Olive Howe Streeter

From Anne Browning Williams (daughter of Olive Howe Williams' brother, Arthur Williams).

Aunt Olive married Earl Streeter. She had gone to Wellsley, he never went to college and according to Arthur felt inferior. They had Peggy. I wonder what happened to her. Olive was Elsie's sister. Elsie and Uncle Billy Valentine had two boys slightly older than my brothers, Archie and I think, Billy.

I don't know much else. Olive was skinny, Elsie was fat. Arthur said I looked just like her. She died of heart I think at 63.

Our family went on vacation every summer, one year visiting Daddy’s sister, Olive Streeter, when she and her family were living in Chaplin, Connecticut, and later when they lived in Hamden, Connecticut. Back in far away New Haven, my brothers were working their way through Yale. Weekends they hitchhiked to Aunt Olive’s and Uncle Earl’s house in Hamden, Connecticut. If no one was home, they forced open a window and climbed in. Aunt Olive didn’t mind. My brothers loved the doughnuts in Aunt Olive’s big ceramic cookie jar, but the lid creaked when they raised it to sneak out yet another doughnut. If it was close to dinnertime Aunt Olive would call out from the kitchen, when she heard that creak, “No more doughnuts, boys, you’ll ruin your appetites.” We stopped twice on our way to Boston to visit both Daddy’s sisters, Aunt Elsie Valentine and Aunt Olive Streeter. Aunt Elsie was jolly and tubby and outgoing. Aunt Olive, who lived in Hamden, CT, was thin and saturnine and reserved. Aunt Elsie lived in the countryside near Pomfret Center in a house that had been built in 1732 on a huge block of naturally occurring granite. The house had the original hand-forged iron “H” hinges on the doors. Perhaps it was a wonderful old house, but it was dark and smelled of urine. The solid granite foundation wouldn’t allow any plumbing and chamber pots were used at night. My Aunt Elsie, a Wellesley graduate, was not at all interested in being fashionable. She told me some of the Stow and Williams family stories. “My grandfather’s grandfather, Captain John Stow, was one of Benedict Arnold’s men in the Invasion of Canada.” This was before Arnold, disgusted with the way he was treated by the Americans in command, went over to the English. “Arnold’s men worshiped him. Captain John used to take my grandfather on his knee and say: ‘Never forget — Benedict Arnold was a brave man who was badly treated.’” Aunt Elsie also told about a cousin, General Green, who fought in the famous Indian battle at New Milford, Connecticut — one of the few times the Indians won.

FN My brother Robert joked, “Aunt Elsie and Aunt Olive got in the DAR, through Benedict Arnold.”

The Streeters had a good-sized strawberry patch behind their house. Mom and I helped pick the large, delicious berries. Each of us ate a big bowl of berries covered with powdered sugar and heavy cream. The Streeter’s only child, Peggy, was like her father, Earl, quiet. Uncle Earl was an engineer for the state of Connecticut. My brother Arthur said that he had an inferiority complex because he hadn’t gone to college, while Olive had gone to Mt. Holyoke and Elsie, to Wellesley.

We visited the Green family in Hartford and found a dozen ancient people sitting in the large living room of a huge old house. They all lived there and were all related. Mrs Green showed me the 300-year-old Williams family Bible. The first signature was “Richard Williams, Gentleman” and the date1628, the year he paddled in a canoe to the future Rhode Island and settled on land near what would one day be Teaneck, Rhode Island. A nearby town is named after his wife, Frances Dighton.

The Green family was related to Daddy’s late aunt whose maiden name was Harriet Green. She lived in Hartford and was the heiress of a clipper ship fortune of seven million dollars, a huge sum of money in the early years of the twentieth century, the same Aunt Harriet whose hand-painted china was displayed in the cherry wood corner cabinet in our dining room. Daddy was designated by Aunt Harriet to be her heir since she and her husband didn’t have any children. When she died, her money was to go first to her husband and then, after he died, to Daddy. People weren’t so conscious of legalities in those days and trusted each other to do the right thing. Six months after Aunt Harriet died, her husband married a pretty young woman of nineteen. He died within the year and Aunt Harriet’s fortune went to his young wife.

this is earlier:

The two young men wanted to come home for the summer, “home” being where Mom was although they had never been to St. Louis before. They had almost no money and had to figure out how to travel the cheapest way possible. They looked at an aged Essex convertible coupe with a rumble seat priced at $75 and asked Uncle Earl’s advice. “Don’t buy it, it’ll never make the trip,” he told them. But they couldn’t find anything else that cheap so they bought it anyway. The car blew out five tires along the way and used a quart of oil every fifty miles.