 Welcome, welcome to the Channel 17 Stump the Chumps program on this October 21st, 2021. Stump the Chumps is a program that goes back to the 1990s. We talk about Burlington Trivia and what it was when milk was 19 cents a quart and pot. Well, that was the container that held, that was best definition of pot was a container different today. Anyway, I'm Bill Keough, your co-host of Stump the Chumps. And with me on this panel is my co-host, Joey Dunovan, and her brother, Jim Letty. Now, this is the Letty family, and you know Jim as a state senator. Joey was in the House of Representatives for a long time. I served in the House with Joey. So you get three politicians here. But these, the three of us have grown up at Burlington, and we've got a history of going to local schools, rice, cathedral, remember, cathedral, and Mount St. Mary's. And Joey, I went to Mount St. Mary's. Jim, did you go to Mount St. Mary's? No, I didn't. That was an all-girls school, K-12, except they took boys through kindergarten through second grade. And I was one of those guys. You were one of those guys. I was one of those guys. Because you grew up in Mansfield Avenue, right? I grew up in Mansfield Avenue, right across the street. So go ahead. I just was going to say, this is the first live show that we've done in how long? Probably two or three months. Even no live here in the studio. Oh, live, yeah. Two years. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, we had the little pandemic that's happened over the last couple of years, so. We've all survived so far. So what did you do in Mount St. Mary's? Did you ski over there, or slide over there, or did you go, I mean, where did you grow up? Where did the family grow up? We grew up on North Prospect Street. In our early years, when we were young children, we grew up on Stanaford Road. And now they call it the New North End. It was just the North End then. And off the Avenue. Off the Avenue. And we started off going to Thayer School, the original Thayer School. Yeah. And before they built the new one. And then our family got too big for the house we were in. And we moved into, into the, in town, as they called it. And we, my parents bought a home on North Prospect Street. So that's where we were raised, on North Prospect Street. So. But can I just say that when the house that we moved out of on Stanaford Road and Jimmy and I were first living there, Oakland Terrace was just being developed and we grew up in a neighborhood of cellar holes because there was so much development going. But one of the reasons that we moved in town was because there wasn't room for us all in our home. And yet the two families that followed us had more children than we did. And also had more insight. One, my father sold the house to Francis Pysche. And the Pysche's had a large family of probably eight or nine children. Nine children, yeah. And Francis was a very, very brilliant lawyer. And his wife, Mary, was lovely. And they were so innovative, they decided to raise the roof. And put a third decker on. So I think my father wanted to come home to lunch and he couldn't do that staying on Stanaford Road. So it really wasn't about the family and the size of the house. So you traversed over in Mount St. Mary's? No, I never went to school there. But in the wintertime, they had a wonderful sliding hill over Mount St. Mary's on one of the hills right beside the convent. And you could slide down. And if you were really good and got a good run, you could go down what was called the Snake Trail. And it would meander through the woods all the way to the old dump on Riverside Avenue. A dump on Riverside Avenue? Yeah, it was a long walk back. What kind of a dump was that? It was the city dump. There was one, I think that took the place of the one that was on North Bend Street. OK, you could actually ride your bike and walk down and go on the bike path along the northern connector now. But there was a dump there. And then it moved when it got, I guess, to fill down there in the interval. They moved it to Riverside Avenue. OK, no. Were you? We had those woods. And we also had the Mackenzie Woods behind our house. That was another woodland that you could do great explorations. But there was a big, huge sand slide in the. What was what was that called? The dump. Because we would take cardboard and slide down that sand hill. And my mother, we were forbidden to do so because she was so afraid there'd be a collapse and we would be smothered to death. But we we at least I didn't see the wisdom of her ways back then because it was just so glorious and so much fun. But Jimmy also was a he went to Mount St. Mary's in another way. He was one of the great altar servers to the Sisters of Mercy. Oh, just going to ask that question. At the break of day. And that was when that convent was two hundred plus in their community. