Southbridge 1951

Main Street, Southbridge

          In early January, 1951 I took the Greyhound to Harrisburg to pick up my car with its new engine. It hummed along perfectly like new. On the way back to Fitchburg, I stopped briefly on Long Island to see Gina and Levi who were temporarily living with one set of their parents with the little ones, figuring out what to do next. At home Mamma was continuing with her housekeeping chores with the Dragottis, my former employers at the Blanchard & Brown Printing Co. Irma was finishing her second and final year at Becker Business College in Worcester in her studies to become a medical secretary. As soon as I had returned I began to search for a newspaper reporting job. Nothing was available at the Fitchburg Sentinel nor at the Boston metro dailies that I visited. I even tried a paper in Portsmouth, NH. I don’t recall how I connected with them, but visited the Southbridge (MA) Evening News near the borders of Northeastern Connecticut and Northwestern Rhode Island. I was interviewed and hired by Managing Editor George Anderson at an expected low salary, to start the following Monday. It was a five-day a week afternoon daily, something that doesn’t exist any more in the age of television and on line computer news. George even got me a place to live with Belle Andrews, a 65-year-old widow who operated a boarding house in her home at 56 Dresser Street, just around the corner from the newspaper.

            The Sunday that I left for the job I read in the Fitchburg Sentinel that American Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas was to lecture in the city under auspices of a Jewish service organization that very afternoon. Politically burnt out as I was I decided to attend for a different slant from what I had been exposed to the past two years. This was the tradition of my parents’ socialism that believed in and practiced the democratic process. Thomas’s eloquence and charm were warmly received by the full house audience. I set next to Ahti Lahtinen of Westminster, the older son of Kalle Lahtinen who had been chair of the Westminster Local of the Finnish-run United Cooperative Farmers, Inc. in the late 1930s, early 1940s. Ahti and I reminisced about the Finnish Socialist farmers in Westminster as we stood in line to shake the speaker’s hand after the meeting. I wasn’t ready to join any poltical organization again but it was good to share in the values of the tradition in which I had grown up. I drove to Southbridge immediately following the lecture.

SOUTHBRIDGE AND THE EVENING NEWS

Southbridge City Hall

            Southbridge was an industrial town of about 16.000 people then and now. The large American Optical plant was the main industry that dominated its economy, although there was a smaller textile plant or two and other smaller manufacturing businesses. AO was not union nor was the textile industry although there was an organizing drive at the latter which wasn’t successful during my stay in the community. There was a large French-Canadian community, the largest ethnic group. Nearby Webster was dominated by a unionized textile industry with Polish being the largest foreign language identity. Both towns had large majority Democratic Party registrations electorally although Southbridge was much more conservative, as indicated by its lack of unionization except in skilled trades. Roman Catholicism was strong in both places, except that there were a sizeable number of Protestant churches in Southbridge among Anglo-Saxons. Southbridge also had an Albanian immigrant community George Anderson told me there was only one black person living in Southbridge then, an older single woman who had been a resident for many years. According to Wikipedia, AO closed its plant in the 1980s, a severe blow to employment. There is now a large Latino community, mostly Puerto Rican per Wikipedia.

            The editorial staff consisted of Managing Editor George Anderson, who had broken into newspaper work in Lowell, Mass.; City Editor Paul Giroux, a married WWII vet and a journalism graduate of Boston University; Society Editor Evelyn Norton, in her 60s and sister-in-law of the absentee owner-publisher, a wealthy New York businessman whose name I’ve forgotten and am unable to trace down; and Sports Editor Saxton (Sax) Fletcher, a youngish Dartmouth graduate and the son of a New York millionaire capitalist; and me, a general city reporter and special feature writer. The owner-publisher and George and Sax were moderate Republicans (Are there any “moderate” Republicans left in this year 2015?); Paul was a Democrat as was Evelyn, who later told me her father had been a Debsian Socialist and that she admired Norman Thomas. George Mosley handled circulation and advertising downstairs, a rock-ribbed GOPer.

