Lumina & Elizabeth Desmarais, Page Two

Lumina Demarais, admitted 12 years ol[d] Been doffing in Spring Mill all summer. Location: Winchendon, Massachusetts, September 1911, Lewis Hine.

Edited interview with Richard Dube (RD), son of Lumina Desmarais. Interview conducted by Joe Manning (JM) on March 12, 2009.

JM: What did you think of the photo?

RD: It was such a nice surprise.

JM: Did you know that your mother and her sister Elizabeth worked at the Springs Mill, and did it surprise you they were so young?

RD: I knew that they worked when they were very young, but no one in the family discussed it to any extent.

JM: What do you think about the fact that the photos were used as examples of child labor that the photographer wanted to outlaw?

RD: It was a good thing that he was pointing that out.

JM: When were you born?

RD: 1934. I was the only child.

JM: Where were you living at that time?

RD: 148 Glenallan Street, in Winchendon. My parents were married on August 2, 1927, and they bought the house in 1928.

JM: Where did your father work?

RD: He first worked at New England Wooden Ware, in the Waterville section of Winchendon. They made wooden buckets. Initially, he worked in the saw mill cutting the wood and sizing it for the buckets. For the last several years at the shop he was in charge of filing all the saws. Then he worked for Temple-Stuart furniture factory in Baldwinville (town next to Winchendon). He had become an expert at filing saws, and that is all he did at Temple-Stuart. He retired from there at about the age of 70.

JM: Did your mother work when you were growing up?

RD: Not that I remember. Unfortunately, my mother had what was then considered a mental illness. In today's world, it would be called an eating disorder. She was fairly short, and sometimes she would weigh over 200 pounds, and then she would stop eating. No matter how we tried to convince her to eat, she would not want to eat. Ultimately, she went to Gardner State Hospital (Mass). In those days, they used shock treatments. When they did that to her, somehow they would get it out of her system, and she would seem to recover. So she would come home, but then a while later, she would be faced with the same problems all over again. Finally, my father felt he just couldn't deal with it, so she ended up in Gardner State Hospital for quite a long time, and then went from place to place. I can't remember all the places she went to.

JM: How old were you when your mother started having this problem?

RD: When I was a teenager.

JM: Who took care of you when your father was working?

RD: At that point, I was taking care of myself. But my grandmother, my mother's mother, lived right down the street, and my uncle, my mother's brother, lived next door. I spent a lot of time at both places.

JM: Before you were a teenager, did your mother have any difficulties?

RD: I wasn't aware of any. As far as I remember, she was okay.

JM: When she was in the hospital in Gardner, did you visit her?

RD: On occasion.

JM: Was that hard to do?

RD: It was very difficult.

JM: Did your father continue to visit her?

RD: He didn't visit her much at all. Both of us were struggling with visiting her. We were living alone. Fortunately, my mother's brother Peter Desmarais, and his wife, lived right next door. They had several sons, and I used to pal around with one of them. His name was Norman Desmarais.

JM: Were you very close to your father? It seems like you would have been depending on each other for support.

RD: Sure. We took care of each other. We were relatively poor, but we got by okay. We owned the home. We also had a car, but we didn't go far.

JM: Did he have a big influence on you?

RD: Definitely. Like him, I tend to be financially conservative. I am a Democrat because he was a strong Democrat. He never used foul language. He never drank. All those things rubbed off on me. He wasn't very social, and neither am I. When I was a kid, I was pretty much of a loner. My father and I did a lot of work together at home. We built two barns, both of which still exist, in back of the house, and we used one of those barns as a garage. I rebuilt a truck engine once in it. I still have a lot of my father's tools.

JM: Was your father always working, or did he have some leisure activities?

RD: He liked to garden. He came from a farm family. His parents owned a farm in Quebec. He always had a garden.

JM: Was Winchendon Springs your neighborhood when you were a kid?

RD: Yes. All through my childhood, until I graduated from high school in 1953. I went into the Air Force a year later. I didn't live at home again after that.

JM: Did you go to college?

RD: I spent four years in the Air Force. And then I got the GI Bill and went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for four years. I majored in mechanical engineering. I graduated in 1962 with a BSME. I married my wife Carol in 1959. We lived in Amherst for a few years, and then in nearby North Hadley. My first job was with the New England Electric System. I was in a six-month training program, and we moved to Salem (Mass), where I worked at the power plant as a trainee. Eventually, I worked for the same company in Worcester (Mass). Then I worked at the Brayton Point Plant in Somerset (Mass). I left New England Electric in 1965 and went to work for Metcalf and Eddy. I worked there for about six years and then went to work for Stone & Webster Engineering Corp. in 1972. I left Stone & Webster in 1994 to go to work for DB Riley (now Babcock Borsig) in Worcester. I retired from Babcock in 2002. We've lived in Billerica (Mass) since 1967. We have one daughter, Dawn-Marie.

JM: When did your parents die?

RD: My mother died in 1987, at the age of 88; and my father died in 1986, at the age of 93.

JM: Did you continue to visit Winchendon when you settled down in Billerica?

RD: Yes, we went back frequently to visit my father, which we did until he passed away. I still visit my cousin Leo Desmarais in Winchendon about twice a year. My father lived with us for about six months when he had a hip operation at about the age of 88 or 89. Then he went to a rest home in Winchendon. When he needed more care, he went to Parker Hill Nursing Home in Gardner.

Before my father went to Parker Hill Nursing Home, I sold the house. I drive by it when I go back to Winchendon. The house is still pretty much the same. It has the barns in the back that my father and I built. The porch that goes all the way around was there when I lived there. We had apple trees all around the property. But we had a wind storm that blew them down.

JM: For the period that you knew your mother before she had the problem, what was she like?

RD: She was a very good mother. She took really good care of me. We got along very well. She let me do pretty much whatever I wanted, which was okay because I was shy and didn't get into any trouble.

JM: Did she have interests outside of the home?

RD: She visited relatives quite often, including her sister Elizabeth, who lived in town, though she later moved to Gardner. She loved playing Bingo.

JM: Is there any other thing you can remember about your mother?

RD: She and my father were very religious Catholics, and very active in St. Mary's Church, which is now called Immaculate Heart of Mary. She liked buying shoes and hats. She used to have a small room full of shoes and hats. She would buy some inexpensive jewelry, and I remember that she had a fur coat that she loved. And there was one other thing. My mother loved to play the harmonica. I don't know how well she played, but she played it, and played it, and played it, even when she was in several different facilities. When she passed away, my cousin Alexina gave us one of her harmonicas.