A Tale of the Franco-American Diaspora – Work in Progress, WIP
Already as a teenager in the early 1950s, my view and concepts of the big wide world were greatly influenced by the street smarts and attitudes of the adults in Centralville and in Little Canada, including those living near or on Austin and Moody Streets.
Except for Saturday morning forays to the Lowell City Library (now called the Pollard Library) and occasional visits to movie theaters downtown, my world was hardly touched by events happening in Boston or even on television screens across the nation. Like other immigrant groups in the city, and there were several, my family and I lived quietly in our own quaint and curious world of beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, superstitions, fears, and hopes, all of which had been transplanted through grandparents, who had immigrated from Quebec Province or New Brunswick (le Nouveau- Brunswick) in a diaspora from 1870 to the early 1900s.
Curiously, we first enjoyed our family boob tube about a year after my father died on January 6, 1953. In a sense, we had chosen to be willingly cut off from important world happenings simply because our financial standing in the community remained precarious, if not quite faulty.
Concerns Everywhere – Atmospheric Tests, Nuclear Fallout, Censorship in Hollywood
Of course, the Lowell Sun and the local radio stations, WLLH and WCAP, kept us aware, daily of the many external dangers to our physical and mental health that abounded worldwide due to nuclear (A-bomb) and also thermonuclear (H-bomb) weapons that, hopefully, would keep us all safe and sound.
Several hundred, US, atmospheric tests were being conducted in the deserts of Nevada and also in the South Pacific islands under US control. In contrast, the Soviets were conducting similar experiments in barren locations under their control.
Were there signs of danger as outlined by our news media?
The planet’s upper atmosphere was gradually being made awash with residual radioactive compounds (nuclear fallout), which endangered the Earth’s inhabitants with undesired cell mutations in animals including humans as a predictable consequence.
Doctors were finding milk with high levels of Strontium-90, a close chemical cousin to the benign Calcium. Should Russia and the US agree to limit atmospheric testing ASAP? Eisenhower’s State Department and Stalin’s replacement, Nikita Khrushchev, at the Kremlin would need to negotiate.
Adding to the general feeling of local unease, there were Church officials like Cardinal Cushing, among others, actively promoting the Hays Code regarding the banning of any sexuality, immorality, or violence depicted on movie screens. Even supposedly married couples, when shown in their bedroom, never shared a common bed. Rather, each person was assigned to his/her separate bed, with a respectable amount of space separating the two beds.
This was movie censorship in the 1950s right here in the US of A. But, as a young lad, my focus was on film heroes like Tarzan, Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey, Red Ryder, Tom Mix plus the Lone Ranger with his trusted Indian companion, Tonto. Fortunately, these crucial kid films were given free rein at theater box offices everywhere in the land.
Indeed, all Hollywood films were expected to show that crime does not pay, which certainly was not exactly the story as told by tabloids, even in the Boston Herald at the time. A heavy hand of supposedly benign censorship ruled the moral landscape. Clearly, the 1950s were not a period of psychological relaxation of human anxieties, at least, not in the Greater Boston area.
Employment and Career Possibilities in the 1950s
It certainly was not the “best of times” since there existed a lingering degree of unemployment in the Merrimack Valley and in much of New England at the time. Why this technical desert when Lowell’s textile worker class desperately needed jobs and job training in new technologies? Where could an able-bodied person, man or woman, expect to get the experience needed to compete in the national or even the local job markets?
Many of the posted jobs that offered better-than-average benefits such as good salaries, sick leave, vacations, etc. required recently acquired, technical skills, which very few workers in Lowell possessed.
In the past, on-the-job training had been the mainstay, the very foundation, of a successful career in Lowell’s textile and leather shoe manufacturing. Why not introduce the idea of job training into advanced technology industries?
Where in Lowell or nearby could someone earn a one or two-year certificate in electromechanical maintenance, telecommunications, machine tool design, or chemical applications?
The Lowell Technological Institute was still a developing brainchild of Doctor Martin Lydon and his contacts at the US Air Force. Certainly, there existed an immediate need for trained technicians in these advanced technologies, but, for the most part, former textile and shoe leather workers lacked the needed skills.
Perhaps, this practical concept had been evaluated by the industry movers and shakers of the period?
Personal Experience – On the Job Training – 1956
I remember my own brief training in the shoe manufacturing business back in the summer of 1956. Robbie Shoe, which was located way up on Jackson Street toward the railroad tracks, apparently liked my application for work, so I was assigned to operate a shoe tacking machine, which required that I quickly nail three tiny tacks into a thin, cardboard inner-sole onto a wooden lass, which was made to resemble a human foot in form. This process represented the very first step in making a finished product.
