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Complete Autobiography - 23 pages I was born late in the afternoon on December 15th, 1941 at Porter Hospital in Middlebury, Vermont, the first of 2 children of Dick and Ruth Hubbard.
For the first 6 years of my life we lived in my father's family homestead on 9 Court Street in Middlebury, just two doors down from the Courthouse. This large white Victorian style home, built in 1823, with its big side porch, large yard - lush with peonies in June and a vegetable garden in the summer, had been home to my father and his parents, brother and sister since shortly after 1900. My grandfather Frank sold insurance for a living and later was in the Vermont legislature. For many years the family kept 2 cows and 2 horses in a nearby barn, and Grandfather Frank used the horses for transportation to visit his insurance clients, hitching the horses to a sleigh in winter and to a 4 wheel wagon in summer. There were no automobiles in Middlebury in the early years. The house was first heated by wood and later by coal. Grandfather's family had as many as 35 chickens and a couple of roosters and the family sold milk, cottage cheese and eggs on a regular basis to other Middlebury residents. Unfortunately, in the years before Dad completed his senior year at Middlebury College in 1936, his entire family died in separate incidents, leaving him at age 23, alone, in college, and solely responsible for the family homestead, his father's insurance business and his invalid grandmother, who died in 1937. Immediately after his father and mother's deaths in 1935, Dad became licensed to sell insurance to continue his father's efforts. On the side, Dad coached skiing at Middlebury College, working with the men's team for 2 years and the women's team for a following year. In 1939, 3 years out of college, he married my mother Ruth, just after her senior year at Middlebury College. During World War II, my father continued in the insurance business and instructed at Middlebury College in the Navy V12 program . Ruth stayed at home to care for me and the family homestead. Three and a half years after I was born, my brother Peter arrived. In 1945, after the war, my father returned to full time work in the insurance business. As the business grew in the years ahead, Dad became very active in Middlebury affairs and served in a variety of volunteer positions in the community. My mother continued at home to raise their 2 sons.
A love of the outdoors was always central in our family. In 1940 Dick and Ruth purchased a small homestead with about 27 acres of meadow and forest land on Chandler Hill Road in nearby Ripton. They immediately resold the small homestead and, with the proceeds, built a small summer camp with an exterior log cabin design on a hillside in the middle of a small meadow. Until I was 7, my family summered there in Ripton, while Dad commuted daily back to Middlebury. We kids would walk on the nearby roads and trails, swim in a local brook, inspect the meadow flowers and pick raspberries, blackberries and blueberries. |
