As I was growing up in Pawtucketville and, later, in Centralville, my inquisitive ears often picked up the tempo and rhythm of the moment, either in English but more often in French, by judiciously overhearing conversations taking place in the spacious, family kitchen where the rotary Bell telephone connected us to the events of the wide, wide world. I still recall our telephone number as: GL-20602 where GL stood for Glenview.
Our Old-fashion Kitchen Area
It was in this culinary palace of many cupboards, shelves, pots and pans, dinnerware, two sinks, an old icebox, a pedal-operated Singer sewing machine, an RCA short-wave radio plus a large table in its center that most of the serious business of the day was conducted. Symbolically speaking, the spiritual altar of culinary preparations rested in the yellow, enamel-covered, black, wrought-iron stove, which my brother Bob and I fired up regularly through periodic infusions (several times a week) of Hafner’s heating oil.
The care and feeding of an oil-fired stove, back in the 1950s, required that the two Bolduc boys adopt a disciplined and time-proven protocol that consisted of eight, fail-safe steps in the operation. Bob and I had each learned the correct way of handling this task in the early days of the 1950s when our father was still alive.
Replenishing the Oil Supply – A Dark Cellar Adventure
a) Carefully remove the empty, five gallon (was it five or ten gallons?) heavy, glass bottle from its mount in the rear section of the stove
b) With a flashlight in hand, carry this glass container down the cellar stairs and through the locked door of our designated portion of the cellar
c) Place the opening of the glass bottle under the faucet of our 50 to 70 gallon storage barrel, which the Haffner guys had filled a week or two before
d) Open the faucet and fill the container & then close that faucet
e) Repeat these four steps in reverse order and claim victory upstairs
Success at an Early Age
So, Bob and I, at six and ten years of age, respectively, learned early in life that lending a helping hand in a family situation was excellent training for reaching some success in the big world out there. Working together for a common cause was an early, take-home message from my youth.
More on Our Tenement’s Layout
In a real sense, the other rooms in our tenement, which included two bedrooms, a parlor, a den – sometimes, a temporary bedroom – plus my mother’s hairdressing parlor played a very secondary role in providing harmony to our home. The front room, which I have called a den, had a tongue-in-groove wooden floor that would be the envy of any homeowner.
Bills, Bills and More Bills
After several years of trying to digest and understand the daily happenings of my surroundings, I, finally, decided that the main reason for our stalemate at home hinged on our never quite having enough money in the monthly budget to pay all the bills such as rent, groceries, heating oil, electricity, phone, water, ice, etc. Even when my Dad was working at four jobs, one full-time and three part-time, and my Mom was doing permanents, hair styling, etc. and Bob and I were each bringing in about $3.50 per week, we barely had enough for even a minor seasonal change in personal apparel. Our common family physical exercise program rested strictly on belt-tightening for all.
However, the reader ought not assume that our budgetary shortcomings were quite unusual for the times. Many, if not most, immigrant families in Lowell in the time period of 1939 to 1960 could easily report a similar story. The local economy never sparkled with any new and interesting job opportunities. Times were tough and moments of discouragement were many.
Personal Thoughts and Early Conclusions
As a growing lad interested in the world around me, I often wondered why any adult (child labor was no longer allowed) would take a job in one of the several remaining textile and leather factories dotting the city’s landscape. Also, how could a single mother possibly raise a small family – even only one child – from the proceeds of her working at the Bon Marche, Pollards or at one of several 5 & 10 cent stores in Kearney Square?
The socioeconomic underpinnings behind the city’s economy really puzzled me. Of course, as a ten-year-old boy, I never used these big words that usually only appear in serious texts on economics. However, as a Franco-American lad with a strong sentimental attachment to Dicken’s Christmas Carol, I could readily recall those words of admonishment: “The Poor You Will Always Have with You”. Life in this post-industrial town often helped us all to reflect upon and recall these noble sentiments.
Changes in the City
Many of my friends and schoolmates had fathers working, for a modest salary, in the bleak trappings of the city’s then decaying, industrial structures. Some of these buildings had been transformed into warehouses, low-rent public housing (early on), retail stores and, in a special case, one became the famous Giant Store on the corner of Dutton and Broadway. This restructuring of city assets, I found quite interesting since it represented a strong socioeconomic trend that was happening in much of Massachusetts’ industries in that period. But, it was also sad.
