Oral History Project Interviews

Event: Telling Tales Out of School #2

Oral History Project Interviews

Location: Old Lyme Town Senior Center

Date: March 6, 2010

Interviewee: David McCulloch

Interviewer: ?

Then I went to work for a company building the Massachusetts turnpike as a resident engineer and oversaw the boarding program and part of the construction.

Finally had enough of that. Massachusetts is not the place where the most honorable people are involved in the construction business and I saw dishonest things that made me leave. The head of the engineering company I worked for was indicted.

I quit and came back home, we’d built a sailboat that I’d had since I was 16 called a friendship sloop and sailed it down to Virginia where I went to work for awhile in a boat yard and then worked on a drilling rig in the James River as a study preparatory for deepening the James River. Got married. Came back. Sold the boat and went to graduate school. Had 2 children.

And then you moved back to Old Lyme?

No I got my graduate degree at the University of Michigan. Went right from there to California where I joined the geological survey. And worked there for 30 years. (pause) That was Andy Pfeiffer, whose been a long time friend. I’ve known him ever since I can remember. He came to the camp that my mother ran and his wife lived with us for a couple years when she was in her teens. She’s the daughter of a Babylonian scholar from Yale who made his scientific career translating ?????? and generating early Babylonian history. Anyways, back to the geological survey, I joined them in the early 60s; worked in Alaska working out the history of marine transgressions. Then I moved to work in the San Francisco bay area. Worked in San Francisco Bay itself for 10 years looking at the exchange of the water mass and the animals that live in the Bay trying to get some idea about the best way to manage that estuary. I‘ve also worked on big earthquake, I worked on the Alaskan earthquake studying the damage to the railroad and structures there. And what’s called earthquake ground response problems. Then for 10 years I worked offshore in California and I mapped the structure of the CA shelf, about the northern half of the California shelf. And I’ve studied tsunamis. So I had quite a varied time working for the geological survey. And if they’d known about it, they wouldn’t have paid me because I had so much fun, you can’t believe it. It was wonderful. They were a wonderful organization to work for, they really cared about science which was just what I was looking for.

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Then I came back, retired, because my mother was in her early 90s and my older sister was having full care of her and I didn’t think that was fair, so I came back. We built a house that was on the farm. Lived there while I built my own house. Had my own house nearby the farm and my mother died a few years later and since then I have built another house for my daughter. And now I spend my spare time building boats, I think I’ve built maybe 20 boats since I retired in 1992. I try to build about a boat a year and I also built a house for my daughter who lives next to me. So I’ve been very busy. Also another fella and I really started the open space movement in this town and have been very successful in getting open space for the town. And I’ve worked on town commissions; the wetlands commission, conservation commission, open space committee. But now I’m only on two of those.

So how many houses now are on the farm property altogether?

There is the old house that was there when we bought the place, which incidentally was given to my folks free because the people said it wasn’t worth anything.

How old was that house when they got it, do you know?

I don’t, I should remember, 17 something, I’m not sure, I don’t really know, I should go back and look at the tombstone in the basement. Anyway, all the beams were handmade, it was a full frame house, poorly made out of second hand lumber, no insulation in the walls, drywall foundation, all of those things that don’t meet modern standards. I’ve seen a picture of the house when we first got it. The roof was peeling off , the windows were broken and there was a window frame hanging out of a window. They had to have had chickens up the upstairs, so they were really right, it wasn’t worth anything and we’ve been living in that house ever since. My sister is still there.

I hope you moved the chickens out!

Chickens are out, that’ s right.

So besides the main house, there are how many other houses on the property?

There is a stone building that my father and I largely made which is about 180’ long and about 40’ wide. Its laid up in stone right up to the roof line all the way around and the window frames are cast in concrete so that there’s no maintenance on the building except for the roof and that’s now used as storage and as a place to work. Then there’s another house that was used as a bunk house in the camp, which several years ago another fella and I moved off of the post it was on built a foundation under it and shoved it back onto that. Then there’s a long barn with stalls underneath it which was the original barn that my folks built, that was done before I remember. Then there’s the house that my sister had built which I redesigned because she didn’t like the design. That’s on the farm. Then she had a pole barn built several years ago and then added onto that with one of these huge fabric covered open space barns on the back. And there’s a couple others; corn crib and a few other small buildings. But we did all our building with exception of that new fabric building, they are largely our building. We did all the building. There’s also a milk house that my mother and I built.

Now your sister is named Jean, is that correct?

Yes, my older sister is Taffy. Taffy came back after working for many years. She’s a computer programmer and a tech writer. She came back to take care of my mother and commuted for a long time from her tech writing job in Massachusetts. Finally came back, got a job with Pfizer and worked for them for a long time and finally retired.

Does she still live in the area also?

She lives in that old house and her daughter lives in the old bunk house that we rebuilt.

Now, how many brothers and sisters did you have altogether?

I had 2 sisters and an adopted brother. One younger sister, one older sister and my adopted brother is older.

Is your adopted brother still in Old Lyme also?

Yes, he is. That’s George Duncan. There was another man who lived with us through high school, a man named Elliott Ressler who came from Brooklyn. His mother worked on the camp with my mother and she got to know his son and to know this woman very well. He started high school in Brooklyn, was really not fitting in very well in that kind of city environment so he came to live with us. Lived with us through high school. He blossomed from somebody who was having a very hard time in a big city school to be the head of his class, to be captain of the football and basketball team. A very successful guy. Went on to school, fought in the war against the Japanese, came back, worked for the police athletic league in Connecticut trying to get kids off the street because he remembered Brooklyn. Eventually became head of child adoption for the state of Connecticut. And from there went to be the town social worker and finally retired. Very pro social person.

