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Rhode Island’s Little Annapolis: The PT Boat Training Center at Melville

During World War II, Rhode Island residents could hear the roar of PT boat engines from Narragansett Bay all day and see tracer bullets fired over the ocean at night.

They could watch the PT boats racing around either in formation or practicing maneuvers. Perhaps Richard Nixon saw them from the Quonset Point Naval air station while he trained there in 1942. Perhaps George H.W. Bush had an aerial view of the little boats while training at the Charlestown Naval Air Station. And maybe they caught a glimpse of John F. Kennedy racing around the bay, leaving a rooster tail in his wake.

PT Boat 140 off Melville, R.I.

Birth of the PT Boat

The Navy had recognized early in the war that it needed small, high-speed, heavily armed gunboats to use among the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific. From that insight came the Patrol Torpedo boat, known as the PT boat. You may have seen PT boats in motion pictures such as They Were Expendable and PT 109 or the comedy TV show, McHale’s Navy.

Nearly all of the 14,000 PT boat officers and men trained at the small navy base on Narragansett Bay in the village of Melville, a part of Portsmouth, R.I. The Navy didn’t just train its men there, but developed PT boat policies and tactics as well.

Not many histories of these small bases have been written. Melville, however, graduated a disproportionate number of extremely successful men. In addition to a president of the Unite States, Melville graduated a U.S. Supreme Court justice, three movie stars, five U.S. ambassadors, four NFL coaches, six top corporate executives and a U.S. attorney general – to name a few.

This is their story.

Devil Boats

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, has published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He has a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lives in East Providence, R.I.

PT boat logo

The base was formally known as the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center (MTBSTC). The Japanese called them Devil Boats, and the Navy fondly called them the Mosquito Fleet, after their logo. The Secretary of the Navy signed an order establishing the PT boat fleet on Feb. 17, 1942.

In the beginning, a Massachusetts firm began construction on the small base. But then the Navy largely turned it over to the Rhode Island companies of Gilbane, Coleman and Collins. When all was said and done, there would be 59 buildings and 150 Quonset Huts (a Rhode Island invention). These buildings and huts would house classrooms, mess halls, warehouses, machine shops, living quarters and more — everything you’d find in a large Navy base.

The builders literally built a boat basin for the PT boats out of a swamp. It was staffed full time by 57 officers and 280 enlisted men. Motorists could see it from the Mt. Hope Bridge, which connects Bristol and Portsmouth.

Alongside the PT boat training unit was the Motor Torpedo Boat Repair Training Unit (MTBRTU). This unit had a staff of 30 officers and 950 enlisted men. Here they trained on maintaining the three 1500-horsepower Packard engines on a PT boat either in dock or the field. On the other side of the base was the Naval Fuel and Net Depot – a good location because those Packard engines gobbled up huge amounts of high-octane fuel.

Melville also had the advantage of having the Navy’s Newport Torpedo Station on Goat Island down the road from it. The torpedo station could provide training duds, sometimes live, for the torpedo boats to practice with. It also supplied experimental torpedoes to try out and a seven-mile torpedo range running north from the torpedo station up Narragansett Bay toward Prudence Island.

Mount Hope Bridge

Specht Tech

The Navy organized the PT boats into 44 squadrons, generally comprised of 12 boats. All told, the Navy commissioned over 650 PT boats by the end of the war.

The men nicknamed the squadrons ‘RON’, from the last three letters of ‘squadron,’ and added their number. RON 4 began operations at the Newport Navy Base on Jan. 13, 1942. It later moved to the crowded Melville base and remained in operation for the duration of the war. RON 4 patrolled the Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts coastline. Thus Narragansett Bay provided a safe haven for training and experimentation.

Lt. William C. Specht, soon promoted to lieutenant commander, was tapped to serve as Melville’s first commander in March 1942. He also ran the repair and fuel depots. Specht oversaw the construction of the base as well as the development of its curriculum. Navy men assigned to the course at Melville joked they attended “Specht Tech.”

Lt. jg. John F. Kennedy in PT 109

Plenty Tough

The PT boats were built mostly by the Higgins Company in New Orleans and the ELCO Company, a division of Electric Boat, the submarine builder. They had to measure at least 77 feet long in order to carry and launch Mark 8 torpedoes. They also carried twin 50-caliber machine guns. Some of the PT boats had 20 mm cannons.

