Charles Raymond Goddard was born in Southwick, Massachusetts, on March 25, 1888. In 1909, at age 21, he was attending Yale. To pay for law school, he sold women's hosiery door-to-door. When he knocked on the Widow Treat's door in Hartford, Connecticut, the seventy-year-old did not buy any of his products. Instead, she presented him with a surprising proposition he could not easily refuse. Charles obtained a marriage license on August 24, and he and the Widow Treat wed on September 1, with the bride wearing a thick veil. Edwin A. Treat, the widow's son, was old enough to be Charles' father. Having read about the marriage in his local newspaper, he went to court on September 9 in an attempt to have a conservator appointed to his mother's vast estate, claiming that Charles was after his mother's money. Charles and his new bride received a summons to appear in court regarding the conservatorship. Meanwhile, a prosecutor who wanted Charles to answer perjury charges h...

Concerned residents and motorists throughout Western Massachusetts couldn't believe their eyes as they tried to determine what they were looking at high in the sky.  Garrett Cashman (27) of Albany, NY, left Wynantskill, NY, at approximately 7:00 a.m. on July 21, 1955, and touched down on Walter D. Anderson's farm on Vining Hill Road in Southwick, Mass., at about 10:15 a.m.  Cashman, a part-time hypnotist and mailorder dancing teacher, made the roughly 80-mile flight across the Berkshires and into the Pioneer Valley suspended from a 35-foot net attached to 82 balloons. The balloons measured five feet in diameter, except two measuring eight feet.  Mrs. Cashman drove to Southwick to retrieve her husband and his flying contraption.  Cashman attracted quite a crowd of concerned residents who phoned police when they watched him as he flew through the air attached to 60 balloons on his first trip, which lasted 21 miles, on September 9, 1954. The balloons were gas-filled wit...