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I used to I used to play first of all, if you've got a story about Old Time Burlington you want to share with us, give us a call 862-3966. That's 862-3966. Ask a question about the old days of Burlington or jump into this conversation because we're going everywhere with this conversation. Well, I don't think we can we can leave this the sliding era of the neighborhood without mentioning Mary Fletcher Hill. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was that was that in the country club were the two golden standards for sliding. Mount St. Mary's was closer, but it couldn't touch Mary Fletcher or the country club. Now, Mary Fletcher Hill. I used to live on Colchester Avenue growing up and used to go from top of Mary Fletcher Hill all the way down. And you were good if you went behind our Allen School, which meant you crossed which made you cross Colchester Avenue. So my mother put the no slide zone there. But did I adhere to it? I don't think so. I mean, when you got going and you got going down that Fletcher Hill, it was kind of too bad when the hospital put the parking garage in. But that was part of the whole debate of that parking garage, was there were many, many Burlington citizens who were against it because it was taking Hospital Hill away. Yeah, that was now you went down in cardboard, you had a toboggan. And what was the name of the popular sled in those days? Flyer, flexible flyer, flexible flyer, American flyer. Yeah. Yeah. Now, you talked about Joey brought up about serving at the Mount St. Mary's. Well, I used to live the Mansfield Avenue for a while. So we'd play football in that corner lot at the Loomis Street and Mansfield Avenue. Go there and I'd be all sweaty. And I'd go in for the five o'clock benediction to do my gig there and then come back out and continue the game. So, Joey, those are the days when I was a good boy. OK. Well, I did it. I used to serve mass at the convent twice a week. And if you were an altar boy and lived in close proximity to the convent, you got you got that duty. So I also did double duty at the synagogue because we lived across the street from Mojave Zedek. And I frequently would on the Sabbath help out some of the Jewish neighbors by lighting their stove and doing little things for them because they had to keep holy at the Lord's Day. Wow. That's interesting. It was a great neighborhood. It was a very diverse neighborhood in those days. I mean, diversity certainly didn't we never had any people of color, but they were certainly significant Jewish families and Catholic families and Protestant families. And the Mackenzie's lived around the corner and they were a big family of eleven children. The McNeils lived a couple of blocks away. The Canes were living near us. It was the Mahonis who had several families of our cousins, the Mahonis, the Shi'i family. Several of the families, my sister just mentioned, all had ten or more children, which was not unusual back then. That's funny. I have a list. Somehow I got a list of families like Verrachionis and all the ones that you mentioned. And you're right. They had anywhere from eight to eleven or twelve kids. Remember Father Bill Hammond, who adopted a dozen kids and he lived out in the avenue. But today you're today it's a lot different. You got two or three, maybe if we had five, you and you. So anyway, so it's all that has evolved. It has. So where did you go to grammar school? Well, I went to their school till second grade when we moved in town. And then I went to Cathedral Grammar School. Most of the places where I was educated no longer exists, the building, physical buildings. The Cathedral Grammar School was on the corner of Cherry Street and St. Paul Street, seven hundred kids in three stories, jam with thirty, forty kids in a classroom. And Jimmy, how would you say that building? How old was that when you were there? It was probably built in the 1870s or so. And this was this is back in the in the early fifties. You remember the fire drills that they had? You go out in the fire escape and you look down in the in the schoolyard. Oh, there's a three three stories down on an exterior fire escape. Don't look down. I remember once we were in the playground at Cathedral Grammar School and there was by a playground, you had two rusty basketball hoops and a lot of dirt and rocks. And in the wintertime, I remember we were out. I think it was lunch break. We were and the non sister Eugenia sister Eugenia. She got seventh or eighth grade. She came out on the third floor fire escape to ring a bell and say it's time for class. And one of my friends as she was ringing the bell, let loose with a with a snowball. Oh, took her bonnet right for the first time. We saw what a sister looked like without a bonnet. How'd you get along with the nuns? It depended. I remember when I was in high school, I didn't do well academically. I was challenged, as they say. And I had a French teacher who also oversaw the altar boys. Sister Fabian. No, this was Sister Leo Cady. Oh, I remember Sister Leo Cady. And Joey's rolling her eyes. Well, she taught French in school, and then she took on the altar boy duty. And I thought I was in her good graces and until I got my report