south edge of Red Bank, New Jersey. Born the 26th of May, 1912, she was 89 years old.

In recent months a woman from Trinidad, Norma Whiskey, a very caring person, was living in the house, in the apartment upstairs, to help as needed — Mother could no longer live on her own, as she had for so many years. About 3:30 AM, Norma heard a thud and found Mother lying on the floor next to her bed, apparently having gotten up to go to the bathroom and then having had a heart attack. Norma called my son Ben, who lives nearby. He was there within minutes, in time to be with Mother when she breathed her last.

She had wanted to finish her life at home and, thanks in large measure to Ben and Amy living nearby and my brother Dick also being in New Jersey, managed to do so.

Some family history: Her mother, Janet Collier Estes, was from Memphis, Tennessee. Her father, Charles Hendrickson, was a successful lawyer whose office was in Jersey City, where Mother was born, but she grew up on the Jersey Shore in Red Bank, a town best known as the birthplace of Count Basie. It was a comfortable house with servants. There was a strong bond in the family with the Methodist Church that flavored my Mother’s life even during the years when she thought of herself as an atheist.

Mother was slightly handicapped from birth, never having good use of her right arm.

My favorite photo of Mother was taken when she was about ten — she is sitting on the porch steps at 55 East Front Street side by side with her much loved dog, Nipper.

Her summers were spent at a bungalow her parents had in Island Heights on Toms River. After retirement, this became the home of my aunt and uncle.

Mother went to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. By that time the U.S. was enduring the Great Depression. Like so many others in that period, she was drawn to the Left. After graduating from Smith summa cum laude, she applied for membership in the Communist Party. My father, at that time a soldier stationed nearby, was sent to interview her. Not only did he recommend her for membership but eventually proposed to her as well. They were married in November 1934, when he was discharged from the Army. They settled in New York City. Mother got a job working for the Municipal Employees Union. They lived in various apartments in lower Manhattan, including one on 14th Street and another on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village.

In 1936, they moved west, first to Denver (where Mother got her Master’s Degree in Social Work), then to Salt Lake City, Utah, where my Father was Communist Party state organizer. Together they founded and ran the Jefferson Book Shop. It was in Salt Lake City that I was born November 2, 1941. My brother Richard was born 14 months later, by which time I think we were living in Chicago or Denver.

My own earliest memories are in Denver in 1945, living in a house on an Army base while Dad was stationed in Hawaii. When he returned, the marriage ended — my father had fallen in love with Dorothy Baskin, who, following the divorce, became his second wife.

In that painful time, Mother decided to move back to Red Bank. I have vivid memories of the train journey east, staring out the window in fascination, nose pressed against the window.

By this time both her parents had died, her mother only a few years before, her father about the time I was born. He had a heart attack at the dinner table. He was standing at the head of the table, about the say the grace, and simply keeled over. He was 67. My aunt was present and later arranged the funeral. Knowing her father’s views so well (she was also his secretary at his law office in Jersey City), she ordered the cheapest coffin available. The funeral director was so embarrassed at her choice that he substituted a much better one, but at no additional charge. He couldn’t bear to see an important dead person in such an unimportant casket.

Initially we lived with my mother’s sister, Janet Douglas, and her husband, Robert Inglis, who somehow managed to squeeze the three of us into their apartment, but soon Mother, using money from her inheritance, bought a small house at 171 Newman Springs Road in Tinton Falls, just across the street from Red Bank. It was in this house that Mother lived the rest of her life. It was a move to “the other side of the tracks,” in that we were in a chiefly black community. Libby, a coal-black woman who had been born in slavery days and had earlier in her life worked in my Mother’s home when she was growing up, lived nearby. Mother got a job as a social worker at a mental hospital in Marlboro, a few miles west of Red Bank.

She was still a Communist Party member in those days. I can recall going door to door with her as a child as she tried to sell subscriptions to The Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper. I would be amazed if she sold a single subscription, though I was too young to realize that there was something unusual about what she was doing. If she saw something in the Worker that she thought children might appreciate, she would read it aloud. My brother and I grew up with left-wing songs — Mother sometimes singing the International (“Arise ye workers of the world, arise ye wretched of the earth…”). We had records of Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives and the Weavers to play on our wind-up record player. There were some books in the house with Stalin’s picture on the cover, though these later disappeared.

