Edited interview with Janice Brids, first wife of Rose's son Donald Gagnon; and Gerri Gagnon, granddaughter of Rose and daughter of Donald and Janice. Interview conducted by Joe Manning (JM), on March 7, 2009.

Janice: I was born in 1940. I married Donald Gagnon in 1960. I had just graduated from a nursing program, and he had just graduated from American International College. We had been going together for about three years, so I had known Rose since about 1957. She and her husband had just moved from Wildemere Street, in Chicopee, where they had owned a house, to a rental on Ames Ave in Chicopee. They had just sold the house.

JM: Why did they move?

Janice: I think it was just too much upkeep. It was a two-family house, the typical two-story tenement that factory workers lived in.

JM: Was Rose working then?

Janice: No. She had worked at Monsanto and Fisk Tire Company, both in Chicopee. But she stopped working when her son - my husband - was born in 1939. I think she was 42 then. He was her only child. I remember her telling me stories of how all these years she had been trying to have a baby, and then all of a sudden she was pregnant.

Gerri: Some quack doctor had first diagnosed it as a tumor.

JM: Janice, where was Rose's husband working when you first got married?

Janice: He worked at the United Rubber Company in Chicopee.

JM: At that time, what were your impressions of your soon-to-be mother-in-law?

Janice: She was a very sprightly lady. She was very small, and she was getting to be a little bit round, as most of us do. She didn't have much education. I don't know how far she had got in school.

Gerri: She finished the eighth grade.

Janice: She was very busy all the time, moving all the time. She was not one to sit there and just do nothing. She was one of those housekeepers where everything had to be perfect. I remember that after I got married, I was a nurse and I had a child right away. I was pretty busy. I didn't iron dish towels and stuff like that, and I thought she must have wondered what kind of a wife I was making for her son. But she was very good to me. They didn't have much money. They were just factory workers. She used to make over dresses. She was very good at designing things. She'd get old dresses and redesign them, sew on frills, add collars and pockets and buttons, and so on.

JM: Did you know that she had grown up in Winchendon?

Janice: Oh, yes.

JM: Did she ever talk about that?

Janice: Not much. She said she came from a large family. Because she had my husband late in life, much of her family had died off by then. She had a sister in Gardner that she would go visit. Her name was Della. She worked in the furniture factories. Then Della died of cancer.

JM: Did she speak French?

Janice: Yes, but not to me.

JM: Would she sometimes speak to your husband in French, and you wondered what they were talking about?

Janice: Absolutely.

JM: Did you and your husband live all of your married life in Chicopee?

Janice: No. He went into the service quite soon after we were married. He was going to the University of Massachusetts for his master's, and we were living in Northampton. I was working at the state hospital. Then Gerri was born.

Gerri: I was a honeymoon baby. They got married August 20, and I was born May 18.

JM: How long did you live in Northampton?

Janice: Just until Gerri was born. Then we moved to Three Rivers (part of Palmer, Mass), because my parents owned a two-family house there and had an apartment available. So my mother was right next door, and she could babysit while I worked at the state hospital in Monson.

JM: How was your husband able to afford college?

Janice: His parents paid for it. They had both worked until he was born, and they had only one child, so they must have been able to save some money. Then my husband joined the Air Force and became an officer. We were stationed in Texas, and then we went to Japan, where my second child, Donald, was born. We returned to the States the following year, because my husband was sent to Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. He worked in intelligence. A year later, we returned to Japan and stayed there for three more years.

JM: That would have made it hard to see your husband's parents very often.

Janice: Well, they actually came to Japan once when we were there the second time. Rose was in her seventies then.