proper dosage always helps

We moved from Lawrence to Methuen in 1978 to get a bit out of the city. Lawrence was always known to be an immigrant city and that was how it came to be a city in the 1800’s. Largely made up of immigrants from Ireland, England and Canada and later Italian and Spanish the city was built largely by mill workers.

By the late 70’s there was an influx of people moving to the suburbs Into single family homes and more and more property owners becoming absentee landlords. This created a decline in the quality of life within the city as you had people renting solely for profit and renters who didn’t care to take care of what they didn’t own.

My grandparents had bought the house we lived in at 78 Marble Ave in the depression. If you were to pay attention to the census records from the 1600’s to the early 1900’s you will tend to find families that stayed within a given area for long periods of time. My best guess of this is because it just wasn’t easy to consistently move entire households like it is today.


When my grandparents made to move from renters to owners they had already had their children and were renting on the first floor of the 3 family at the corner of Marble Ave and Ohio. It was by stroke of luck that the house right next door went up for sale and they bought it.

In 1978 it was time to close that chapter of our lives and move onto better things and my mother had bought a tri level townhouse in the next town over. At that time it was a 2 bedroom unit and 3 of us so I got my own room and “bertha” and mom shared a room.

We had gotten to know several of our neighbors and had befriended a family in another unit in the complex where we would spend a lot of time hanging out. The Jacklins has 2 kids that were close to my age and my mom got a along with the parents so it was to be a good mix for friendship.

One day while visiting the neighbors something about bertha grew more and more odd. Her answers to questions were becoming more and more strange as the night was progressing.

Mom- It’s starting to get dark outside
Bertha- No thanks I’ve already had my tea

Mom would look a the neighbor oddly

Neighbor ..is there anything we can get you?
Bertha- Yes it’s a very nice day outside

Again looking perplexed my mother finally decided to ask ..

Mom are you taking any new medications I don’t know about? No, just a bit of cough syrup bertha replied.. My mom thinking this was a bit odd disappeared to the house and brought back a simple bottle of Robitussin cough syrup.

When asked if this was the correct medicine my grandmother agreed that it was and my mom proceeded to make sense of the label. Ma, how much of this are you taking? 4 spoons every 2 hours why? My mother started to laugh at that point because the label read 2 spoons every 4 hours! My grandmother was high on cough syrup!! I would have never thought that possible …

Bertha was not a very tall lady but had some definite weight to her and was a very large breasted woman. This was a symptom of the family that would not only plague herbut every other woman (And some men) to get the Sunderland gene. We had decided to take Bertha hime to allow her to sleep off her high and I ust admit that even though it was a short walk from one door to another trying to to walk with a drunken old heavy canadian woman was not the easiest of tasks…

As kids we used to mess around by standing in line with 3 or 4 people arm in arm and walking leg over leg like the monkees did in the opening credits of there show.. Taking Bertha home was almost reminiscent of that very move ….