She had the last word, after all.

Researching my paternal grandmother–my step-grandmother, actually, as my father’s mother died of breast cancer when I was only one–I came across the crowning glory of her life. For some women, it is children. Increasingly, I’m told, it will not be this way. Going forward. But it has been for me. I don’t speak for the other women in my family, particularly the ones who came before, but child bearing, child rearing, and family life feature strong.

So when this relative of mine was struck down at age 16 with Polio, she was crippled for life. She would never bear children. Thus the father of her beloved, her future father-in-law by all counts, called off the engagement. His son would not marry a barren woman, said the Methodist minister, my great grand-father. Upon which he, my grandfather, promptly called off the church. Forever. Or any hint of religion. It wouldn’t be the first time hypocrisy had bred an agnostic in its own home. And then he, my grandfather, married her best friend.

That was Dorothy, my grandmother. I never knew her, though I’m told I look like her. “Dot.” I have photos, but no possessions. She was the wife of an academic, a Greek and Latin scholar prof for 43 years at a prestigious boys prep school in the Berkshire Mountains of New England. They lived an academic life, did academic things, went to faculty dinners and convocations. In late 1960s they went to Greece on sabbatical, which is where she got sick for the second time. The cancer came back. He, my grandfather, lived to see his 90th birthday. She died the winter after I was born.

My grandfather told everyone he’d been an ambulance driver in Italy, during the war. He was overseas during my father’s early childhood. I know from his father’s notations in a family record that this was not the case. Cpl Bacon had seen quite a bit of action, actually. According to the notes of his proud father safe in his study, he endured “rugged service” from 1943-45 in the North Italian campaign and at Anzio Beachhead. According to a very fragile newspaper clipping from the era, Grandpa was part of the 168th Infantry Regiment, vets of 300 days of combat trying to breach the Gothic line in Italy. That’s no bumpy ride in a military vehicle on med service! And so the stoic by way of study became the tight-lipped soldier who came home deeply scarred and silent on the matter. His conversation killer “’nuff said” was I think a product of his puritanical New England upbringing but also the horrors of war, rendering him mute to the subject of trenches and battles, and deaf to the life of faith.

My grandfather bore the tragedy and the trauma silently. But he would not grandparent alone. In June 1967, he went back and found his childhood sweetheart, the never married Eleanor Colby Adams of Natick, Massachusetts. Where had she been all his life? It had been almost 40 years since my great-grandfather wedged them apart. Photos of the three friends summering at the beach, in front of somebody’s first car (c. 1930 so you can picture the car), relaxing on porches of the posh summer houses their set would have known. Three friends. They were inseparable, until my great-grandfather’s prohibition. Where had she been?

She had graduated the Walnut Hill School, founded by two Wellesley graduates in 1893. I have one of their lace hand-kerchiefs. The name C (Charlotte) H. Conant is stitched in blue thread to one corner. I carried it at my wedding, along with the elegant beaded clutch that my grandmother, Ellie, gave me for the occasion, even though she was not able to attend. By then she was bed-ridden. Most of my young adult life she had been so, reigning from a back bedroom of their Lakeville home like a queen arrayed on fine bedding, surrounded by mail order catalogs like so many scattered rose petals. That’s where the name “Dearie” came from. It was a term of endearment (literally) she gave my grandfather as she called to him or after him as he was leaving the room on her next request. He waited on her hand and foot. We visited there, perched on arm chair arms, standing stiffly in the corner of another person’s bedroom, her inner sanctum and we, the awkward and willing court.

Still, there are photos of the time she was able to get out and about, even with her disability, on a motorized cart. “Friend” it was called –Amigo. They traveled through the 60s and 70s. Brought back dolls from foreign lands for my sister and me. As a young child, I remember following behind the little Amigo as she navigated it through narrow aisles of this or that fancy restaurant at which she would have made reservations for Easter Sunday dinner. When they still lived in school housing near the campus, their back stairway was rigged with a mini elevator with a fold-down seat that rode a track beneath the handrail so that she, and one lucky grandchild standing on the miniscule platform and holding onto her skirt, could ride from the garage to the upstairs kitchen door. And before that I remember her on a walker, both legs decently under her though they were deteriorating even then.

That is how she would have navigated the labs at Harvard University medical school, where she worked as a research assistant in her young adulthood–on braces and maybe even crutches. A graduate of Mt Holyoke College (’34), she was a serious student with a scientific mind, stepping over her gender and her disability to work with top researchers of the time. Her work and her papers are preserved in Harvard’s Museum of Medical History. What did she study–Polio? The causes of the disease that was killing a half a million people annually? A race for the vaccine? Did she, like more than a few in medicine, turn the microscope on her own cells, her own ailment that had taken so much from her? No, she did not.

I’d always heard my grandmother was a “famous scientist from the 1930s” but I’d never known what she was researching. That’s a far cry from “hardworking research assistance to two well-known guys at Harvard” or “lab rat,” which is probably more accurate, but she was young, female, college-educated, single and handicapped, so that’s something. May all our hurdles be fewer.

But here it is. From the few online papers I can find with her name in the byline, she was working under two Harvard scientists on a grant from Carnegie Institution in embryonic research. She was researching the development of the fertilized egg, part of an early study that sought to document the earliest known ovum. “The Race for the Early Egg” a LIFE Magazine article is titled. Apparently that was a thing back then. I found a copy of the form some lucky typist would have been pounding out by the dozens (1940!!) to collect data on menstrual health and habits from patients at the Free Hospital for Women in Boston, that participants were instructed to mail back with a stamp. 

She was, broadly speaking, working in the field of infertility and in birth control, a field which pretty much started in the same petri dish (and there are 1940s cartoons indicating that irony). The irony magnifies this woman for me so much, decades after her passing (she died in 1999). Crippled in adolescence, prevented from marriage and having a family of her own, she was researching conception.

Photo Credit: Harvard University Museum of Medical History

Life Magazine, “The Human Embryo,” OnView, accessed May 6, 2025, https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/items/show/6537.