In 1952, Dad was arrested. I can recall my Uncle Charles standing on the porch, shouting at Mother, holding a newspaper with the banner headline, TEN TOP REDS ARRESTED IN ST. LOUIS. It was my uncle’s last visit to our home while I was growing up. Dad was to be in prison for half a year before being bailed out. This was the period of the early Cold War, with many leading Communists arrested under the Smith Act, all charged with conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence. (Note that the charge wasn’t attempting to overthrow the government by force and violence, or advocating such activity, but conspiring to do so. Some years later, while the case was pending before the Supreme Court, the government withdrew the charges.)

In those years Mother lived with a dread of losing her job, as happened to so many Communists in that period. Working for the State of New Jersey, she was in a vulnerable position. Even when sick and running a fever, she never took a day off, was never late to work, often worked at home in the evening, wanting to be such a perfect employee that there could be no excuse to fire her. By nature she was a hard worker and certainly she cared very much for the people she was trying to help. Her main concern was to get patients out of the hospital into some living situation which would work for them. She had a genius for finding people who would take in boarders with special needs.

Somehow, with my aunt’s help, she managed to raise my brother and me as a single parent, never having an unkind word to say about her former husband or voicing any regrets about the problems we faced.

It was a house full of books — complete sets of such authors as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Jack London. I recall spending many hours studying the illustrations in her history books — one about the Assyrians provided us with a name for one of our cats. We called her Tiglath Pileser the Third.

Our life was a strange mixture of wealth and poverty. We had no car — Mother said she didn’t want to grow dependent on something we might not be able to keep. She got to work and went into Red Bank by bus; it wasn’t until she was nearing retirement that she finally bought a car. On the other hand, Mother did her Christmas shopping for my brother and me at F.A.O. Schwartz near the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York. We were often in Manhattan for plays (The Diary of Anne Frank, The King and I, Pajama Game, A Touch of the Poet) or to visit museums, most often the Museum of Natural History but also the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art. There were visits to the Bronx Park Zoo. There were trips to see the Thanksgiving Day Parade, which at least one year we watched from Schrafts, where Mother had booked an upstairs window table. Visiting the New York Public Library with her when I was perhaps ten or eleven, I can recall looking at the huge stone lions guarding the entrance and Mother telling me that, “Every time a virgin walks past, the lions roar.” We would sometimes eat at the Grand Ticino, one of the best Italian restaurants in Greenwich Village, or at Sweets, a 19th Century restaurant near the Fulton Fish Market. Then back by train and bus to our small house in the poorest part of Tinton Falls, where most of the roads were without asphalt and many houses lacked indoor plumbing.

Going door-to-door with The Daily Worker didn’t last long. It must have become obvious that activity like that could easily cost Mother her job. We continued to get the Worker but instead of throwing it out with other papers (Mother was a devoted reader of The Herald Tribune), she would save all copies of the Worker till the Fall, then burn the old copies little by little with leaves my brother and I raked up in front and back yards.

In 1956, a revolt in Hungary resulted in Soviet intervention and cost hundreds of Hungarian lives. At this time, many in the West — my mother among them — resigned from the Communist Party.

In fact she had never been a very ideological person. I can’t recall her ever trying to convince my brother or me of ideas that were matters of dogma for most Communists. She once told me, in response to a question I posed, that she didn’t think God existed, but there was sorrow in her voice in saying it. Still more telling of her not-completely-lost religious faith was her taking us to the Methodist Church at least twice a year, for Christmas and Easter services. She never objected to my going to various churches in the area when friends invited me. Early in 1952 I started going to the Episcopal Church in Shrewsbury on a regular basis and was, at my own request, baptized there on July 27. As far as I could tell, Mother enjoyed the day as much as I did, though it wasn’t until 1960 that she found her own way back to the religious faith she had lost while in college. From that point on, she was one of the pillars of the Methodist Church in Red Bank, in church every Sunday and active in an adult study group.

Though no longer a Communist, many of her radical social ideas remained with her. She battled local politicians for many years over all sorts of issues — roads, water mains, transportation for the old and handicapped, etc.

When she was in her mid-seventies I once took her out to eat at a particularly nice restaurant in Nyack. I had seen the film “Reds” a few nights before and was trying to remember the English words of the “International,” which had been sung in Russian in the movie. I asked Mother if she could recall them. Though the restaurant was crowded, without hesitation she sang the song straight through, at the end — tears glistening on her cheeks — saying, “With a hymn like that, how could you not be a Communist?”

