The Preservation of Familial Ties: Family United by a Shared Love of Music, Animals, & a Summer Home

00:02 Hello, this is Samantha Hano and I will be interviewing Catherine Baker. Today is Monday, April 4, 2022 at 3:00pm and I am in Amherst, Massachusetts.

00:15 Great. Well, hi, Samantha. I'm Katharine Baker, as you know, and I'm going to be interviewed for the first part of this Monday, April 4, 2022 at 3:00pm and who is the audience for this interview? Should we just from my point of view, it could be anybody who's interested, particularly in your class, because this is a wonderful class that you're taking and I feel honored to be part of it.

00:47 Great. I love it. Okay, so the first question, the questions that we came up together that I would love to ask you is what is your family origin story? And particularly who told you about your family history?

01:03 Okay. Yeah, it's been fun as we've met and talked, to explore family a little bit because that to me is just the most important set of relationships certainly that I have. And I think that most people have. My family of origin story comes from both my parents who told me the stories of how they grew up and their parents and grandparents, but not I didn't hear from grandparents because by the time I was born, my grandparents were no longer alive. But for my parents, their families were very important. And both of them came from English backgrounds and they also, so they were kind of pioneers, early settlers, both of their families. And they were farmers and both of them came from farming families. And they, by the time they got to my parents generation, they were going to college, they were getting educated. But my father's great grandfather came to from England and he was a forester, and he was cutting down trees in a forest way up north of Albany, New York. And he got to know the boss's daughter, who was the guy who owned the forest land where he was cutting down trees. And he fell in love with the boss's daughter and married her. And then he kind of became part of the family business. The family business was tree cutting. And they, they would float the trees down the river to New York or wherever the construction was going on. So that was. But my father was very proud of that and loved the whole sense of being part of the wilderness back in the 1800s, before, before there were cities or towns or anything up the Hudson River. And my mother's family, they were also farmers in Massachusetts and they raised cattle and they. What else? My father, my grandfather, my mother's father was a butter taster. It's not a profession we know very much about these days, but in those days he was a lot Older than my mother's mother. And he used to go around to all the farm. One of these farm people brought in their products to the town, the town of Southborough in Massachusetts. And the women would have churned butter and have it in these great big tubs, and he would taste them to see which one had the best butter fat content, because that was what everybody wanted in those days. He would go around this circle of maybe 20 or 30 women with big tubs of butter and that they'd made on their farm and then brought into the town and then between. So he wouldn't get them mixed up with each other. He would have an artichoke leaf. So he would chew an artichoke leaf. And that would neutralize the taste of the. Of the butter. So we're all. I think my mother and all of my brothers and sisters and cousins love butter. So that's. That's where we got. That's one of our origin stories. They do come from my parents because they were very proud of their. Of their stories of where they came from.

04:51 Definitely. And I think the sentiment of being in nature and being outside and being farmers, I think that resonated with your childhood Now. I mean, you talked about the horse and the goat that were best friends and.

05:05 Right, right. They kept on. They kept that sense of animals and planting and gardening and all that, even when we no longer lived on a farm. But it was important. And one of the things that I did when I was, I don't know, growing up, 10 or 12 years old is I would go visit my father's brother and his family out in western New York State. They'd put me on a train and I would go out to the farm. That was the name of the place where my father's brother lived and where my father grew up. And I would have spring vacation, vacation on the farm. And it was always the time when the lambs were being born. They had a lot of sheep, so it was kind of exciting in the middle of the night to go out to the barn where the ewes were just. The baby lambs were just being born. And my uncle knew exactly how to help the little lambs come out and get them going, nursing their mothers. And one time that I visited, there was a little. There was a mother who had two or three lambs all at once, and it was too much for her. And so my uncle said I could take one of those baby lambs home with me. So I did and raised it back in our suburban community outside of New York. I had My baby lamb. I would feed it and raise it. Learned to come when it was called.

06:36 Did you take.

06:39 I took the lamb in a little basket on the train. Exactly.

06:44 That is incredible.

06:46 That was a fun story, but you're right. That is part of my family theme and values is to be really connected to the land and animals and gardening and that kind of thing. Pets, very important.

07:01 That's very important. Lenny is very important.

07:04 Letty is my puppy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

07:08 Similarly, kind of jumping off of that question, how has your family's history and or origins shaped your current values?

