Our first two pictures this week have to do with Hoffman’s at Cliftondale Square. Many Saugus residents remember this dry good store with fondness. It was started as early as 1927 and didn’t close until 1988. During the intervening years, Hoffman’s served the Cliftondale area very well. I can still remember Anna Hoffman serving the customers with her quiet dignity. She probably wore clothing of various colors but I remember her as always wearing black.

Our second illustration is of one the store’s charge cards and certainly a Saugus collectible!

A few weeks ago when I discussed the letter from Mrs. Iva Adlington, I mentioned that both she and Marion Starkey taught at Hampton Institute before the Second World War. Here is Miss Starkey’s account of that experience in her own words:

Things were tough and I felt that I had to go back into teaching-which struck me as a fate worse than death. I got a job at Hampton Institute in Virginia. My surviving grandfather, a Civil War Veteran was one of the few members of my family who approved me taking the job because of course; Hampton Institute was a Black school.

I was told that Southerners in Virginia wouldn’t have anything to do with me because I taught at Hampton but that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, one of the best known Virginians, E. Sciater Montague, was one of the people working to get the Virginia legislature to segregate the school and yet he was the man who helped me publish my first book! I had been working on my master’s degree at Boston University while in Virginia and working in the courthouse among old records. People had been saying that the old records had been destroyed during the Civil War and I said no-there are plenty of records here! Mr. Montague asked to see my notes and after studying them said that if I could shape them into a book, he’d publish it for me and he did! Its right in back of you on the shelf. No Cherokee Nation wasn’t my first book-this one was! It was published locally but I’m proud of it-it’s a damn good book!

The First Plantation, A History of Hampton and Elizabeth County 1607-1887 was published in 1936 by the Houston Printing and Publishing House, Hampton, Virginia and reprinted in 1967. When Mr. Montague published a limited edition of his own World War One memoirs in 1959, he sent Miss Starkey an autographed copy.