My Mother's Mystery

This is the story of secrets that go to the grave and the reality of how close we were to not existing at all.

I spent a good share of my working life as a journalist - though I prefer storyteller - and wrote hundreds of stories about the lives of "ordinary" people by asking questions.  But I missed the best one: the stories of my own family.  I never asked, nor did I follow up on the hints they occasionally dropped that suggested they wanted their stories - their lives - peeled.

For the past four or five years, I've been digitizing all the photographs that my parents left behind, an effort that first alerted me to the fact that they and their ancestors were a lot more interesting than I'd suspected as a younger, less interested, man.

When I called my parents in 1980, for example, to tell them I was getting a divorce (hey, not my fault: she was doinking her boss), my mom said, "You know, Bob, both your father and I were married before," I didn't follow up. I had other things on my mind.

Fast forward to 2002, when my siblings put together a 60th wedding anniversary luncheon for my folks and asked me to give a toast.

I said "I don't do toasts" but I, an interviewer by trade, would, instead, interview them about their 60 years together.

And so it came that during said interview, I dropped one of my favorite questions when probing the lives of people. I asked them both, "When you met, what's the first thing he said to you?"

They had met at a dance at the old Whalom Ballroom. Dad, an Ohio man of about 22, was stationed at Fort Devens, preparing to be shipped to England. Mom, no more than 19 or 20, was a hairdresser in town.

I did not get much of an answer and moved on.  I would not get an answer for another 10 years or so and well after my father died in 2004. I was watching a Patriots game when a phone call interrupted at an inopportune time.

"Bob," my mother started, "remember that time when you asked us what's the first thing Dad said to me when we met?  I couldn't answer then in front of everybody, but it was 'I can't dance with you, you're married.'"

How long she must have carried this! How anxious she must have been to tell her story!

"It's not really any of my business," I said,  "but let me call you back because I'm watching the game."

But I didn't.  

And I never pursued it again because I didn't much care. It wasn't my business and it wasn't my story.

And, really, it wasn't until I was digitizing 4,000 photographs that I realized, it was my story. Only it was too late now because my mother was dead and she never told anyone else the story so my siblings had only similar, small fragments.

I've thought about it more in the last year or two. Maybe it was the guy she went to the high school prom with. Maybe he was in the pictures somewhere, I thought, before remembering that my mom, who could keep a grudge with the best of them, cut out the images of people from pictures she had if one of  them had the audacity to divorce one of her kids. The only picture I have of my first wife is a shoulder on the edge of a picture she must have missed. So she wouldn't have kept any pictures of anyone who might have done her wrong.

I don't recall how the subject even came up last week when I was having lunch with an online acquaintance, but it must have impressed Bill Childs, of St. Paul, enough to start poking around.

By  nightfall, he had a name, and the wedding announcement that appeared in an August 1940 issue of the Fitchburg Sentinel. The man who almost prevented me from existing at all: was named Kenneth Charles Meehan.

I

I recalled that the Meehans lived down the street a bit but didn't know much about them beyond that.

Then I started doing the math backwards. My folks were married in June 1942, they must have met around early 1941 and the Meehan-McFarland nuptials took place in 1940. Say what?

The wedding announcement also confirmed that the little Cape Cod-style house I grew up in, the one that still stands, the one my brother bought and renovated, the one I thought my father built, was actually built by my grandfather for them.

And, wait a minute! My grandfather left my grandmother for another woman in the '30s, those digitized photos told me. But apparently so much of the story I thought I knew was not the story at all.

I couldn't find much more about the man-who-almost-prevented-me-from existing, other than a yearbook photo in the 1933 yearbook of Fitchburg High School.

Meet Kenneth...

...whose most notable attribute was he got to school on time.

I could find no obituary for young Meehan, who would be pushing 110 now, and so the trail has ended with no clues about why the marriage lasted mere months.  How had they met? What was the first thing he'd said to her? Who wronged whom? What was it like keeping a secret?

True, I know more than I used to know, but I don't know enough. The secrets are in a grave because when I had the chance, I didn't ask questions.

