Tammi has asked for us to send “stories”. Tell us a story—back in the day, what were you and Anne/Tammi doing? Sliding down bannisters at Central Church, cruising the halls of Central High, fun times in Hardwick, those wonderful trips in Holland, road trips, vacations, Middlebury times…take us down memory lane.
If you have 1-2 pictures, send them along too! (If you want to send pictures, send them direction to Beth.)
Hi Tammi and Craig,
Here is a story about the Goddard Memorial Day reunions!
Every year when we gather at Aunt Ruth’s for our family picnic each family member brings a “dish to share!” Tammi….you and Craig always bring delicious, healthy salads all the way down from Vermont! Everyone looks forward to them and you are always so good about sharing your recipes! You are always so much fun to talk with, Tammi, and be with at the family reunions! You are, too, Craig! Talk to you soon! ~Ginny and Rich~
The first Story! Hurrah!!! Thank you Ginny. I originally thought I’d be contributing stories left & right….very ‘Story Core’, you know…… but I sure have not fulfilled that vision. Thanks for the Goddard Reunion story. I remember when I had bumped into a fellow on Genealogy.com, back when that was a free site. He said he was a Goddard and wondered if the Goddards ever had family reunions. He had grown up in New Salem. So I told him about our tradition – and imagine my shock, months and months later, when he actually showed up at the upper Cemetery on Memorial Day! Really nice fellow, too.
This is and isn’t a story. It is more of a snapshot.
Every morning (and many evenings) for the last God knows how many years I have seen you and Craig and your dog(s) walking down the street. There is something in your step, your pace, in the way you tilt your heads towards each other that conveys such intimacy and tenderness. It is soothing and sweet and makes me smile. I thank you for that.
I sure am looking forward to the time when I have the energy for those morning walks! I don’t know who misses them most, Ballew or me. And I feel so out of touch with the neighborhood when we aren’t walking it every day!
A long lasting friendship across the ocean
In my youth I have always been a member of a drumband and in 1969 I joined BATO BAND HAARLEM. Unfortunately this band does not exist anymore, but in those days BATO was THE band in Haarlem. We often got invitations to perform at important events. One summer the board of the town asked us if we could host an American band which was touring through Europe and would also visit Haarlem. The two bands performed one nice summer evening and we had a great time with the American youngsters. Not much later the BATO BAND received an invitation to come to the United States. At that time about 50% of the members was still in school, so it was decided we would save money to pay for the trip by having bingo evenings, have jumble sales and more of those things. In 1973 we crossed the ocean and went to Massachusetts for 2 weeks.
Tony (another member of the band) and I were hosted in Hardwick, MA and stayed with the the Durand family. Tammi also had guests and that’s how I met Tammi.
The very same year Tammi came to Holland with Christmas and we visited Amsterdam. Tammi was very interested to learn Dutch (but you already spoke a bit of German, didn’t you Tam?).
Tammi had a great time and very much enjoyed seeing the BATO BAND members again.
In 1974 I went back to Hardwick and stayed with the Durands and with Tammi. Together we went in Tammi’s green Volkswagen Beetle to Detroit to visit her parents. I remember driving those long, long roads while we were singing songs of James Taylor etc. We visited Niagara Falls and then went on to Detroit. We visited the Ford factories and Tammi showed me the school she visited when she was a teenager. What a great time we had.
That same summer, Tammi came to Holland again and we both went to Austria by train. We had no car there and as I recall well, we did a lot of walking. One day we booked an excursion to the Grossglockner and threw snowballs in our summer dresses :).
In 1976 I went to America again and this time I brought my parents. Together with Tammi, we went to New York and stayed in a fancy hotel and went out at nighttime.
These are things I will never forget. All these impressions, the laughs and the friendship.
Tammi has visited Holland many times and also did her utmost to speak Dutch, which she did and does pretty well!!). What I most appreciate in Tammi is that she knows how to enjoy the little things in live. The way she can walk around with a big smile on her face enjoying small things.
In all these years we have been writing each other many, many letters and they always contained a lot of smileys 🙂 :).
I don’t recall exactly when and how, but somehow we lost contact for many years. Later on I got to know that Tammi got married and had moved out of MA to Vermont. At that time we had no internet yet and all I could do from here, was to look in Yellow Pages to try and find Anne Ruth Thompson (not knowing she had changed her name in Goddard).
Fortunately Tammi found me again and so the contact was renewed.
In 2010 my husband and I made a trip to New England and of course we payed a visit to Tammi and Craig. I was very much looking forward to see Tammi again of course, but also to meet Craig. We stayed with them for a weekend and did we have a great time!!!!
The funny thing is that, when I stepped out of the car and saw Tammi again after 34 years, she had not changed a bit. Of course, we both got 34 years older but while talking to Tammi I had the feeling we had spoken each other the week before. And Craig is so easy going, that is it not difficult to feel you at home immediately. (and we noticed that Craig LOVES ice cream 🙂 ).
Nowadays we have internet. What a blessing. If I send Tammi an email, most of the time you can expect an answer the very same day 🙂 :).
One of these days I will try to contact you through Skype Tammi!!
With love, René and Mary
Oh you do bring back the memories, Mary! We DID have fun, didn’t we?
One memory that stays so strong with me is Christmas Day, 1973. We had gone with John and Nel to St. Bavo’s the night before for the Christmas Eve service. Remember the oil embarge? No cars allowed on the road. Only bus and broom-fitz (am I spelling that right?), or walking.
