Type: Exhibition section
Name: *I Remember Section Title*
Detail: Rei R. Noguchi, a resident of Seabrook for seventeen years, recalls his childhood in the idyllic suburban town, through a stream of memories chronicling his route as a paperboy. Noguchi remembers the path he took to deliver newspapers throughout the town; his routine was simply to attend school, return home, and then head to work on his prized bicycle. As he describes his paper route, Noguchi explores what his younger self perceived of the surroundings, passing by scenes of classmates playing baseball or participating in the Seabrook Boy Scouts. To a young Noguchi, Seabrook was a town like any other, with general stores, repair shops, churches, and even bullies. Noguchi’s memories were shaped by the omnipresent community life; the town housed Japanese, Estonian, German, Latvian, and Polish families whom sent their children to school and then worked in the warehouses of which the children had no significant knowledge. Noguchi reminisces about a life where work does not really enter the picture; fishing on the weekends, playing sports, and attending community dances. He was not cognizant of the labor his parents were performing. Seabrook Farms was not a historic site to the child who routinely struggled with the stresses of “afternoon naps and the awful tomato juice,” offered in class, it was a typical community, offering him far more than the basics of survival. The looming warehouses were merely background figures, never explained to children as anything other than places of work, and thus were not among any significant memories of a childhood spent in the neighborhoods of Seabrook.