He had a good helping hand growing up. So what are some of the other big changes you’ve seen in Old Lyme over the years?

I guess a couple of changes that bother me, the amount of building that really bothers me considerably. I can remember walking through the woods all over town. The kids in those days before electronic games spent a lot of time outside and there were very few restrictions. For example, I played in the waterfalls at Devil’s Hopyard. Now its all off limits. We used to swim from the Dam at Rogers Lake, now its all shut off. Kids really did an awful lot outside, and because parents weren’t scared for them, kids were allowed to do a lot of things which now parents won’t let them do because they’re concerned. We used to bicycle to the movies in Essex and Saybrook. Which now you wouldn’t dare do it.

Now did they have a special thing to go over the bridge? The bridge was not a high bridge at that time, it was a drawbridge over the CT River at that point?

The bridge was a drawbridge, the deck on the bridge was wooden planks, so when a car drove over it you could hear all the wooden planks moving underneath you. When the bridge was up, the traffic would back up all the way through Lyme Street because that was the major road. So one day three of us, I think I was maybe 15 or so, we went to go square dancing at Ocean Beach in New London, and being young and dumb, we missed the last bus back and had to walk. We walked back that Saturday night to Old Lyme, its about 16 miles, not a single car passed us on Rt 1 between New London and Old Lyme. That gives you some idea the amount of traffic that was not on the road. That was the major road from Boston to New York. The other day we sat down by the river to have a sandwich and we watched the bridge over the Connecticut, there was not a time when there wasn’t at least one semi trailer on that bridge between that time, so the amount of movement and traffic is horrendous. All that stuff went by freight, every time at a station, if it wasn’t a passenger station, at least a freight station and there were two in Old Lyme, one in the central part of town and one at Soundview.

Now were they both passenger or was one for freight?

I’m not sure. I know the one in Soundview was passenger, the one in Old Lyme I think did both. But those ended pretty early along with the beginning of trucking.

Now the station in Old Lyme, was that, where exactly was that?

Across from the golf course.

I hear about that station quite often and nobody‘s ever really able to pinpoint where it was.

Oh yea, that’s where it was, I remember that station.

Now were there stations also in like East Lyme and Niantic and all the way down or just a few?

I don’t know. When I was in grade school, coming back from New London, the call would be Saybrook, New London, Westerly, Kingston, Providence, Bagley and Boston. That’s what the conductor would yell. So those were the only stations at that time, but before that there were other stations.

I think that’s still what they yell when you get on.

Except now they’ve added 128. So that has changed that much recently. I think the thing that really bothers me most is the enormous amount of housing in town and the shift from general housing for all kinds of people to a large number of houses that are huge and largely for the wealthy and so on. So the composition of the populous is changed considerably which is also too bad. We have town that is divided into four units that have almost nothing to do with one another. There’s the young professionals who work at Pfizer whose principal concern is the school system. We have the well-to-do retired who belong to the golf club and other such organizations. We have the people who have been here forever and do all the service work; they’re in the fire department, the plumbers, electricians and so on. And then we have, of course, the beach community. And there’s almost no interchange between these groups in the town and it makes it very hard to get some sort of unified interest or action in the town. Unlike a Vermont town or even Lyme, where when they call a town meeting everybody goes and participates. It’s a strange town and its not getting easier, its getting harder to get things done.

Now what about the population when you were young, what would you say the population of Old Lyme was, and did you know just about everybody, or did you feel like you knew just about everybody?

In that sense, I’m different than a lot of kids that grew up in Old Lyme. First of all, I went away when I was fairly young, but also my father was internationally known and people came to visit us on the farm and we lived a very rich and luxury life on that farm. At dinnertime, there’d be maybe 15 or 16 people. People from all over the world, they talked about everything and that was our life when we were here in Old Lyme. There wasn’t much interchange with the people in Old Lyme, just a few of the kids we met in school. Not much else going on. We were isolated in that nice ivory tower, which I have missed all the rest of my life, I can tell you.

Now where were you during the 38 hurricane, were you here at that point or were you gone by then?

I was 9 years old, I was driving on Long Island in my grandmother’s car, we drove back to CT, as we drove over the CT River bridge there were houses and barns floating down the river. I can still remember that. Trees down all over. About a third of all the trees in CT were blown down. Now that doesn’t say much, because as a child, I can remember driving along the CT River and being able to see the River. There were so few trees. The same on the farm where I grew up. We’ve planted many, many of the trees there and the reason my father could buy the land so cheaply was because it had been forested. And people thought it was worthless. There was still tremendous damage and the flooding along the shoreline, as you know, Misquamicut Beach, all the houses were wiped off and at white sands beach, I think the water was 16’ coming over the beach. Something like that. I’m a little concerned that people now have forgotten what that was like and are not ready for that again. And the same sort of feeling when you study tsunamis around the world, people forget what has happened because the time between them is so long, they don’t remember that the water was maybe 20 or 30 feet high and it took out everything on the shoreline. And of course real estate interests are to develop those shorelines again and so on. So there’s competing uses.