In the bleak midwinter, my family said goodbye to an 86-year-old cousin. A sweet, caring woman, Sheila was laid to rest at the family burial plot in Rockland, Mass. As the priest said prayers, I spotted the grave marker for my maternal grandfather.
His name—Edward Francis Roach.
I knew little about the man. When I was three, he bought me a tricycle. He passed away months later, leaving the kind of hole that’s so familiar—a relative gone before you get to know them.
Edward was 58 when he died, married with seven children, my late mother being the oldest. I was also told he built roads on Cape Cod, and that’s just about all I knew.
Sheila’s funeral pushed me to tackle a question I know others have about someone as important to their family as Edward was to mine. How did this man I barely knew spend the years he was given?
His last surviving child, my uncle Greg, said my grandfather grew up working in his father’s business, M.F. Roach & Sons. Its Cape headquarters was in Eastham with a mixing plant and room enough for trucks, bulldozers and other paving equipment.
In the 1920s the company did lots of work on Nantucket. How do I know this? It’s nothing short of amazing in what you can find on the Internet. The digital archives of the island’s newspaper, the Inquirer and Mirror, turned up a trove of stories. In 1923 the company won the job of rebuilding what was referred to as ``the state road.’’ Its bid was $100,115, or nearly two million in today’s dollars. Another big job was Polpis Road, a scenic artery that connects the downtown to the village of Sconset on the island’s eastern tip.
And while infrastructure may not be the sexiest of legacies, get this: in November 1927 the company’s departure made for a mention in the newspaper’s society column. MF Roach and his son, Edward, were heading home to East Bridgewater, the paper reported.
My great-grandfather died twelve years after that, in 1939, leaving Edward and his brother Michael F. Jr. to run things. Their signature project in the 1950s: building the uppermost section of Route 6 that heads out of Truro, cutting through the dunes, delivering the summer crowd to the joys of P-Town. These guys were very busy.
According to the digital archives of the Provincetown Advocate, the Roach brothers also built smaller roads in P-Town and bike trails in the National Seashore. They repaired a runway at the airport and rebuilt at least one section of iconic Commercial Street.
These stories made my grandfather come alive like nothing before. And they were all right three, a couple of clicks away on the Internet. I could imagine him jawboning with the bulldozer operator, showing a rookie how to run the Barber-Greene. In my mind, he lights a cigarette (Greg said he was a smoker) and now he’s cursing that batch of asphalt that hasn’t shown up.
Where is that (expletive deleted) truck! he shouts. Ater all, isn’t the use of a four-letter word one of the perks of this back-breaking work?
The company is gone now. Edward’s money made possible a comfortable life for his family with two cars, rare back then, and a house spacious enough that Greg and another uncle, Mike, could play floor hockey in the fourth-floor attic.
I’m told my grandfather died a popular man. The wake in his home drew hundreds. And for summers that came after that, my mother and dad took their five boys to the Cape, eventually buying their own place. And now I have a cottage of my own. Maybe it was a summer job that landed you here. Or a career move. Maybe the cottage that belonged to your grandparents is now yours. Or you were lucky enough to be born here on Cape Cod, among the sand and waves.
For me, it was my grandfather, I learned, who paved the way.
My Grandfather Paved the Way
