Wednesday, July 26, 2023
I am so sad about Norma's death. I am Norma's nephew. (Richard Borgeson) I grew up in my grandmother's (Ma) household with Norma. She was 7 years older than me, so she was like a sister. The house was very small and the three bedrooms were tiny. At the time, Norma's sister, Doris, and brother, Albert, lived with us. So, between them and Ma and Pa and me, we six had to share rooms in two's with very small beds and hardly any room to move around in. And there was only one small bathroom for the 6 of us.
I'm those days, it was common for young women to make their own dresses from patterns you could buy. Many a time, she and Doris had cloth spread out all over the dining room table with pins and scissors. I remember especially that, when pinning the cloth pieces together, they would be holding the pins in their teeth. The sewing machine was right next to the table.
According to Ma, Norma became deaf due to meningitis at age 3. She went to a boarding school for the deaf in Beverly, Massachusetts (about 20 miles north of Woburn) for a while. At that school, the communication method taught was lip reading. During breaks at school, she would bring classmates to our house, usually Mildred Drew and Helen White. Then, she enrolled in the Horace Mann school in Boston where she learned sign. She graduated when I was 11. She commuted by train everyday. After she graduated, she worked for an insurance company in Boston and continued to commute by train. Eventually, of course, she married Tom and stopped working while raising her children.
A couple of stories. One time, Ma found out that she was drinking Alka-Seltzer because she loved the soda like effervescence. Then, there was the time, record albums from a record club arrived in the mail. Of course, she couldn't listen to them but she was going to save them for her eventual children. I'll never forget that Ma returned the records and wrote on the bill: "Norma is deaf!"
She frequently had deaf friends come by, maybe half a dozen or so. They would sit around talking and eating. Now, you might think they were pretty quiet. Not so. They would laugh loudly and constantly.
She was good company. Her brother Lennie (my Uncle) frequently took us flounder fishing in Gloucester. We'd go into a bay in a large row boat about a mile off shore and drop out lines by hand. When something was caught we'd pull up the line by hand. We did catch flounder but many other sea creatures went after the bait. We had to be careful pulling the line up because if you pulled fast, you might grab one of those creatures, including a lobster. Crabs too. Also, we didn't have a car, and Lennie would take us places like the beach or amusement parks where it was a lot of fun to be with her.
She moved out when she married Tom. I was a teenager at the time. She and Tom frequently came to dinner at Ma's on Sundays. Tom and I would huddle in the living room, passing notes back and forth about his favorite subject - politics.
I went off to college when I was 17 and never lived in Woburn again. So I didn't see much of Norma after that.
I guess it's no secret that Norma was very beautiful. And she was always cheerful and smiling, with a lot of laughter. A delight to be around.