card. And on my report card, I'm a sophomore in high school now. And French, there was a 70 was the passing grade. And I had a 70, but there was a minus sign in front of it. And I went to her and I said, sister, I said, I don't quite understand what 70 with the minus sign means. And she said, well, James, let me explain to you what it means. She said, you flunked. You failed the course. You failed the course. But I was the last teacher to write the grades in the marking book. And I noticed that you'd fail several other courses. Jimmy, you're supposed to do true confessionals. Well, the statute of limitations has expired. So she said, you actually failed the course. But I noticed you had failed several others. And I didn't want to cause your mother and father any more pain. Oh, man. I said, thank you, sister. Sister Leo Cady, I was a very proud woman of French heritage. And I took great delight many decades later when I was substitute teaching at Montecristi. And one of the perks to teaching there was you got to have lunch with the sisters in the in the dining room. And Sister Leo Cady was the chef and she loved cooking. And so I had great joy one day to ask one of the sisters to go in and tell Sister Leo Cady that Joey Letti was teaching French that week, which I'm sure she came out and just shook her head. She didn't think that was a possibility for me, you know. So when you brought that report card home, what was the reception when a burner and your mother looked at that? What did she tell James? Well, my my I brought it to my mother. Why? Well, for good reason, she she had a heart. And she understood me. And my dad did not that he was a cruel father at all, but he was all business when it came to school. Oh, I'm sure you do your homework. You pay attention. You don't get in trouble in school and don't bring home a card like you just brought home. So and he was had been an incredibly strong student himself and really looked to education as the way out. You know, he grew up on a farm in Underhill and he had higher ambitions. So he was he loved learning just for clarification. Their dad was Judge Bernard Letti, who was a strong candidate to be the first Democratic governor in Vermont. And he was, as I said, a federal judge and and Letti Park in Burlington was named after Bernard Letti, who served very, very well to the city and on the Parks and Recreation Commission. OK, Tom, going with that background, but wanted to get that across. Sorry, guys. OK, Joey, how'd you get along with the nuns? OK, that's a sister, Leo Kadia. Did you get in any trouble? Were you punished at all? There were times that things didn't probably go as well as my parents would have liked to them to have gone. But I I and I and I think I really valued so many of the relationships I had with the sisters, because as an adult, I've been very involved with them and the good work they've done throughout the city and and the state. And I really treasure the relationships I've had with so many of them. So I it probably I didn't value them as much when I was a student as I have as I grew up and appreciated them. It's called maturity. I guess that's what it's called. Well, I think it's very important to just to echo what Joey just said. We laugh or recall days with the nuns as our teachers that, you know, we can laugh at it, but they were they held us accountable. Absolutely. But the sisters of mercy made a world of difference in the lives of thousands of young people growing up in this community. They were outstanding. I had Sister Elizabeth Candon. I was a young nun in fourth grade. Wow. And I and Sister Janice Ryan worked with you. They were young nuns and they were teaching and both of them went on to be college presidents and state officials and state of both of them. State officials, Sister Elizabeth, Secretary of Human Services. And I think Sister Janice was Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Corrections. So they made a contribution not only in the classroom, but in the lives of them from others. Yes. And now I'm wondering what's going to happen to Mount St. Mary's now. You know, it's so beautiful. It is a beautiful piece of property. And as an audible, you remember how those marble floors and those little stalls that I just hate to see those ever be torn down. I'm very sad to have learned that the beautiful chapel at Mount St. Mary's is not on any historic registry. Oh, it's not. And I would keep on thinking I haven't done what I should have done to inquire about how do we go about that? It is an absolutely beautiful, beautiful building. Yeah. And it's really should be a tourist attraction. Yes. Yeah. It's gorgeous. It should be a shrine. OK. Yeah. Well, we have a lot of strong, good memories there. And we do at that time. Maybe we can start that committee right here tonight to do something about that, because it is it is remarkable. And the Pine Grove and walking down in the Pine Grove is where the Sisters of Mercy have their cemetery. And that's still a remarkable thing. And some of them lived to be