The next day we came to your house for a big Christmas feast that your mother prepared. So delicious! We got to talking about the war. I had just seen WWII bunkers in the little town with the wooden houses that morning. Before that I was not thinking anything about how Holland had been right in the middle of that. So while we were eating I suddenly thought….!…… your parents would have been living there while Haarlem was occupied by the Germans. I asked about their experiences and felt my life change as they told about the war and you and John translated for me. How John’s uncle would be hidden each night in the false top of the wardrobe in the bedroom. Hidden so he could not be taken away to be a soldier. And your mother talked about how they were starving the winter after the war ended, digging up tulip bulbs to eat and pushing the baby carriage out to the country to try and find food and wood for fuel. It removed the War from books and brought it right into REAL LIFE for me. I will never forget it.
And I also remember the day I learned the most Dutch. I think it was with Karen, your niece. I will write more about this soon.
It was at the wedding lunch for John and Nel. I was sitting next to a young girl (maybe Karen ? Her age, for sure. ) She could speak some English. We started having some fun. I asked her how to say, “How do you say…._______ in Dutch ?” She told me, “Hoe num ja dat? [remember, I can speak some Dutch but I never learned to spell those words 🙂 ]
I asked her that question while pointing to things over and over again. She thought that was fun, but it would have driven any grown person crazy. And she felt perfectly free to laugh at the way I tried to say things and correct me. That is how I learned a whole lot of the words I know. And you are very nice to say I can speak Dutch. Not really, but I sure have had fun trying!
My First Tammi Encounter:
I’ve pretty much forgotten the subject of my first series of communications with Tammi but I’ll never forget the feeling, enthusiasm & fun of it.
Back when I was relatively new to the Rosborough family during the dreaded winter off season, someone posed a question or comment about something or other – the subject doesn’t really matter. Anyway, I responded as did some other members including Tammi. Pretty soon, we were zipping responses back & forth, deeply mentally involved with our RF-246s & cruising thoughts in mid-winter when Tammi wrote, “hey, this is fun!”. Well, it sure was. Here I was having this great conversation about our favorite subject with someone I didn’t know at all but quickly came to respect her opinions & enjoy her wit & enthusiasm! And it’s been many good times since then! Here’s to many more.
Pete “Sooner”
How did we ever spend the winter before we had that Rosborough chat site on yahoo? It has pulled me through many a frozen season, talking boat talk with all you guys! Gol, I love it.
I moved into the apartment in the old Mixter house in Hardwick so many years ago that I cannot count.(maybe 34?)I met my downstairs neighbor who was friendly and so knowledgeable. We became friendly and she offered gardening advice (how the Romanoski brothers taught her to prune tomatoes, bulbs, flowers etc.) and auction advice. Do you remember walking to the fountain in nightgowns late on hot summer nights to sit on the cool marble? or coercing me to become part of the Home baking committee for the fair,34 years later we are finally creating a cook book! Memories that made me love Hardwick.
I so vividly remember the first auction that Tammi allowed me to accompany her to. Some small town in New Hampshire, we had to leave EARLY in the morning to check out the preview of goods. We sat ALL day while very expensive things sold like crazy.Then it was my turn. I bid on two things and paid such a small price but ended up with two box lots full of beautiful things that everyone had passed by! (she just kept telling me to be patient) I still use the delicate crystal pitcher and glasses that were buried in one of those boxes.
Tammi took life then ( and it seems now) with a grain of salt. She never was ruffled about much and she was very pragmatic about most things. I do remember the beginning of her love with Craig. Suddenly she started disappearing for weekends and she would always come home with a sort of goofy grin on her face. In fact, I don’t remember the grin leaving! She chatted about him continuously. Love, and Craig….the perfect things for Tammi Thompson.She left Hardwick to move to Vermont but created in me, a love for this place and the fact that the romance of life can be found in everything.
Tammi, you were one of the first stories of my early days in Hardwick that my daughter remembers. Thinking of you…. perhaps we will meet up at the 250thFair this summer! Be strong!
Thank you, Micky! What a lovely story. We did have fun! And I remember your beautiful wedding at Olde Sturbridge Village. Just lovely.
Being Anne’s niece has always been fun. I think any Aunt knows that Aunt-hood can trump Mother-hood at times, in that you get to be fun without having to also be strict. And she did it well.
In my mind, Anne and Boston are interwoven. She invited me out to visit her in Massachusetts. She arranged to have us stay in a fancy hotel, a B&B on the Maine coast, taught me how to dismember a lobster, and introduced me to Hardwick.
I was 11. There is no age more impressionable than age 11. To me, Boston became my Mecca, but I had to wait until gradation to start my pilgrimage. College couldn’t come fast enough.
That week in Massachusetts changed my life. I felt as if I were being treated as an adult (when I think about it now, I just laugh…adult…age 11). But it was the most independence I’d ever been given. I was allowed to choose to do or not do anything I wanted, stayed in a fancy hotel in downtown Boston, paddle around the ocean, and experience all kinds of new regional foods (remember how Heather kept ordering only hamburgers, even when we were at the lobster shack??? pshaw).
So I came to Boston for college. I lived by the ocean for the 5 years post-college. I moved to Hardwick, as your surrogate. And I found a man who is so incredibly similar to Craig, even I’m surprised! But all in all, yours has been a good life to model mine after.
Who knew that a little visit like that would mark us for the rest of our lives? The 1977 (?) visit was fun….. But the years with you since have been the million dollar payoff! Do we got us some love, girl?.??
Xxxooo