            My daily beat included the YMCA, police and fire headquarters. phone contact with the highway patrol, quartered nearby along the Springfield to Boston highway, and Chamber of Commerce. I’d do other general city coverage, gotten from news tips or through my own solicitation or as assigned by George or Paul. I enjoyed the town and its residents and soon became known as a roving reporter. I met and dated Shirley Bernard, who worked in the newspaper business office, for most of my stay in Southbridge. Sometimes I’d visit my Uncle August and Aunt Olga Siitonen who lived on their poultry farm in Moosup, CT, an easy evening’s drive away. About every other weekend I’d see Mamma and Irma in Fitchburg.

I REJOIN AVC IN WORCESTER

            One day I read an item in the Worcester Telegram or Evening Gazette about an American Veterans Committee chapter meeting regularly in Worcester, about 16 miles from Southbridge. Although I was still too shell-shocked to consider radical left politics of any sort, I felt a need for even liberal contacts to discuss world and national events, particularly with the Korean War going full blast. I had no such outlet in Southbridge. So I contacted the AVC chapter and began attending its monthly meetings and joined, They met at the home of Bill Chapin and his family in Worcester who was a copy editor on the Telegram and a Newspaper Guild activist. He’d had been badly wounded in WWII and walked with a severe limp. I fitted in with the group very well who were more or less ADA-oriented liberal Democrats and peaceniks of their day. Occasionally they’d hold house parties on Saturday nights which I’d attend. In 1960 when I started work as a printer at the San Francisco Chronicle I ran into Bill Chapin again who was working there as a copy editor.

SOUTHBRIDGE A COMPANY TOWN

One morning I walked into Police Headquarters to see the desk sergeant to check out the police blotter for arrest records during the day or night before. Included were drunk driving arrests we reported in the News every day. On this particular morning Police Chief Ovid Desrosiers came out of his office with a worried look to talk to me. He said in hushed tones that the night before they had arrested AO CEO Walter Stewart for drunk driving after he’d crashed his car into a telephone pole. “He’s an important man in town so maybe we shouldn’t mention his arrest in the paper,” he said. What the hell is this I thought? If one of the American Optical wage workers was busted thusly, we’d be sure to report it, and simply responded to the chief: “I’ll just take the information to George and see how he wants to handle it.” While I was completing my downtown rounds, Desrosiers had phoned George about it, apparently worried sick about his own job. When I got back to the paper and reported the arrest to George, he asked me for my notes which I gave him. That arrest was never reported in the paper. George apparently had called Stewart and the issue was buried for good.

            One afternoon I was alone in the office on a story with no early deadline. George was in the front upstairs office used by the publisher on his Southbridge visits working on an editorial. The others were away, too. I kept an eye open on the United Press teletypesetter in the corner for news that might need attention. This was before the computer age and we did our writing on manual typewriters with wire stories coming over the teletypesetter automatically onto a roll of paper in continuous feed. All of a sudden I spotted a wire story from Chicago that American Optical Company headquartered in Southbridge had been indicted by the Federal Government for an anti-trust law violation. I let the story run its course, then tore it off the machine and ran it to George in the front room. “Get a load of this, George, it’s BIG!” I shouted. After all AO’s biggest plant was anchored here and it was the prime engine that made the town’s economy run as its largest employer. George was startled and began reading it. I returned to the main office. Shortly afterwards, AO’s Walter Stewart, its CEO came huffing and puffing up the stairs and went on to see George. The story didn’t run in either the News or the Worcester Evening Gazette which had a full-time reporter working in Southbridge. I later asked George if we were going to run anything on it, and all he said was: “I’m working on it.” End of story. I had enough knowledge about how the media works in a capitalist society, especially in small town economies where never a harsh word is printed about its business economics which controls its life, newspapers and government. I began to ask myself, how long can I continue to work in an environment when full disclosure journalism doesn’t exist or is distorted?