very, very elderly women. Yeah. And it's just remarkable what a big community. And I used to play basketball in that little gymnasium. Oh, what about the band box? Is it the band box? Oh, my gosh, it's small. We used to try to break in. I mean, in order to play basketball, we'd climb the wall and try to open the windows and break. Isn't that something you have to break in or a place to play basketball? We used to do that in Memorial Auditorium. Yeah. OK. That changed when one of my friends, their father, was a custodian there. And we would a Marty Fitzgerald and Mr. Fitzgerald was a custodian. We always found a way to get in Memorial Auditorium on a weekend. You climbed the outside wall. We went through the back door. Mr. Fitzgerald told us how to get in. Tell us about the baseball in your back yard. Well, on Prospect Street. Well, we had a good sized yard and it became a neighborhood playground. We had a lot of big families in the neighborhood. The Brode Heirs from North Willard Street. I think there were 11 Brode Heirs. There were 10 Allards on North Street. Two sets of Mackenzie families, 11 in each and the Rocks, the Rocks, you know. So a lot of kids came over to our back yard to play basketball because we had a light over the hoop football and then baseball and a very small baseball. We had ground rule double. If you hit the ball more than 40 feet down the third baseline, it was in the garden. That was my father's. But if you hit it down the first baseline and it went into the Gladstone Flower Garden, the question then was, who's going to go get the ball? Why? Well, the beautiful gardens. Yeah, Mrs. Gladstone had absolutely gorgeous. So were you the guy to go get the ball? No, Tommy Rock. Why Tommy Rock? He was a fast runner. So Mr. Gladstone came out and said, get out of my garden. Tommy would run out of his back out with the ball in hand. With the ball. He didn't come back without the ball. Oh, so you wouldn't let him back in? Well, that was the deal. Why don't you get another baseball? Well, that was a problem. Yeah, there's usually only one ball. Oh, OK. Yeah, you watch Major League Baseball today. If a speck of dirt gets on a ball, they threw in a new one. We'd go for a week, two weeks with one ball. No, I like this story, because when I was growing up in Burlington and about baseball, we made do with what we had. We had a once the cover left the baseball, we put black tape around it and we continued to play with it. And with bats, we'd get a bat from the Burlington Cardinals or something like that. We put screws in it. They're broken bats that we put a screw in and then tape the handle because you didn't want to. So, you know, we made do with what we had. We didn't have much. So we had to find what we could do and make the best of it. So apparently, you guys did the same thing. A better baseball field for the neighborhood was our backyard was for was kind of the rookie league. The better field was at Pomeroy Pomeroy School. Oh, yeah, that was. Oh, that was the gold standard. OK. You could play. You could play ball down there and it was great. And we used to. Where was that in Pomeroy? Because Pomeroy was a big building. Booth Street, the corner booth. I know where Pomeroy was, but I can't think of where the baseball field. Oh, it's towards the towards Loomis Street. Loomis Street, yeah. And we had a couple of things happen there. We'd have so many kids playing ball down there. Sometimes you'd have 12, 13 kids in the field. And I remember Eddie Mackenzie, Murph Mackenzie was killed in Vietnam. Yes, the neighborhood kid grew up on Isham Street. And Murph was a little brother to all of us. His older brother, Mickey, was in my class and we're all and he just followed us around as a little boy followed us around. One day, Murph, we were all his job usually at Pomeroy was to climb the fence and ask Mrs. Courtney, if we get the ball. Mrs. Courtney, oh, she let us have the ball back. One day, well, me and her mother. And one day, Murph is out and he's out at second base and his brother comes out and said, well, Murph, what are you doing here? He said, I told you to go to second base. You aren't playing second base, you are second base. So we filled the field and we had great times. So how did you get all those kids together? Did you have to say, oh, we meet you tomorrow morning, eight o'clock? You didn't have to. Everybody knew where to go and what time to be there. If you were late, you didn't play. Oh, so you had to be there on time, whatever time that was. And you flip the bat and you go up and choose sides. How about this, like this? Yeah, no bottle caps. You had the right bottle cap. That was when you topped it off. Oh, you never did that. Oh, yes. Yeah, we had Dave Hartnett here. But we were talking about that. He'd be good. And then, Jimmy, remember Miss Mullins? Oh, the Batesy Bakeshop. Oh, God. Remember that, Bill? Oh, Miss Mullins, Tasty Bakeshop. Two doors up on North Street, just above North Gwilliam. Oh, I thought there was gelinose up that way. Gelinose down further down North