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| Phyllis Newman awaits her turn as she plays SkipBo with her friends at Hildreth House. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz) |
Growing old in Harvard can be a real challenge sometimes, but Still River Road resident Phyllis Newman has never been one to let challenges deter her. In fact, Phyllis has literally made a career of helping others grow old gracefully and with considerable style. From 1953 to 1968 Phyllis and her husband, Churchill, ran New Manor Hall on Bolton Road, a sprawling yet gracious nursing facility with all the comforts of home. Motivated in part by curiosity about New Manor Hall, and even more by the chance to spend time with a woman I deeply admire, I sat down with Phyllis recently to talk about this piece of Harvard history. Over the course of a few hours I learned a lot about a life of generosity and compassion and something about what it takes to grow older with dignity and with joy.
Phyllis welcomed me to her Still River Road home with her usual graciousness. We sat over coffee in front of a bay window that looks out over a charming backyard and watched the birds dart back and forth at the enormous feeder. Once we got past her modest disclaimer that her life hasn’t been “newsworthy,” Phyllis talked with passion and humor about the things that have mattered to her. Chief among those is her family. “I’m very proud of my children; they do me well,” she says, and the stories she tells throughout my visit bear out this remark.
Born in Cambridge in 1916, Phyllis was 6 months old when her family moved to Winchester. At 14 she entered what was then the Northfield Seminary for Girls, later Northfield Mt. Hermon School, and she went on to New England Deaconess, where she received her R.N. degree.
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| Phyllis Newman waves from the Harvard Help float as she rides down Mass. Ave. in last summer’s Fourth of July parade. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz) |
Phyllis married Churchill A. Newman in 1939, and they had four children over the next nine years: two girls and then a set of twins, a boy and a girl. She and her husband, known to most people as Chick, lived in Acton, in a house built on acreage given to them by Phyllis’ parents.
Phyllis’ career began quite unintentionally when a neighbor asked her if she would care for the woman’s elderly mother while she went to a family wedding, a trip that lasted much longer than planned. From then on everyone in Acton knew Phyllis was the one to ask if you needed a caregiver. Soon Phyllis and Chick had moved the three girls into one bedroom, Greg into a small sewing room, and opened up two guest bedrooms for respite care. The requests kept coming and it occurred to Phyllis, “Hey, I seem to have a calling.”
One day Phyllis’ mother was at the hairdresser and mentioned that her daughter was looking for a big house to buy. Another patron, Mrs. Cummings, chimed in, “I have a house in Harvard that I’m trying to sell.” On a cold day in March Phyllis went to look at Heart’s Content, a very large summer home built around the turn of the last century. It had 16 bedrooms, seven baths, six fireplaces, and a barn that housed a squash court, with a balcony for viewers. The house was being sold with five acres of land. To the west was open meadow with a view to Mt. Wachusett, and on a clear day all the way to Mt. Monadnock. The ad for New Manor Hall would extol the view as “ever changing with the seasons and like our gardens brings great pleasure to our guests.” Mrs. Cummings chose Phyllis over two other buyers who had made offers, and it seemed to Phyllis as though “the good Lord was guiding me.”
Everything worked out smoothly as the former summer home was transformed into a licensed nursing home. The town voiced no objections to a business in a residential zone, and the bank was willing to lend the Newmans as much money as they needed. At this time Phyllis’ sister was moving out of state, and she donated all of her furnishings “to help fill up that big house.” Chick’s uncle, an agricultural school graduate who had just lost his wife, was delighted to come and be the caretaker on the property. “The Lord put that right in my lap, too,” says Phyllis of each of these fortuitous events. As she talked, I became increasingly aware of how this sense of faith and gratitude pervades Phyllis’ outlook on life.
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| Illustration by Charles Overly. |
The children each had a room of their own out in the former servants’ quarters at the back of the house. A live-in cook resided in the attic. There were eight private rooms for guests, each two sharing a full bath. All of the guests were encouraged to furnish their rooms as they wished. A large living room, library, foyer, dining room and two bedrooms occupied the main floor.
“Today, you’d call it an assisted living home,” says Phyllis. The charge at New Manor Hall was $10 a day for 24-hour nursing service and meals. “I wore a white uniform every day.” Guests were served breakfast in their rooms, often delivered by the two eldest daughters, and lunch and dinner were served family-style in the dining room. Every need was cared for, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Phyllis helped with bathing and dressing, and doled out medications that came from the Harvard Pharmacy just down the street. There was entertainment, too: Carrie Blue played the organ and sang; the Girl Scouts and Garden and Rotary clubs visited with programs at holidays and throughout the year. Phyllis never left unless there was a registered nurse to replace her. “I had wonderful help from the nurses in town,” she recalls gratefully. Some of those nurses still write to her at Christmas and on her birthday.
