Three Friends: Hilda Bulkley, Thelma Ricci, and Shirley LaRochelle

Celebrating Seniors: A Series of Profiles
Hilda, Thelma and Shirley
L to R: Hilda, Thelma and Shirley. Photo by Cesar Castillo

Tupperware parties, potluck suppers, trips to the Wayland Town Beach with kids in tow, or piling into the station wagon for an adventure -- these are the things that helped build lifelong friendships among three Wayland women in the 1960s. “We did so many things together, we went through so much together,” recalls Thelma Ricci, who lived within walking distance of her friends Hilda Bulkley and Shirley Larochelle in the neighborhoods surrounding Old Connecticut Path and Stonebridge Road.

When Thelma, Shirley and Hilda gathered recently, their reminiscences were sprinkled with admiration, humor, and obvious love and affection. Together, they weathered the ups and downs of work and family life, including raising a combined 15 children, and the loss of four husbands among them. Now, only Shirley still lives in Wayland, but the others aren’t far, and they spend time on the phone or, when they can, getting together to bask in their long friendship. “We truly love each other,” says Shirley.

THELMA RICCI

“My parents were tenant farmers in northern Maine, near the Canadian border,” says Thelma. Her parents had seven children; only four survived. Thelma was born on Easter Sunday in 1928, arriving two months early. “My father went into town to get the doctor, and when they came back I was already born, with the help of my 10-year-old sister,” says Thelma. “The doctor said I would be ok, but he didn’t come all that way for nothing, so he wanted to name me. So I’m Thelma Marie, after his wife.” That big sister, Thelma’s only sister, would die later that year.

Work dried up in northern Maine, and in 1941 the family moved to Massachusetts, settling in Lawrence. “My father got a job in the mills,” says Thelma. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, two of her brothers enlisted. “My oldest brother Bill joined the Army as a paratrooper, and was sent to Europe, and my brother Dennis, who was just 17, lied about his age and joined the Navy, and went to the South Pacific.” Both would come back home, but Bill would spend six years away, with long periods of no contact. “My mother was so afraid she would have to put a Gold Star in her window,” recalls Thelma.

A Chance Bus Stop Encounter

Thelma liked school and was a good student. “I had perfect attendance in high school, in fact I only missed three days in my whole school life,” she says. Thelma planned to go to nursing school, but her mother got sick and needed care, so she put nursing school on hold. Eventually, nursing school dreams faded, and she entered the working world, where she held office jobs and learned cashiering, filing, and bookkeeping.

Ask Thelma how she met her husband, and before she can answer, Hilda starts singing with a sly smile: “Standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by…..”

Thelma explains: “My mother had recently died, and it was my birthday. My brother was having a little party for me. I lived in the Back Bay and he lived in Somerville, so I went to Lechmere Station and then took a bus to Somerville. We had a fun time reminiscing, laughing and crying, late into the night, and then I had to hurry or I’d miss the last bus. I’m standing on the corner and I hear someone whistling, and he comes over to me and says, ‘What are you doing here so late?’ It was about one in the morning. I said I was waiting for a bus. He said, ‘Do you mind if I wait with you, to make sure you get on the bus?’ Well, the bus came, and I’m standing on the step of the bus when he asks for my number. I used to give my number backwards to guys I didn’t want to date, but I gave him my number and he called me the next day. That was the end of April, and we got married in August. This year would be our 72nd anniversary.” Her husband, John, passed away in 2004.

They moved to Wayland in 1958. “We bought our house from the nicest man who took out a second mortgage so we could afford it, and for seven years we sent him $7.50 a month to pay him back,” recalls Thelma. Thelma and John had seven children together – “we lost a boy at four, having his tonsils removed” – and raised their family here. Thelma’s husband was a custodian at Claypit Hill School for more than thirty years. Thelma worked as a cook in Wayland schools for a while and at nearby private schools for many years. And in Wayland, more than 60 years ago, Thelma also met her best friends.

