MARGARET LOUISE FREY CARRINGTON

Mom with a dustmop, er, dog ("Babe")

    My mother was the middle of three children. My Aunt Katherine was actually her half-sister, brought by my grandmother, Katherine Brocar delRieux,to her marriage to George Henry Frey, the son of German immigrants. The baby of the family was my Uncle Bob, a blond-haired Teutonic heartbreaker, whom everybody called Whitey when he was a boy because his hair was so light. My grandmother was of Huguenot extraction, having come here with her mother from Alsace-Lorraine as a babe-in-arms. Her father had been a prison guard and was killed during an escape attempt. My grandmother died of Parkinson's disease before I was four.
    As far as I know, my mother grew up in the same house on Dodge Avenue in East Haven where my grandfather lived when I was growing up. According to her, she started wearing glasses because she had scratched her eyeball while sledding when she was nine. She won a prize in 3rd grade for something she wrote, so she thought writing ran in the family. (My sister did some writing too.) One year, she was advanced one grade in the middle of the year, which made her unhappy, because she had to stay in during Easter vacation, studying to catch up with her new classmates, unable to go out and play during vacation. She worked several years in the East Haven High School office and married my father, Alfred Carrington on June 28, 1933.
    When I was growing up, she didn't work until she started working parttime at the North Haven Town Hall for Frank Sherman, the building inspector, when I was about 14, taking the bus the one mile or so from our house to the North Haven center. As far as I know, she was the only wife working in our neighborhood. She eventually started working fulltime and, when I was 17, she learned how to drive. I resented it at the time, thinking she did it so I wouldn't be able to drive the family car.
    She continued working at the town hall when the Democrats took control, although she now registered as an independent. She said they treated her better than the Republicans although she didn't much care for the people who followed Frank Sherman in the building inspectors office.

1963

    When my father died in 1965, she said something that was very perceptive (which surprised me at the time) and something that I have found out for myself is true. "You never think of yourself as growing old." Inside, I still feel like I'm 25. She stayed alone in the same house at 239 Maple Avenue where I grew up but it was too much for her. She moved to an apartment on Whitney Avenue, just inside the Hamden line in 1969. In 1974, she married the man who had been our backyard neighbor, Art Jackson. His wife had died several years earlier. They lived in his house at 15 Watson Avenue for a while then moved to an apartment on Mix Avenue in Hamden, where they stayed until she died.
    Like my father, she died suddenly. They were getting ready for bed and, when Art came out of the bathroom, she was dead. They kept her on machines until Wayne and I could get there at 11 o'clock the next morning, when we pulled the plug.
    She was in some ways a fearful woman, not liking to leave her home territory, her nest, always afraid that someone would break in while she was gone or that she had left the stove or some other appliance on. She only left the apartment on Mix Avenue for groceries, church, an occasional walk with Art, to visit Marilyn, or to go to the doctor or the hospital. I only remember one time when we were younger than we went somewhere other than to visit a relative. When I was 16 or 17, we all went to the Mystic Seaport Museum, about an hour's drive that really wasn't a lot of fun. Wayne and I were both pretty fidgety. When I was at the Champlain Shakespeare Festival, she came up with my father to pick me up at the end of the summer. She went to Wayne's graduation at George Washington University in DC and on several trips with the Espositos VW camping club after Dad died but she didn't enjoy them and apparently made life pretty unhappy for Marilyn and Charley with her worrying.

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Louis Delrieuxe (German innkeeper)
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Katharina Delrieuxe
b. 10/12/1850 (New Isenberg)
m. Wilhelm Brocar (d.1890)
emigrated 1892
d. 1925 East Haven
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"Gretchen or Greta" Margaret Susan Brocar
b.10/3/87
m. Louis Monro
m. G. Henry Frey
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Katherine Frey (daughter of Louis Monro)
Margaret Louise Frey
Robert Frey

Wilhelm Brocar was a colonel in the Prussian Army. He died in prison guarding a criminal who got the keys when Wilhelm was sleeping, killed him, and escaped.

Katherina Delrioux

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My mother with her 2nd husband, Art Jackson
Christmas 1980 & Fall 1984

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Mom, Jennifer, and Art
Meriden Hospital, Sunday, 7 P.M., 8/12/84

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4 generations--Mom, Marilyn, Laurie, Jennifer