Sheila Mullen Langlois

January 30, 1949 —  May 2, 1982

Exactly 42 years ago today, my cousin, Sheila Mullen, died as a result of injuries sustained in an automobile crash. While I’ve known about this tragic death all these years, it is only today that I feel compelled to write about it. Here’s why.

A few days ago, another cousin, Pete, emailed to ask if I had any pictures of Sheila. This was somewhat of an odd, out of the blue request, so I asked Pete what had motivated it. He responded saying he had recently been talking with a friend and a memory involving Sheila had popped into his head. Here's the gist of it:

In the mid-60's, Sheila's entire family (Uncle Jack, Aunt Kathy and their four girls) traveled to the Philadelphia area to visit the relatives. By all accounts, visits like this were rare. As such, the girls were never very close with any of their cousins. Sheila, the oldest, was remembered as being somewhat shy and quiet. But since Pete and Sheila were about the same age, Pete was "encouraged" by his parents to take Sheila to a dance at the local Catholic Church. When Pete arrived at the dance accompanied by this beautiful young woman, his friends were shocked. They asked Pete why he had been hiding his girlfriend from them. Pete replied, "She's not my girlfriend, she's my cousin from Connecticut, so she's available!".

I didn't press Pete for further details, but that little story was more than I had ever heard about Sheila in my life. Although she was only six years older than me, I don't remember ever meeting her. She was born in Jersey City in 1949 and moved to Connecticut in the mid-50's (about the same time I was born). In 1972, she married Ken Langlois and moved to Michigan in 1978. The fatal car crash occurred four years later. Here is a copy of her obituary from the May 5, 1982 edition of the Hartford Courant:

As expected, the obituary provides only minor insights into Sheila, so I asked Pete if he had any other memories of her. He provided one more small anecdote. 

Our grandmother, Bridget Agnes McHugh Mullen, died in July of 1975. I was 20 years old at the time and attended her funeral. Everyone did, including the Connecticut Mullens. After the final gathering at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, Pete and his wife Marie went back to their car – an AMC Matador – and discovered it wouldn’t start. Sheila and her husband, Ken gave them a jump-start and followed them back to Pete’s parents’ house in Rockledge to troubleshoot the problem. Somehow, I  managed to be at the event where this happened without meeting or talking with Sheila or her three sisters.

At this point, I knew I wanted to write something about Sheila, but I was stuck. The post would be woefully incomplete without a photo of her.  I was now in the same boat as Pete, only worse, since I had no idea what Sheila looked like. I began by searching through Ancestry's genealogical databases. Their yearbook collection is my go-to place for photos of people in their teenage years, but I faced two difficulties: I didn’t know where or when Sheila went to high school. My best guess was that she attended East Catholic High School in Manchester, Connecticut, graduating in either 1967 or 1968. Sadly, Ancestry’s database only had East Catholic yearbooks for 1975, 1980 and 1982. 

Discouraged and ready to give up, I decided to search the entire web to see if any site other than Ancestry had East Catholic yearbooks on file. In football terms, this is known as a Hail Mary pass. Unbelievably, this Hail Mary was caught for a touchdown! I found a site dedicated to the East Catholic High School Class of 1970 that contained East Catholic yearbook photos from 1965 through 1969 as well. And that's where I found Sheila Mullen's 1967 senior year photo, displayed at the top of this post.

That’s about all I’ve got, except for one personal observation. Starting at around the time my parents died in the late 1980’s, I became very disdainful and dismissive of organized religion. For the most part, I'm still that way. I continue to believe in a Supreme Being and an afterlife of some sort, but the ability to communicate with God and those who have gone before us is, to me, a childish fantasy. There are no ghosts. God and our ancestors do not intervene in our lives.

These last few days, though, have put a few tiny chinks in that armor. Why did that story about Sheila suddenly pop into Pete’s head? Why did I feel compelled to spend hours researching a cousin I never knew in order to commemorate her death in a blog post? Why, after hours of fruitless search, did a photo of Sheila fall into my lap, dare I say, miraculously? And why did I carefully re-read Sheila’s obituary, looking for any tidbit of information I might have missed, and discover that today is the 42^nd anniversary of her death?  I can't explain any of it, but it all seems a tad eerie and way too coincidental.

If anyone else has any other memories of Sheila, feel free to add them by clicking on the comment button. If you feel like it, add your name; otherwise your comments will be attributed to Anonymous, which is also fine. 

Rest in peace, cousin Sheila.

   

The Whittier Bridge of Ossipee, New Hampshire

This post serves two purposes. First, it demonstrates how easily my brain can be hijacked and sent careening down a rabbit hole for hours at a time. But it should also leave you feeling happy about yourself, happy you're not a local politician in the state of New Hampshire.

The story begins almost two weeks ago when New Jersey was hit by a magnitude 4.8 earthquake. While it was unnerving to those of us who experienced it, it caused minimal damage and quickly disappeared from the news cycle.Yesterday, though, the local paper decided to milk the story a bit more by running an exposé on the fact that typical homeowners insurance doesn't cover earthquake damage. Stop for a second and imagine you are the reporter tasked to write this story. How in God's name do you make the nuances of homeowner insurance interesting?  Well, hats off to the author, because he found a way to hook me. Since there were no seriously damaged houses to show, he led off his article with this picture:

This is the 264-year old Taylor Grist Mill located in Readington, NJ, with a portion of its front wall partially damaged by the earthquake. But if you expected this article to inform you about this mill's history, the extent of its damage and what it will take to restore it, you were sadly mistaken. It contained exactly one sentence about the mill, a perfect example of journalistic bait and switch.

No matter. I had the Internet at my fingertips and was off and running. I clicked on a bunch of websites and discovered all kinds of interesting things about the mill.  It supplied grain to the Continental Army during the American Revolution and continued to operate into the 20th century. It's on the National Register of Historic Places. It's part of the Taylor's Mill Historic District, and a bridge leading to it within the District was recently replaced in 2006.

Wait.  Hold on. What was that?

That last fact caused my trip down the rabbit hole to come to a screeching halt. I was suddenly reminded of another historic bridge under repair that my wife and I came across while bird-watching in New Hampshire. But where, exactly, was that bridge? When were we there? Did I take a picture of it? The rabbit hole continued, but it had veered onto a brand new path. After a painstaking search through my iPhone photos, I found the picture below, taken on September 1, 2022:

Close scrutiny of the sign at the top of the bridge revealed that it was located in Ossipee, New Hampshire. The game was once again afoot!

I learned that it is a type of bridge called a Paddleford truss bridge and that it was built in 1870 after a prior bridge had been washed off its abutments by a flood in 1869. It is named for the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who spent his summers in a hotel nearby. I learned that, at 132 feet, it is one of the longest covered bridges in New Hampshire and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. 

But that's not all. I also learned that, a few months after I snapped my photo, the Whittier Bridge was moved back on its abutments and opened to pedestrian traffic only. No motorized vehicles of any kind are permitted on it. And then, unexpectedly, the rabbit hole hit rock bottom, landing upon the article below from the Conway Daily Sun. Once I read this story, I knew I was done, a fitting end to my quest.  

It's a JPG file (in case the original web page goes away), so you have to click on it to read. It's a tad long, but its insight into life as a local New Hampshire politician was  unexpected, somewhat amusing and, ultimately, stunning.