The crewmen did their gunnery training at the Anti-Aircraft Center at Price’s Neck on Newport’s Ocean Drive. George Donovan, now 92, remembers them practicing at night. Along with his brother and cousins, he watched from his grandmother’s bedroom window, which faced Ocean Drive. They were fascinated and mesmerized watching countless tracer bullets fired out over the ocean at practice targets towed by small airplanes. These trainees used live ammunition, and occasionally they strayed off target and accidently shot down the tow plane.

The men trained in their PT boats on Narragansett Bay and in the ocean between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, 10 miles south of Newport. People said the rooster tail and the roar of the engines was most impressive the first time you heard and saw them. These boats could travel between 40-45 miles an hour at full throttle and were physically demanding to operate. So demanding they sometimes said that “PT” meant the men had to be ‘plenty tough.’

A PT boat underway near Midway

Accidents Happen

Occasionally, things went wrong.

Whenever the torpedo station was going to launch a test torpedo along its seven-mile range off Gould Island, it blew a very loud warning whistle. But one day in 1942 the commander of PT 122 did not hear the whistle, understandable over the roar of three Packard engines. He strayed into the test range and was nearly sunk by a test torpedo.

On another occasion that same year, PT 59 launched a torpedo in error. It traveled an estimated seven miles and struck the cargo ship USS Capella, anchored off Jamestown, and it began to sink. The quick-thinking skipper used his powerful engines to push the Capella to shallow water and thus save her from sinking. She was later repaired and put back into service. However, the entire incident was kept secret until the 1970’s.

Then in 1943, another PT boat launched a torpedo that went off course and sank a freighter anchored off the Quonset Point Naval Air Station.

And while patrolling Rhode Island coastal waters, PT 200 struck an unknown submerged object and sank.

Melville Today

Soon after the end of World War II, the Navy decommissioned the Melville Training Center and dismantled it. All that remains today are a couple of buildings and a plaque to commemorate what once was there. A busy marina operates in the PT boat cove.

When I was a youngster in the early 1960s, my friends and I used to play on an abandoned PT boat, which had been stripped of its armament and beached on the shore of what is now Hanley’s Beach, on Jacobs Point along the river in Warren, R.I. It had apparently crashed into something submerged because it had a large hole in its hull. We could enter the PT boat through the hole and play around, imagining what once might have taken place aboard her.

According to the Warren Preservation Society, what remained of the PT boat burned to the ground about 1970. All that’s left is some iron from what once must have been her engines.

Today there are precious few PT boats remaining, perhaps 10 in the world. Two fully restored boats can be seen on display at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Mass. If you want to experience what they were really like, take a trip to New Orleans and the National WW II Museum where they have fully restored the PT 305 to fully operating condition. You can even take a 45-minute ride on it in Lake Ponchartrain.

As noted previously, about 14,000 people went through the Melville Training Station out of about 12 million men and women who served in the armed forces during the war. What seems to me remarkable, and far out of proportion to its size, is the number notable men who served there.

The PT boat in Battleship Cove

Melville Alumni

Here is an incomplete listing:

Anthony Akers, U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand

Paul Austin, Chairman of the Board, Coca Cola

Howard Baker, U.S. Senator from Tennessee, chief of staff to President Reagan, U.S. Ambassador to Japan

William C. Battle, President of Field Crest Mills, U.S. Ambassador to Australia

Charles A. Black, husband of Shirley Temple and aquaculture pioneer

John D. Bulkeley, Navy Vice Admiral and one of the most decorated men in military history, including the Medal of Honor; skippered PT boat that took Gen. Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines

Michael Burke, CBS Sports executive and President of the New York Yankees

John Clagett, author of 19 books

Bernard A. Crimmins, All-American football player, Notre Dame 1941; college football coach`

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., part of the invasion of Southern France, organized the Beach Jumpers, movie actor

Paul B. (Red) Fay, Undersecretary of the Navy, author

John Harllee, Chairman, Federal Maritime Commission

Michael J. Holovak, All-American football player, Boston College, 1942; college football coach and NFL team executive

John F. Kennedy, U.S. President

Joe Kuharich, college football coach and head coach NFL teams

Elgar Laux, Vice Chairman, Chrysler Corp.

