Coincidence? Or Fate? You Decide.

             Tim Mygatt and I were chatting at the Mt. Kisco Country Club bar. Part of the joy of a high school reunion is picking up where you left off twenty five, fifty years ago. I said I’d heard he was doing some work on his family genealogy. Tim said, yeah, the first Mygatt landed in Boston in 1633.

             "On the Griffin?" I asked.

The Griffin

             "How did you know?" he said.

              My ancestor, Thomas Judd may have came over on the Griffin. I have no proof, not even a scrap of evidence. I do know that Thomas Judd came from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, England to Boston in 1633. He bought four acres where now Harvard stands and followed Rev. Thomas Hooker inland to the banks of the Connecticut river. So did Joseph Mygett.  Mygett, Judd, Hooker and others founded Hartford, Ct.

    

            And later, Farmington, Ct.  So Thomas Judd was a follower of Thomas Hooker and Hooker was on the Griffin. So maybe, just maybe, Thomas Judd was on the Griffin.  His name is not on the surviving scraps of the original manifest of the Griffin. So maybe not. But it’s fun to think about.

Rev. Thomas Hooker

 Think of King Charles soldiers, their red and yellow tights muddied from the ride down from Kent, plumed helmets drooping in the rain, running onto the dock at Plymouth, England in 1633 and waving their pike staffs at the dot on the horizon, the Griffin.

            The Griffin was one of the several dozen ships that transported nearly 30,000 English men and women and horses and cattle in the great migration from England to the new world from 1630 until 1649 when King Charles was beheaded by Cromwell.

             On board the Griffin, Joseph and Ann Mygett; Tim Mygatt’s great great etc. etc. etc. grandparents were sailing away from the threat of jail and loss of all their property. They were hunted as enemies of the crown for the treason of not worshiping God in the Church of England but rather in their own home and in humble places like barns and simple wood churches. Good Congregationalists, (Congregationalism is more easily identified as a movement than a single denomination, given its distinguishing commitment to the complete autonomy of the local congregation) they saw the family as the center of the church, not the King, and certainly not Rome. So they were fleeing but they were also headed for the New World. To start a new life in a wilderness, and shape a government to serve the people.

           As was, I think, Thomas Judd. And I wonder if Joseph Mygett and Thomas Judd stood at the rail of that ship, nearly 375 years ago, watching the shores of the old world drift over the horizon. And a month later saw the New World rise up before them. And I wonder if they were friends, and if their wives got along. And if they stayed friends as their later generations moved to Farmington, to New Milford, CT. and New Preston, CT. as Mygatts, and to Kent, CT, and Roxbury, CT. as Judds.

The beautiful girls of Horace Greeley High have a slumber party. Anne, "same beautiful girl" has her finger in her mouth lower left.  Next to her Bette Pillar would later be Miss New York City. Starting from the top left they are: Dorinda, Sue, Linda, Barbie, Patty, Abby, Nona, Betty Ann, Susie, Carol, Anne, and Bette.

               And if they had any idea that over 300 years in the future, that their great, great, great. etc. etc. etc grandsons, would fall in love, one after the other, with the same beautiful girl.  (above pic was stolen from our class website)

               One final footnote: Tim and Anne got married and still are.

My Big Crash

79 Mustang Cobra

            Ruth was very beautiful,tall and shy. Her green eyes  flinched if you moved suddenly. We were going to have a picnic in a meadow behind my cabin the next day to steal pumpkins for Halloween and get acquainted. She was living with a drug dealer at the time.

            I was living in my log cabin on Hatch Pond during the week and in New York City on the weekends. 

I wasn’t working on a book and had plenty of time to go to the local Ford Dealer in New Milford and try out the new Turbo Mustang Cobra. It was an all new car and getting a lot of press.

 

 I had a 66 Shelby GT 350 Mustang, same color as the one on the right and I thought a comparison of the old beast and the hot new lightweight might make a good article for Road & Track. The salesman tossed me the keys and said, "be careful, it's very fast." Luckily he stayed behind in the showroom.

            I took the shiny new Turbo Mustang Cobra up route 7 heading north and floored it.  Even after the wait for the turbo to kick in, it wasn’t very fast, nowhere near the grunt of the my 66 Shelby GT 350  Mustang.  I stomped on the brakes see if it stopped better than it accelerated and the car yawed left.  Fortunately the road was clear and I wasn’t worried.  There was plenty of time to catch the skid and I steered into it. 

         Jackie Stewart would have caught it but I didn’t. The car was gone, sliding sideways past a farmer’s vegetable stand and into a telephone pole.  That vegetable stand was another bit of luck.  The farmer told the cops I wasn’t going that fast, maybe 55.  Which was true. Looking at the car, wrapped around the pole, you’d have thought I was going 90.

after Bob's test drive the car was headed in two directions

            The telephone pole sailed through the passenger door as if it were wide open and cracked my pelvis.  If the salesman had been with me he would have been ketchup.  Another piece of luck, I had my arm up as the door window shattered so the glass severed the tendons of my arm instead of my face and neck.
          

click to enlarge

  The dealer was really pissed off.  "You owe me for the car," he said.  I didn't blame him for being pissed off and I didn’t think it was my fault. But I couldn’t be sure.  We settled out of court for the two or three grand profit he would have made on the car if he’d sold the car.

              My friend, playwright and professor Dave Ward, pointed out that there had been several mysterious Turbo Mustang crashes in that first month after the new Turbo Mustang came out. Dry road, no other traffic, driver sober and alert, car found upside down in a ditch, that kind of thing.  A year later I learned that there had been a production computer error on the very first turbo Mustangs. A proportioning galley in the brake system was too small, (or too big, I forget) causing the right front brake to lock up.
   

  Ruth came to see me in the hospital and brought a bottle of champagne.  I was there for a month but I never saw Ruth again.

Cartoonist Don Silverstein waves from the drivers side where the door was pried off with the Jaws of Life to get me out of the wreck. He took these shots of the car behind the dealer's showroom. (click all the images to enlarge)