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Note: According to Lois Gemmell's gedcom, there was another child born to Bradford & Florence, named Bradford Washburn, Jr. He was born June 27, 1906. There is a BRADFORD ELDER WASHBURN baby buried in the Vale plot. My mother remembers Florence mentioning that her first child was stillborn. Bradford, as he was called, died in a rest home in Durham in 1968. Death cert lists cause as acute pulmonary edema, which caused a heart attack. SS number was 095-20-2585.
The following was written by Jerry Bloss in an email rec'd 2000:
ABW was a product of socially strict Victorian times. He practiced this strictness to a fault. He was a typical example of the Britishers whom if you placed two in one room and kept them there for forty years neither would have spoken to the other until someone they both knew would've introduced them in as formal way as would be acceptable to both. Why there was a level of society such as this I'll never know. Did you ever hear him address Mom or refer to her as Florence? It was always "The Mrs., or You, or Her". There was another side of him...He had a brilliant scientific mind. There are a few events about which I was told. Some were such that they had to be true. One of Dads' photos was a pastoral scene of Professor Carl Steinmetz who was a physicist employed by the General Electric Company. He was in a row boat on a local small lake. Dad used to visit him on weekends, sometimes engaging in chess games. Their conversations reportedly always involved mathematics. One time the Gazette held a contest concerning Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Entrants were to lay out the basis of this and submit their entries to be judged. Dad won with total accuracy. All during the depression years he walked his mail route until he was forced to retire due to his age. At the same time (1928) the GE Company was looking for someone with a scientific mind and Dad was hired. His duty was to invent things. Aside from his laboratory he was given an office, which was shared by some secretaries. They thought he was the cutest thing. When these stories were repeated at home it became the first and only time I can remember him smiling.
It was unfortunate that once again he had to retire. He simply couldn't stand around doing nothing, so he took another job as a bellhop at the Van Corlear Hotel. What a come down.
I suppose you knew that the Washburns were a musical crowd. Dad played the piano and the coronet while I think Bill played the violin and Bob was on the clarinet. Not very good, but I thought it was wonderful.
They made me sing and I never stopped. Unbeknownst to him, Dad caused me to love classical music. I'm sure the music he's hearing in heaven is truly beautiful, but wouldn't he love to have heard our modern CDs and the wonderful new tenor voices of people like Jerry Hadley and Andrea Bocelli.
At the bottom of the stairs at the Main Avenue home there was a library containing some books that were old even then. We also had a stereopticon with many pictures of western movie stills.
I'm sure you realize you're causing this old mind to be following the path of an oil driller. He goes through a lot of sand then mud and clay then finally, if he is lucky maybe he'll hit the payload. At this point my mind is struggling through the clay.
I mentioned the violin. Somewhere, someone brought a fiddle into the picture. I'll swear to it but I can't pin-point where. Some of Dads' piano pieces were marches composed by John Phillip Sousa. A favorite of his and Moms' was "On The Mall". Of course there were others. He didn't perform well, but you had to know, with his obvious love for music, to play it and listen to it like an avid fanatic, there had to be within that hard-line exterior a loving, pensive and really romantic heart. Would he show it in any way? Of course not. In addition, there was that deep love for our dogs.
Close your eyes once again and come back with me to a cold night in 1940. A winter storm has roared down upon us. Hitler is raising hell in Europe. Bob has been drafted and is required to spend at least one year as a draftee. Twenty-four dollars a month. Dad's listening to "London Calling" accompanied in the background with the ringing of Big Ben. Every night Edward R. Murrow would talk to us. We heard and actually felt, in our imagination anyway, the bombs falling on London. Massive fires. People dying. Mom would shed a tear. She prayed for Bob's safety and hoped he would never have to leave the States to go and fight. Well! He did and he became a hero. On nights like this we all gathered in the kitchen. Three doors led to this cozy but scary gathering place but each was covered with blankets to keep the heat in and totally contain our very dim light. All the windows were covered with blankets and each side had a fold over type of cardboard that guaranteed no light would get through. We were afraid we would be attacked by fifth columnists or hit by bombs. There was very little driving because gas was severely rationed and we could only wangle an "A" card from the ration board. This gave us about two gallons a week (I think). Meat was also hard to come by but Mom always managed to put a lot onto our table. Every family was allotted little red cardboard coins about the size of a dime to be used for meat rationing. Somehow that ingenious lady managed to put plenty of everything on our dinner table. She'd fix it so we never were hungry. Coal was scarce too so on these cold nights the kitchen stove served as an alternative for the furnace. Dad always kept the furnace fire from going out though, because it was always hard to restart it. He would literally tease that furnace into keeping going all night every night.
One night while the family was gathered in that kitchen, I sneaked through the blanket that was blocking one doorway from here to the front of the house, because I wanted to see what it was like having no lights outside. Carefully I opened the front door and ventured out into the darkness. Boy was it cold. Scary, too. So-o-o dark. I met our block warden and he got pretty upset with me. "Hey kid." He yelled. "Get back into the house." I got back. Mom never found out about my little adventure.
The only nice part of these nights is remembering how I would crawl onto my bed and pull the heavy comforter over me. Now, I wasn't alone. I had a radio with an extension cord. The radio and I were both under that blanket. The volume was turned way down low and I would venture to far away lands listening to WOR or The National Barn Dance with Minnie Pearl, Eddy Peabody the banjo king and my favorite-Joe Parsons who would always sing Away in The Deep. His voice was so low that in order to hit those low notes he had to remove his shoes.