Walter Lemm, head coach Houston Oilers and St. Louis Cardinals

Henry Loeb, Mayor of Memphis, Tenn.

Carl Maddox, Athletic Director, Louisiana State University

Clinton McClain, player, New York Giants

Torbert MacDonald, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts

John N. Mitchell, U.S. Attorney General

Robert Montgomery, actor, President of the Screen Actors Guild

James Madden Newberry, founder of PT Boats, Inc.

Jack B. Olson, Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas

Paul T. Rennell, Vice President, Pan American World Airways

Don Rickles, actor and comedian

Raymond P. Shafer, Governor of Pennsylvania

Preston L. Sutphen, Sr., President of Electric Boat, builder of PT boats

Harold Thorkilsen, President and CEO, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.

Malcolm Troon, U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Israel and the Soviet Union

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, millionaire

George Vanderbilt, millionaire

Byron White, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

End Notes

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, passed away in 2020. He published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

Images: PT Boat at Battleship Cove By Wikimaster97commons – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3846572; John F. Kennedy in PT 109 courtesy the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. This story was updated in 2022.

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Jolly Jane Toppan, the Killer Nurse Obsessed With Death

Jolly Jane Toppan killed at least 31 people between 1880 and 1901, but the doctors who hired her thought she was one of their best nurses.

Jane Toppan

Today, psychiatrists say she was one of the most unusual serial killers in history. Like many serial killers, she had an unstable childhood. Unlike most female serial killers, she did it for the sexual thrill.

As her victims lay dying, she got a powerful erotic charge from holding and caressing them.

Jane Toppan couldn’t resist that excitement, and admitted she aspired “to have killed more people — helpless people — than any other man or woman who ever lived.”

Jane Toppan

She was born Honora Kelley around 1857 in Boston, the youngest of four girls in a poor Irish immigrant family. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was a year old.

Her father, Peter Kelley, a tailor, lost his mind and was said to have sewn his eyelids shut.

Kelley — known as ‘Kelley the Crack’ — tried to raise the girls, but he was suspected of abusing them.

In 1863, Kelley took 8-year-old Delia and 6-year-old Honora to an orphanage called the Boston Female Asylum in the city’s South End. The orphanage placed girls in respectable families when they turned 10.

Boston Female Asylum

Delia supposedly became a prostitute and an alcoholic. Another sister, Nellie, ended up in an insane asylum.

Honora became an indentured servant to Mrs. Ann C. Toppan of Lowell, Mass. The Toppans passed her off as an Italian girl whose parents died at sea, because of the stigma associated with the Irish. They also renamed her “Jane Toppan,” which sounded less Irish. She died well in school and had many friends, but got unattractively fat.

Jane also displayed the earmarks of a sociopath, telling outrageous lies: her father sailed around the world, her sister married an English nobleman, her brother was decorated at Gettysburg by Abraham Lincoln.

Nursing

At 18, Jane Toppan graduated from Lowell High School. The Toppans freed Jane from her indenture and gave her $50, but she stayed in the household as a servant.

Young Jane Toppan

When Ann Toppan died, Elizabeth took over the house, and continued to treat Jane as a servant, though with more kindness than her mother.

Elizabeth married a church deacon, Oramel Brigham, who moved into the Toppan house. But something — some strain or dispute — caused Jane to move out of the house she’d lived in for 20 years.

At 33, Jane Toppan started her training as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital in 1887. There she earned her nickname, ‘Jolly Jane,’ for her friendly outgoing personality. She liked to gossip, though, and celebrated the dismissal of students she didn’t like. She lied that the Tsar of Russia had offered her a nursing job, and she probably stole small things. Many of her fellow students grew to detest her.

The hospital administration grew concerned over her obsession with autopsies, but didn’t know she experimented with morphine and atropine on her elderly patients.

Boston City Hospital female ward around 1890

One patient, Amelia Phinney had an operation in 1887. Afterward, she said, Jane Toppan gave her a dose of bitter medicine, causing her to lose consciousness. Jane climbed into her bed and kissed her all over her face, but something startled her and she stopped.

The next morning Phinney decided it had all been a dream. Fourteen years later, Jane Toppan was arrested, and Phinney realized she’d had no dream.

Two Faces of Jane Toppan

Jane Toppan got a job at Massachusetts General Hospital, but lost it because she recklessly gave out opiates. Nevertheless, doctors recommended her as a private nurse to their wealthy clients.