I VISIT COUSIN LEMPI

            One weekend I decided to visit my cousin Lempi and Mickey who were living in their rent-controlled apartment in New York City, with their Windy Hill resort closed for the winter, working in waitress jobs. They were happy to see me after the previous summer when Lempi was de-converting me from Stalinism. I told them I had bought a couple of books by Norman Thomas in a Worcester bookstore and was reading them. They were glad I was educating myself in other approaches to socialism. But they also introduced me to their Trotskyist politics. Still devoted members of the SWP, they gave me some mimeographed polemics on the bitter debate between the Cannonites and Schachtmanites over the legacy of American Trotskyism. James P. Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party holding a position that despite the crimes of Stalin, Russia was still redeemable as a “degenerated workers state” with its state-owned economy. Max Schachtman’s Workers Party, later the Independent Socialist League, which had split from the SWP in 1940, argued that the USSR was in no way a workers’ state any more but ruled by a corrupt dictatorial managerial bureaucracy that constituted a “new class” in a system they dubbed as “bureaucratic collectivism.” Their British counterpart led by Tony Cliff called the Soviets as “state capitalist.” Leon Trotsky sided with the Cannonite projection until his murder in 1940. Both groups considered themselves Marxist-Leninist ideologically. Lempi said the SWP was more blue-collar then the WP, which included a goodly number of college-educated middle class intellectual such as literature Professor Irving Howe at the time. She considered the SWP as more down-to-earth proletarian. Lempi considered me too vulnerable at the time and said she could easily sign me up in the SWP right then and there, but wouldn’t do so. “We’ve had a close relationship as cousins since your birth and I love you dearly. Suppose you allow me to recruit you and then you resent the decision and break contact with me as a result. I love you too much to risk a rejection so will not pressure you to do anything. Study all these groups yourself and then affiliate with your own choice from your own free will and desire.” I will always love and honor Lempi for that stance with its total honesty. Despite any future differences we would always love one another as family.

PROMOTION TO CITY EDITOR

One day City Editor Paul Giroux gave his notice to quit. A crackerjack reporter and copy editor, Paul had been offered a job at the Worcester Telegram. This was a step upward, a sizeable boost in pay to which I believe was a Newspaper Guild-organized editorial room. He was married with two young children and needed the change. George then promoted me to City Editor, lamenting being a post-grad tutor for recent J-school graduates who because of the lousy pay the News offered would move on to greener pastures as soon as the opportunity arose. He well understood and sympathized with Paul and others like him. I’m sure he hoped the publisher would offer better salaries to staff so they would hang around for a few years more. Fiftyish or so, George himself was stuck as he had a wife and three young daughters to raise and house payments to make and was given enough of a salary himself to make a decent small town living.

            So I stepped up from my beat to cover City Hall and local government at a slight salary raise. This meant more evening work to attend meetings of various municipal agencies, although the Board of Selectmen barred me and the Worcester Evening Gazette reporter from attending its meetings. The Board Chair would just give us summarized hand-outs of decisions the Board had made during the evening and was reluctant to answer any more impromptu questions from us. Apparently the selectmen felt they had been burnt in the past by the news media and played their cards close to the chest with us. The other city committees had more open meetings we attended although these were quite dull and routine in nature. Yet both the Gazette news scratch and I felt that the Selectmen were limiting the “public’s right to know.” I doubt if there was any unseemly hanky panky going on behind closed doors as I got to know these politicians but it wasn’t exactly what you’d call open government.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

ANNUAL TOWN MEETING

            I don’t recall whether it was before or after Paul quit when we had the annual town meeting in Southbridge and similar municipalities governed by boards of selectmen, where basic policies and budgets and even elections of public posts were voted upon in some places. The town meeting was the hallmark of local democracy in New England, where the public itself debated and voted upon basic issues. As a boy I had never been to the annual town meetings in Westminster where I grew up, so I was looking forward to this assignment. George instructed the entire editorial staff except for society editor Evelyn Norton to be at the meeting that night, including George himself. Each of us were to cover different aspects of the proceedings which we would write up after adjournment at the paper to have our copy ready for the composing room first thing the next morning. This meant burning a lot of midnight oil that night. The meeting was chaired by Town Moderator “Tiny” Stark, a huge, rotund Democratic Party machine pol from Boston who had moved to Southbridge some years before. He was a seasoned pro who ran the meeting quite smoothly and efficiently as reports were read and motions made and debated. No one was denied the floor and there were no dramatic disruptions or gaffs as we saw New England democracy in action. It wasn’t until the early morning hours before the News staff finished with our typewriters and crawled off to a curtailed night’s sleep.