My Grandmother's Voice

I had to change my cellphone service today because Verizon is raising their price by $20 a month. With the new sim card arriving, I quickly swapped things out then finished by calling the new provider and moving my phone number over.

It wasn't until much later that I realized the old provider's voicemail system had something pretty important: my mother's voice. It was a voicemail from around 2019, the year she died. Nothing major, just telling me she wrote a check to her grandson for his birthday (I kept her books). And now it was gone!

A dash to my PC and the external hard drive solved the panic. Some time ago, I must have downloaded it.

Then I remembered: I've got my grandmother's voice around here somewhere too and never moved it to a safe spot.

It was late at night on the editor's desk in the newsroom at the United Stations (formerly RKO) Radio Network, just off Times Square in Manhattan. It was the week right after Christmas and the news cycle was typically slow, so I did what I used to do fairly often. I called my grandmother (shown with my mother in 1985)  in Massachusetts.

She was 91 then, the new year that was about to start -- 1986 --   would be her last; she died on my wife's birthday in September.

No doubt I was mindful that there wouldn't be many opportunities to visit when I called that night because I started the tape recorder that sat by the editor's desk, used to record newsmaker interviews.

We chatted about the usual things we'd chat about - the Red Sox and Bruins, and various health issues - and then she wished me a Happy New Year and I went back to what could loosely be classified as work.

I kept the large 10 inch reel of tape, having no idea what I would so with it, and lugged it around with me from New York, back to the Berkshires, and ultimately to two different homes in Minnesota. It sat on a shelf for 35 years, through a plethora of storage technology cassettes, floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, and USBs.

I always intended to use one of the few remaining reel-to-reel recorders before I retired at Minnesota Public Radio to dub it off, but never did.

A few years ago, I sent it out to a digital recording service.

Behold! My grandmother's voice.

Bob Collins 10 · My Grandmother's Voice

Bob Collins 10 · My Grandmother's Voice

I'd forgotten a number of her mannerisms until listening to it for the first time a few minutes ago. She'd often end a sentence with "I don't know", for example.

She and I went to a lot of baseball games at Fenway Park and until the day she died, she'd tell the story of the time the Indians (my team) beat the Red Sox and as people filed out I was yelling "We won! We won!" A grandmother puts up with that sort of stuff. And, besides, even Boston wouldn't pop a kid with his grandmother.

She was a wonderful woman and I was lucky to grow up in a house where my grandmother lived right next door.

Like her daughter's voicemail, my grandmother's voice has been with me constantly, even without a recording.                    

Ed Bell 1940-2025

Ed Bell with Mike Miller in a WHDH production booth

 (Post updated 1/28/25)

Word reached Flyover Country today that Ed Bell died yesterday.

Ed is the man who scooped me up out of Pittsfield, brought me to WHDH in Boston to be an editor in the newsroom, taught me everything I know about how to cover news, and then eventually -- as AM Radio began to die -- gave me the most gentle layoff ever, and then found me a writing gig at WCVB TV in Boston before I headed to RKO in New York.

If there was part of my life I could live over again, it would be the WHDH years. I didn't know how good I had it, even though I knew I had it good.

Ed actually called Fred Lantz at WUPE in Pittsfield to see if he'd be interested in the editor's gig. But Fred wasn't and suggested me. Had he not done that,  I can't imagine how much different things might be.

Eddie took care of his people. He advocated for the newsroom with the suits in ways that news directors stopped doing a long time ago.

Everyone who ever worked for him, it seems went on to big things as an Ed Bell disciple.

He knew everyone in town. One executive had a yacht in Marblehead so during the summer on Thursdays, Ed and he would take some public officeholder for a sail (stopping at Bob and Bill's Roast Beef in Lynn first). All the better to make contacts with.  I was invited once; I think the "guest" was the fire commissioner although Ed took me to a Bruins game one night with Joe Jordan, the Boston police commissioner.

Some of the biggest stories in Boston were broken by that little newsroom - no, really, it's stuns me today to think of how much we did with so few people -- thanks to Ed's contacts.

