My name is Lawrence Lowell Bright. The Lawrence and Lowell come from outside Boston, Massachusetts, and the Bright comes from Pennsylvania. It's a Pennsylvania Dutch name that's been anglicized.
date of birth: April, 1953
family origins:
Well, my family is
from Pennsylvania. My father's family was from Berks county, Pennsylvania. My
mother's family was from Delaware county, Pennsylvania. My mother's family are
long time Quakers in the Delaware valley and the Philadelphia yearly Meeting. My
father's family are Pennsylvania Dutch people coming from Berks county and
Schuylkill county, Pennsylvania.
family life:
I'm the seventh out of ten, four girls and six boys. When it comes to being
number seven, there's not too much the older ones haven't already done. I shared
a room with a brother or a sister, but as they got older I had a room to myself.
Our house had five bedrooms.
My father worked and was gone a lot, traveling. I never really knew my father. We didn't play baseball out on the lawn or anything like that and my mother was occupied being a mother. We used to live on the side of the railroad tracks because my father could get on the train and go anywhere in the world. He used to go to Chicago a lot. I remember the first time he took an airplane. We were just amazed. On the train he'd be gone for the better part of a week, but on an airplane he would be gone and back the next day. That was pretty incredible. I asked my father one time, as you know little kids do when they're kind of interested in where they come from and how they got there, I asked him what it was like when I was born. He said he was in Chicago and he called home and everything was all right. I wasn't born yet. So he thought he would go to New York. He got on the train to New York. He called home when he got there and my father-in-law was in the hospital and he was in the doghouse.
school:
I
went to a day school and later to a private Quaker school. It was fun. There
were all sorts of kids there. We were in Maine then. A lot of towns don't have
their own high schools so what they do is they pay your board to go to what they
call academies. There aren't as many now as there used to be. There were some
that were for smarter kids who would go to college and some, like Maine Central
Institute, that were vo-tech. I went to Gould Academy, which was for kids going
to college.
My mother's family are Quakers, and my father's family are atheists. I guess I fall somewhere in between. Sometimes we went to Quaker meetings, sometimes to an Episcopal church.
traditions:
We decorated the Christmas
tree on Christmas eve, that was one thing we always did. My mother liked to keep
it up for the twelve days of Christmas. On Christmas Eve she always invited
people in that didn’t have a family, so there would always be three or four
people who weren’t family members. We would put the tree up in the afternoon.
Christmas Day we always had either a turkey or a goose, plum pudding, sweet
potatoes, creamed spinach. I don’t know whether we had mashed potatoes or not,
but I remember the creamed spinach and sweet potatoes.
On our birthdays, my mother would hide our birthday presents in my parents’ bedroom basically. Two or three or four presents. It was a big deal, we would come in and search for our presents in their bedroom. Of course, my father was gone during the day. This was before breakfast. We always had a birthday cake and ice cream. That was the standard routine. I guess that’s the way I always think of having a birthday. You hunt for your birthday presents in the morning and then go to school. But that night you’d have a birthday cake and ice cream.
a family legend:
My great grandfather was a surgeon in the Civil War and
later on he had a clinic in Bedford, New Jersey. In those times they didn’t have
any insurance, and clinics were private. He took care of this guy who had
tattoos all over him, an Indian. The guy died and to pay my great grandfather he
had willed him his body. So he skinned him out and dried the tattoos into
parchment. When we were little kids we used to go to my grandparents' house and
once a year my grandfather would bring out this box with tattoos on parchment.
They were ships and anchors and scenes of Indians and such. I haven't seen them
since 1960, but it's still in the family with my uncle.
books:
I'm an avid reader. I think people
who read as kids for enjoyment, not just for schoolwork, end up to be lifelong
readers. Both my parents always read books.
One of the books that I had I picked up in 6th or 7th grade was called A Sporting Chance, by Daniel P. Mannix. To this day I can look at that book, I know that I must’ve read it a hundred times, and I know every photograph. It was about all different types of hunting and I pored through that book backwards and forwards. There was also Mike Mulligan, Steam Shovel Man.