NEWSROOM TURNOVER

            Leiter Bamberger Jr., a Jewish lad from Brooklyn, NY and a recent J-grad from Boston University was hired to fill my slot as general reporter and feature writer. He was likeable enough but a hyper-active, restless sort who couldn’t sit still and was rather mediocre in his writing talents. He went home to Brooklyn for a weekend and committed to a job on a Jewish-run community weekly. He had been driving us up the wall in Southbridge so there was a general sigh of relief in our editorial room. Leiter was replaced by another BU grad who I’ll call Roger, as for the world of me I can’t recall his name. He did a decent job of reportage and we became good buddies. We spent one weekend together in Boston bar hopping and hearing some great live jazz and had two empty bunks available to crash in at a boarding house where he had lived during his college years. One day Roger and I had lunch at a diner in nearby Sturbridge and on our way back to work we decided to stop at the small Southbridge airport for a looksee for possible story ideas. There were three small private planes sitting on the ground. I had never been up in air before and mentioned it to a man we engaged in conversation who was hanging around. “You want to go up for a little ride,?”he asked. “Why, yes” was our response. So he walked us up to a Piper Cub he owned and we crawled in. It was a thrill to be up in the sky for a about 15 minutes as he showed us the sights of Southbridge and environs from a bird’s eye view. So in next day’s Southbridge Evening News there was a feature article about our maiden flight into the New England skies.

SLANTING THE NEWS

            On my City Hall beat I would sit in at the meetings of an agency I’ll call the Building Permit Board as a news source. One of its three members was a business agent for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), a venerable craft union. The other two members were also union people, so I felt comfortable there. One day the IBEW guy gave me a press release for his union. It was a straightforward news story without any distortion. I took it back to the paper next day and handed it as is to George for publication. I’ve mentioned it beforehand that George was a Republican but also had a particular animus toward unions. George took the release and did a little rewrite on it to show the IBEW in a slightly negative light although there was nothing really controversial about the original. George was a fun guy and easy to work for, but this I thoroughly resented. I apologized to my IBEW friend about it, who knew I came from a union family and had told him I’d been active in the CIO Steelworkers during my Lorain days. Sometime later he gave me another release with the same result for which I apologized beforehand as he wouldn’t like the way it would look at publication. But he dismissed it as something he would expect from a Republican. This was another reason I didn’t plan to stay on the job all that far into the future, although I liked my work as a journalist, my colleagues, as well as the townspeople of Southbridge. These capitalist games were just too much.

COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA

            In the summer of 1951 the Sturbridge players came back for their annual summer season to stage a series of eight or nine dramas at their theatre in that town which was an old converted one-room schoolhouse. The cast was composed of a group of graduate drama students from Yale University who entertained us with plays of one week’s duration and who were in rehearsal for a different production for the following week that were all of good quality. Co-directors were a middle aged married couple named Moose

Orhms and Elaine Bullis who live in Tennessee during the school year where Moose taught at a college drama department. Moose was the principal director and Elaine performed in a number of Sturbridge Player shows. Audiences came from all over the Southern Massachusetts area and Northeastern Connecticut. I got to know the cast well and got free passes to all their shows. I was perfectly willing to review the plays, but the publisher insisted that George Anderson do that job although it wasn’t George’s genre, who much preferred to sing in Southbridge’s barbershop quartet to which he belonged. Meantime, the publisher and his wife, who was our Evelyn Norton’s older sister, left New York and lived at their country house in nearby Palmer for the summer stock season, as he loved the Sturbridge Players and was even a generous financial benefactor to them.

            I don’t remember the names of any of the plays but one, “Come Back, Little Sheba,” by popular Midwestern playwright William Inge (1913–1973), All the principal roles in the plays were taken by the Yale students, except for bit parts for which local area talent was engaged. “Sheba” was no exception. And that’s where I came in! Sports editor Sax Fletcher and I were invited for two slots. He and I played the roles of two members of the Alcoholics Anonymous who came in the last act to drag male lead, drunken “Doc” Delaney off the stage. Doc was an unhappy middle-aged chiropractor who had been sober and an AA member for a year, but had reverted heavily back to the bottle following a household crisis which involved a young female boarder. We had been called by Doc’s desperate wife Lola who had also seen better days, to come take the raging Doc away. Both of us had a decent number of lines we needed to memorize. I hadn’t been in a play since junior high school and I loved every moment of this unexpected opportunity. Moose and Elaine both said I had come across as a seasoned trouper. Jim Asp, a Yale actor, was a convincing Doc, and Elaine Bullis was his hapless wife Lola. I drove up to Fitchburg for our final Saturday show and brought Mamma and Irma down to see it. I felt the stage was a natural calling, but sadly didn’t return to it until the mid-1980s in Berkeley, CA where I played the male lead in a bilingual performance adapted from the Finnish epic poem Kalevala. (But more on that much further along in these Memoirs.)

