BEN DUCHESNEY PHOTO
FRIENDS FOR LIFE – Ruth Duchesney, right, and Bertha Salo Hudson get together for lunch every week.
Ruth Duchesney recalls a simpler time
Ruth Duchesney leans back in her rocking chair, thinking of a different time, growing up back in Finntown, an old name for West Barnstable. Her piercing blue eyes scan the room where she has watched the past 92 years flash past.
I had walked to her front door, as I have done since childhood, and passed the wind chimes hanging in her breezeway. Finnish signs hung above, hinting of the past. I looked at one that read “Tervetuloa” (welcome) as I knocked on my great-grandmother’s door.
Sitting in her chair, her wooden cane nearby, Ruth adjusts the lumbar pillow behind her. I’m sweating just noticing her turtleneck, sweater, and slippers, worn though the thermostat says 90 degrees.
“Times have changed completely,” she says, looking through her old journals and laughing at the memories in them. Born in 1920, Ruth has seen Cape Cod change from woods and sprawling farmland to a more populated place of tourists and second homes.
“West Barnstable was half woods,” she says. “Those days, you could walk for miles and not see a house. John Maki Road was just an old way to the marsh, now [it’s] a real road.”
She remembers playing on the large boulder near the entrance to the road as a child. Maki was a successful shell fisherman who sold his catch to Boston restaurants and owned all the land near the road.
Ruth grew up on 6A in West Barnstable, next door to the Ojala farm, where her mother would take the family milk cow out to graze for the day. “She trained that cow to follow her around; it would follow her right back home at the end of the day,” she says. Ruth also remembers the days before refrigerators, and hanging a butchered cow in her backyard throughout the winter for meat.
“We were freezing all winter long,” she says. It was “a very simple life, but a good life.” Her family also had big gardens around the yard, a tradition her son, Leonard Duchesney, Jr. maintains today with his large backyard garden.
A staple of early West Barnstable, Ojala farm doubled as a family farm and a store for ice cream and house shingles. “Many people built their own houses back then,” says Ruth, including her own father. She remembers other businesses like the Wennikainen Dairy, Peter Feike’s grocery store and Brocktonia, an ice cream shop run by two sisters.
“Home life was very important then,” she said. Ruth was one of four kids. Her mother, Mary Viik, never spoke English. Ruth went into first grade knowing only Finnish.
Ruth still knows most Finnish words and talked of “sisu,” which has multiple meanings like perseverance, grit, determination and willpower. Her son Leonard remembers only “Joulupukki” (Santa Claus) and “paha poika” (bad boy).
It was cramped at times raising her four children in a small house, Ruth recalls, “but the kids seemed to enjoy that more, being closer to family… Sometimes one of them would get a blanket and pillow and come sleep right here,” she says, pointing to the living room floor.
I was sitting where my great-grandfather, Ruth’s late husband of 56 years, Leonard Ismay Duchesney, Sr., always sat during our visits. I would be sitting on his lap. I remember staring at their old cuckoo clock, waiting for the bird, while he rocked the chair back and forth. Some of Ruth’s great-grandkids, and great-great grandkids, call her “Grandma Cuckoo” because of the old clock.
After Ruth’s father, John Reinikainen, came from Kartsula, Finland to build a house, Ruth's mother, her mother's sister Lemby and Ruth's older sister Hilma came over on the ocean liner, the S.S. Arabic.
John Reinikainen did odd jobs around town, from digging and selling quahogs to working on the railroad. “We were poor, but didn’t know it,” says Ruth. Her mother sometimes did the neighborhood’s laundry for money.
At night, or if it was snowing, back in the days before indoor plumbing Ruth’s father would walk hand in hand with her to the backyard outhouse on top of a hill. Then he’d wait outside to walk her back, since she was afraid.
He died of stomach ulcers at 47, when Ruth was only 9 years old.
Ruth remembers always playing outside with her five siblings. They would often play cops and robbers, ice skate on Garrets pond and swim at Hathaway’s pond or Wequaquet Lake. One of her brothers, Rayman, died at age 7 of pneumonia in both lungs. “That was before penicillin,” she says.
Ruth also remembers doing homework, with books and papers illuminated by a gas lamp until halfway through high school when the family got electricity. She says doing schoolwork with electric lights was much easier.
Bertha Salo Hudson, 95, has been friends with Ruth since they were kids in Finntown. Bertha, the goddaughter of John and Mary Reinkainen, still drives her car over to Ruth’s to pick her up for their weekly lunch.
Recently, Bertha found a picture from 1925 in a drawer at her grandmother’s house, one of Ruth at the age of 5. “People didn’t take many pictures back then, so it’s sort of amazing they found that one,” says Ruth.
Bertha grew up with five siblings, three boys and three girls. Her parents also performed odd jobs around town. “It was different back then, you just did what you had to, to survive,” Ruth says.
Saunas were another important part of Finntown. Ruth describes the family’s backyard sauna as a small shed with two separate rooms; one for dressing and one for bathing. “That was how people bathed themselves then,” she says, but “it was [also] a social gathering.”
Finns love coffee, Ruth says, and drank it before or after the sauna. They also ate nisu, Finnish coffee bread. “My sister Elsie always made nisu,” says Ruth, “[People] always asked why I never made it, but I never had to.”
I tell Ruth I would have to make her some soon. She smiles and says, “That would be lovely.”