These are pictures from 1983 election night, which we staged out at WCVB (we had a working relationship with Channel 5). Ed was the first person in the business to tell me I could write, and he made me the writer for election night.   I'm in the back, Ed is producing. Jim Mitchell (who died a few years ago is watching the TV coverage. Neil Ungerleider, who went on to be an exec at WCVB, in the foreground.

Election night 1983. Ed Bell running the show. Jim Mitchell watching the coverage. I'm writing in the back.

Here's more of that team:  Mike Miller, the evening talk guy, Mitchell, Bruce Cornblatt, who was Miller's producer and went on to be Bob Costas' producer, and Ed.

Oh, about that layoff. I'd been producing the hour-long afternoon news program at WHDH and Dave Croninger, the WHDH boss, canceled it without notice on a Friday afternoon. People like Bob Parlante and Peter Casey and I had put a lot of work into it and the weekend afterwards was not pleasant for me. The idea of going back to just editing half-hourly news scripts didn't seem like a step forward.

What I didn't know is that it was just the first shoe.

The next week, Ed took me down to Sarge's for a drink -- the bar and deli on the first floor of our building on Stuart Street next to the Hancock Tower. That wasn't unusual.

Then Ed said, "Bobby, tomorrow I've got to lay off the finest news staff in Boston."

"Oh that's a shame," I said and it was a good minute or two before I realized I was being laid off. Gentle indeed. A spit-take would've been in order, but I guess I'll save that for the screenplay.

A day or so later we were in his office shooting the breeze and he said, "Bobby, what am I going to do? I'm 43."

Ed gave me the option of staying around for a month and working or taking the money and leaving. I took the money and left. A day or so later, a tannery in Peabody exploded and it was all-hands-on-deck in a newsroom that had just had layoffs.  One final bow. But I didn't go.

"I kind of thought we'd see you," Ed said to me at a farewell party a few days later, which was Ed's way of saying "you should've come in." I still feel bad about that because Ed Bell was the type of boss you'd run through a brick wall for and the sting of disappointing him  never goes away, even 40 or so years later.

Nonetheless, he called in a favor with Jim Thistle, his friend and news director at WCVB and got me a summer vacation relief writing gig with the station where I learned - or didn't learn -- TV's mantra to "write to the pictures." I was a fish out of water and when my old WHDH pal, Nick Young got me an offer with the RKO Network in New York, I took it.

We won the Edward R. Murrow Award that year for coverage provided by some of us that were now somewhere else. Ed had a nice clock made up for everyone to mark the award. He flew down to New York and gave it to me.

Long after I stopped working or Ed, Ed was working for me, sort of. I took everything I learned from him with me.

Because I watched Ed, I became pretty good at breaking news in subsequent stops.

Example: Snowstorm coverage, AM radio's coin of the realm. 

Ed had developed a plan for covering large snowstorms to dominate the news market. I took Ed's philosophy with me and when  I was running programming at WSBS out in the Berkshires, we did wonderful coverage with the plan I "created", including an October 1986 storm that paralyzed the county and during which everyone turned to this little station that stayed on the air well past sign-off to comfort a panicking Berkshires.

Everything in my career from the time I joined WHDH to my retirement in 2019 is owed to Ed Bell. 

The last time I saw Ed was in 1987  at his daughter's wake and funeral. The family had been heading to Bretton Woods on vacation when they were hit by a drunk driver. Mysterious ways, they tell me.

I owe just about everything in journalism and a hell of a lot in life to Ed.

I should have told him that.

P.S. Here's a really nice remembrance from the Marblehead Current

 

The BlogDog signs off

Somewhere around 2009, we were ready for a new dog following the untimely death of Otter the Wonder Dog (whom my wife thinks was poisoned by a neighbor).

We went to a pet adoption day to see if  a dog we saw on a website would be into us. She (he?) wasn't. We took her for a walk behind the store and the dog had zero interest in us.

Somewhat dejected, we returned the dog to the store and started to leave. That's when a paw reached out of the kennel and stopped us.

It was Lucie, then known as "Star".

Lucie had been adopted once before and taken to Kansas with her new family where at some point she knocked a toddler down, the story goes. And so the family - helicopter parents who denied their kid the joy of growing up with a great dog - put her up for sale on Craigslist.