She was an avid reader from childhood till well into her 80s. After retiring from social work at age 65, she become a student at nearby Brookdale (later Monmouth) College and took classes there for at least twenty years, until she was too weak to continue. Conversations with her during her two decades would inevitably turn to what she was studying at the time and what book she was busy with at that moment, which might be history, theology or law. When she lost all but peripheral vision, she was undeterred, reading with the help of a complicated scanning device that hugely magnified letters on a TV screen. A single word would often overflow the screen area, but mother doggedly read on, syllable by syllable, word by word, line by line. For nearly ten years she used this machine in the college library for hours per day, five or six days per week. Finally the college, when upgrading library equipment, gave her one to have at home.

There was also a steady flow of books on record and tape coming into the house from a special library for the blind in Trenton. For years she subscribed to a large type edition of The New York Times. At least once a week , even when she could hardly see anything on the screen, she went to see a movie with my aunt. (The last film I took her to see was “Chicken Run,” a story about chickens escaping from a factory farm. She loved it — it was, she said, “a parable about revolution.”)

Though she had a car in her later life, finally giving it up only when her eyes started to fail her, in many ways her life style was little different in her old age then it was when Dick and I were kids. She wasn’t one to rush out and buy things, and had a strong aversion to getting anything in credit. I don’t think she ever had a credit card.

She loved her neighbors and would do anything for them, but talking with staff in stores one would often be reminded that she had grown up in a well-to-do family and expected Service with a capital S. If she had a complaint, it was delivered with hurricane force. In stores, she was an impatient millionaire.

In the summer of 1997, after doing some errands, we stopped at a nearby free food kitchen called the Lunch Break in the middle of the black neighborhood on the west side of Red Bank to drop off a box full of light bulbs that Mother had found in the cellar. One lady at the Lunch Break asked me, “Is Marguerite still going door to door?” This was a reference to my mother’s efforts from time to time to gather signatures for various petitions. I assured her this was still going on. “You sure got yourself some mother. Nothing can stop that lady!”

During that visit I was struck by her “one day at a time” way of life. She was not at all nostalgic. She had little interest in the future either — but a tremendous enthusiasm for the present. She still had her strong opinions. Over lunch at a place called Perkins near Asbury Park, she expressed her agreement with a letter to the editor my aunt had sent to a local paper — a protest against capital punishment. Aunt’s main point is that we should leave the taking of life to God.

The next summer I found her still in surprisingly good shape and spirits. She couldn’t get around quickly but you would hardly notice she was nearly blind. Her hearing was good. She was very alert, though when tired she couldn’t quite remember if I was Ben or Jim. She was slow in doing things and used her four-legged cane inside the house. She was dismayed that her book magnifying device was broken — I found it had become unplugged. The book she was reading at the time was about life in Israel/Palestine at the time of Christ. On the other hand, she still spoke of Communism in glowing terms. When I told her the ideals were fine but that in practice every country that had tried Communism has ended up being a particularly hellish place to live, she was resistant to hearing it, though when I described visiting a place near Minsk where truckloads of people were killed each and every day year after year in the Stalin period, she was horrified. The ideals of her youth still haunted her.

The next day I took her to a coffee shop in Red Bank. We sat at a table out on the street where Mother had iced coffee and little by little, but with childlike enthusiasm, ate a piece of cheese cake. She recalled how when she was very small her mother took her for a walk on Broad Street but didn’t know that when she went with Hanna Fuelling, the woman who normally cared for her, she was given a lady finger when they passed the bakery. Mother started howling “finger!” when they passed the bakery without stopping and wouldn’t stop. Back at home Hanna explained what “finger” meant. Mother also recalled, on another walk with her mother at about the same age, running under a horse to cross the street. “Mother was alarmed!”

After coffee I drove her across the river to Middletown, driving east along the road closest to the Navesink River (it was called the Shrewsbury when I was a kid) past various immense houses that belong to the super rich, then crossing the river to get to Rumson, another bastion of wealth, and driving back to Red Bank. Mother loved the ride. There many exclamations about how beautiful the trees were.

