Lou Gard: I moved to Norwich from Chicago when I was seven years old and it was a big difference of course moving from Chicago to Norwich but I had a very quite a modern school in Chicago when i moved to nNorwich I I went to school at third grade in a Cortland Street school which is not there any longer but it is. The same kind of school as you have there on Rexford Street. As a little girl, we moved from an apartment in Chicago to a beautiful home that had six bedrooms. So it was a completely different situation. I remember buying my bicycle, a used bicycle, for money that I’d saved, and I spent $15 for it. And I rode that bike for a long, long time. Went to the swimming pool, I went to the tennis courts, and then I went home for lunch, and I was on the bike a lot of the time. My favorite teacher that was wonderful, her name was Ruth Belden, and I had her for third and fourth grade, and she was a very jolly person. She was a lot a fun. We had plays, and we had a play that our parents came to. We also I had about an hour and a half for lunch and we would walk, walk to school, walk back home and walk back to school and then went back home again and I lived on North Broad Street right across from Newton Avenue if you know where that is and we just had a lot of fun. I, uh, in the, we’d go to church on Sundays. On Saturday, we’d usually go to the Colonial Theater for a double feature, and it cost us 16 cents to go to a movie. Smallies was on Main Street, and that was 14 cents to get to the movie there. Norwich was about 10,000 when I lived there. My father worked for the Norwich Pharmacology Company. He was the sales manager there. Digital sales manager. Of course, he, his, He worked in, or he had people working for him all of New England and Pennsylvania and I think Ohio and I don’t know all the territory he had. He traveled a great deal. My mother was a housewife, but she went to lots of bridge parties and they had a very nice social life here. Everybody in. Big parties and it was a nice place to live. In fact, my parents are buried there. I graduated from Norwich in 1957, went on to college and really wasn’t back in Norwich an awful lot after that as my mother. My parents were gone by 1966. My mother was a teacher I was a second grade teacher at the Stanford-Gibson School. Norwich Pharmacol Company did a lot for the community. It’s my understanding that they paid… What’s it called? Canis Huat Creek to be dammed up. That’s where we swam. And then we also had the tennis courts. They gave tennis lessons down near the football field. I don’t know if that’s still the football field or not. And then at Halloween, they provided doughnuts in. Cider for all the kids up in the courthouse. They always had a big parade at Halloween. It was a really nice town. And because of the Norwich Pharmacal Company, there happened to be a lot of doctors and veterinarians. And it was a fairly intelligent community because we had all those people working in the town. When I was a seven or eight year old, I had bronchitis and I remember I was in there for a week and I got 42 penicillin shots in that one week. That saved my life. And I got a dime for each shot. So I know it was $4 and 20 cents worth of shots. Every four hours, I got. But then the, I worked as a pink lady. You know, taking the cart around and they had a little place where you could buy gifts and that sort of thing. But the Norwich or the hospital has grown a lot since I was there.