That's against the rules of adoption and, fortunately, someone in the Twin Cities saw the listing, and Lucie was retrieved from the home and brought back for another try.

So she decided in that store that we were the right humans for her.

Every dog is a perfect dog in its way and Lucie checked all the boxes.  An Australian shepherd mix, she kept track of us. She was the first dog that wanted to be with me. And every morning, I'd wake up early to write the blog for Minnesota Public Radio, but not until "the BlogDog" got her walk.  Lucie was never interested in hearing an excuse for passing on a walk; we were going. Period. Snow? Rain? Doesn't matter. We were going or she would nag you until nightfall. 

Not that I didn't try to get out of it, mind you. But you can't write a blog while a good dog is using her superpower to command you to action.

That routine continued for another 15 years.

She'd greet me every evening when I returned home, a "Tigger" stuffed animal in her jaws to be thrown and retrieved.

Lucie was the perfect traveler, joyfully sticking her head out the window for a treat from the tollbooth collector. Her only flaw was a general disdain for the ocean.

She loved the Woodbury dog park and would begin howling a mile away once she realized the destination. It is there we'll spread her ashes.

Lightning fast, she was a champion rabbit hunter although her career stats for catching squirrels are not impressive. She failed at every one, and on our recent walks, she'd make a threatening step or two when she saw one, possibly remembering the joy of the chase, but no longer able to do much more.

Lucie had some quirks. She disdained Carolie's cough but would find mine acceptable. Weird.  (Video link)

At certain times if you sat down in a room in which she was sprawled, she'd get up and go to another room.  She valued her "alone time."

Carolie reminded me today that her main trick was sprawling on her back and sticking out her tongue if you'd say, "show me a dead dog." We didn't teach her that so maybe her time in Kansas wasn't a complete waste.

She was - as all dogs are - a good dog; the best we've ever had.

In recent years, time took away a lot of the Lucie we'd come to know. She went deaf a couple of years ago.  She mostly just slept, though she would become a puppy again for a few minutes when she realized that I was about to take her for a walk. But otherwise, there was a sadness in her eyes that was disconcerting. 

In the past, I'd walk at my pace and Lucie would follow. But now, the walks were long as I allowed that it was her walk, not mine. No blade of grass went unsniffed along the route. Her hind legs no longer worked quite right but she was not given to complaining. She was outdoors and in her happy place.

I'm not a believer in God or Heaven but I'm open to the possibility of a dimension where dogs live long lives and catch the squirrels they chase and where they sleep on the furniture and dream of the humans they once raised, content that theirs is the best life a dog ever had.

MPR is wilting but it's got company

 I had lunch with a long-time best friend colleague during my working years yesterday. She came out to the hangar for a picnic.

She left MPR a few months ago, which surprised me because she was an indefatigable supporter of the place; one could easily make the argument that she was the foundation. I've never asked the circumstances of her exit but one thing she said to me revealed a lot. "I rarely listen anymore," she said.

She said this after I learned that Mike Reszler, probably the smartest digital news person I've ever known, was shoved out last year in what remains of Minnesota Public Radio's expertise:  reorganization. The deck chairs are moved around every few years, and the Board of Trustees is none the wiser that they end up being moved back to where they were a few years earlier.

Reszler's exit - and my friend's - was but the latest release of talent from an organization that has a dwindling amount of it.  The two newspaper people who fled their own dying industry years ago and now run MPR, are trying the same strategy for saving it that they used in their previous industry: shed talent , move the deck chairs, and see what happens.

To be sure, there are still amazingly talented people working at MPR, although I know very few of them anymore. But like the Pioneer Press, which still has a handful of hardworking journalists putting out a paper every day, it's not enough to grow; it's only enough not to die quickly.

This, of course, is not unique to MPR.  

Yesterday, WGBH in Boston announced it's cutting 30 people and canceling shows

“We made these hard choices only after implementing a range of other cost-saving measures and operating efficiencies,” wrote Susan Goldberg, GBH chief executive in an email to staff. “The basic reason for these reductions is simple: revenues are flat and the cost of doing business has gone up. A lot.”