During the last year one could see that Mother was physically less capable — much less able to get around, much quicker to tire. The TV was on most of the time — she often watched programs on Discovery Channel. Her world has shrunk to about the size of the house. In October, when I mentioned the events of September 11, she knew what I was talking about and was distressed, but I don’t think recent news was in her thoughts except during those moments when they were mentioned. She was amazed to be told how many great-grandchildren she has. “Goodness! Imagine that!”

When Aunt Douglas, age 94, died in August, it was a stunning loss to her. Even when face-to-face visits became infrequent, they had normally been in touch with each other by phone several times a day. Though she had been battling a failing body for years, I think for Mother this was the signal that it was now time to die.

Before going to sleep the night she died, she asked Norma to leave the door unlocked because her sister was going to be coming to get her later.

Mother had an extensive collection of stock phrases that she used in various contexts. One of them was, “Time, time, said old King Tut, is somethin’ I ain’t got nothin’ else but.” It meant there was no need to hurry.

She often said, “What is money to a Forest?” This meant it was okay to buy a certain item.

She often said, “Everyone to his own taste said the old lady as she kissed the cow.”

Another oft-repeated saying was, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”

She would sometimes say, especially to me, “If your head wasn’t attached to your body, you would lose it.”

Another favorite: “In for a penny, in for a pound.” Truly, Mother never did anything by halves.

She was fond of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millet: “I burn my candle at both ends. / It shall not last the night. / But ah my friends / and oh my foes, / it makes a lovely light.”

Not long ago I told Mother that Anne took great pride in having so adventurous a grandmother. She responded, “Yes, I am adventurous.” It struck me that even then, when she could hardly move without becoming exhausted, she put it in the present tense.

In the last weeks of her life, Nancy and I would call her at least once a week. These were brief conversations in which she would invariably express the hope that we would visit soon. She would say over and over again, “I love you.”

* * *

Memories of Marguerite

by Nancy Forest

People are always asking me if I miss America, and I usually say no. But if there’s one thing I do miss, and indeed regret about living in Europe, it’s not having lived closer to Marguerite and having gotten to know her better. She was a model for me of a strong woman — strong but not rigid or brittle, no-nonsense but kind, serious and principled but with a fabulous sense of humor. She was one of the most amazing women I’ve ever met.

The first time I met her was around 1977. Jim had just moved to Holland and was on one of his trips back to the States, and he came over to visit us (my former husband and myself) and our daughter Caitlan, Jim’s god-daughter. He brought Marguerite with him. I was living in a very humble apartment in Nyack at the time, and they came for dinner. Marguerite was bursting with enthusiasm about our “wonderful” apartment and the “beautiful” dinner plates, which, as I recall, were a sort of drab green. So my first impression was a woman of non-stop enthusiasm.

When Jim and I decided to get married he came to the States again, in 1981, for Christmas. This time I went down to Red Bank for the first time, and really met Marguerite in her home and as my future mother-in-law. I brought a freshly-baked pecan pie along as a house gift, which made a big impression. A few days later, she and Aunt Douglas came up to Nyack for dinner with me and Jim. I was living in a much nicer apartment at the time. While Jim stepped outside for a few minutes to park their car, she and Aunt Douglas had me alone for the first time. Aunt Douglas took me by the hand and said, very clearly, “Listen, dear, you do whatever you think is right for you!” They didn’t want me rushing into anything.

Later that spring, all the Forests came up to Nyack to have what I guess was an official welcome for me. They took me out to lunch at a very nice restaurant in town. Marguerite and Aunt were both there, and Dick came, too. Dick was wonderful. A real brother-in-law. I remember feeling so warmly welcomed. I felt like part of the family.

I moved to Holland in 1982. When Jim and I were preparing to get married we had trouble with the Dutch authorities because they wouldn’t accept my New Jersey birth certificate, which contains very little information. So finally Marguerite went to Trenton herself and dug up a special birth certificate that even my parents had never seen — something the New Jersey Health Department keeps in its secret files — with every scrap of information about my birth. The Dutch authorities were pleased, and Jim and I were able to get married.