In all of my years I've never known anyone as intelligent as Dad. Contrary to what you've been told, Dad didn't plod the letter carrier fields because of a health condition. He did it because at that time it was a guaranteed, for sure lifetime income. It was a government job from which no one was ever fired (at least not back in those dark ages). If he held it for health reasons, I'd never heard about it.
His mind was that of a scientist. He was definitely knowledgeable of chemistry, archeology, astronomy, history, physics, musicology, photographic art and he had a total devotion to anything in which he believed. Additionally there was nothing in which he believed that didn't have a completely logical foundation. In his own way he was also a sports nut. He was an avid and good swimmer. He ice-skated and even tried iceboat racing. In addition to everything else he didn't only play chess, as so many do, but he was a recognized chess master and, as you well know, he played against the best at the Mohawk Chess Club in Schenectady.
He was adventurous. I was told (Not to be verified) that many years before I came along, he was at Lake Placid near the end of one of the first Olympic seasons, when this idiot went to the top of one of the ski jump ramps and with ice skates securely strapped on, he took off on the ice covered ramp, nearly killing himself flying through the air.
ABW was a tough, demanding, and very intelligent perfectionist. He worked hard at anything he undertook and made every effort to do it just right. There was once when he posed one of our dogs, with Mom holding her head while he carefully drew a pencil portrait of her. Not Mom, the dog. To this day I believe he tried to replicate every hair of that mutt in its correct place. He certainly was no experienced portrait artist, but he did this one very well. I can still close my eyes and see that picture.
He would start off to work at exactly the same time each day, and when coming home, he was almost equally as punctual. Mathematically, as in many other fields, he was a genius, but he hated helping me with my homework because I had a hard time adding two and two. That hasn't changed much. He would refuse to miss a day's work unless the reason was pretty serious. Now this brings me to the crux of my tale.
In the late thirties, I must have been around seven or eight; he came home from work one night and said, "I don't feel too good. I'm goin' right to bed." Now for him to do this without any supper, or even listening to the evening news, there had to be something seriously wrong. His voice was real scratchy. Immediately Mom was worried. No! She was almost scared to death. He never got sick, or at least when it happened, he would never admit it. She followed him upstairs and after a few minutes she came back down and called Dr. Schwartz. He was the typical family doctor. He not only knew every one of us but he could recall every day of our medical history. He could probably tell you the day and time your Dad had his first sneeze, and when he came down with every cold he ever had. He was also a demonstrative, and deeply sensitive person. He cared for all his patients. His office was over on State Street, a couple of miles from us. It didn't take him more than a few minutes to pull up in front of our house in his model "A" Ford. The black bag he always carried was filled with magical powders, salves and awful medical aromas. He and that bag was really a blessing to our town.
It was a dismal fall evening. Bill, Bob, and I waited just inside our front door, so when Doc Schwartz arrived, he didn't have to even knock. He was almost running when he topped the front porch stairs and didn't stop until just before he entered Dads bedroom. He stopped just outside the room, gathered himself up, and then went inside wearing a broad smile. A few moments later the three of us appeared outside the door and watched him as he placed his hand on Dad's head; then took his temperature. Yes, we had mercury thermometers back in those days. He applied his stethoscope and checked his pulse. When he examined his throat he turned to us and said, "His temperature is 104 and what he has is a streptococcal throat infection." He didn't play it up big to Mom but later on we learned it was so serious we could've lost him. "Don't worry." He said. " Believe it or not, I've got a medicine that will cure it."
What we also learned later on was that medicine was made from a newly discovered drug called sulfonamide, later called sulfanilamide and later still, made into a powder that was used extensively during WW II. That medicine was discovered just in time to save Dad's life. You see, when Mom called Doc Schwartz, he asked her what the trouble seemed to be and she told him "He's so hot and his throat is terribly sore. He can hardly talk". Right away Doc had a pretty good idea what the problem was because there was a minor outbreak of the same sickness in our town and he played it safe by packing his bag with that new stuff. At this stage of the discovery Doc Schwartz wasn't too sure it would really work so what you saw next was something you don't see very much today...After swabbing Dads throat with this awful smelling stuff, he got down on his knees and with his chin resting on his folded hands, he asked God to help us. Now he was a good doctor, and he knew it, but he also knew he could never do much without God's help. It hasn't been until only a few years ago that many doctors have come to realize that God has a hand in many cures.
Jerry Bloss
2000
Following census info was done by Dick Bloss in 2005:
1900 - listed as a clerk in a Manhattan dry goods store
1920 - living on Main St at 402 (This house was later made 841 Main Ave)
working at the Post Office
John and Catherine Duke living with them
in 1910 living at 615 6th Ave. Sure on house number not sure on street working at the post office (I believe this was 615 Congress St)
also living in the house was Frederick Harvey -his wife and dau.
Interesting that there were a LOT of Washburns living in Schenectady in 1910 and 20.
Based on the following directory info on his father, ABW is believed to have been born in Montclair, NJ:
Orange, New Jersey Directories, 1887-90
about Lansing C. Washburn
Name: Lansing C. Washburn
Location 1: Upper Mountain avenue n Van Vleck, 6 Wall, N. Y.
City: Montclair
State: NJ
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