“Susan [Goldberg] has repeatedly assured newsroom staff in multiple meetings that local news is of utmost importance to her,”  Zoe Mathews, a steward and senior radio producer at GBH, tells the Boston Globe. “Today’s layoffs are in direct contradiction of her statements about and directly to the newsroom. ... [What] happened today — and the way it happened — is a disgrace to an organization that holds itself up to the public as a vital source of community news, transparency, and accountability.”

There's a lot of that going around.

A newsroom member said she had no idea of the financial condition of WGBH up to that point, which is odd, given the wildfire of public media's collapse should not be escaping notice of any newsroom.

Just up Commonwealth Avenue, WBUR axed employees last month, including my college best friend. The upper crust of public radio - KQED,  Chicago Public Radio, NPR - are all presently following the same path.

Each organization president utters the same thing. They'll turn to more digital offerings. MPR did that 10 years ago under Chris Worthington and - wait for it - Mike Reszler. It was glorious before their bosses decided to slash the newsroom digital operation and send more money to Marketplace in California and set up a podcast operation.

Worthington is gone. Reszler is gone. Most of the podcast operation has shut down.

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there," the late senator, Dave Durenberger, quoting Lewis Carroll, said about U.S. economic policy.

And that's where public broadcasting is: desperately trying one road, then another, with no idea, no vision, no strategy, no innovation in mind and no acknowledgement of the reality that a dead end is just around the corner.

Finn

 I don't do much writing anymore. Once writing was a joy, before Minnesota Public Radio basically beat it out of me thanks to writing 17,000 blog posts there over the years. That's work. Writing shouldn't be work.

Even so, it was a surprise to note today that I haven't written since 2020, a year after I retired. So there's nothing in this journal about Finn, my second-born grandson, born July 23, 2022. More accurately: Finley Robert Collins, his parents honoring me and an uncle.

Like Dex before him, Finley got an autographed baseball to mark the occasion.

With any luck, the ball will survive enough for Finn to appreciate his grandfather's gift. Not so much for Dex, whose ball disappeared into the clutches of the amazing Reggie the Wonder Dog. No matter, Dex is none the wiser at his age.

Anyway, I dig the grandfather scene. We're fortunate to be nearby both kids, having decided a long time ago we weren't about to flee to the disgusting South, leaving our family behind, so we can survive a Minnesota winter. Frankly, I wonder what snowbirds are thinking.  But maybe they just don't love their kids and grandkids as much as we do.

This is a great age for kids. They're cute. They still love you, and they're not shy about telling you.

That, of course, will all change in the teenage years.

The other night I read a tweet from an online acquaintance who was divorced a year or so ago, but still maintains a good relationship with the father of their son. Still, she's hurt that at the moment, he prefers Dad over her.

This, of course, is not unusual. The teenage years are a time when kids realize they're going to be leaving someday and they have a way of starting the process a little too early. We've all done it. You can argue that Mom bearing the brunt of that process is actually a sign that the son is closer to Mom than Dad, which, by the way, is the first thing any new father should accept.

Parenthood can be non-stop heartbreak at times.

Your time with your kids is a bank account. The "cute years" are deposits that you withdraw to get through the teenage years.

But, eventually, they "come back" as pretty neat and interesting adults. And sometimes they give you pretty neat grandchildren.

My brother Bill

 

This guy has been my friend longer than anyone else on the planet -- my twin brother, shown here at my oldest son's wedding with his incredible spouse, Felice.

He may not tell you how he feels about you but he'll show you, and God help you if you're not paying attention.

We were having coffee one day in Afton MN when he visited in 1997 and I casually mentioned I hoped to fly one day. He already had his pilot certificate.

He went back home and a few days later on our birthday, he called and said, "Happy Birthday, you start flight lessons tomorrow in St. Paul "

He prepaid them.

Flying changed my life for the better. He did that.

2011 photo

I marveled, during that coffee stop, at his easy way at making small talk with perfect strangers. I vowed to be better at it and, as a result, I became a writer known for telling stories of people whom I'd randomly meet. I made a good living and told good stories.

He did that, too.