Oral history interview with Kay and Ann Gallagher

Boston (Mass.). Office of the Mayor · [ca. 1975–1976]

Interview with siblings, Kay and Ann Gallagher conducted by Sari Roboff. The Gallaghers talk about the Depression and the jobs people in Mission Hill held during that time. The siblings talk extensively about members of their family. They describe their Aunt Minnie, who was active in the women’s liberation movement and Massachusetts politics and listened to radio shows from Fulton Lewis Jr. and Father Charles Coughlin. They also talk about the working life of their single mother, their father having died when they were young. The Gallaghers describe holidays such as the Fourth of July and Christmas traditions, going into detail about their experience of Christmas during World War II. They continue to talk about the Mission Hill Housing Project and the blockbusting of housing property by the Lahey Clinic and the Ruggles Street Baptist Church in the 1960s. The Gallaghers were active in public zoning hearings about the development of infill housing in Mission Hill. Other topics include trips to City Point Beach, Irish immigrants, former Massachusetts senator David I. Walsh, novenas at Mission Church (Basilica and Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help), Mission High School, Girls Latin School (Boston Latin Academy), describing how their father died due to a lack of penicillin in the hospital, clothing factories, Resthaven, a formerly black, now integrated nursing home in Mission Hill, parties in Mission Hill during Prohibition, stores in Dudley Square such as the Timothy Smith department store, Blair’s Foodland, Ferdinand’s furniture store, and the First National in Mission Hill, the difference between the “back of the Hill” and the “front of the Hill,” the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Children’s Museum.