Kathy Heywood is a bundle of energy just waiting to explode herself into all things Newburyportand in fact, she has been “out and about” in her hometown.
”Onward we go,” the artist/music teacher/organizer said this week with her big smile.
She proceeds to tick off her near ancestors and those who were original settlers to Newbury and you have to know that between the Crowleys, the Cronins and the Plummers, there are a lot of them.
Her (paternal) grandmother Crowley came to Newburyport under the sponsorship of her cousin, Pop Crowley.
“All the old-time Newburyporters are related to Pop Crowley, I think,” she said with more smiling.
That might be why there is a street near Cashman Park that is named for him.
Mary Agnes Crowley married a Heywood, they had a son who was Kathy’s father and there you go with three generations.
But obviously the Heywoods were already here. Her father grew up on Carter Street, which is where coincidentally Kathy’s mother ended up living, with her grandmother. Most of the Plummer ancestors had in the 19th century moved to from Newburyport to New Hampshire.
So Kathy has a female Heywood relative who owned boarding houses all along Merrimack Street during the time of the Civil War (and a husband who was lost on his way to sign up for the war) and a female Crowley ancestor, Mary Agnes, who escaped certain death by deciding not to come to America on the Titanic.
She and another relative thought the ship was too big and sailed on the Lusitania instead.
Two ships with fateful and historic deaths.
Growing up in the North End in the 1950s and 60s, Kathy had Nana Plummer (her grandmother) and Nana Shea (her great-grandmother, who had re-married) and her Heywood relations all along Carter Street.
“They all met because they were all neighbors,” she said.
Knowing all and sundry and having a large family network was a fantastic experience, but did not work so well when a kid got into trouble.
Instead of calling the police, the child offender was asked ”What’s your father’s name?”
Kathy said, “When you got into trouble, everybody knew it, instantly. You didn’t need the police. You didn’t get away with anything at all because everybody knew everybody.”
The kids hung out down in Cashman Park; there was a baseball field where the soccer field is now.
It would flood in the spring, but it would eventually dry out.
Kathy Heywood has been past chairman of Yankee Homecoming , in 2004 and this year she worked on the parade. This year she also organized a Labor Day Festival to replace the Busker’s Festival that was canceled by the Chamber of Commerce.
“And I did it with me and a handful of friends, in four weeks time,” she said. ”It’s that Yankee spirit and that Newburyport spirit.”
Onward we go.
