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By Linda Thomas
Hometown Weekly Correspondent
It wasn’t long before the end of World War II when Bob Knight came back to live in the house he knew as a child. Now, the Medfield native got a chance to visit the house he hadn’t been inside for nearly seven decades.
Though his old home felt strangely unfamiliar, he easily recognized it all the same.
As a boy, Knight said the house was just ordinary – the one he lived in. But the historic home located at 411 Main Street bears a style of late Greek revival architecture built in 1880. While the home features modern amenities the original architecture and period details have been preserved.
“You sort of expect to see what you left, but you don’t,” he said. “What you see is not what you remembered.”
Earlier this month as he surfed Facebook he learned his childhood home was sold and an estate sale was being held. So he went.
He roamed from room to room and said it seemed smaller than the “mansion” he had remembered. Back then he said it took him a long time to run from one end to another. While he sees what’s now there he remembers what used to be there. Where that chair is there’s a couch. The piano was against the wall in the parlor next to the hallway.
“It conjures up memories of us all – my sisters (who were both piano players), my father (a great tenor) and myself – singing after supper while Ma did the dishes and then joined us,” he said. “Not every night, but often.”
The front bathroom upstairs was his bedroom.
“When I was little. I used to see ghosts … or boogie men … in the room,” he recalls, ”when it was actually the light from the street lamp flickering in through the tree branches.”
As he got older, he’d lay awake at night in his bedroom that faced the far end of the hall listening to loud, persistent chirping of crickets in the back meadow. He remembers the first room going in the back door was sort of an anteroom - mud or junk room -where you hung your jacket or took off your boots. He remembers the large pantry … at least it looked large to him.
“I’d hide under a shelf,” he said, “and eat sugar from the sugar can until I got caught.”
The pantry had an outside opening for the iceman to put in his blocks of ice to the refrigerator. The refrigerator had been replaced, but the door was still there. The old kitchen had a kerosene burner, hot water heater, stove with oil burners and an oven. His job was to fill the oil bottle every night.
There was a barn in the back of the house where Knight and some of the neighborhood kids played before his father moved his commercial laundry from Bakers Pond to the barn known as Medfield Custom Laundry.
Today, what used to be the barn is now the first house on Brook Street.
In the ‘30s Knight’s mother turned the dining room into a full restaurant she called Quinnapin House, after the town’s original Native American name. Folks lined up just for a taste of her famous roast lamb and coconut custard pie. Julius Tofias, who ran what may have been one of the few women’s hat factories in the country at the time, was a steady customer.
“I think my father got sick of having his dinner upstairs instead of in the dining room,” Knight said. “So, the restaurant didn’t last too long … but was quite popular when she ran it.”
He often played in the attic where there was a plethora of family treasures including piles of phonographic records his three sisters collected. He stood in the room he knew as the parlor and recognized the old circular radiator in the corner. It was in that same room that his parents put up the Christmas tree set up in front of the bay window every year. One Christmas present was his first Lionel train set.
He looked out at the bay window and suddenly he was 13 again when the Great Hurricane of 1938 hit New England hard. He remembers being outside at the front of the house while his younger sister and parents peered through the window watching as slates kept falling off the roof from the house across the street – some landing on their front lawn.
“To me that was kind of exciting,” he said. “But my parents thought it was pretty dangerous so they made me come in.”
Challenges seemed to lurk wherever young Bob Knight went. He was about 8 when he fell through the ice while skating at the old Tibbetts Pond at the south end of town.
“So, I’m walking home stiff-legged because my pants were freezing,” he said. “Somebody who knew me found me, picked me up and brought me home – but my mother wasn’t there. I got on the telephone and called the operator and told her, ‘I fell in … where’s Ma?’ I heard her say, “She’s down her mother’s house. Wait there and I’ll see if I can find her.’”
His mother was reached and he remembers her telling him, “Get in the bathtub. I’ll be right home.”
No dialing. You just picked up the latch and a light went on and a voice on the other end answered, “Number please.” His home phone number was 14; his grandmother’s (who lived on a farm on Phillips Street) was 183.
In 1940, the Ralph Wheelock School burned down. Knight and Billy Kelly (of Lord’s Department Store) were the first who heard the town’s whistle go off. They got to the site even before the firemen. “I jumped on my bike and went up there to find out where it was and saw the fire,” he recalls.
The boys went back to the remains of the building to stock up on pencils and paper and anything they could salvage after the fire.
“We really thought we were loading up with the stuff,” he said. “We took it all to Billy’s house next door. But we were told we shouldn’t have done that - so, we put it all back.”
At 15, he bought a ’31 Model A Ford from a laundry customer.
“I drove it home and worked on it driving around the back field until I got my license and could take it on the road. Ma did the cooking for a contingent of Black soldiers stationed in Millis at the old WBZ tower station. One day I took a bunch of them up to Milford to a movie and on the way home we went through Medfield. They stood on the back trunk rack and running boards hollering at the people as we went by – having a grand time.
“The next day Ma gets a call from the police station telling her the chief wanted to see me. I couldn’t figure out what he wanted but went to see him. He scolded me for being so reckless on the road. But all he said was, ‘Robert, you shouldn’t have done it. I don’t expect to see you do it again.’
“That was it,” Knight said. “Typical small town way of doing his job.”
He wore high cut leather boots with hard soles and would often come down the back stairs and tip himself at the top step. Instead of coming down tread-by-tread he cluttered down the edge of the stairs with the heel of his boot. “The sound disturbed restaurant patrons,” he said, “so my mother made me stop.”
It was 1943, his senior year at Medfield High, four months before graduation when Knight joined the Navy. Just 18, he went off to war. He was at Iwo Jima at the invasion and at Tokyo Bay at the time of the surrender. He was aboard the USS Boston, a heavy cruiser the next size down from a battle ship. He was a radio technician in the transfer room.
He got out of the service in February 1946 and came home to find the house had been converted to a two-family. The living room was now the dining room and the parlor the living room.
A year later he married Connie Northrop of Watertown. He bought the house at 403 Main Street – two houses down from 411. Then, in the early 60s, he was relocated to Newington, Connecticut where he and Connie lived for 50 years raising two children and having four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He and Connie were married just three months shy of 67 years before she died in 2014.
Last November Knight found love again at the age of 90. He and his wife Joanne, who had been married 52 years, now share a home in Holden, MA.
It’s likely Bob Knight will return back to his hometown of Medfield - but less likely he’ll ever get a chance to tour his childhood home again.
“It’s gained it’s own charisma,” he said. “It’s a landmark.”
Editor’s Note - Linda Thomas writes for Hometown Weekly Publications, Inc. For comments and suggestions she can be reached at [email protected]
