The inspiration for my son's work....

When my grandfather, Dr. Frank Sears Parsons was a young man, he wanted to be a pharmacist. His father, who was a lawyer thought he should be something more prestigious and insisted he become a doctor. He attended Harvard Medical School, graduating around 1884. Although he was a General Practitioner, he specialized in Pulmonary Tuberculosis and even wrote a small book about it.

During the Great Influenza Pandemic in 1918, he saved many lives with his treatment, using his own theory of treating pneumonia. Some of the medicines he used were cocaine and heroin, a practice that was common to do at the time. He had an office in his home and made house calls, as was the custom of doctors back then. His practice was in Dorchester, MA a section of Boston. He delivered a good portion of the babies in Dorchester, in their own homes. This included his own children and all of his grandchildren, except the last one, Priscilla Anne Trotter... me.

He loved toys. He was the first one in Dorchester to have a car, a telephone, electric lights and an oil furnace with a thermostat in his house. The house was a huge Victorian, with a Mansard roof and seventeen rooms. It had been a wedding gift to the young couple from his father-in-law.

It had a living room with ornamental beams, a parlor with a baby grand piano and a chandelier, a huge dining room and a foyer big enough to be another living room. His office was in the back of the house with a private entrance, a waiting room and a “lavatory” with a small sink and an old fashioned toilet with an overhead water closet and pull chain to flush it. All the main rooms except the kitchen had gas fireplaces in them.

The kitchen was huge, with a long butler’s pantry that had its own sink. The three Heller grandchildren, my cousins, grew up in the house with their mother, Katherine who had been divorced. The only boy of the three, Frank, who they called “Brother”, had a beautiful voice and sang in the Boys Choir in the Christ Church in the City of Boston. There was a fine formal picture of him in the living room, taken wearing his choir robe. When the three had to do the dishes at night, Brother was assigned to the butler’s pantry to wash the pans. They would all start singing and when they got to the high parts, Brother’s sisters, Betty and Punkin would stop so they could giggle when they heard their brother’s voice crack on the high notes.

Off the kitchen, looking as though it was hanging in midair, was a breakfast nook. It was supported with posts that went down to the ground outside. From outside, the little room looked like it was telescoping out of the big house. It had benches that you had to slide in on when you wanted to sit at the table. If you were on the inside, you were stuck there until someone let you out. If you were young enough you could always slip down to the floor and crawl out between the grown-ups’ legs.

The dining room was big enough to hold dinners for 15 people. When I was a teenager, my church youth group asked if we could use it for dances. The minister that we had a the time frowned upon our holding dances in the church basement. Every Friday night, we rolled back the rug, brought out our Tommy Dorsey and Glen Miller records and held dances. My parents were happy, they knew where I was.

On the second floor were four large bedrooms, a sewing nook and a huge hallway with an enormous tapestry on the wall, that my grandmother had painted. There was also a billiard room where the men gathered during the holidays, played pocket billiards and got the room all smoky with their cigars and cigarettes. The walls were lined with more painted tapestries. There was a narrow laundry chute in the room that dropped directly down to the wash room in the basement. My cousins would get inside it while playing hide and seek, dangling two stories above the cellar floor.

Three of the bigger bedrooms had gas fireplaces, as did the billiard room. On the fireplace mantle in the billiard room was a stuffed parrot. He had at one time been a pet of the family. His name was Pollyreeka and he had been very adept at imitating the voices of my aunt and my cousins, much to their annoyance. My brother had been born in one of the back bedrooms.

My grandparents’ bedroom was the biggest one, with the second bathroom on this floor, in addition to the main bathroom. Their bathroom had the only toilet I had ever seen that didn’t have its water closet high above and needing to be flushed with a pull chain. The main bathroom was big enough to be a good sized bedroom.

On the third floor where the three Heller grandchildren slept and later, my brother, were three more bedrooms and a couple of rooms used for storage. These used to be the maids’ bedrooms. Like any young matron during the Victorian era, my grandmother had maids to help her with her household duties. They “lived in”, were paid a weekly wage and room and board.

Apparently, electricians were hard to come by back then, because my grandfather wired the house himself, when he switched from gas lighting to electric. He used the metal gas pipes to thread through the electric wires . One had to be really careful to avoid electrocution when turning on the lights, especially in places like the bathroom. One day, my brother reached up casually with two hands, to turn off the lights over the bathroom sink. He let out a howl and we saw he was frozen to both lights. Our grandmother rushed in and shut one of them off and he was able to let go. Fortunately, he wasn’t fried too much.
It was a wonderful house.