Ellen Vinciulla and Joy Heider
Ellen Vinciulla and her daughter Joy Vinciulla Heider live in a sunny home that looks out on the aqueduct and Dudley Pond. From this home base, Ellen has served the Town of Wayland in important ways over the course of her long life here. She worked in the Wayland Public Schools for 12 years, with the Wayland Police Department for 25 years, and spent 22 years delivering meals and eventually managing the Meals on Wheels program in Wayland.
Ellen and her husband Tony moved to Wayland in 1945, not long after they married. For 10 years they lived in a cottage, or what was known then as a “camp,” simple, unheated dwellings that used to ring the Pond. “We had no heat, no hot water, and an outhouse in the side yard,” she recalls. In 1955, they razed the cottage (“It’s buried in the front yard,” says Ellen) and built their current home. Tony passed away in 1987.
Growing Up and Making Mischief
Born in 1923 at home in Plymouth, MA – just across from Plymouth Rock “which was not in a cage back then” – Ellen Sherman was the fifth of seven children. The family moved to Quincy when she was young. Her father was a minister, and also worked for Shell Oil Company. Growing up, she and her siblings swam in a nearby quarry, jumped rope, played with paper dolls, and had a “store” outdoors that used stones for products and leaves for currency. “No electronic toys,” she says.
The siblings also had regular chores, and sometimes made mischief. “The three youngest had to clean up the supper dishes,” she recalls. “One would wash, one would dry, one would put away. My sister was goofing off, and I put her hair in the can opener. My mother had to cut it off,” she says, still telling the story with obvious pleasure. Ellen is the last surviving Sherman sibling.
Finding Work, and Finding Love
After graduating from Quincy High School and Quincy Junior College, where she got a business degree, Ellen went to work in a machining factory in Waltham. “We girls threaded the nuts,” she says. “There was a machine kind of like a sewing machine, but with a drill, and you’d put the nut in place and poke the drill through and that created the threads.”
It was through this job that Ellen met her husband. “He worked in the building across from us, and we noticed a few men would walk up to the little corner shop every morning and get coffee,” she remembers. “We girls thought we should have some coffee, too. The yard around our building was fenced in, so I went to the fence and asked if they’d pick up some coffee for us, too. It became a regular thing, and after a while, they knew what we wanted.” And as it turned out, what Ellen and Tony wanted was each other. They were married in 1945.
Ellen recalls their early life in Wayland with fondness. “Our phone was on a party line with six other houses. Our ring was three rings.” They walked everywhere in those days, and felt like they knew nearly everyone in town. She and Tony raised their children Patti, Joy, and Tom here; Tom went on to work for the Town Highway Department for 36 years.
“I Like to Work, I Like People”
When the children were young, Ellen stayed home to care for them. “When they got to junior high, my husband said I could go to work as long as I got home before they did,” she recalls. So she worked in the schools as a substitute cafeteria worker, and then permanently in the cafeteria at Happy Hollow.
Eventually, the Police Department hired her, and during her long tenure there she served as a crossing guard, a matron, and a jill-of-all-trades. “Sometimes they would ask me to direct traffic if there was an accident,” she recalls. As a matron, she would attend and accompany women who were in custody. “I like to work, I like people, I like getting out,” she says. “I loved directing traffic.” During heavy snow storms, she was known to deliver home-cooked food to the Highway Department.
Recipients of home-delivered meals during Ellen’s time managing the program often found cheerful notes included with their meals or smiley faces on the brown paper bags. Volunteers who delivered the meals were treated to occasional poems singing their praises. “You have to roll with the punches, as you deliver the lunches….” She says she still writes poems from time to time, when inspiration strikes.
Five Generations
Joy moved in with her mother in 2003, intending to stay “just a few years.” She works for an educational collaborative in Natick, driving special needs students to school and back home again. She has a son in Worcester and a daughter in Montana, and three grandchildren.
Joy spent her early working years as a telephone operator at New England Telephone and Telegraph. “We connected the calls, we told pay phone callers when their three minutes were up,” she recalls. Some towns, like Holliston, didn’t yet have the ability to dial calls directly, “so they had to tell us the number so we could make the call for them.” Later on she rode a motorcycle to her office job at Dennison Manufacturing. Jobs at Puritan Dress Company, Friendly’s and Rite Aid followed, as well as a job managing the snack bar at a ten-pin bowling alley where for several years she held the high single record for women with a score of 289.
Family photos decorate Ellen and Joy’s home, including one showing five generations all together, with Ellen, the beaming matriarch, in the middle. Though she has come through a number of serious health challenges in her long life, Ellen keeps it all in perspective. “I try not to worry,” she says. “I keep a positive attitude and try to keep my mind turning. My father taught us to do what’s right. He told us kids to say ‘Satan get behind me!’ if we’re ever tempted to do something bad. I have always remembered that.” Words to live by, evidently: Ellen will celebrate her 99th birthday this fall.