Frank C. Berry was a beloved local figure in Milford, MA. He died in 1946, before I was born.

We need pictures of my dad’s mother, who we knew as Gram, who died in her 90s in Milford. She loaned me her old standard-shift Ford when I was in college and told me to teach myself stick shifts. She would shovel snow off of her driveway by herself until she was well into her 80s. She was a political liberal all her life, always well informed, always ready to engage in a political discussion.

J.P. O’Neill, my mother’s stepfather, was a wonderful man and a very kind and loving grandfather to me when I was a boy. He and my grandmother lived in Ojai, CA, in a beautiful old, small, not fancy house at the end of the street, close to the mountains. He and Granma (“Noni” in this website) invited Chip and I to stay with them for a week or two several times in the summers. The house had a screen-enclosed patio that was wonderful on hot summer nights, and a huge oak tree. Grandad took us deep-sea fishing in a neighbor’s boat and we caught dozens of bonita, a variety of tuna, which we carefully smoked for days. That’s a picture of me with him in the yard in Ojai in 1954. He was a carpenter, born in Ireland, a very big, strong, but gentle man. He was about 6’4″ tall. My mom loved him as a father, and I loved him as a grandfather.

My mom’s mother, Edith O’Neill, is in the album as Noni, which is the name she used for great grandchildren.

We have even less about Fred Wurtenbach, my mother’s father, for whom I’n not even sure of the spelling. He was a journalist, he wrote for Pittsburgh’s largest newspaper, he had german ancestry, and he was a published poet — just a few poems published mainly in that same newspaper. He fought in WWI. That was not a successful marriage, however, so Noni left him and married JP O’Neill.