Massachusetts General Hospital. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Outside of her job she guzzled beer, told dirty jokes, gossiped madly and enjoyed turning her friends against each other. But to the doctors and their patients she seemed a highly skilled professional, compassionate and cheerful.

Nurse Jane Toppan was earning $25 a week when women earned an average of $5 a week. She was also getting a sexual thrill, she later admitted, from climbing into bed with her patients as she murdered them.

Killing Spree

She befriended her elderly landlord and his wife, but killed them one by one. She later explained they had gotten ‘feeble and fussy’ and ‘old and cranky.’ Her colleagues in nursing school remembered her saying there was no use keeping old people alive.

In 1889, 70-year-old Mary McLear fell ill on a visit to Cambridge. Her doctor sent Jane Toppan, ‘one of my best nurses,’ to care for her. Jane poisoned Mary McLear.

A month later she killed a close friend with strychnine so she could take her job as dining hall matron at St. John’s Theological School in Cambridge. She got the job, but it didn’t last. The administration couldn’t ignore complaints of her incompetence and missing money.

Marriage Plot

Elizabeth Toppan Brigham, Jane’s foster sister, often invited her to come visit and stay in the house she grew up in. Jane sometimes took her up on the invitation.

Jolly Jane was vacationing in Buzzard’s Bay in the summer of 1899 when she targeted Elizabeth Brigham. Elizabeth complained of depression, and Jane invited her down to the Cape.

One day she took Elizabeth to the beach for a picnic of cold corned beef, taffy and mineral water laced with strychnine.

“I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out,” Jane later said.

Jane Toppan then insinuated herself into the household of Elizabeth’s widower, Oramel Brigham, because she wanted to marry him.

With three days she killed Brigham’s housekeeper, 77-year-old Edna Bannister. She took over from Edna and tried to impress Oramel Brigham with her housekeeping skills. Brigham made it clear he didn’t want her as a housekeeper or as a wife.

Jane Toppan decided to win his love by poisoning him and then nursing him back to health. That didn’t work either, so she threatened to claim he’d gotten her pregnant. An enraged Oramel Brigham ordered Jolly Jane Toppan out of the house.

She tried to commit suicide with an overdose of morphine, but failed and went to the hospital. Upon her release, she visited an old friend, Sarah Nichols, who lived with her brother in Amherst, N.H.

Suspicious Minds

By 1901, a Massachusetts state detective was following Jane Toppan. He suspected her of killing the entire family of Alden Davis .

Jane had rented a cottage in Bourne from the Davis family, but she hadn’t kept up with the rent. Alden Davis’ wife Mattie came to Cambridge to collect, but Jane killed her with a cocktail of morphine and atropine. Then she moved in with the elderly Alden Davis to take care of him.

Jane Toppan took care of Alden Davis all right. She killed him and then two of his married daughters, Minnie Gibbs and Geraldine Gordon.

Minnie Gibbs’ father-in-law suspected the sudden deaths of an entire healthy family had to do with foul play. He consulted a toxicologist and got a judge to order Minnie’s body exhumed. Investigation revealed she died of morphine and atropine poisoning.

Taunton State Hospital, 1987 (since demolished)

Police arrested Jane Toppan in Amherst on Oct. 29, 1901.

Jolly Jane Toppan went to trial for murder in the summer of 1902. She confessed to her lawyer she killed at least 31 people, perhaps as many as 100.

She claimed she started her killing spree because a boyfriend dumped her when she was 16. A Lowell office worker gave her a promise ring, but moved to Holyoke, Mass., and fell in love with someone else.

“If I had been a married woman, I probably would not have killed all of those people,” she said. “I would have had my husband, my children and my home to take up my mind.”

An eight-hour trial took place in Barnstable County Courthouse. A jury deliberated for 27 minutes and found Jane Toppan not guilty by reason of insanity. She spent the rest of her life at Taunton State Hospital, dying on Aug. 17, 1938.

Some attendants remembered her calling them into her room and smiling. “Get some morphine, dearie,” she said, “and we’ll go out in the ward. You and I will have a lot of fun seeing them die.”

This story last updated in 2022. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read ‘Married to a Murderer, H.W. Mudgett’ here. Images: Boston City Hospital female ward courtesy Boston City Archives via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0. Boston City Hospital surgical ward via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0.