A TRIP TO WINDY HILL WITH MAMMA AND IRMA

Sister Irma, 1946-47, Fitchburg, Mass

            My sister Irma had completed Becker Junior College with honors that Spring and I had attended her graduation ceremonies in Worcester. Her first job was as medical secretary at Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Boston, where Pappa’s cancer had been diagnosed as beyond hope in the Fall of 1944. I drove her to Boston to a single women’s boarding house to where she was going to live on the Sunday just before she started work. She was then age 19. So Mamma now faced the “empty nest” syndrome as both of us children had now left home. There had been a ripple of immigration from Finland in this early post-war period so she had rented her extra bedroom to a young single Finnish man who had found work in the mills of Fitchburg. That gave her a little company, extra income, and big manual help in heavier tasks like carrying up kerosene from the basement to heat the kitchen stove. Fortunately, none of her young roomers were problem drinking men. Which I couldn’t say about myself.

Hanna & Antti Siitonen, 25th wedding anniversary, Westminster, Mass., 1942

            Early Fall came in 1951 with Jane and Mickey closing up their summer guest home at Windy Hill in Walden, NY, and they were busy closing the place up for returning to New York City for the Winter. This was an opportune time for a family visit, so I drove to see them one weekend with Mamma and Irma in tow. They had not seen Lempi since 1944 when she came to help them out in Westminster following my father’s death. We had a grand time. There was much love between Mamma and her niece, and since both were extroverted talkers they spent the whole time talking, talking, talking, while Irma and I hung out with Mickey. By this time Lempi had lost a lot of her Finnish, but it didn’t matter. Their non-stop happy palaver went on in a mixture of Finnish, Finglish, with whatever words came to mind. The weekend energized us all, and it was with sadness that we left for Massachusetts early that Sunday afternoon. As it was, it was the last time Mamma and Irma saw Lempi, who died of lung cancer in 1984 at 73. I did see Lempi and Mickey many times before that as whenever I visited New York I made it a point to go up-river on the Hudson to stay with them for a couple of days. I kept in touch with Mickey after that by phone and letter until she passed away in her early 80s, living all that time alone in retirement at Windy Hill.

FINAL STRETCH AT SOUTHBRIDGE

            It was a relatively uneventful Fall for local news. Turned on by my acting stint in “Come Back, Little Sheba,” I went to see a couple of plays produced in community theaters in nearby Connecticut towns about which I wrote reviews for the News. They were fun to do and George welcomed them as long as he didn’t need to write them. But my main focus was on my future beyond Southbridge. I wrote to several universities about graduate school in journalism and got a favorable response from Indiana University in Bloomington. But then I thought, do I really want to think about working on commercial capitalist newspapers or magazines with their editorial biases? With a graduate degree I had no particular interest in teaching journalism, either. But then a potential solution presented itself. The prestigious University of Chicago had a special MA program for a sociology degree pointed toward industrial relations in both labor and management. My interest would be working in the trade union movement either as a journalist or in labor education, public relations, or politics. So I applied and was accepted as a graduate student beginning the Fall semester of 1952. I gave notice at Southbridge for January, 1952, hoping to move to Chicago then and find work at some job where I could get paid enough to save decent money for the expensive tuition at Chicago and to live on while in school.

            The News was sad to see me go but expected it as few would want to work long at the bare subsistence wage it paid. Apparently I had gained some popularity at Southbridge during my year in the city, as George Mosely of advertising staged a going away party for me, dinner at a good local restaurant with speeches, music and the works. About 40 people came, which included my old Michigan State pal Harry Doehne, who was now in graduate school at Yale, who came to visit me that weekend from New Haven. The one person who was unhappy about my departure was my girl friend Shirley Bernard who hoped for more from our relationship than separation. I really didn’t want anything more serious at that point in my life. Shirley didn’t come to the dinner. So at 25, again I responded to the Horace Greeley advice: “Go West, young man, Go West!”

End of Installment 15