A glance at Lexington, 60 years ago

Interviewer: Have you been around Lexington for a long time?

Francine: 60 years. When we moved here, there were so many farms. It was all farmland. It’s amazing how many farms disappeared. I have a picture of an aerial view of Lexington in the 1950s. It was called Cambridge Farms originally.

One thing my husband and I did was make video programs of oral history of people in Lexington who've lived here a long time and what life was like for them. 

For example, we did Michaelson's Shoes. Their great-great-grandfather came from Russia. He was a harness maker. He worked in leather. He came to Lexington to work on harnesses for the horses for the farms. And then he realized these farmers' kids needed shoes, and that's how he got into making shoes. The rest is history.

And then Theatre Pharmacy. That man’s father started as a pharmacist. He wanted to buy the drugstore, and he eventually was able to. It has been in his family since 1935.
We hear all these stories about the Revolutionary War; that's not the history my husband and I were interested in. We were interested in the “how.”  For example, Sophia Ho and how the Chinese community came to be established in Lexington. 

And Russian immigrants, how they came here, and how they happened to pick Lexington, and what life was like before they came here.

It’s just interesting how life has changed. When we first came to this community, every Sunday, every church bell was ringing. I don't hear that anymore. That was 60 years ago, when Sunday was a day of rest. Now, it's a day of shopping.