HILDA BULKLEY

In the 1930s, much of Wayland was still farm land. Hilda Bulkley’s family owned a farm along Old Connecticut Path, across from today’s Lavin’s Liquor. “My father grew vegetables and raised chickens,” she says. But when the Commonwealth built the Hultman Aqueduct in 1939, Hilda says it cut their farm into quarters. “He sold the back two portions and kept the two in front.” Farming, she says, was not prosperous as the family grew, so he became a postman.

Hilda was the youngest of six children, and when she was nearly three, her mother passed away. “I was the only one not in school, so I went to live with my uncle and aunt in Pennsylvania until I was ready for school.” At five, she returned home, and attended the Center School, a grammar school that stood on the south side of the Trinitarian Congregational Church.

“When I was in seventh grade, my father remarried, and we moved into Boston,” recalls Hilda. A country girl, Hilda found the city hard to take. Her father, already a veteran of World War I, enlisted in the Navy to fight in World War II, and her older sister, a high school senior, was preparing for college. Hilda realized that soon she’d be living in the city without her siblings, father and friends. “My uncle in Pennsylvania was the principal of a boarding school, so I wrote to him and asked if I could come.” She spent the rest of her high school years there, graduating in 1948. Her father and step-mother added two more children to the family; Hilda remains close to her step-siblings.

A Grandmother She Never Knew

Hilda went to Howard University, an historically-Black college in Washington, DC, living with an aunt there. During her sophomore year, her paternal grandmother died. “I was so sad,” she recalls, “because I hadn't known my mother, and I hadn't known my grandmother either. She lived in Louisiana, and we couldn’t go see her. My father wouldn’t take us there because it wasn’t safe back then for Black folks to travel south.” Hilda was so sad, in fact, that her father thought she needed a rest. “He took me to her funeral in Virginia, and I stayed there for a while with my father’s sister until I began to feel better.” Eventually, at the urging of her sister, she went to Minnesota where her sister was getting a Master’s degree in social work. “I enrolled in the nursing program there, and did all the academic work, but when it came to the lab work, I found out I was allergic to so much, and it just wasn’t going to work.”

Her aunt back in Pennsylvania was in poor health, and needed her, so Hilda went to take care of her. “And that’s where Talbot and I met again,” she says. Talbot Bulkley had gone to the same boarding school. After graduating from Lincoln University and doing a stint with the Marines, he became the dean of boys at the school. In 1956, Hilda and Talbot married at the school.

Back Home to Wayland

“Tal was working on his Master’s, and was teaching biology, first in Philadelphia, and then at a private Friends school in New Jersey,” says Hilda. “He had to find work during the summers, and he found a job working on the trash pickup trucks for the town. One of his students saw him, and went home to tell her father. It wasn’t long before the father, who was an executive at Socony-Mobil, got Talbot a job in the lab.” The company was a merger between Socony (formerly Standard Oil Company of New York) and Mobiloil.

When Honeywell came recruiting, Talbot accepted an offer. “That brought us back to Massachusetts,” says Hilda. “We lived in Dorchester, and after a year there we asked my father for a piece of his land in Wayland, and he agreed. We built our house in 1961.” They raised their three boys there, and Hilda began working with Metco, the state-funded program that seeks to address racial imbalances in schools. “I was a secretary for Metco, then I became the Happy Hollow liaison. Because I was a Wayland resident and a Metco staff member, I was able to do more. I organized groups, and helped the teachers and guidance counselors with whatever they needed. I loved the Metco program. Tal and I were Metco hosts, and we would take Happy Hollow kids on picnics, or to the boat and car shows, or all kinds of places.” Hilda left Metco in 1981, and worked in the finance departments of two area insurance companies, retiring in 2011. Talbot passed away in 2016.  

SHIRLEY LAROCHELLE

Shirley LaRochelle was born in Woburn and came to Wayland as an infant. She and her parents lived in several homes in the Dudley Pond area in those early years. “In those days it was mostly summer cottages,” she recalls. “People came in the summer who didn’t come the rest of the year.” She still lives in the last home that was owned by her parents – and has lived there for 83 years.

An only child, Shirley was good at entertaining herself. She was “a dad’s girl,” following her father around as he did chores or projects. “He would build everything, and I’d ask him to show me how to hammer a nail. One time he was painting and he let me paint the ladder. There were always chores around the house. We didn’t go to the dump, we had a big barrel to burn paper, and cans and glass you had to bury. The glass would come to the surface when it rained. The water pipes would freeze so we would shut them off for the winter. The only people who had water in the winter were at the end of the street, so we had to haul water from them.”