In 1987 I was able to return to the States for a two-week trip. I spent one week at a conference in North Carolina and then flew up to New Jersey to spend several days with both Marguerite and Aunt Douglas. It was then that I really got to know them both better. I’m so glad I was able at least to spend those few days with her then. Aunt was still driving, and she took us to Brookdale so that Marguerite could give me a full tour of “her” campus. We spent a wonderful day in Princeton, too. But what I remember most was the incident with the keys. Marguerite had recently returned from a trip to Atlantic City with some local people, and she had lost her duplicate house keys on the way. So Aunt Douglas drove us into Red Bank to the locksmith for new duplicates to be made. Aunt Douglas parked the car and started reading the newspaper she had brought with her, which I thought was odd. But she didn’t get out of the car. I went into the locksmith’s with Marguerite. The unfortunate young man behind the counter asked if he could help her. She pulled out her main set of keys — a huge bunch on a ring — and explained that she needed duplicates, but she needed two duplicates for some, and which one was the key to the garage door? And when the young man said he didn’t know, she seemed surprised and a bit annoyed. This went on and on, with the young man trying to maintain his composure. Finally I went out to the car, where Aunt Douglas was still reading the paper. She looked up at me and smiled. She knew exactly what was going on in the locksmith’s shop.

Jim and I visited together in 1994 and were able to go to church with Marguerite, where we discovered that the Methodist minister and his wife were graduates of my alma mater. That was a nice connection. During that trip Jim expressed interest in visiting the Hendrickson House, the 17th-century country house located near Red Bank that had belonged to Marguerite’s Hendrickson ancestors and had become a museum of the Monmouth County Historical Society. Jim wanted to see it again himself and to show it to me and Anne. At first Marguerite was completely disinterested. Who would want to see anything like that? She seemed so un-nostalgic on the one hand, yet she liked to walk through Red Bank and talk about what it used to be like, and where they used to live, and tell stories about her parents. Anyway, we did end up going to Hendrickson House, which Marguerite ended up enjoying immensely.

On that particular trip she had just been to the movies to see Forrest Gump, a film she loved so much that she wanted us all to see it. So she took us all to the movies. Anne had never been to an American movie theater (complete with the smell of buttered popcorn, which Dutch theaters didn’t have at the time). She sat there and laughed all the way through.

I remember the joy she took in her pets. She called her cats “adorabilities”. She had great respect for people who were enthusiastic, strong, decent and hard-working. She had nothing but disdain for people who felt sorry for themselves and didn’t seem to be able to get a grip on life. I have the sense, from having met her and from things I’ve heard from Jim, that despite the difficulties she had had to deal with — physical disability, having been ditched by her husband and having to raise her sons alone, blindness in later life — she was filled with appreciation for the good things around her. The love she lavished on her sons and her grandson Ben came back to her in spades. She was an amazing balance of generosity and tough expectations. For a strict non-romantic, she had more love than anyone I know. It was a grace and privilege and blessing to have known her, and to be her daughter-in-law.

* * *

In her own words…

In the summer of 1996, when Anne and I were in America for Ben and Amy’s wedding, I was able to get Mother to talk about her life. These are my notes. She started by recalling how animals had been in her life from early childhood:

We had ducks, of course! And chickens — two kinds. When it was very cold out we had the baby chicks in the house. We always had a dog. I can remember Nipper from my earliest childhood. When I went to college I was given $25 to buy things. What I did was to buy a collie puppy, Flipper the First. There’s his picture on the wall. Flip!

We had a cow, Bessie — we kept it in grandma’s side yard on 103 East Front Street. I remember for a time sharing my room with our maid — Hannah Jackson — and even sharing the same bed. On Front Street we shared the house with my grandmother, then later had our own house on Wallace Street.

We had a canary — of course! Dickie was his name, naturally. After Dickie we had another canary that escaped from the house. I was hysterical. Mother wasn’t. Then we got a phone call from grandmother — he had flown down the street to her house and flew right in the dining room window. And there he stayed until we came to get him.

We had cats, though they came a little bit later. Douglas was afraid of cats when we got the first one. You can see she got over it!

We had pigeons. Dad used to take them to shows — and he took the chickens to chicken shows. Dad was called “Chicken Charlie” by his friends. Naturally we wouldn’t eat our own chickens — only Dad would eat them. Finally Dad and Uncle George stopped duck hunting because we wouldn’t eat them.

We had a hobby horse by the fireplace. Big! To me at least. It had stirrups and everything.

