Excerpts - Steeples: Sketches of North Adams

From a 1996 interview with Jerry Gamari:

I had the worst job in North Adams. A friend of mine got me a job in the Hoosac Cotton Mill. Worst job I ever had. It was noisy in the first place; they had all those machines going, about fifty machines in one room spinning around. Jeez, if you wanted to talk to someone, you had to holler in their ear. You’d go outside, and you could still hear those machines.

I think I worked in every place in North Adams. At the Clark Biscuit Company, I used to run the oven. The oven was like a Ferris wheel. It would have all these shelves, and the cookies would go around; and by the time they made the circuit, they were done. When the cookies came down, they would go down a chute and into a basket. I would rake the cookies into the basket, send them down on the elevator, and the girls would pack and ship them. The company would give you some cookies to take home, and you could also buy them by the barrel, and they’d give you a break on it.

From a 1996 interview with Joanne Saltamartini:

I live right above Heritage Park, the highest house on that street. You go over Hadley Overpass, you can wave at me. My husband has got the same neighbors he’s had all his life. We still got fifteen or twenty Italian families there. I can go up the street and name everybody on the street. I’m a person who just likes to sit outdoors and watch. You can find me on the front stoop of my house waving at everybody and looking at the changes in the mountains. I watch the gliders coming off the hairpin turn. My house is very high, and the view from the top is a picture you gotta take. Honest to God, on the top floor of my house, you look right across Main Street and see all those church steeples.

I like to count how many vehicles go over Hadley Overpass. I look down at the fire station, and I can see somebody going down the pole. In fact, my brother-in-law was a fireman. He has since passed away. He said, when the doors were all open, he could hear when I used to yell for my kids. I like hearing the trains. You used to get so many. You only get a few now. I would travel on the railroad from North Adams to North Station. I got in a taxi all by myself to South Station, and went to Westerly, Rhode Island, to visit my sister. I was ten or eleven then. I was never afraid of anybody. I always talked to strangers. It was really fun going through the Hoosac Tunnel. When they had that last trip through the tunnel, I was one of the passengers.

I’ll tell you, it’s just a wonderful place to be. I think everybody should have the opportunity to bring their children up in a small town. I think the people who do the complaining here, they don’t go out and reach. If you want to be happy, you’ve gotta go out and reach to people. I have neighbors that moved in and don’t even say hello or goodbye, you know. I tried to be friendly when they moved in, in typical old Italian style. I brought them something to eat and some flowers and invited them into the community, but people don’t do that anymore. I don’t understand the world today. People need to know each other.

From a 1997 interview with Arthur Boucher, who worked in the Hoosac Tunnel for Boston & Maine Railroad:

During the war, they were sending trains through east and west on both tracks, and you didn’t have much room in the tunnel. There’s a little hole about every hundred yards or so you could get into to avoid the train. There was enough room for three or four guys in each little cutout. One day we laid one brick. We’d just get started, and we’d have to take everything down and set it in the middle and get out of the way. If you went in about 1,500 feet and looked out, you could see this ring around the wires, this circle of electricity around the wire. If you went in without a hat on a damp day, your hair would tingle. So we always wore a hat. Some days, it would be so foggy in there, you couldn’t see the hand in front of you. Of course, there were no lights in there, so we had to bring our own carbide lamps. We would walk into the tunnel up until about 2,000 feet. If we went further than that, we’d drive into the Central Shaft on motor carts.

During the war, we switched from steam engines to diesel. When we’d go into the tunnel, some of these firemen wouldn’t pull their fires quick enough, and the train would go in with black smoke coming out. It would get sucked all the way through the tunnel. You’d be in there gettin’ this black smoke all the time. Every time a munitions train come through, we had to extinguish all the lights. We had to put everything out in case they had an accident, or we’d get blown outta here like out of a shotgun.

In the tunnel, it’s a funny thing. As the trains would go through, they’d hit pockets of dirt, and in some places there’s six foot wide of brick. In the wintertime, the water gets in between the layers of bricks and pushes them out. In those days, they had two tracks through the tunnel. So the train would wobble a little bit and hit the side. So the mining crew would go through and tear out two or three layers of the bricks. Then we’d have to go in and rebuild it again.

From a 1996 interview with Patrice Bolgen, who moved with her husband to North Adams in 1992:

North Adams is a constant artistic experience. I don’t even have to go to a museum to see art work in a frame. It’s right out there, and it’s every place I look. We have traveled to many places in Europe. I remember when we were in Venice. We were trying to find a spot that wasn’t artistic, and we couldn’t. Here, everything is a painting. North Adams is full of paintings. It isn’t conventional, and it isn’t squared off like a box. It’s hilly, and the streets aren’t perpendicular. They curve.

To me, the mountains are the most important thing. They give me a sense of security and coziness. North Adams is a real town. It has real problems and real beauty, too. It’s not like a made up town. Williamstown and Stockbridge are very nice, but I like the diversity. We also have the best of both worlds. We feel like we’re in the country, but the library is two blocks away, the post office is several blocks away. If I want to go to MASS MoCA, I can walk. If I want to go the college, I can walk. You can walk to just about anything in town.

We have everything here. I can look at the mountains and go to a lake. Williamstown is only a 10-minute drive, and there are so many cultural things close by. They have marvelous concerts and wonderful dance and theater productions at North Adams State College. We have met so many artists and musicians who live here. People say it’s like a European town. Sometimes we take the same route when we go walking, but it’s never the same. The streets and houses look different at different times of the day. I never get tired of North Adams.