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Old Roger Williams Tries To Stop King Philip’s War

On March 29, 1676, old Roger Williams was one of 30 men who remained in the town of Providence. Most of the population had taken refuge on Aquidneck Island, rightly fearing an attack from indigenous people. It was the midst of King Philip’s War, and Roger Williams tried to stop the bloodshed. He was 77 years old.

Old Roger Williams tried to stop the bloodshed.

That day, Native Americans roamed Providence unmolested as they set fire to houses, barns, sheds and churches. They burned Roger Williams’ home, though he had long been their friend.

Williams sent an ominous letter to his brother, then staying on Aquidneck Island.

[P]repare forts for women and children at Newport and on the island or it will be shortly worse with you than us.

King Philip’s War

King Philip

No U.S. war was as catastrophic as King Philip’s War. For 55 years, New England colonists had lived in peace with the Native Americans. But then Plymouth Colony grabbed too much land, subjected them to a humiliating peace treaty and hanged three Wampanoags.

War broke out.

Metacomet, also known as King Philip, led the rebellion. He was the son of Massasoit, the sachem who had negotiated a peace treaty with the Mayflower Pilgrims.

Native Americans attacked nearly half the towns in New England, but it was all over after 14 months of fighting. Philip was dead, his head displayed in Plymouth Colony for 20 years. As many as a thousand indigenous people were sold into slavery, and 5,000 were killed in battle, of sickness or starvation. Another 2,000 fled west or north. At the outset of the war, Native Americans comprised 30 percent of New England’s population; by the end, they were down to 15 percent.

King Philip’s War devastated New England. Plymouth Colony lost 8 percent of its adult male population. Compare that to the Civil War, in which less than 5 percent of the country’s men died.

The New England economy suffered, and it would take a century before per capita income rose to its level before the war.

Before the bloodshed, there had been about 100 towns in New England; afterward, only about 65, the rest having been burned or abandoned.

Great Swamp Massacre

Old Roger Williams did his best to stanch the bloodshed. As the colony’s leader, he and Rhode Island’s largest tribe, the Narragansetts, tried to stay out of the escalating violence.

Roger Williams

Williams had consistently upheld Native rights. He bought land from them, instead of appropriating it, and he learned their language, publishing a guide to it in 1643, A Key Into the Language of America.

At the outset of King Philip’s War, the Narragansetts had signed a treaty of neutrality with Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Knowing this, King Philip sent the women, children and infirm from warring tribes to safety with the Narragansetts. But a 1,000-man militia from three colonies – Plymouth, Massachusetts and Connecticut – invaded Rhode Island and massacred the Narragansett winter settlement in the Great Swamp, now South Kingstown. Seven hundred indigenous men, women and children died in agony.

The Narragansetts had no choice but to go to war. The Narragansett sachem Canonchet assembled an army that attacked towns in Central Massachusetts, Rhode Island and, finally, Providence.

Old Roger Williams

As Providence burned, a group of Native Americans from several tribes assembled on the banks of a salt cove across from the town. Williams walked out to talk with them across the water, his back to the burning town.

The conversation between the warriors and the old minister lasted an hour.

Roger Williams asked them why they burned and killed their kind neighbors. He told them,

This house of mine now burning before mine eyes hath lodged kindly some thousands of you these ten years.

They said Rhode Island had joined the other colonies in the Great Swamp massacre.

In a letter to his brother, Williams recounted his reply:

I told them they … had forgot they were mankind and ran around the country like wolves tearing the innocent and peacable….They confessed they were in a strange way.

Roger Williams then warned them that it was almost time to plant. The Indians said they didn’t care about planting; they would take food from the English. They argued some more, and finally Williams suggested he intervene to make peace.

The Native Americans said they would spend the next month burning Plymouth Colony, and then they would talk to him.

But they never used Rogers Williams’ services as a peacemaker. They did, however, tell him the safe way home.

Old Roger Williams lived for another seven years.

With thanks to Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. This story was updated in 2022.

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Lillian Gilbreth, Genius in the Art of Living

Lillian Gilbreth hated the best-selling book written about her in 1948 because it depicted her as a sweet, stay-at-home mom who deferred to her husband.