At Aunt Uytendale’s marriage, I was a reluctant flower girl, not at first but at the actual event. We wore fancy dresses — I think they came from Paris. Not that this meant much to me at the time! Cousin Catherine Nesbitt from Memphis was the maid of honor. She finally succeeded in leading me down toward the altar by having a donut on her finger which I followed. I was probably five.

Mother came from Memphis. Her father had a wholesale grocery business, not the most respectable business, but he was prosperous at the time. Later he went broke. Mother was named Janet Douglas Estes. The Douglas was for the Douglas clan in Scotland. Estes is an Italian name. Probably there was some French ancestor too, which is why I was named Marguerite.

Bobbin came with Mother from Memphis and was with us until she died. She was an Afro-American. She died of gall stones. Mother had the funeral right in our home. In those days that wasn’t what happened with servants, having the funeral in the home of a white family. The Afro-American residents of Red Bank must have been astonished. They all came to our house to view the body. Our white neighbors must have been even more astonished. But they would never have disapproved of anything Dad did. She was buried in the little church that is now the Russian Orthodox Church. In those days it was the church Count Basie went to.

Mother was different. Though she came from the south, she wasn’t at all a racist. Her brother, my Uncle Collier, would walk out of the opera if he were sharing a box with an Afro-American. She was the oldest in her family and I suppose she had her own relationship with the Afro-Americans who raised her. She was different! She was the unusual member of her family. Her youngest brother, my Uncle Newton, once slapped a member of the Supreme Court when he gave a lecture in Salt Lake City. This had to do with the Supreme Court ending segregation. Uncle Newton had run in Memphis for the Board of Education but lost and later moved out to Utah because he knew the Mormon religion was racist.

At Mother’s finishing school they spoke French every day except Sunday. It was Ely Court. Then it was in New York — now it’s in Connecticut. The only French she remembered when I was little meant, “I love you, I adore you, what more can you desire?” At the time the school was considered “the fastest school in the east.” Fast meant going out on a date without a chaperon, which I doubt ever happened at Ely Court. The school was directed by Mrs. Parsons. She loved Mother and Dad — they had been married out of her school. She sometimes came to visit us. When she was old enough, Douglas went to the same school. By that time there were children of movie actors from Hollywood boarding there. When she graduated we were all pleased that she got a special award but finally we noticed that everyone got a prize!

Dad had a wonderful garden. There was also a grape arbor — I used to give the grape skins to the chickens, who just loved them. Naturally we had eggs, Mother sold some of them and gave the money to Dad. She was very proud of that money.

Dad’s father — also Charles Elvin Hendrickson — was one of the founders of Island Heights. It was all Methodist in those days with a Camp Meeting place in the middle.

My grandfather looked like a movie version of a judge — handsome, with a beard. He was Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. He was buried in his judicial robes. Aunt Uytendale lifted me up so I could see him in his coffin. And I remember.

Dad loved to go to funerals. He was always the happiest man at the funeral.

When he went to Aunt Uytendale’s funeral, they had a closed coffin. Dad insisted they take the lid off. And they did.

Dad’s first clients were Jewish. They were our friends. They gave us our silverware. He once stopped Uncle George from telling an anti-Semitic joke by saying, “I don’t want to hear it. I am a direct descendent of Solomon, King of the Jews.” Uncle George hated that kind of teasing.

Grandmother’s name was Sarah. She married when she was about sixteen. She probably came from the same town — a town with a biblical name in South Jersey. I can’t remember the name. Ask Douglas. Then they moved to Mount Holly and later to Red Bank.

My brother was Charles Elvin Hendrickson the Third — you can see he was supposed to be an exact copy of his father. Dad was wonderful with Douglas and me, but not with our brother Elvin. He wouldn’t get Elvin an electric train and that was when Elvin started to hate him. Dad wanted Elvin to be just like him. Elvin flunked out of Brown because he played football — he never got a law degree. Every man in the family had been a lawyer for generations. Finally he graduated from the University of Alabama.

Mother went to a finishing school in New York City and she shared a room with Aunt Uytendale. So Dad met Mother through his sister.

Mother went to the movies almost every afternoon, or at least whenever there was a new movie. When you have a cook, you can do that. We all loved Mary Pickford. Movies in those days were as pure as could be. It was the Strand, on the corner of Broad and Linden Place. Larry somebody was the organist. He committed suicide after they stopped having live music. He was a handsome man. I guess he just loved playing for the movies.