07:18 Well, we were getting into that. I was just getting into that a little bit. I think my family values when we were growing up always had to do with good health and lots of exercise and taking care of your pets before you took care of yourself. You always had to think about who needed your support and help before you were doing your own thing and having your dinner or whatever. The dogs had to have their dinner. Yeah. Eating healthy, lots of exercise. My father was an athlete in college, and so he wanted. I mean, I'm not a natural athlete at all, but we definitely had to do the sports that he believed in. And a lot of that was running and ice hockey. He was a great ice hockey player. And football. I had to play touch football with my brothers.

08:23 Wow.

08:24 But it was kind of a family thing that we all played football together. And values really had to do with honoring family and being really totally transparent and honest about what was going on with you. Being a good communicator. That was also a very good. A core. Kind of a core family value and doing your best. You know, I think when we were all in school, I have a lot of siblings, as you know. And when we were in school, we were. It wasn't so much the grade you got, but the fact that you were doing your best. You were just trying hard and you were involved. And, you know, I see that in a way with you because of the way you're involved in this class. It's really impressive. And you take a lot of leadership, and that's great. And that would be very congruent with my family values. Definitely.

09:21 And do you think that these values carried through to your siblings as well? Do you think you all embodied this spirit of dedication, passion, particularly with music? I know that that's.

09:34 That's true. That's true. Music was in there. Yeah. That came pretty much from my mother's side. Cause she played the violin. My father played the piano sort of by ear. You know, he would play all the good Old tunes from the 1920s. And we play along and we all played instruments. We all had to practice, but we had to practice before we got breakfast. So my mother would set the egg timer, maybe I told you that already, for about an hour before breakfast. Before we went to school, we had to do our practice, our instruments. But I think for my siblings, yeah, I. Four siblings, an older brother and two younger brothers, and then the youngest is a sister. And all of us have really. I mean, we're all alive, which is kind of amazing. I mean, my older brother is turning 86 this year. I'm turning 84.

10:33 Wow.

10:34 Two younger brothers are 81 and 79, and my sister is 76. And we're all still involved with. With sports. You know, lots of athletics and running and cross country skiing and biking. And one brother is a rower. He's kind of a competitive rower who wins all the races in his age group. Luckily, when you're a rower, he's over 75 now, so he's doing very well. He's looking Forward to turning 80 because then he'll beat all the other. That's what he said. But they have. They have two brothers have sailboats, and my husband and I do a lot of canoeing, not so much kayaking. We've done kayaking, but we do a lot of canoeing. So the things we do are not so competitive. The rowing brother is competitive, and we do them for the fun of being outside and moving around. And again, staying healthy is a really high value in the family. I think all my siblings would agree with that. I'll have to let them watch this tape and see if they agree.

11:52 See if they agree or disagree.

11:54 If they agree, they want to do their own tape and say, no, it wasn't like that. I think they would. I think they'd agree, definitely.

12:01 And I think I'm jumping around a little bit to question number four. How do you think your relationship with your siblings have evolved over the years? Maybe even, you know, have these values stayed consistent across all. All of your siblings? You know, I. You mentioned working out, but I'd love to know more about, you know, how music carried through, how. How your relationships have. Have evolved. I know in the time that I've been alive 22 years, my relationship with my siblings are worlds different than they were even a few years ago.