The entire process was repetitive and flowed effortlessly after the operator – me, in this case, got the hang of it. After about ten minutes of help from my co-worker, Gerry, who was a generous and likable person, I was tacking with the best of them. The job paid $0.75 per hour, so I could bring home $30.00 a week (before taxes) to help my mother maintain a workable house budget.
As an aside, I will offer an anecdote related to my three-month-long employment history at Robbie Shoe. Eight hours per day standing in front of that infernal piece of clanking machinery had convinced me that a lifetime commitment to leather shoe manufacturing probably would not satisfy my interests in all things scientific.
Indeed, after the first few days, I discovered that humming pleasant little tunes made the drudgery of my robot-like movements just a bit less stressful. Even in the idiocy of repetitious, industrial labor, musical artistry could bring some beauty to the task.
However, the tune that I, apparently, favored over all others was Chopin’s Funeral March (Death March), which clearly reflected my state of deep disappointment regarding life’s many existential inequities that even permeated Lowell’s hallowed halls.
Fellow workers had expressed their personal disappointment to management with my limited musical offerings, so soon, my supervisor, Red, a large personage of Irish ancestry, opined that it might be best for me to not consistently return to Chopin’s somber tune. I took his pleasant advice into serious consideration, and then continued my work without any further audible overtones.
Clearly, I was learning the ropes of the shoe factory world. Life seemed good again.
More Dismay and Disapproval Among My Shoe Shop Colleagues
During my junior year in high school, I had successfully stumbled deeper into the inner sanctum of the Pollard City Library to discover the thrills and spills of scientific research on a shelf right there in front of my nose. Life would never be the same again for me!
Cosmic rays and short-wave radio transmissions soon became my passion of the moment.
During lunch hour on a dull but typical day on the job, a colleague discovered that my lunch pail also included a library book on cosmic rays and their origin. Only a week before, I had been grappling with the mysteries of alternating currents in house circuits, but, apparently, cosmic rays were beyond the pale.
Was I becoming a freak or a weirdo?
The concept of short-wave, night-time, radio reception, which is due to a residual ionized layer of the upper atmosphere (the ionosphere) reflecting radio frequency signals emitted by an earth-based antenna back over the horizon became of interest to me. Was this how my RCA radio at home could receive signals directly sent from a transmission tower in Warsaw, Poland?
But, why wasn’t the whole Jackson Street Robbie Shoe operation not also enthralled by reflected E&M radio waves bouncing into our space in Lowell, Massachusetts? At that time, I began feeling alone in my obsession with classical E&M theory and applications.
That experience felt exciting to me.
More will follow regarding the ionosphere and the so-called electron plasma frequency later, when I held an internship at the Ionospheric Research Laboratory of the Pennsylvania State University in the 1961 to 1963 timeframe.
In summary, I was not just another guy barely earning enough bucks to pay for food and a few beers while employed at Robbie Shoe.
I, then, realized that I held onto a vision of the world around me, which differed greatly from what others in my age group seemed to believe. Everyone in this big, wide world sees and feels a personal reality in a unique and special way!
Getting Ahead in the Post-War Economy
A dearth of technological savoir-faire clung onto the regional labor pool that was available to industry in the Post-War economy. However, manufacturers like GE, Westinghouse, Dupont, Raytheon, Philco, RCA, etc. were looking for workers with recent experience in plastics, electronics, telecommunications, machine tool design, microwaves, electromechanical machinery plus industrial and pharmaceutical chemistry.
However, Lowell was, certainly then, not a national mecca for such advanced expertise.
Like in the case of Casey at the Bat, there was no joy in Mudville, AKA, Lowell-town, with no fictional, superhero, Casey, to save our bacon. A city, where the town-fathers have failed to properly prepare its workforce for today’s technology, is a township empty of any viable future.
Closing Comments and Observations
For this son of immigrant French-Canadian grandparents, the 1950s were replete with many potential career opportunities, especially, if he had an interest and native abilities in mathematics (algebra, trigonometry, and plane geometry) plus a great deal of personal drive to succeed in a technologically challenging learning environment. However, such career possibilities were, generally speaking, only available elsewhere.
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Cardinal Cushing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cushing
Hays Code
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheHaysCode
Short wave radio
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortwave_radio
Nouveau-Brunswick
http://www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca/amnord/nbrunswick.htm
Khruschev
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/khrushchev-elected-soviet-leader
Calcium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium
Strontium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium
soviet nuclear tests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_Soviet_nuclear_tests
foreign policy under Eisenhower
https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/eisenhower
film censorship
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_the_United_States
Chopin – funeral march
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt9SN7Y-z-A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D05AB8xs7qA
cosmic rays
https://www.space.com/32644-cosmic-rays.html
electron plasma frequency
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/plasma/Plasmahtml/node6.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_oscillation