Lillian Gilbreth

Cheaper By the Dozen, written by two of her 12 children, described how she and her husband used time-and-motion principles to manage their large household. They figured out the most efficient way to take a bath – and had the children listen to language lessons on the Victrola while doing so. They even incorporated recordkeeping into the daily routine, requiring the children to initial process charts showing they had bathed, brushed their teeth, made their beds and combed their hair.

What Cheaper By the Dozen failed to show was that family life was just an extension of Lillian Gilbreth’s professional life. She and her husband ran an engineering firm, and together wrote hundreds of articles, published eight books, ran courses on industrial management and wrote many, many professional papers. Lillian Gilbreth was actually one of the most influential women of her age.

When her husband Frank died of a heart attack at the age of 42, Lillian Gilbreth turned her attention to the domestic space, where she sought to reduce the drudgery of household chores. Her goal was to help other working mothers find more time for leisure and creativity. She called those moments ‘happiness minutes.’

Lillian Gilbreth

Lillian Moller Gilbreth was born on May 24, 1878 in Oakland Calif., the second of 11 children. Both her father, William Moller, a well-to-do merchant, and her wealthy mother Annie Delger, were of German descent.

Frank Gilbreth

Lillian Gilbreth was well-educated for her time, and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1900 with a bachelor’s degree in English. She was the college’s first female commencement speaker. She started on her master’s degree in English at Columbia University, but fell sick and returned to California. In 1902 at the University of California she finished her master’s degree in English, but by then her interest was turning to psychology.

In 1903, she dropped out of graduate school and embarked on a tour of Europe with friends. They stopped in Boston, where she met a charismatic building contractor named Frank Gilbreth. Sixteen months later they were married at her parents’ home in Oakland.

Lillian gave birth about every 15 months, in between moves from California to New York to Providence to New Jersey, with summers on Nantucket. Together Frank and Lillian Gilbreth had 13 children; one daughter was stillborn and another died of diphtheria at the age of five.

Frank Gilbreth

Frank, a poor student, had never gone to college and started his career as a bricklayer’s apprentice. He became fixated on the single most efficient way to lay bricks. He learned about other aspects of building and contracting as well, taking night school courses on mechanical drawing.

Frank rose rapidly at a large construction firm, patented several inventions and then quit to start his own company. When he married Lillian, they founded a management consulting firm that studied employees’ work habits and recommended ways to make their jobs easier and more efficient. His specialty was time-and-motion management, while hers was educational psychology.

In 1912 their consulting firm won a contract to introduce scientific management to the New England Butt Co., a hinge maker, in Providence, R.I.

Time-and-motion study at the New England Butt Co. Photo courtesy Smithsonian Institute.

Home Laboratory

There, Lillian Gilbreth was able to earn her doctorate in psychology from Brown, and she and Frank turned their home near the university into a laboratory for motion study.

The Gilbreths took photos of their children doing dishes to figure out how to do it faster. They spent a vacation on Nantucket finding the best way to pack soap for Lever Brothers. The children learned Morse code after Frank painted the symbols on their walls and ceilings. He left funny messages in code for them to decipher.

In their work, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth pioneered ways to incorporate psychology in industrial planning. They introduced such concepts as work breaks, improved lighting, suggestion boxes and free books. They did research into fatigue management, the forerunner to ergonomics.

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth with some of their children. Photo courtesy Smithsonian Institute.

In 1919, the Gilbreths moved to Montclair, N.J. Frank died five years later of a heart attack. She outlived him – and succeeded on her own – for 48 years.

On Her Own

Lillian Gilbreth continued the consulting firm, but turned her attention to housework and home management. She thought that gave her the best chance of success on her own. She did marketing and management research for Johnson & Johnson and Macy’s. And she consulted with Katharine Gibbs and helped IBM develop an exhibit for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.

Cheaper by the Dozen

She is credited with developing the modern kitchen, conceiving the ‘work triangle.’ She also invented the foot pedal trash can, refrigerator door shelves and wall light switches.

Lillian Gilbreth had a long friendship with Herbert Hoover and his wife Lou. She campaigned for Herbert Hoover and headed the President’s Emergency Committee for Employment in 1930. At Lou Hoover’s request, she became a consultant and director to the Girl Scouts. She also did work for the federal government through the Truman Administration.

