Marijane dosdell
Interviewed by Grace Drury and Chris Ulian
The Kids Go to Elementary School
Marijane Dosdell moved to Wellesley with her husband in 1955, coming from Minnesota and lured by Wellesley’s reputation as a beautiful commuter community with good schools. The Dosdell family lived on Oakland Road down near Longfellow Pond, a neighborhood that was populated by some of the most illustrious figures in Boston at that time. The sports broadcaster Curdt Gowdy and the inventor of the donut machine Ted Andrews both lived nearby - Marijane remembers that “years ago, you’d go into a store and they’d have these machines and they’d pop the dough in and it’d go around and it’d come out a donut! This was well before Dunkin’ Donuts, of course.” The Longfellow Pond area also provided ample opportunities for recreation; “it was so nice - the kids could walk down there and mothers could sit in the car nice and warm and watch their kids skate. Because really there wasn’t any other place to skate. There used to be the [outdoor] hockey rink at the high school, but they kept that pretty closed.” The school rink was located on the Hunnewell fields, in the same location town officials planned to install a temporary link two winters ago (last year the town installed an outdoor rink at Phillips Park). Skating on Longfellow Pond declined when the town stopped plowing the ice, but even today families can occasionally be seen out on the pond in the winter. Marijane ran for elective office in the Recreation department once, but she says, “The Wellesley Townsman took all the money for my ad but then they left my picture out. So no one knew it was me running! My friends all said ‘Why didn’t you tell us, we see you all the time and we would’ve voted for you!’ And then I lost by only 13 votes. But that’s ok. We got a nice party out of it anyhow!” When Marijane first moved to Wellesley from Minnesota, she joined the Junior League in town, which required a certain amount of volunteer service per month; “I had two babies and I didn’t know anything coming from Minnesota, but the Junior League said they needed help at the Mary MacArthur rehab center over at Babson. So Sue Brooks and I went over Wednesday evenings and we would walk into this humongous room - it was a lecture hall after they left - and it was filled with iron lungs.These were people that, you know, it was getting towards the end of it for them. There was a little boy that I had - little Tommy - he was probably 2 or 3 years old. There was a professor from Dartmouth College there, there were people from Connecticut and the Syracuse, NY area. I learned how to play cribbage there, and we’d write a few letters. We never fed them, but we talked to them, and they were all very interesting. I noticed Little Tommy in the paper a few years after that in the paper. He could move his head, but that was it, so they put a light switch underneath his neck, and he nodded and turned the Christmas tree lights on on Boston Common. I don’t know what happened to him after that. One of the other patients became completely paralyzed, but his best friend was such a good friend of the family. And the dying one asked his friend, ‘When I die will you marry my wife? I know you love her - would you love her enough to get married?’ And they did get married!” Marijane’s four children (Jane, Mary, Jeff, and Nancy) attended Fiske elementary school, where one teacher was detested by parents and students alike; “[this teacher] said to one of the mothers of my daughter Jane’s classmates, ‘your daughter is never going to amount to anything.’ Lisa just finished her 26th year as a producer with Martha Stewart, so she certainly did amount to something! And my Jane had red curly hair and [the teacher] said to me ‘your daughter cares more about her hair than she does this and that.’ And now Jane’s a psychologist in Burlington VT - shes been very successful.” Growing up, the kids played Little League baseball, and Marijane’s husband coached. Marijane was also involved in Cub Scouts, “bless their rotten little hearts.” She recalls that “the fire department used to blow the whistle at 10 minutes of 6 every night. I kind of miss that too - you’d know when Jeff would be getting off the train and I’d have 10 more minutes to finish dinner!” In the summers, the Dosdell’s would spend days at Morses Pond, and would take trips to Minnesota and Cape Cod. Marijane tearfully remembers one of the hardest days in town during her time living here, when a young resident drowned at Morses Pond; “Jeff was a guard the last time they had a drowning, which was probably 30 years ago. I was there that day. It was probably the worst day of my life when I saw John Manny reach down and pick up an arm out of the water. Because the mother kept saying ‘he’s not in the water, he’s taken off again - because he had taken off two days before and hid in his car, and they had looked for him and found him in the car. So they didn’t get him right away. And Jeff just went crazy, he just - all the guards blamed themselves. Jeff as eating lunch when they had the all-clear and there was nothing they could have done. The mother, I had seen her talking to a friend and the friend had on a dress that I had almost bought. And I just kept thinking, ‘I’m so glad I didn’t buy it.’ My two girls were out sailing so I was keeping an eye on them, but I noticed this mother with the dress that I didn’t like, and she didn’t report them for a long time.” But there were happy memories recorded at Morses too - “Nancy was the best sailor at Morses pond. She beat the pants off of every adult. We had 5 sunfish at one time! My husbands company did not pay for the country club, so when the kids asked ‘Well why don’t we belong?’ I said ‘Because your fathers company doesn’t pay for it, that’s why!’ So we spent a lot of time at the pond.”
