With all the old newspaper clippings we’ve relied on for this issue, we thought we would reserve this month’s “Remembering” for a 1917 article which affirms the New England saying “You can’t get there from here.” Who knows? Perhaps Hampton was the original source.

HAMPTON IS HARD PLACE TO REACH

Woman in Tears After Many Suggestions and Goes Back to New York.

It all happened because a woman from New York missed her train to Hampton at 2:30 o’clock yesterday afternoon. Owing to her inability to determine the best method of getting to Hampton, she went back to New York. Apparently there is only one through train a day between Hartford and Hampton by way of Willimantic, and she did not get it. But many were the suggestions she received as to how she should get there.

She walked up to the announcer with a little 8-year-old girl, and asked the way to Hampton, showing her ticket. “You go to Willimantic, on a train leaving here after 5 o’clock,” said the announcer, “and then you can go across to Hampton by trolley or jitney.”

“I beg your pardon,” spoke up an interested listener, a woman. “But the best thing for her to do is to go to North Windham, and she can get a trolley from there to Hampton without any difficulty.”

“Excuse me,” put in another woman, “but as a matter of fact there is no trolley service between North Windham and Hampton.”

“Really now, but there is,’ said the first woman, sweetly.

“No, there isn’t, because I have been there,” put in the second woman, in honeyed tones.

“All right have it your way,” replied the first woman refusing to become angry. “By the way, there is my train,” and she hurried away to catch it.

“Well at any rate,” said the announcer, as soon as he could get in a word, “you can get a trolley from Willimantic.”

“Yes, and you can tell the woman,” added a man who had been listening and was about to start off to catch his train, “that she can find plenty of transportation either at North Windham or at Willimantic to get her to Hampton.”

The air of finality in the voices of both men ought to have convinced the poor woman, but instead she burst into tears. Throughout the discussion her face had alternately radiated with hope and clouded with gloom, like a flickering candle, but sure that she would never see that haven of refuge, more difficult to reach than trenches filled with barbed wire entanglements, her courage gave way and she cried. Her little daughter not knowing what “mamma” was crying about but sure it was something serious, began to cry too.

Meanwhile the controversy had sprung up anew. The announcer had said lightly that there was a trolley to Hampton from Willimantic, and the statement was immediately challenged by a woman standing near.

“There is none at all, I know,” she said firmly.

“Burt she can get a jitney,” said the announcer, glaring at her and turning to the weeping woman, he asked her kindly if she had any money.

“A little,” sobbed the woman.

“Well you can get a jitney out to Hampton for about a quarter,” he said with an air of settling the whole business, but the woman was not to be consoled. The circumstances surrounding the trip to Hampton were too precarious for her to tackle, evidently, and she had bought a return ticket to New York, and had mounted into her train.

“Gosh,” said the announcer, wiping his brow, after the woman had gone, “that Hampton must be a heard place to reach.”