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announced their impending marriage that morning at church and invited everyone to come to the ceremony—unannounced to Dot and Lester! The service went off without a hitch, but the reception, which was held in what is now the choir room, was going on FAR too long for the newlyweds, so they escaped down a dumbwaiter and out through the kitchen, which is now the youth room. This was a good practical solution for Dot and Lester at the time.
Dot has lived her whole life in Scituate. Her church has been St. Stephen’s here in Cohasset. There was no Episcopal church in Scituate. Dot’s father died when she was young, and her mother couldn’t get her young family to church. They would have their worship service in the living room. When Betty Rodgers (donor of Walton Rodgers Hall) heard that Dot wanted to go to church, she drove her each Sunday for many years.
Then one day Father Wilson, who was like a father to Dot, stopped by the house to have a drink with her mother. The conversation centered on the fact that they didn’t have transportation to get to church. Father Wilson continued his pastoral visits, having a drink at each house, until he came to his friend at the Front St. Garage, Ebon Wilson. Fr. Wilson told Ebon that each house he stopped at, the parishioners told him that they couldn’t get to church because they had no transportation. From then on, Ebon would pick up parishioners of the Cohasset churches living in Scituate, and drive them to Sunday worship in Cohasset.
One of Dot’s highlights of being at St. Stephen’s has been her work in the church. “Rich and poor alike, wherever there was a need” she said, “we did the work of the church.” At first there was the Women’s Guild. They rolled bandages for the Red Cross during the war, visited the sick, purchased the Day by Day books, and raised the money for the dining room at Briarwood Camp on the Cape, where families and youth of the
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church went until the Barbara C. Harris Camp was built in New Hampshire. “Then newcomers like the Seaveys, Lincolns, Nasts, and Hills came and the men wanted to be involved, so we created the Couples Club,” she said. The highlight of the Couples Club was holding an auction on the Common to raise money for the furnishings of the rectory. They raised the largest amount of money of any church at the time for a single event.
Dot saw many controversies at St. Stephen’s. Rectors and Bishops had their flaws. Parishioners would disagree. “My faith through the prayer book and receiving a state of grace is what is most important to me,” she said in explaining how she had coped with things that made others leave the church. “Most of my friends are at St. Stephen’s.”
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