Academia

On top of all that, Lillian Gilbreth was a visiting professor at Purdue and the University of Wisconsin. She lectured at many other colleges. At the age of 86 she became resident lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lillian Gilbreth retired in 1968, just before turning 90. She died Jan. 2, 1972, in Phoenix, Ariz.

Cheaper By The Dozen, still in print, made the best-seller list. It was also made into a film, a stage play and a musical.

You can still see the New England Butt Company building at 304 Pearl St., where the Gilbreths pioneered the first process flow charts and micromotion studies. At Brown University, Lillian obtained her PhD in Applied Management. The family lived a half block from Brown, first at 71, then at 77 Brown Street. The Gilbreths’ Nantucket cottage, which had two buglights on the property, was on the extension of Hulbert Avenue behind the Jetties Beach tennis courts. This story was updated in 2022.

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Samuel Sewall – The Witch Trials Judge Who Couldn’t Get a Date

Samuel Sewall is best known as one of the nine judges who condemned witches to death in the Salem witch trials of 1692 – an act for which he later apologized. His detailed diary records many of the actions and thoughts of a life that spanned 77 years from 1652 to 1730.

Some of the more humorous entries – at least from an onlooker’s perspective – describe his troubles getting remarried as a widower.

Not So Lovelorn — At First

Samuel Sewall

Samuel Sewall was profoundly lucky in love as a young man. In 1676 he married Hannah Hull, a young woman very much in love with him.. Hull was the daughter of John Hull, the first mint master of Massachusetts—a position that made Hull very wealthy.

With his wealthy family connections Sewall, a lawyer, easily rose in power and stature. By 1717, however, when Hannah died, the old man was viewed as less of a catch by the women of Massachusetts.

Indeed, Samuel Sewall notes in February of 1717 that following his wife’s burial, “This morning wondering in my mind whether to live a single or a married life.” And in his diary in July of 1718 he writes that “twas hard to know whether to marry again or no; whom to marry …”

But there was pressure to be married in those times. One of the Mathers sent Sewall a tract: Marah Spoken To: A Brief Essay to do Good Unto the Widow. Expectations were that Sewall would not only remarry, but that he would find a respectable match. And among the women of Sewall’s day, there were many matchmakers.

Sewall fended them off with humor: “… They that put to sea should be careful how they put to sea again, especially in wintertime.”

Mrs. Denison

Nevertheless, Samuel Sewall did decide to put to sea once again. His first efforts at finding a match led him to a Mrs. Denison of Roxbury. Sewall had handled her husband’s affairs, including drawing up his will, and he knew of her financial conditions. She was a shrewd lady herself, about 15 years younger than Sewall, and apparently felt Sewall was no bargain.

Sewall writes of visiting Mrs. Denison and eating curds with her. He notes: “I gave her two cases with a knife and fork in each, one with turtle-shell tacking, the other with ivory handles.”

By now, Sewall’s friends expected marriage, but the lady broke it off – offering to return all his gifts. His diary notes that in November 30 of 1718 she did apparently have a change of heart. Visiting him with her cousin, “she asked pardon if she offended me. She seemed inclined the match should not break off, since I had kept her company so long.”

But Samuel Sewall had moved on. In 1719 he successfully courted and married Abigail (Melyen) Woodmansey Tilley. This marriage lasted only a couple months, however, before Abigail died.

Catherine Winthrop

Unbowed by this second death, Samuel Sewall again pushed forward with his romantic endeavors. He next set his sights on a member of the Winthrop clan – Catherine Winthrop, widow of Wait Winthrop. At their first meeting in October of 1720, Catherine dealt rather coyly with Sewall. She kept him waiting and then she informed him that she would never move from her home and needed to take care of her grown children.

He tried to feel her out about her answer if he proposed marriage. Her reply: “She could not answer until she was asked.” Samuuel Sewall left her with a book, The Fountain Opened, and proposed to visit again in a week.

Later, Sewall notes: “I visited Madam Winthrop who treated me with a great deal of courtesy; wine, marmalade.”

A series of future visits found Catherine Winthrop treating Samuel Sewall well, solicitously sending her servant Juno to walk him home with a lantern to light the way. But she also took aim at some of Sewall’s personal shortcomings. He should keep a coach, she prodded, and suggested he might do well to buy himself a wig.