12:34 So you change. It's true. Because when we were little, you know, we're all about two years apart. It was very organized. Our lives were very, very organized. I guess you have to, when you have a Big family like that. My parents were both teachers and so they expected us to have a certain routine to get up and make our beds and as I said, practice and do our homework. And so it was all kind of. We had to keep track of what we were responsible for. And my older brother and I were often put in charge of the younger kids. He was put in charge of the two younger brothers and I was put in charge of my younger sister. Often, I guess that was the way my parents survived having so many children. But so it was fairly regimented when we were growing up. Harry, my older brother, was definitely the in charge sibling and we all looked up to him. He had a collection of comic books that he would let us check out and treat like library books if we promised to get back. But generally we had to pay to get to read the comic books that he had big collection in his bedroom. And we would have to sign them out and give him, I don't know, a nickel, a comic book, something like that. This was a long time ago, but then as we grew up and we left home and we went to college and then we got jobs and then we got married and had our own children. The relationship has, with all of them has changed over time. So that my sister, who is seven years younger than I am, is now my best friend. She taught at Smith College. She's a musician, professional musician. She taught at Smith College for a long time. Now she's retired. But we get together a lot for meals or dog walks or we go to concerts together at Smith. So seven years has no real meaning at all. At this point, I'd say we're fairly equal. We do a lot of sharing of our lives together. And let's see, my other. Yeah, the other brothers I sort of keep in touch with through phone calls. And we all go to the same island in Maine in the summer. So that's. I've told you about that. And that's a wonderful place for family gatherings and picnics, lunch picnics on the rocks and swimming in the quarries and biking around the island. Lots of fun things that we do together. Then I'd say that's now that's when we're all very old, the middle part of our lives, we were very focused on our jobs and our children, raising our marriages and raising our children. And so in that period, it was really important for our kids to know each other. So that now as they are adults and have their families, they have cousins that they feel quite connected to, which is kind of one wonderful. We're now passing on the cabin in Maine, the log cabin, to our own children. So that means that the cousins are going to have to figure out how to work together to keep the boats in good shape and keep the cabins clean and enjoy that place with their children, with our grandchildren. So it's kind of a multi generational process in Maine. And it's where I keep connected to my siblings.

16:31 Yeah. And I mean, just thinking, you know, you have four other siblings that, that's a large extended family that gather, gathers.

16:40 There every summer, a lot of people. And they actually three of my siblings built. And also my family, too, we built our own little houses that are kind of near to the log cabin so that more of us could be there at the same time.

16:56 That's fantastic.

16:58 Yeah. So my. Let's see, my brother, my older brother, his whole career was being a teacher. He was a history teacher and a coach, a sports coach at the school where he taught. And I've been a family therapist. And the next brother had a business in Portland, Maine. And the next brother has been a doctor in Maine who got into politics. And for quite a number of years he was in the Maine state legislature as a senator, particularly focused on health, trying to get some kind of universal health care going in Maine at least. And then my younger sister, as I said, is a singer and was in the Smith music department for many, many years. So we've all done very different things, but we do keep connected. That's important.

17:54 I just want to share this for anyone watching the interview, but my favorite thing you've ever told me is that you still play music to this day with your siblings.

18:03 Oh, yeah, I do.

18:06 Absolutely. Incredible.

18:08 Especially in Maine when I take my violin and my brother, one of my younger brothers plays the cello. He brings his cello. My sister was a singer, but she does play the keyboard too. So it's really fun to play together. We often say, you know, wouldn't our mother be delighted? Delighted. Because she's the one who made us practice. It's paid off for her because we're still doing it, making our own kids practice now at this point. Yeah, yeah.

18:41 I mean, you could have a whole family orchestra at this point.

18:44 That was her dream. I'm not. She. She didn't quite get to it because a couple of brothers didn't keep up with their instruments. I have kept up with my violin. My sisters, serious, serious professional musician. And then the brother who plays the cello. So they're just the three of us who still play, but the other two are listeners.

19:12 Almost as if Important, if not more.

19:16 Than you have to have listeners. Right.

19:19 A good peanut gallery.

19:22 Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

19:24 Well, that's. I think that it always gives me chills and I will never. I will always appreciate you sharing that. And I think a similar kind of extending. Going through the family lineage. I'm really also curious to see what relationship you formed with your parents and. Or grandparents that have shaped the person you've become now as an adult.

19:48 Yeah, it's interesting because my biological grandparents were not, as I said, were not really alive. I didn't have a relationship with them after I was born. But I had another set of adopted grandparents who were the. My father had a first wife, a first marriage, and his wife died. And they did. They. She died in childbirth and no surviving children. But his. Her parents became kind of grandparents to me and my brothers and sister. So I learned a lot from them. And we. They had a cabin in Maine also. So in the summers we would spend a lot of time visiting, hanging out with them. And that adopted grandmother taught us all about sailing and canoeing and lots of water rules because the water in Maine is very, very cold, so you have to be very cautious. She knew where all the rocks were under the surface of the ocean. And as the tide goes up, you can't see the rocks anymore, but they're down under there, so you have to be careful when you're in a sailboat. She taught us all of that. And her husband, our kind of adopted grandfather, was also a really warm, lovely guy who was a great storyteller, great sense of humor, very affectionate person. So the sense of connection with that family came definitely through those grandparents who were very, very attached to. And my parents, because they were both teachers, they were quite strict. And as I'd said before, they set up the rules for how a big family was going to function so that the parents wouldn't be exhausted. And we became. My older brother Harry and I became kind of parent helpers. But they also, my mother, as I said, encouraged that we all play musical instruments. And my father, who, he was more the strict disciplinarian, but I felt that he was a warm and affectionate person, even though I think my brothers maybe had a slightly harder time with him, which changed as he grew, as we grew up and they grew older. But we all kept really close connections with them, visiting them regularly. And they would visit us, too. So we had a sense of balance as we became adults, that our adult lives were kind of parallel to their adult life, not that they kept treating us as if we were children, which was an important way that doesn't always happen. So I was glad in our family that it worked that way, so that the basic values that I learned from them, I think are still there. They're still the core values, definitely.

