Mary Whelan: History buff
Just past the DotHouse, between the flat, gray, stone front of a pharmacy and a three-decker with peeling brown siding, sits a house with clean white siding, neat black shutters, and an American flag jutting from above the double front doors atop a brick stoop.

Inside, Mary Whalen sits in the home on Dorchester Avenue in which she has lived for her entire life, since her birth in the fall of 1935. The living room is a study in family presentation: photos of her mother and father, her brother and sister, her nieces and nephews. On the wall behind her heavy brocade couch is a framed map of Cavan County, Ireland.

“I’m a Cavan girl,” Whalen said, chuckling, on a brisk sunny morning in October.

As much as Ireland may be in her blood – both sides of her family left the old country – she is the only native of Fields Corner in the family. As to her home: “This house has always, always been in my family,” she said.

Although not sure how old the building is, Whalen is certain that it tops 100 years. The property was marked on atlas plates as belonging since at least 1889 to her mother’s uncle, who oversaw the home’s construction.

She is the youngest of three siblings. Her older brother Frank lived in Jamaica Plain and died a few years ago. The middle child, Teresa, lives in Townsend. The two older children were born on Meetinghouse Hill before their father lost his job in a recession.

At the time, their uncle lived in a two-story, two-family house down on Dorchester Avenue, and two aunts had just passed away, leaving an opening for the Whalen family to move in.

“And then I came along,” she said, smiling. “So I was the only one of the three of us who was actually born here.”

From that day to this, with an exception after college when she was in a religious order for about a decade, Whalen has remained in the house. The three siblings attended the St. Ambrose Grammar School. Frank was in its first graduating class, and Whalen in the fifth.

“Growing up here, it was a real neighborhood,” she said. “There were many, many families here.” Where now there are commercial properties, which she points to out her window, there once were rows of apartments filled with generations of “nuclear families,” mainly Irish and Italian. “Everybody watched out for each other and took care of each other. And of course the church was the center of our lives.”

And then they all grew up, slowly, moving through schooling, watching their generation marry, have children, and leave for the promise of suburban life and better schools. Over time, the exodus left a void that was filled with commercial lots.

But Whalen stayed long enough to see things change yet again.

“When I compare things now, it has turned 360 degrees because of the grand influx of Vietnamese,” she said. “And I look around and I say, ‘deja vu’ – it’s all families again.”

She gestures outside at the glass company across the street. “There were years when you didn’t see any children, and now you go to church and they’re coming into church and it’s beautiful,” she said. “There are grandparents there, mothers fathers, aunts, uncles. Like days of old.”

“These are the big things to me,” she said later. “The family returning, and the faith, making our parish such a wonderful and vibrant place.”

The house has changed. Not much in style but in structure.

Whalen’s uncles used to live in the upper residence of the two-family home. She cared for them, puttering up the narrow stairs when they rang a little bell, until they died. In later years, the door separating the two units was removed, leaving a passageway between the living room and the staircase.

Now Mary Whalen keeps house for herself in a little white home with hallways filled with photos of family members, the Kennedys, and sports stars. The second front door remains closed.

And sitting in front of the fireplace you see a clue to her real passion, a framed, glass-covered, illustrated alphabet board. “I” for “Inaugural,” “R” for “Revolutionary Soldier,” “W’ for “The Washingtons.”

Whalen’s small body surges forward, smile wide and hands gesturing excitedly as talk turns to the past. “I always had a passion for history,” she said, crediting a secondary school teacher of hers who “made history just live.”

She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Boston College and a degree in secondary education from Boston State College, which she leveraged into 39 years of teaching eighth-grade American history and government in Braintree while commuting from home. For 28 consecutive years, she took classes of eighth graders to tour Washington D.C. She also taught eighth-grade students for five years at St. Catherine of Siena Parish School in Norwood while in the religious order.

Post-retirement, she has been doing volunteer work, and the one that gives her the most pleasure should surprise no one. In September, Whalen received an award for her 3,000 hours of service as a volunteer State House tour guide.

“It’s just so thrilling,” she said. “People from all over the world, and they’re just mesmerized by the whole thing. Having taught history, having taught about Samuel Adams and John Adams and George Washington, and to stand before those monuments and artifacts and present them to the people. How blessed, how honored I am.”

She also works at polling stations on election day, and loves that one is just down the street from her home. Sometimes new citizens cry when they vote, she said. “It just means so much to them.”

And then she reflects again on the house, still standing there after more than 125 years. It will go to her niece in New York who, she said, lights up her world. “So, whatever,” Whalen said, laughing, “she’ll sell.”

But for now, she has the butterflies in her garden, her tea on the porch, and her church up the avenue. “You know, I really feel a commitment to it, and to past generations. It’s my legacy, right? And I love it.”