The Kids Go to High School
All of Marijane’s kids graduated from Wellesley High School in the late 1970’s and early 80’s. She fondly remembers Thanksgivings spent cooking and waiting for the family to return from the Needham-Wellesley football game; “Everybody would go to the game. I was always cooking turkey. I went one year, but it was cold. One year the phone rang and it was Jeff saying ‘Mom, you’ve got to come and get me - I’m at Newton-Wellesley hospital.’ And I said ‘What’s the matter?’ and he said ‘Somebody dropped his billfold and I went down and picked it up under the stands, and I stood up and cracked my head open on the bleachers. And the damn kid never even said thank you.’ So here I had the turkey and Jeff...Jeff won out. I just turned the stove off and went!” Jeff ran track in high school, and was a co-captain of the team - he even held the school record in the 440 yard run (track measurements hadn’t yet been converted to the metric system in that time) for a year, until somebody else broke it. Marijane also recalls school events such as the prom, which at that time was open to both juniors and seniors. “Mary went to the prom with Skip Sullivan. She was a junior and he was a senior and he was the co-captain of the football team. Big deal. I said, you know, he should be taking a girl his own age, but no one else had asked her and so she went with him. And the next year she wasn’t asked. Mary and Sue Dacey and Mary Anne McGovern were all not invited, so they came over to my house and I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ And they said they were going to go out - there were a lot of parties so they were going to go to one of the parties. I said ‘Why don’t you put costumes on?’ So they started wearing costumes, and they went and broke into the prom in the costumes! Mary called around 11 o’clock and said ‘Mom, we’ve been invited to parties all over and we’ll be home in the morning.’ But thats how they went to the prom! This sort of thing went on for several years, but then they were banned - the school said nobody else can do this anymore.” One year, Marijane was the co-chair of the committee responsible for planning the party for graduating seniors (the equivalent of all-night party today). The year before, kids had overindulged on illegal beverages at the party and had created a spectacle that became quite big news among the news outlets in the Boston area. Naturally, Marijane and her co-chairwoman were concerned with making sure that this scenario did not repeat itself: “every radio station had a car out here and they were just zeroed in on Wellesley because they thought the same thing would happen. So we changed the rules. Once you got in you couldn’t get out. Once you got out, you couldn’t get in. So Betty and I were making sure the kids were ok, and there was only one kid that we had to call the ambulance for. But we had to smuggle him out because we didn’t want these awful stations to say ‘Here we are at Wellesley High School’ and to make it another spectacle. Fortunately it was teeming rain that night, but his parents were nowhere to be found. So we put him in the wrestling room and barricaded the doors until the police got there, then we smuggled him out. And then they got him down to Newton-Wellesley and they did something to him, I hope something not very nice, because he could have caused a lot of trouble that night. We had a New Years Eve theme - you know, new life, new beginning. That was fun. But we were really kind of scared. We didn’t want any more bad publicity. As you know, anything happens in Wellesley, boy, they’re going to report it. They never say anything really good that happens, but they watch everything else.”