23:06 And I think. And you never mentioned the set of almost adopted grandparents that you had.

23:12 Oh, yeah, I didn't mention that. Yeah. Yeah.

23:14 I mean, what kindness and compassion to, you know, want to join and extend their care and their love to children that aren't biologically related to them. I mean, that is fantastic.

23:29 Right, right. They really treated us like grandchildren. Now they had other grandchildren who were biological because my father's first wife had two younger brothers who both married and had kids. So those kids were kind of like our cousins and still are in some. To some extent. We know all of them very well. We also spend a lot of time in Maine with them because they all go to Maine, too. They all still go to that cabin that their grandparents. Initially, it was. It's not a cabin, actually. It's a fisherman's house and wonderful boathouse. And there are, you know, lots of rocks and things. Mike. My grandfather took up painting after he retired from his regular job, and so he would sit out on a rock with his palette and paint the islands and the sunsets and the water flowing through the tidal. There's a tidal rip right near their house. That was something also that was very, very special. I still have some of the pictures that he painted, and she painted, too, actually. The grandmother. The adopted grandmother. So, yeah, they were like. They were definitely like our part of our extended family.

24:51 That is fantastic.

24:54 I have a picture right here that he painted right here in my desk. I'm going to show it to you. I may not be able to move. I have a light that's sort of in the way. But I can show you the painting of his son canoeing through a tide rip. Very fast. The water rushes through there. And he kept trying to find, how do I paint moving water? It's very, very hard to paint moving water. His wife, my adopted grandmother, did this. This is one of her paintings. He does watercolor and he did more oils. But those are the islands. The islands right near where our little cabin. So just so you get oriented to the place there. That's where it was.

25:50 I was trying to imagine it in my head, and I love those pictures so much, and it's incredible that you still have them.

25:57 I got them right here in my little study here in Northampton. Everyone has some of them. All my siblings, I believe, have Some of these paintings of our adopted grandparents and of course, their children, their biological children, grandchildren, lots of them. This was their favorite topic to paint. The islands and the light and the water. So challenging to get it. To get it right.

26:22 Wow.

26:23 Yeah.

26:24 That is fantastic. And he painted his son. Wow.

26:29 Yeah, Right.

26:31 I love that. That is incredible. Incredible, incredible. That is so special to have them right there. I mean, they're with you.

26:39 They're all around me. Right, right, yeah.

26:43 So question number five for you, Catherine, is how has the pandemic changed the way that you interact with your family?

26:53 And I was starting to say that because we all live. We've lived for many years in different towns, except for sister and I, who live in Western Pass. But we would get together in person, probably at Thanksgiving and then in the summer in Maine, but because we're far apart, not a whole lot of personal stuff. So we've kind of continued telephoning each other from time to time. And the wonderful positive thing about the pandemic has been Zoom, because here we are sitting and talking to you, and the family talks on Zoom, you know, about plans for the house in Maine or other activities, health issues that anybody might have. So we share with each other a lot on Zoom, and it's been great. It's been better than just phone calls. I really have enjoyed that. Luckily, no knock on wooden. None of us have actually gotten Covid. We've been very. All of us got vaccinated right away, got boosters because we're older, so we had access to the vaccination pretty quickly. And it's, you know, that's how you stay healthy, I guess. It seems to be working that way.

28:11 And it's so important. It's so great that you were all able to access the vaccine.

