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| October 23, 2024 |
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People: Lillian White Remembers the 30s and 40s
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| Jack White's Painting of Sands-Ring Homestead |
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| Lillian White |
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| Lillian White Outside C-O-H Elementary School |
Lillian White Remembers Cornwall of the '30s and '40s
Lillian White is a 75-year resident of the village of Cornwall-on-Hudson and a face you may recall if you ever pass by the elementary school before or after classes begin.
Since 1991, Mrs. White has stopped cars, buses and trucks for thousands of children crossing Hudson Street on their way to school. She is the crossing guard, a job she inherited from her husband, John (Jack) White, when he became too ill to carry it out.
Lillian Whiteýs connection to the Cornwall-on-Hudson school is not new. She walked from her home on Shore Road to the building every day as a child in the late 1930s and 1940s, when it housed grades one through 12.
There were two drugstores in the vlllage then and a Grand Union market right next to the school. "Whitney's drug store was in the house with the little fence around it now, next to the bandstand. Mr. Whitney lived upstairs," Lillian recalls. "All the kids used to go in and get an ice cream after school." She also remembers Clark"s Meat Market that was in the building where the bandstand now sits.
Lillian lived down the hill in a 15-room house with her parents and nine sisters and brothers. As a child, Lillian Hager could walk up a road that ran up the hill in an area she calls Madison Park. A friend had a few horses there and they would hitch one to a surry and ride around.
When she played around her house, Lillian attracted the attention of Jack White, a Duncan Avenue man who was working as a pressman at the Cornwall Press printing plant on Shore Road. He later told Lillian that the first time he saw her he knew that he was going to marry her. The couple married in 1948 and moved into a house that Jack built for his bride.
Sitting in the kitchen of her house, Lillian recalls how Jack was a volunteer fireman in the village and painted classic landscape paintings with his own particular flare (one of the paintings hangs in Cornwall Town Hall). Lillian worked at Star Expansion and together they raised a daughter.
By 1990, Jack was suffering from diabetes so bad that he could no longer work. He had been the crossing guard at the elementary school for some time and when he got sick, Lillian stepped in to cover for him. She never left the job, even though she was caring for her husband by herself for the next ten years.
Asked what has changed in the village in three-quarters of a century, Lillian returns to the places she and her husband worked, Cornwall Press and Star Expansion, that are no longer in business.
"There's no industry in Cornwall today," she laments. "Where are the children going to work? I'm OK. I have my pension. But I worry about those poor kids."
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