Street. Gelinose was for the big birthday special. Miss Mullins was for the oatmeal cookies. And the rolls. And the rolls. Oh, my gosh, they were wonderful. So now, how about when you have a family like that, have a division of chores in the household? I mean, Joey and I, you and I talked about this the other day. As a boy in my family, I mowed the lawn in shovel coal. My sisters did not mow the lawn or shovel coal. My sisters did the dishes. I did not do dishes. We had that work division in our family. Did you have something similar to that in your family? Well, we we weren't very good at chores. But I do remember that Jimmy's job was always to take the trash out. And of course, she'd burn it then. OK, yeah, 55 gallon grunt. And there never would be that would never I would never or my sisters would never be asked to take the trash out. Because that was a division of labor. Yes. OK. But my mother used to say is my father would tell us to go in and help my mother do the dishes. My mother used to say to my father, I'd prefer to be by myself. OK. And so I used to say, well, I'll go up and do my homework then. So you build out. Yes. OK. But I used to draw the outside duties, too. I was supposed to mow the lawn. And the other most most hateful chore I could be asked to do or expected to do was to rake the leaves. And we had a big yard and we had Dutch Elm to say. I gave thanks for Dutch Elm disease. Dutch Elm disease killed a lot of the trees, a lot of the Elm trees in Burlington. I can tell you a story about that from my experience, but go ahead. Well, my father would go and he leave on a Saturday, go hunting and expect when he came home, the yard would all be raked. Well, I spent the morning playing football in the backyard. In the afternoon, we'd go over to UVM and watch that's the tenure field and watch a football game. And he would come home and he said, well, you didn't get the. So he would tell me, Sunday, you have to go out and rake the leaves. I said, well, I can't survive work. You can't do survival work on on a Sunday. And so so I I pleaded religion that I couldn't do the raking on a Sunday because, you know, we were forbidden to do that. You don't work on Sunday. So my father, so I said, the Jews who lived across the city, those kids on Saturday, you don't see them working. So one of my sisters said, Dad's out talking to Rabbi Wall. My father, Rabbi Wall, were good friends. Rabbi Wall was going to the synagogue. And so my father came in and said, I took your case to a higher court. I spoke to Rabbi Wall about working on the Sabbath. And Rabbi Wall, after listening to my story, he said, well, he should rest one day a week on the Sabbath. But since he's already been resting six days, give him the rake. So you didn't win on that one. Rabbi Wall was no help. So Joe, how did you fit into some of this outdoor work? Or were you were you immune to that? I was immune. So definitely. So what happens today? Now, I try to I try to teach my daughter how to change oil in a car. Maybe a story or a story. Ellen, this is where you get into the car and here's the here's this. What would be the point? That's why I wanted to do something besides the dishes. Someone's a quote, a male. These are these are your early feminist years? Yes. OK, yes. But she never changed your oil since then. So into that story. Well, I don't think my father was not a mechanical person. And so we none of us learned much about anything. He he had a workshop down seller. And I don't know what the man did down there. In every tool imaginable. And he loved that you hear these hammers and you think there was going to be a new dollhouse coming out or something. But rarely did anything come out. So I don't think any of us really got any mechanical skills or taught anything like that. OK, OK. Well, folks, this is eight, six, two, three, nine, six, six. We're waiting coming down to the end of our program. Joey Letti Dunovan and Senator Jim Letti are here. We're sharing experiences of way back in the day, I guess, well, in the New North End, it was in the New North End and in the avenue. What did you think of Father Tenein when he put that question king that not the St. Mark's Church out in the avenue? My mother and father were very much a founding member of that community. And they they thought very highly of Father Tenein. I thought that was what's he doing? As sending a church way out there, there's nobody out there. Well, the first masses, as the church was being built, were at the Heineberg Club. Oh, really? Our parents, when they went to mass originally, they went to the Heineberg Club and then the church. I think I made my first communion at the probably a year after the church opened. OK, well, we're going to wrap up, folks. Thank you for watching Stump the Chumps. We tried to give you a little bit of Burlington and days gone by with these two natives with, man, what stories they had. Did it conjure up any thoughts in your mind? It's fun doing history of Burlington. The trivia is good. Thank you for watching. We'll see you next time.