28:18 That's. On a personal level, I mean, on a wider societal level, it's been appalling what has happened. I could rant and rave a little bit about that, but I won't. But the need for everyone to be vaccinated seems obvious to me. I remember I was vaccinated as a child against smallpox, and I was too old to be vaccinated by the polio, the Salk vaccine in the 1950s. I was already a teenager when that came through, but I know that that had dramatically wonder effect on the disasters of the time, of the polio epidemic, when I knew other children my age who died or were in iron lungs, that kind of thing. There are wonderful things that vaccines do for people. I just wish everyone would get vaccinated against Covid. In fact, tonight, I'm about to go get a second booster, because when you're over 50, you can get a second booster.

29:25 I just saw the CDC updated that, and I'm so excited. I mean, I echo all of your sentiments about the urgency of vaccination.

29:35 I think it's so important, the public health issue. Here you are in the field of public health, and it's absolutely vital that people are responsible about things like an epidemic pandemic that can spread so rapidly.

29:55 Because of the pandemic, have you seen your relationship with your children and then your grandchildren, even great grandchildren, change?

30:04 Well, there are sometimes the little great grandchildren. They're under 5, and so they have not been vaccinated. So when I visit them, there's a bunch of them up in Shelburne Falls. And when we get together, we take walks outdoors. So we haven't had gatherings, indoor gatherings like Christmas Eve, we usually would all get together, just not doing that. Although it's starting now. We're beginning to feel that the world is a safer place, and we're starting to invite them for lunch or for walks or whatever. So we do. Initially, when the pandemic was raging, we did not get together at all. We, again, we talked on the phone and we zoomed. But, you know, that kind of thing, you just have to accommodate to it.

30:55 Right.

30:56 And keep connected in whatever way is going to work. One of my sons got. Several of them got these fire pits, you know, where you can sit outside and it's warm, and even if it's a freezing day, you can still have fun and visit and, you know, have a picnic around the fire pit. So we did that. We did that for a while, but now we're not doing that.

31:22 Ways to adapt and overcome.

31:25 Yes, yes. Abercrombie has not been as bad.

31:30 And the last question, I think it really encapsulates what we've been chatting about is do you see or how did you integrate these learned familial values into your family? So how did you maybe pass these values on to your children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? How do you see your siblings implementing?

31:55 Yeah, I think that it just was one of the things that made a big difference was that I married somebody who kind of had the same values and the same ideas about what was important in life. And so we were incredibly compatible in the way we wanted our children to grow up, what we wanted them to learn. And they were all boys, so there was lots of activity and sports and exercise and all of that. Rowing has continued to be a theme in the family. Maine. They all go to Maine. I think that it was a natural process of having a very compatible marriage and family sense of what a family is all about. It went quite smoothly. I would say that again, my kids probably pass on the same values to their children, too. The kinds of things that they learned as they were growing up. They're all doing very different things, but they keep connected to each other. The oldest is a doctor in Michigan, and the second one is an artist and a sculptor who teaches art at a college in New Jersey. And the third one is a community organizer, lives in Shelburne Falls. The fourth one is a college professor. Business school professor, actually. So they're all doing different things just the way my siblings and I are doing different things. But keeping connected and learning from each other is just really, really important, no matter what the ups and downs of one's life might be.

33:53 Oh, definitely. And when you were, I guess, thinking back to when you were first trying to find a life partner, was it. Was it something important that you sought out? They had these similar. Same value systems.

34:08 Yeah. It just seemed like. I mean, I guess I was incredibly lucky because it just seemed like when I met my husband that we didn't talk about whether, you know, how we wanted to raise our children or anything. We were just enjoying the same, basically a very similar kind of lifestyle. So it was just. We were just very compatible, comfortable. And that was. I don't remember sort of seeking for a partner, actually. But when I met one that was very compatible, it worked out. It just worked out. I know you're supposed to talk about all those things before you get married. Well, we really didn't. We just enjoyed ourselves.

34:57 That makes it even more special.

35:01 We didn't follow the rules, talk about all these things anyway.

35:09 That's so important. And, you know, you're lucky, but also it's. You deserve happiness. And it's amazing that you find a partner that.

35:21 Yeah, that kind of comfort. Comfort is very. It's really significant, you know, that you enjoy the same activities and you have similar sense of humor and, you know. Well, just making a family out of a very compatible relationship seemed to. To be comfortable seemed to work well. I saw my parents doing that, so it was a role model there.

35:52 Definitely. Incredibly.