We never bought new clothes at Easter time. Mother said only people who don’t have proper attire the rest of the year needed to buy a new dress for Easter. I was very disappointed.

I remember the first time mother took me to Childs Bakery on the west side of Broad Street. She had no idea that I was always given a lady’s finger when Hannah [Jackson] took me there. Of course she didn’t buy one. I had very few words. We left Childs with me crying, “Finger, finger, finger.” I cried all the way home. Mother was humiliated. Hannah succeeded Bobbin after Bobbin died. Hannah was white, Bobbin was black.

There was the day I decided to run away and announced this to the whole family. They were teasing me for some reason or another. I was told that I could go whenever ready. I sat in the porch for a long time. Dad brought me a little suitcase, but by then I decided not to run away after all. I’m not sure how old I was, I was still wearing rompers.

There was the time that I was put in the corner for pulling another girl’s hair and of course that was the day Mother came to visit the school. She was humiliated! Her daughter in the corner.

Then there was the time, the only time, I cheated. I put the word list on the seat and just copied the words. Miss Bailey, who was a horror, exposed me to the whole class. Mother came to school to talk to Miss Bailey. “We will not discuss the past. We will discuss the future,” she said.

In those days people came to the house, like the dress maker, Mrs. Stout. She would do any repairs or adjustments to our clothes — lowering hems, that sort of thing. She came regularly from her house in Little Silver.

Libby came every Monday and Tuesday to do the laundry. She had been born before the end of the Civil War. I loved Libby. She was one of the early baby sitters for you and Dick.

But Libby didn’t do Dad’s shirts. There was a Chinese laundry that did those stiff collars.

Our only prejudice was against Catholics. I was really scared whenever I walked by the Catholic church, St. James. I think I was afraid of being kidnapped into the church. We had a Catholic nurse named Margaret Dugan. Dad liked her, Mother didn’t. Mother thought Margaret had taken Elvin to be baptized at the Catholic Church. There was a difference of opinion between Mother and Father when children should be baptized. Mother had grown up in the Presbyterian Church. So we were baptized in the Methodist Church when we were four or five — I was very embarrassed. I remember that.

[In response to a question about relatives:]

There was Uncle George who put off marriage for a long time though he had a series of girl friends. Of course.

Then there was Uncle Jim who went into a mental hospital. When his mind was going he started sending strange postcards — pictures of the rear end of a horse — to local people — usually prominent people. They didn’t care for these. When he began to turn violent, they put him in Trenton State Hospital. The shock of landing in a hospital cured him, though “he never fulfilled the promise of his youth.” He used to say the Jews own New York, the Irish run New York, and the Christians live in New York. He stayed in bed for years.

All three brothers were lawyers. And we had one aunt — Aunt Uytendale. It must have been a Dutch name. Isn’t that a beautiful name? She was beautiful and had a magnificent, operatic voice. She married someone she met at Princeton but who drank up all the money. She finally divorced him. He also had a beautiful voice. His name was Bill Baird — not the puppeteer. He drank like a fish. His family built train engines. He had a brother named Charles. Both left college to join the army during World War I and both survived.

[I asked whether her father took part in the First World War:]

Dad managed not to go into the army. He said, “If you have guns, you’ll use them.” He got an exemption. Mother was shocked. She thought Dad wasn’t patriotic. She believed all the stories about the Germans cutting off the hands of Belgian children. Dad didn’t believe it for a minute. He said wars were fought for economic reasons. Douglas wanted to be a nurse and Dad was very kind to her about that hope. He said, “Don’t worry — the war may last long enough to be one. But it didn’t”

Douglas and I used to smoke in the bungalow in Island Heights — we regarded ourselves as very up-to-date. Dad was usually down at what he called “the shack” — a little house by the boatyard. He knew we were smoking and we knew we weren’t supposed to. He would always knock on the door and wait long enough for us to rush to the bathroom and flush the cigarettes down the toilet. Of course he could smell the smoke but he never said a word. He would just tell us what we were supposed to do and never say another word.

Mother said something else I don’t think I’ve told you — “Love spells sacrifice.”

And Dad put a cheap sign on my desk — just a piece of wood — that had just one word on it: “Perseverance.” He never explained it. He just put it there. And it had its effect.