Stores in Town
Marijane remembers the stores that used to line Washington Street in Wellesley - some of her favorites were E.A. Davis and Filenes, which used to occupy the storefront now home to Talbots. Another mainstay in Wellesley was the Playhouse movie theatre, which stood where Bertuccis is now located. Marijane says, “The worst thing was when the Playhouse closed. All of my kids had their first dates there! I can sit in Bertuccis and remember where everything was and all. I remember I saw ‘Psycho’ there, and my husband wouldn’t go and see it so I went with my friend Jane Wheatley. It was so scary and I had to get up and go to the ladies room, and I was afraid to go! It was a terrible movie. But it was sad to see the Playhouse go.” The first movie Marijane saw in color was “Gone With the Wind,” and then “Snow White,” but color television was not her favorite; “I remember watching color television for the first time and it was awful, just nothing like what it is now. I remember we watched the landing on the moon [in 1963], and that was kind of a bummer too. It just wasn’t clear. We went over to our neighbors because we thought it would be better on their big screen, which at that point meant 14 instead of 12 inches.” Other former stores in town included Diehl’s, a hardware store and lumberyard which stood where Roche Bros. is now, and Brighams, which closed only a few years ago. Marijane says, “Brighams used to have something called an Awful Awful which was 7 scoops of ice cream and all kinds of sauces. And Chris Barker, who lived behind us - he’s in of the top law firms in Boston now - he went in and ate an Awful Awful! And you got your name on the board. But then he ate another one and then went right out in the back and threw up! So every time I see him I like to remind him of that.”
Today
Marijane lives in a condo in town, and is happy being back in Wellesley: “I see people I haven’t seen in years. And a lot of them I dont know, because we’ve all got white hair now! But just go to Captain Mardens for a while, and you’ll see someone you know.”
The Kids Go to Elementary School
Marijane Dosdell moved to Wellesley with her husband in 1955, coming from Minnesota and lured by Wellesley’s reputation as a beautiful commuter community with good schools. The Dosdell family lived on Oakland Road down near Longfellow Pond, a neighborhood that was populated by some of the most illustrious figures in Boston at that time. The sports broadcaster Curdt Gowdy and the inventor of the donut machine Ted Andrews both lived nearby - Marijane remembers that “years ago, you’d go into a store and they’d have these machines and they’d pop the dough in and it’d go around and it’d come out a donut! This was well before Dunkin’ Donuts, of course.” The Longfellow Pond area also provided ample opportunities for recreation; “it was so nice - the kids could walk down there and mothers could sit in the car nice and warm and watch their kids skate. Because really there wasn’t any other place to skate. There used to be the [outdoor] hockey rink at the high school, but they kept that pretty closed.” The school rink was located on the Hunnewell fields, in the same location town officials planned to install a temporary link two winters ago (last year the town installed an outdoor rink at Phillips Park). Skating on Longfellow Pond declined when the town stopped plowing the ice, but even today families can occasionally be seen out on the pond in the winter. Marijane ran for elective office in the Recreation department once, but she says, “The Wellesley Townsman took all the money for my ad but then they left my picture out. So no one knew it was me running! My friends all said ‘Why didn’t you tell us, we see you all the time and we would’ve voted for you!’ And then I lost by only 13 votes. But that’s ok. We got a nice party out of it anyhow!” When Marijane first moved to Wellesley from Minnesota, she joined the Junior League in town, which required a certain amount of volunteer service per month; “I had two babies and I didn’t know anything coming from Minnesota, but the Junior League said they needed help at the Mary MacArthur rehab center over at Babson. So Sue Brooks and I went over Wednesday evenings and we would walk into this humongous room - it was a lecture hall after they left - and it was filled with iron lungs.These were people that, you know, it was getting towards the end of it for them. There was a little boy that I had - little Tommy - he was probably 2 or 3 years old. There was a professor from Dartmouth College there, there were people from Connecticut and the Syracuse, NY area. I learned how to play cribbage there, and we’d write a few letters. We never fed them, but we talked to them, and they were all very interesting. I noticed Little Tommy in the paper a few years after that in the paper. He could move his head, but that was it, so they put a light switch underneath his neck, and he nodded and turned the Christmas tree lights on on Boston Common. I don’t know what happened to him after that. One of the other patients became completely paralyzed, but his best friend was such a good friend of the family. And the dying one asked his friend, ‘When I die will you marry my wife? I know you love her - would you love her enough to get married?’ And they did get married!” Marijane’s four children (Jane, Mary, Jeff, and Nancy) attended Fiske elementary school, where one teacher was detested by parents and students alike; “[this teacher] said to one of the mothers of my daughter Jane’s classmates, ‘your daughter is never going to amount to anything.’ Lisa just finished her 26th year as a producer with Martha Stewart, so she certainly did amount to something! And my Jane had red curly hair and [the teacher] said to me ‘your daughter cares more about her hair than she does this and that.’ And now Jane’s a psychologist in Burlington VT - shes been very successful.” Growing up, the kids played Little League baseball, and Marijane’s husband coached. Marijane was also involved in Cub Scouts, “bless their rotten little hearts.” She recalls that “the fire department used to blow the whistle at 10 minutes of 6 every night. I kind of miss that too - you’d know when Jeff would be getting off the train and I’d have 10 more minutes to finish dinner!” In the summers, the Dosdell’s would spend days at Morses Pond, and would take trips to Minnesota and Cape Cod. Marijane tearfully remembers one of the hardest days in town during her time living here, when a young resident drowned at Morses Pond; “Jeff was a guard the last time they had a drowning, which was probably 30 years ago. I was there that day. It was probably the worst day of my life when I saw John Manny reach down and pick up an arm out of the water. Because the mother kept saying ‘he’s not in the water, he’s taken off again - because he had taken off two days before and hid in his car, and they had looked for him and found him in the car. So they didn’t get him right away. And Jeff just went crazy, he just - all the guards blamed themselves. Jeff as eating lunch when they had the all-clear and there was nothing they could have done. The mother, I had seen her talking to a friend and the friend had on a dress that I had almost bought. And I just kept thinking, ‘I’m so glad I didn’t buy it.’ My two girls were out sailing so I was keeping an eye on them, but I noticed this mother with the dress that I didn’t like, and she didn’t report them for a long time.” But there were happy memories recorded at Morses too - “Nancy was the best sailor at Morses pond. She beat the pants off of every adult. We had 5 sunfish at one time! My husbands company did not pay for the country club, so when the kids asked ‘Well why don’t we belong?’ I said ‘Because your fathers company doesn’t pay for it, that’s why!’ So we spent a lot of time at the pond.”
