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What the Chapel Means to Me
Some thoughts from Harriet Whitehead
Our chapel seems to me an ideal place to worship the Lord in company with dear friends. Aside from its physical beauty and its inspiring music, it is filled for me with memories of loved ones, living and dead. The pew I sit in still has the hearing instrument put in many decades ago for my uncle Lewis Field Hite.
Lewis Hite's wife was my mother's oldest sister, Abbie James Hite, and it was when I visited them as a child from Urbana, Ohio, that I first attended the chapel - perhaps about 1914.
When my father was the minister of the Brockton church there came a time when I spent many weekends in Cambridge with the Hites having dentistry done thanks to a boy named Charlie, who was a cop to my robber in a game of Cops & Robbers. Charlie could run faster than me, and holding his hand as we ran I fell on my face and smashed the second teeth I only had for a short time.
Today as I sit in the Hite pew on Sundays I can almost hear Mary Wisdom's alto, Chester Cook's baritone (Elizabeth's mother and uncle), and Hugh Hite's tenor from the pew behind me, and Harriet Hite's soprano by my side.
Harriet Whitehead, May 2001
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