I didn’t do well in grammar school. Mother and Dad never said a word about study and home work. But in high school I discovered it was nice to gets A’s and then I began to study.

It got in the paper when I passed the college board examination and was accepted by Smith. It had never before happened to anyone graduating from Red Bank High School.

We had a Progressive Club at Smith — and we were allowed to stay up till 10 p.m. when we attended its meetings. Mike Gold spoke more than once. All the big names of the time came up. First I joined the Socialists and then decided they didn’t mean business like the Communists.

I took a course in religion. The professor said you lower your head to get in a religious mood. After that I didn’t lower my head in church. But I got a lower grade because I told my professor that her course wasn’t helpful to me. Dick told me I was a fool to tell her so, that of course she would give me a lower grade, but I never thought of a teacher being dishonorable.

I didn’t go to one of the graduation events because I went on a picket line at a factory in North Hampton.

When I first met your father, he was in the army, “burrowing from within.” I wrote a letter to the Communist Party after graduating from college, apologizing for not coming from the working class and asking to be a member. They wrote to your father at Fort Monmouth — his work was in the Signal Corps I think — and he came to our house in Red Bank, knocked on the door and asked to meet me.

Our first apartment in New York City was on 14th Street on the top floor. Next door was the first gay person I had ever encountered. He was always going after your father. We had one room — it cost $14 a month. When it was very hot we slept on the roof. Across the street was a Chinese restaurant where we often ate. Your father was working full-time for the Communist Party — I’m not sure that he got any money for it. Probably not. Then I got a job in the City Welfare Department — I got it through someone in the Communist Party working in the department. The woman was very relieved when she found out that I had actually graduated from Smith and was certified in social work. I was paid $29.50 a week. As a result we were able to move to an apartment near Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village — I think it was on Thompson Street and cost $30 a month. It had a fireplace — very luxurious.

I had no understanding of money. I asked your father if we could live on $29.50 a week and he said, “Of course.” He was shocked at how little understanding I had of money! What is money to a Forest?

We went to a lot of meetings, and to plays and movies.

When we were in New York, I did a degree in social work at Columbia, which was just like a trade school — you learn something so you could make a living. Later on I went to the University of Denver, another trade school, but I liked it. By then my political ideas were all formed.

Working for the Department of Welfare in New York City, I always did what I thought was right. In those days you either worked for the Welfare Department or you were on welfare.

Later we moved to Salt Lake City because your father was assigned as Communist Party organizer for the State of Utah. I loved Utah. I had good friends.

When we moved back to New Jersey, I bought this house because I wanted you and Dick to grow up in a neighborhood that would be like the world would be when you grew up. I wanted a good cross section of the population. So I moved into this section of the town.

I remember being asked to sign a petition for a local fire house and recall hearing soon afterward that there were to be no Afro-American members of the fire department. I demanded that the mayor take my name off the petition and he wouldn’t do it. The explanation for it being all white was that the fire department “sometimes had dances.”

I recall dancing with a black man before I was married — he was a wonderful dancer.

The only thing wrong with Communism was that there was no religion in it. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Only we’re not ready for that yet. But I’ve never changed my mind that we should aspire to this.

One of my heroes was Paul Robeson. I respect and honor him. He went to Russia and loved it because it was the first time he had been treated as an equal.

Sometime in the mid-fifties I stopped getting the Daily Worker — it was too dangerous. I had to think of my responsibilities as a mother. You were still children. When the FBI came to interview me — they were two Catholic boys — I played the part of the loving mother to the hilt. Which was easy because I was.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need — that’s the Communist ideal. The reason it didn’t work was because of human beings not being decent, but I think Communism was less indecent than what we have. I despise capitalism. (Patting Tony, an immense gray striped cat. “Come, darling! Tony doesn’t despise capitalism.”)

If we become Nazi [in the United States], I’m coming over to Holland. I’m not going to become a hero. I will use my age as an excuse.

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Jim and Nancy Forest
Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands
tel: (31)(72) 511 2545
Jim’s e-mail: jhforest@gmail.com
Nancy’s e-mail: forestflier@gmail.com)
Jim and Nancy Forest web site: www.incommunion.org/forest-flier/
Forest-Flier Editorial Services: www.incommunion.org/forest-flier/ffes/
Jim’s photo web site: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/
Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: www.incommunion.org
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