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Allen Gammons 401.742.6050
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Tyler Gammons Tyler 401.330.0192 Gammons
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39 Main Street 208 Bellevue Avenue
East Greenwich, RI 02818 Newport, RI 02840
39 Main Street 208 Bellevue Avenue
401.886.6100 401.849.1800
East Greenwich, RI 02818
Newport, RI 02840
401.886.6100 www. CommonMoves. com401.849.1800
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spoke wistfully of the hockey team he could never join owing to his after-school job supporting his family at a bakery.( He and the other“ day students” skated through lunch, a pastime recounted in tales of heroic goals.) My Mémère dropped out of school to work, and they married young, moving to upstate New York where my Pépère was stationed with the United States Air Force. Photos from their honeymoon show them beaming at hotels in New York and Washington, D. C.— a big trip for two kids from a small city, and a taste of what was to come.
Later, they’ d return to Woonsocket, where my Pépère built a swimming pool business and my Mémère had a successful career selling Stanley Home Products. My mom recalls trips to Florida crammed in the back of a station wagon with her siblings, but other than these and occasional jaunts around New England, they reserved most of their travel for middle age. It was then that their trips took a decidedly international turn— replacing Vermont and Lake George with Tahiti and Singapore. They even ventured to places I’ d consider dangerous today. After years of corresponding by letters, my Mémère journeyed to Haiti in her 70s to meet a student she sponsored through a charity organization. In 1997, my Pépère was hospitalized for five days in Russia with a bad case of food poisoning, a frightening ordeal in a time before wireless internet and online translation services. An album from the trip features a hospital receipt and packet of pills obtained from their cruise ship’ s doctor.
Through all their travels, they recreated the sense of community they’ d grown up with in Woonsocket. They made friends across the world and kept in touch, returning repeatedly to the same motels and using prepaid phone cards to maintain international connections. Their thrift was legendary, and most fervently on display during the regular trips they took with each of their sixteen grandkids. A rite of passage in my family, the route saw them drive us in pairs up the coast of Maine and across to Nova Scotia. We still laugh about the time during my brother’ s trip when my Mémère ordered
36 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY I APRIL 2026