No Juno for Samuel Sewall

Just weeks into his courtship, Samuel Sewall found things growing colder. During a tedious evening on October 21, Sewall asked when they might make their courtship public, and Catherine said it would probably never be made public. Sewall rose to leave around 11 o’clock. “She offered not to help me. I prayed that Juno might light me home. She opened the shutter and said was pretty light abroad; Juno was weary and gone to bed. So I came home by starlight as well I could.”

On November 4, Samuel Sewall offered Catherine Winthrop a gift. “I asked Madam what fashion necklace I should present her with. She said none at all.”

On November 7, Sewall made one final attempt. “I told her I loved her, and was so fond as to think she loved me.” As the fire died out, Sewall noted, Madam Winthrop made no effort to revive it, or to suggest she had any affection for him. While colonial women didn’t have to marry any suitor who asked, they were expected to be polite – a sometimes painfully slow process to discourage an unwelcome suitor.

Samuel Sewall, Happy At Last

Samuel Sewall next made a brief attempt at courting a Mrs. Ruggles. Perhaps aware of his reputation for persistence, she cut him off short and allowed him no opportunity to come visiting.

Finally in 1722, 63-year-old Samuel Sewall successfully found one last wife, Mary Shrimpton Gibbs, a widow in her mid-50s. He found happiness with her for the last eight years of his life. She then outlived him by 16 years.

This story about the romantic adventures of Samuel Sewall was updated in 2022. If you’re interested in the life of this notable Puritan, you may want to read about his apology for his role in the Salem witch trials here or his experience of the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721 here.

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Connecticut’s King Tut Ticket Scam of 1979

Once the Metropolitan Museum of Art discovered the King Tut ticket scam in 1979, museum officials easily detected the fakes. That’s because a careless counterfeiter misspelled the name of the Egyptian pharaoh.

The traveling King Tut exhibit drew more than 8 million people in the United States to see relics from the pharaoh’s tomb.

One of the first blockbuster museum shows ever, it featured funerary items such as a gold coffin, death mask, thrones, wine, clothing and fresh linen underwear.

Tickets to The Treasures of Tutankhamun were hard to get. The Metropolitan Museum of Art sold 1.3 million tickets in six days. After that, the only way to get them was from Ticketron or scalpers.

The King Tut Ticket Scam

On April 7, 1979, a busload of museumgoers from central Connecticut were turned away from the show. They held counterfeit tickets.

Joanne Perloff had organized the tour for the Dattco Bus company of New Britain. She went to the museum to see what went wrong. She seemed stunned, but would have no comment for the press.

Then the museum turned away more museumgoers. The counterfeit Connecticut tickets were easy to spot because they spelled Tutankhamun with ‘an’ at the end of this name instead of ‘un.’

Police soon learned blank tickets had been stolen from the G. Fox department store in downtown Hartford.

On the morning of Tuesday, April 10, a 38-year-old woman from West Hartford led police on a high-speed chase along 18 miles of I-684 in Harrison, N.Y. She was going as fast as 96 mph.

It was Joanne Perloff.

Joanne Perloff

Joanne Perloff had taught in various school systems before she went to work for the Dattco Bus Company, and she had two children. She had grown up in New Britain, graduated from Emerson College and earned a master’s degree in Education from Central Connecticut State University.

Why did the 38-year-old mother and former teacher turn to counterfeiting? Perhaps she just needed the money.

Police found 2,700 tickets in her car. Some of them were real. Perloff had been speeding to beat a Dattco bus full of people headed to the King Tut exhibit – presumably to distribute the real tickets before the counterfeits were spotted.

She was charged with possession of forged instruments, possession of stolen property, resisting arrest and motor vehicle violations.

On Friday, the Hartford Courant broke the story of the King Tut ticket scam. Hundreds of Connecticut residents couldn’t get into the exhibit because they had phony tickets.

Dattco Bus canceled the rest of the trips to the exhibit.

Joanne Perloff died in 2017 at the age of 77. Her obituary makes no mention of her criminal past.

Photo of King Tut’s death mask By Carsten Frenzl from Obernburg, Derutschland – TUT-Ausstellung_FFM_2012_47, CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia. With thanks to On This Day in Connecticut History by Greg Mangan. This story about the King Tut ticket scam was updated in 2022.

Featured image by By Jon Bodsworth – http://www.egyptarchive.co.uk/html/cairo_museum_52.html, Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3803726.

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