The Kids Go to High School
All of Marijane’s kids graduated from Wellesley High School in the late 1970’s and early 80’s. She fondly remembers Thanksgivings spent cooking and waiting for the family to return from the Needham-Wellesley football game; “Everybody would go to the game. I was always cooking turkey. I went one year, but it was cold. One year the phone rang and it was Jeff saying ‘Mom, you’ve got to come and get me - I’m at Newton-Wellesley hospital.’ And I said ‘What’s the matter?’ and he said ‘Somebody dropped his billfold and I went down and picked it up under the stands, and I stood up and cracked my head open on the bleachers. And the damn kid never even said thank you.’ So here I had the turkey and Jeff...Jeff won out. I just turned the stove off and went!” Jeff ran track in high school, and was a co-captain of the team - he even held the school record in the 440 yard run (track measurements hadn’t yet been converted to the metric system in that time) for a year, until somebody else broke it. Marijane also recalls school events such as the prom, which at that time was open to both juniors and seniors. “Mary went to the prom with Skip Sullivan. She was a junior and he was a senior and he was the co-captain of the football team. Big deal. I said, you know, he should be taking a girl his own age, but no one else had asked her and so she went with him. And the next year she wasn’t asked. Mary and Sue Dacey and Mary Anne McGovern were all not invited, so they came over to my house and I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ And they said they were going to go out - there were a lot of parties so they were going to go to one of the parties. I said ‘Why don’t you put costumes on?’ So they started wearing costumes, and they went and broke into the prom in the costumes! Mary called around 11 o’clock and said ‘Mom, we’ve been invited to parties all over and we’ll be home in the morning.’ But thats how they went to the prom! This sort of thing went on for several years, but then they were banned - the school said nobody else can do this anymore.” One year, Marijane was the co-chair of the committee responsible for planning the party for graduating seniors (the equivalent of all-night party today). The year before, kids had overindulged on illegal beverages at the party and had created a spectacle that became quite big news among the news outlets in the Boston area. Naturally, Marijane and her co-chairwoman were concerned with making sure that this scenario did not repeat itself: “every radio station had a car out here and they were just zeroed in on Wellesley because they thought the same thing would happen. So we changed the rules. Once you got in you couldn’t get out. Once you got out, you couldn’t get in. So Betty and I were making sure the kids were ok, and there was only one kid that we had to call the ambulance for. But we had to smuggle him out because we didn’t want these awful stations to say ‘Here we are at Wellesley High School’ and to make it another spectacle. Fortunately it was teeming rain that night, but his parents were nowhere to be found. So we put him in the wrestling room and barricaded the doors until the police got there, then we smuggled him out. And then they got him down to Newton-Wellesley and they did something to him, I hope something not very nice, because he could have caused a lot of trouble that night. We had a New Years Eve theme - you know, new life, new beginning. That was fun. But we were really kind of scared. We didn’t want any more bad publicity. As you know, anything happens in Wellesley, boy, they’re going to report it. They never say anything really good that happens, but they watch everything else.”
Stores in Town
Marijane remembers the stores that used to line Washington Street in Wellesley - some of her favorites were E.A. Davis and Filenes, which used to occupy the storefront now home to Talbots. Another mainstay in Wellesley was the Playhouse movie theatre, which stood where Bertuccis is now located. Marijane says, “The worst thing was when the Playhouse closed. All of my kids had their first dates there! I can sit in Bertuccis and remember where everything was and all. I remember I saw ‘Psycho’ there, and my husband wouldn’t go and see it so I went with my friend Jane Wheatley. It was so scary and I had to get up and go to the ladies room, and I was afraid to go! It was a terrible movie. But it was sad to see the Playhouse go.” The first movie Marijane saw in color was “Gone With the Wind,” and then “Snow White,” but color television was not her favorite; “I remember watching color television for the first time and it was awful, just nothing like what it is now. I remember we watched the landing on the moon [in 1963], and that was kind of a bummer too. It just wasn’t clear. We went over to our neighbors because we thought it would be better on their big screen, which at that point meant 14 instead of 12 inches.” Other former stores in town included Diehl’s, a hardware store and lumberyard which stood where Roche Bros. is now, and Brighams, which closed only a few years ago. Marijane says, “Brighams used to have something called an Awful Awful which was 7 scoops of ice cream and all kinds of sauces. And Chris Barker, who lived behind us - he’s in of the top law firms in Boston now - he went in and ate an Awful Awful! And you got your name on the board. But then he ate another one and then went right out in the back and threw up! So every time I see him I like to remind him of that.”
Today
Marijane lives in a condo in town, and is happy being back in Wellesley: “I see people I haven’t seen in years. And a lot of them I dont know, because we’ve all got white hair now! But just go to Captain Mardens for a while, and you’ll see someone you know.”