Phyllis speaks fondly of her guests. “Mother” Cummings stayed with Phyllis during one winter. Miss Florence Barry, who had taught in Florence, Italy, had come to Harvard with her from Acton. The white wrought iron benches in Phyllis’ current side yard are in memory of Miss Barry. Several Harvard “natives” were delighted to be able to remain in town at New Manor Hall. Among them were Anis Guilbert, Hermione Mooney, and Mrs. Carpenter. Mrs. Peters had been a librarian. Fred Whitney had lived on Old Littleton Road and owned land on Stow Road. He sold off a bit of his Enchanted Meadow whenever he needed to pay his bill at New Manor Hall.
Phyllis had an ingenious system for handling complaints about food. Each guest put in a request for an evening meal and it was honored on a rotating basis. One request was popcorn for Sunday night supper. Mrs. Mooney wanted tripe (stomach of a cow) and “so help me Hannah, we had tripe,” Phyllis said.
Churchill was coordinator of anything to do with maintenance on the property, as well as managing the business aspects. He regularly took the station wagon or truck into SS Pierce in Boston for supplies, and he drove the patients to their many appointments and around town to see Christmas lights or the apple blossoms in the spring. It was nothing for him to drive a guest into Boston’s Shreve, Crump, and Low to purchase a wedding present.
But state regulations eventually put an end to New Manor Hall in 1969. The law said that there had to be a sprinkler system in the house, something not possible, having to do with the artesian well. Phyllis told realtor Ed Pieters to try to find someone to buy this “white elephant” for $100,000. In less than three weeks after it was put on the market a Mr. Blackmer took a look at the place and pulled out his wallet. He moved in with his wife and eight kids. After that, the back portion of the house disappeared. The Blackmers later sold the house to Ed Miller and Kathleen Cushman, and the Harvard Post moved there from where it had been operating, in the basement of the General Store.
Phyllis and her family moved to Tahanto Trail. She remained active in nursing, working at Emerson Hospital as a postpartum nurse from 1970 to 1980. She served on the board of Minuteman Home Care and, always committed to the care of the elderly, joined Harvard’s Senior Housing committee. She was treasurer of the Sixty-Plus Club, of which she was a founding member, and was active in her church. Churchill, too, was civic minded, serving as a volunteer fireman, a selectman, and officer in the Rotary Club. They suffered a great loss when their oldest daughter, Charlene, died five months after the birth of her first child, their first grandchild.
In 1971 Phyllis saw a “for sale” sign on her current house on Still River Road, and fell in love with the house. Then-realtor and volunteer fireman Peter Warren was showing her the house when he was called to a fire. It turned out to be a false alarm, and by the time he returned, Phyllis had written a check for a down payment. When Peter asked if her husband knew about this, Phyllis replied, “No, but he will.” She laughs as she says, “I did this to Chick several times”—making decisions and then telling him after the fact. (Like the trip to Bermuda, which Chick knew about only after the tickets had been purchased.) Asked if this had ever bothered him, Phyllis responds in the negative. Apparently the family all supported the idea that “If mother’s happy, everyone’s happy.”
After Chick died in 1983, Phyllis traveled extensively with Grace Cummings, as a companion to the older woman. They went “all around the world.” Between her travels with Chick and those with Grace, Phyllis laughs that “it’s easier to say where I haven’t been than where I have.”
Phyllis’ advice about living alone is to keep busy and engage in physical and mental activity. She doesn’t mind being alone at all—there is “so much to do.” She remains active in the Sixty-Plus Club, stays connected to her church, and is in the library program, receiving books in her home. Before the Council on Aging had a full-time director, Phyllis was active in running of it, and she now sings the praises of the COA and participates in many activities at Hildreth House. A tour of her home reveals that Phyllis is working on a collection of writings about her life, which she is calling “Grandma’s Connections.” Some of those connections are quite impressive, and Phyllis wants her family to know of their heritage. A guest bedroom serves as a repository for pictures and papers that she is working on. Throughout her home Phyllis is surrounded by things she loves, objects and pictures from her parents and from her own experiences and travels.
Phyllis says she feels very well cared for. Her three children have each chosen to support her living alone in any way they can, and they, her six grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren all make her very proud. “Harvard is a wonderful place for old people,” Phyllis says. “The police, fire, and ambulance squads and the highway department are such a blessing to the town.”
She is enrolled in the Are You Okay program and receives a call every morning; she also wears a Lifeline alert device. On a recent occasion she slipped and ended up using her line. “Two EMTs got this old dame up,” she said. Those words say a lot. First, they are totally incongruous, since Phyllis is nothing if not a true lady. Calling herself an “old dame” shows her healthy sense of humor about herself and her acceptance of life’s changes. Her attitude makes other people comfortable.
As is clear by her chosen profession, her years running New Manor Hall, and her active life in the community, Phyllis believes that it is better to give. If she regrets anything, it is that her opportunities to give are now fewer than they were throughout her earlier life. “I miss giving. I hate imposing,” she said.
I wish there were still a New Manor Hall with Phyllis as its nurse in her white uniform. But in a lot of other ways Phyllis is still giving—of her wisdom, her graciousness, her courage, her continued joy in life. Here’s one “old dame” who is truly an inspiration.