When Roselle and I first moved to the Berkshires full time in 1971, things didn’t look a lot different than they do now. One of the ways I have always kept track of things is by referencing or—as we used to say in graduate school—“comparing and contrasting.” Railroad Street is one of the things that has changed.
Railroad Street has always been the main thoroughfare for commerce in Great Barrington. The stores have changed hands a number of times over the years, and when we arrived in the Berkshires, Railroad Street was a little seedier than it is now. Now it’s turned into the Greenwich Village of Great Barrington complete with fine stores and restaurants.
As for Roselle and me, we just got lucky. Our friend Elliot, who was then on the left side of the political spectrum (but on the right side of the road), lived in a little house on that road that heads up to Jug End. It was a very small house, and when we visited, we slept on the floor. I loved it. We decided that we really wanted a house, so we went to the real estate guy in Hillsdale who had found Elliot’s house for him. The real estate guy took us around Hillsdale and we found something that we really liked. As I remember, the property had seventeen acres and some water and a huge barn and a big house with lots of rooms. As a starving professor, not yet married, I had almost no money but I loved the place so I told the agent that we wanted to buy it. Unfortunately, someone had already put down a deposit and we lost our chance.
We started to look for other houses, and we looked and looked and found nothing. One day, the real estate agent looked at us and accused us of not being serious buyers. As always, Roselle saved the day. As she passed by his desk, she saw a picture of a little house in Alford. Roselle asked about it, and the agent dismissed it, saying something like, “That isn’t for you.” We asked why, and the agent’s wife said that she would take us over there and drove us to the little house in Alford. We bought that house and that original missed opportunity in Hillsdale led us to the place where we welcomed our two children into the world.
I had accepted a job teaching at the State University College at New Paltz, but we didn’t want to live there so I started commuting and we were off to the races. Now it is more than 50 years later and I am reminded how things all began.
So much of what happens to us is a matter of chance. If that first Hillsdale property had worked out, who knows where we would be living or what we would be doing. We moved into that little house, and Roselle got a job teaching at Monument Mountain High School. We would go out to eat all the time and the check was often $20 for the two of us. Our house was a wondrous place to start out. We bought it for $18,000 and, after fifteen years, sold it to some wonderful people who are still living there.
I love driving down Green River Road by that old house which meant so much to Roselle and me. Look, I’ve made some mistakes in my life, but in the end, things worked out. I’ve been pretty lucky so far. As Pete and the Weavers sang, “I’ve had a lot of kids a lot of trouble and pain but oh Lordy, I’d do it again.”
