Moe

pfollansbee

Nov 15

November 15, 1923. One hundred years ago today my father was born. Warren Harriman Follansbee - though I only ever heard two people call him Warren - his mother and one of our neighbors.

my grandmother Hazel Polhamus Carpenter Follansbee w Warren at 6 months old, 1924

Everyone else only ever called him "Moe" and so that's who he was.

"Warren taken in So. Boston 7th grade" c. 1936/7

Grew up poor in Boston. One sister, my aunt Doris. Moe was bright, did well in school - but was not going anywhere past high school. There was a legend that he wanted to try out for professional baseball - but he also told lots of tales - so I can't swear to that. One story I heard enough to believe was that his father, Edgar Harriman Follansbee, said to him the day after he graduated high school in 1942 "I got an interview for you at the Christian Science Monitor newspaper..." which Moe declined. He left the house, went in town and got a job at A.J. Wilkinson Hardware - Boston's oldest hardware store. And that was the only job Moe ever had. Worked there until the week of his death at age 51 in 1975. (below: a plane I collected long after Moe's death - with the imprint of AJ Wilkinson)

small smooth plane; A.J. Wilkinson & Co. Boston

I only got snippets of stories of his youth - often revolving around how the family made do on so little, or exploits about games in the streets of South Boston - baseball being a lifelong passion. He always said he invented halfball, he kept saying so even after we knew it wasn't true. There was lots of bravado - but my guess is it was a cover. He boasted about all the girls he had clamoring for him - apparently he used to tell many of them "I'll come pick you up tonight..." only to somehow get out of it.

Then he told Mary E. Fiske he was coming to pick her up one night...and she shrugged it off, knowing his track record. But somehow her friends convinced her that this time he meant it. And so he did. So one job - one woman.

Moe, 1943

Moe went in the Army in 1943, served until 1945 - in his words, which I just read for the first time today thanks to my sister Susan: "My journeys carry me at government expense to many of our United States and then to England, Africa, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium and Holland. These two and a half years have a settling effect on a young man and when I return home, I am content to travel no more."

As Steve Goodman's song My Old Man says "after they dropped the bomb, he came home and married mom..." - well, not quite. Moe came home after VE day - got home mid-summer. He was not in combat but in supply. He could type - which pinned him to desks much of the time. For which I'm glad...because he wrote...and wrote and wrote. My mother saved all his letters - neatly bundled and arranged chronologically. I spent years transcribing them. 120,000 words. Each letter signed "All my love always, Moe"

some of Moe's letters

Here's one dated Aug 22, 1943, written on a roll of adding machine tape. Over 3,000 words. Written 7 years before Kerouac put his 120' roll of paper into his typewriter for a draft of On the Road.

a letter written on an adding machine roll

I'm the youngest of five, born in 1957. Between the five of us we have collected memories of some of his exploits. Most of the things I remember about him revolve around us, his family. We lived in the suburbs of Boston, on the south shore. Suburbs, but no car. Neither of my parents drove. That changed near the end of his life, Moe suggested to my mother that she get her license, "you'll need it…" he said. Their not-driving was really economical, it seems to me, though I never knew or thought that when I was a kid. They just didn't drive. But I'm sure it was just that they couldn't afford a car and all the expenses that go with it. So on rare occasions when we got a ride to school in the rain with a neighbor - I always thought it was a big deal. Even now, there's times we'll remember some activity or other happening across town or even out of town - and one of us will ask "How did we get there?" And sometimes we don't have an answer. Other times we'll know it was aunt so-and-so, etc.

My sisters and brother got cars as their turns came. But in those early years, it was walk to the bus, the bus to the subway and on into Boston. Other times my father got rides into work with neighbors. And when he wasn't working, he was working around the house. I remember him painting neighbor's houses - one time he did that in exchange for a week's use of a cottage near a pond in Plymouth. Not on a pond, near one. I was probably 9 going on 10 - and felt like we were so far away. I now know it's a 30 to 35 mile drive. Must have been the furthest I had ever travelled at that point. And for a good while.

He was a woodworker, but I never knew that phrase or thought in those terms. He just made stuff in the basement - the "cellar" in our local speech. As in "Moe's down cellar…" - I remember sitting on the steps watching him at his tablesaw, the loudest, screaming-est machine. Completely covered in dust, smoking a cigar. No such thing as dust collection in the 1960s. Plywood too. So dust from adhesives. I used to sit there with my fingers plugging my ears, but couldn't take my eyes off him. I was very young, an early memory. I have no idea where he got the ideas, plans or anything of that kind. There was no trove or stash of magazines and books pertaining to his "craft" - no one probably thought of it as such. But he made lots of things we used around the house.

I was probably 10-12 years old when I started taking art lessons in Quincy Massachusetts. I'd take the bus from Weymouth Landing and then walk a mile or so to the art center. He made me a plywood and formica carrying case - all partitioned off inside to house pencils, charcoal, pastels and I forget-what else. Plastic suitcase handle, brass hinges and clasps. And using adhesive letters meant for a mail box - "Peter the Pen" plastered across the lid. Except - it was all too big and heavy. So he re-made the entire thing, only a smaller version.

We had a blackboard on the wall beside the kitchen phone. Neighbors would come and borrow tools and Moe would say "Let me put your name on the shit list." But he would always help them with what they were doing. I assume he learned a lot of it from his father Edgar. I never knew my grandfather. But Moe used to tell us Edgar could do all the work around a house - electrical work, plumbing, woodwork. Used to draw too. Shell-shocked from WWI, I think his only son going off to WWII was too much for him, he & my grandmother split up then, while Moe was in Europe. He was alcoholic and abusive - today we'd maybe recognize his problems as stemming from his time in the war…but not then. Or not treated as such anyway. Moe never saw him again, though Edgar lived another 17 years.

Recently I was at my nephew's house and turned a corner and there was Moe's "credenza" -it used to sit beside his chair, with his pipes stored in racks on the insides of the doors. Part of his later period. Tablesaw, router and drill press - I forget what else. I inherited all that stuff when I was 17. My older brother already had what he needed in that vein. I was an art student, so started out learning to make picture frames. I made a couple while Moe was still alive - I remember showing them to him, when he was too sick to go down cellar any longer.

detail snapshot of Moe's credenza, probably late 1960s/early 1970s

Moe had a typewriter in a desk in the cellar (away from the tools, on the kid's "side" of the cellar.) The desk had a handle that you'd grab and lift up and the top would pivot and bring up the typewriter. I don't know what he had it for by that point, but I do remember him always telling us "you should learn how to type…"

When he died I was 17. I floundered for many years after that, but didn't recognize it as floundering until I was done with it. Dropped out of college after one year & a week. Mostly just stayed high for a decade. But eventually found out woodworking was what I could do. So among the many things he never lived to see was my work. And probably for a time that bothered me, til I finally just accepted that things happen this way or that way for a reason. Or maybe not for a reason, but they just happen in the sequence they do and we just cope with it & get on with our lives. But one thing I accomplished that really struck me emotionally was my first published article in Chipstone's American Furniture in 1996. A couple of years of research and writing, (during which I learned to type!) - I felt like that article made up for my floundering years and I remember giving a copy to my mother and all I could say was if only he could see this…

Now all these articles, books, all this furniture, have piled up here and there. More importantly my family - my wife and two kids. Stuff he missed. But they get the stories. I tell them over and over. This is one.

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I wrote some about my father here on this blog ten years ago - 2013. One of my most popular posts - about baseball.

https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/on-baseball-pt-2/