Hot Chocolate Memories

Her father passed away when Shirley was eight. “My life seemed to change after that,” she says. “It was difficult for my mom, with no support or transportation,” she says. She was sometimes lonely, but loved the summertime when the “summer people” would come and there would be children to play with. She loved school, too. At age six, she started school at Wayland’s Center School. “I had a lust for learning,” she says. “And looking back, I know that part of the reason I loved school is because of all the other children there.” There was no cafeteria, she says, so everyone brought their lunch, or walked home for lunch. She recalls with fondness that the school did serve hot chocolate. “My favorite,” she says, smiling. She always got good grades, she says, “because I wanted to join the WAVES or be a stenographer when I grew up.”

As she grew, Shirley remembers that being a young person in Wayland required resourcefulness. “We would find ways to entertain ourselves,” she says. She learned to knit and crochet, swam and fished in Dudley Pond, played cards and games, went on picnics and to an occasional movie. “We didn’t go too many places,” she says. “My mom and I would walk to the Mansion Inn to catch a bus to Framingham or Natick. We didn’t have a car, and my mother didn’t drive.”

Finding Her Life’s Work

Shirley married young and became a young mother. She would eventually have five children. “I didn’t have the chance to go to college,” she says. But in her late 30s, she took an aptitude test that suggested nursing would be a good field for her. She worked as a nursing assistant at the Middlesex County Hospital in Waltham, and they encouraged her to go to nursing school. “I went to Youville School of Nursing in Cambridge and became an LPN,” says Shirley. It was not easy. “My first husband had passed away and I was by myself with a young family and needed an income.”

After about ten years as an LPN at Youville Hospital, Shirley recognized that because of her expertise and experience, she was training new RNs. “I decided to go back to school to get my RN,” she says. By then, she had met and married her second husband, Bob, who encouraged her. “He was always very supportive of my going back to school,” she says. And so were her friends. “We always told Shirley she would be a wonderful nurse,” says Thelma. Shirley worked as a nurse at Youville Hospital until she retired at age 65. Her husband Bob passed away in 2013.

Friends Through Thick and Thin

The three friends have leaned on one another in good times and bad. “We’ve all been caregivers to husbands who have passed,” says Shirley. “We are like a mini-UN,” says Hilda. “We come to each other’s aid.”

Thelma reflects on their friendship. “There has never been a harsh word between us. We are all three so different, and the fact that we’ve had this lasting friendship for all these years, it’s really God-given. We were given these friendships to support each other, because we’ve all had hard times, and we’ve been there for each other. We are our own little support group.”

Shirley concurs. “When I met these ladies….well they’ve been my rock for practically my whole life. They are always willing to listen, through thick and thin, through good times and sad times, they truly listen. They are like family.”

Besides love, laughter is at the heart of their trio. They laugh often and easily. “I am so busy, I had a list a mile long of things I wanted to do when I retired, and I haven’t stopped,” says Shirley, brightly. “And I haven’t started,” adds Hilda with a grin.

Aging With Gratitude For Life, and Each Other

When it comes to thoughts on aging, they have similar philosophies. “You can’t feel sorry for yourself,” says Thelma. “Where I live, I try to get people to come for a game or an activity. I’m the sunshine girl. The reason I’m 94 is because I keep doing things. You’ve got to stay engaged.”

Hilda also lives in a congregate setting, and says “I am so happy where I am, there are so many activities, I have to limit myself or I get exhausted.”

Shirley says that the self-acceptance that comes with age is liberating. “Now we can be ourselves. We’re not worrying about keeping up with trends. We are blessed to live this long, and we have a lot of wisdom to pass down. We see the joy in life, we know that if it’s raining, well, the trees and flowers need it. We’re better able to cope.”

Three heads nod in agreement. These ladies continue to learn from and teach each other. And they don’t take anything for granted. “We cherish the time we spend together,” says Shirley, reaching out for the hands of her two best friends.

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