However, the mothers of the kids in my neighborhood usually were stay-at-home moms, which, I believe, tended to provide these youngsters with a reassuring place to come home to after five hours of school work. Psychologically speaking, perhaps, the late 1940s and all of the 1950s produced parental, home conditions, which had a positive effect on a young person’s sense of belonging, which is needed for a stable community setting? In contrast, that situation began to change in the 1960s when the two-earner family appeared on the scene.
Neighborhood Success Stories – Occasional but Rare
How would any person living in our mostly Franco-American, extended, Lower Centralville neighborhood, which measured roughly three miles by seven miles in area, get an idea of the financial success of its different inhabitants?
The Lowell Sun – An Introduction into Socio-Economics
Well, as a kid delivering daily editions of the Lowell Sun for nearly five years, in the central portion of this landscape, you easily develop a visceral gut feeling for the probable, week-to-week cash flows into those homes. The residences of my customers could be classified into one of the following types:
a) Modest house with small yard & homeowner with a car/truck in a garage
b) Large residence, private owner and several cars in a paved driveway
c) Two-family, converted house – actually two separate tenements and two cars
d) Multi-family, three/four story tenement block with some street parking
Reminder to the Reader: In the late 1940s and early 1950s (the Truman and Eisenhower years) very few ordinary, working-class people owned a personal vehicle of any sort. Doing face-to-face transactions often meant walking to a store or required bus transportation. Also, taxis were available.
As a young business person, the newsboy or news-girl needed to assess the financial worthiness of each customer knowing full well that a “dead beat” customer meant a direct financial loss to the carrier. The working agreement between the Lowell Sun and the boy/girl delivering the papers was crystal clear.
Basically, that contract ran as follows:
a) You, the carrier, must ascertain the fiscal responsibility of each customer on your route and, when satisfied, you would then proceed to order the daily, truck delivery of that number of papers for the coming week.
b) We, the Lowell Sun, will make those scheduled deliveries as promised, and we expect that, next Saturday morning, you will pay us the agreed-upon receipts from all of your collections, which normally happened on Thursday or Fridays evenings.
If a customer missed paying for his/her newspaper for a week then you, the carrier, were deprived of a portion of your total returns for that week. Each carrier was, in effect, a private contractor and not an employee of the firm.
If a customer experienced a temporary, budgetary challenge, you were, naturally, encouraged to keep delivering papers to that home while fervently hoping that the local job market might soon open up providing work for that “troubled customer”. In that sticky situation, a young business person had no need to read Samuelson’s 1948 textbook on Economics to decide how best to quickly handle this frustrating dilemma.
Brief Summary of Local Wealth Distribution
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, my newspaper customers were usually families (about 50 plus cases) distributed geographically on Ludlam, Cumberland, Dana, Lilley, Hildreth and Ennell streets or avenues that were financially committed to a hand-to-mouth lifestyle similar to that of their antecedents from home countries, far away. These immigrant persons usually chose to live as tenants in dwellings owned by more prosperous others.
In terms of the residence types (see chart above) that were cataloged, the more well-to-do half of these people ended up as renters in modified-former-single-family homes (case “c” above) while the less fortunate half (case “d” above) chose to rent living space in three/four story, grey tenement blocks that dotted the neighborhood as visual reminders of those “good old days” going back to the Great Depression and World War 2.
For myself, I tried to treat everyone as equals in our common, joint, social experiment called: “Daily Life in the Big City” where day-to-day experiences taught us all how to coexist well- enough in our complicated, multi-cultural world.
However, I must admit that being in the presence of architectural excellence, displayed occasionally on my daily, neighborhood treks managed to elevate my spirits and hopes so that, maybe, one day, I, too, would be a happy homeowner in these parts. In this case, categories “a” and “b” in the above list remained my secret and fervent hope for the coming days of future success.
So, in closing, maybe, the Lowell Sun corporation was trying to teach my brother, Bob, and me that the children and grandchildren of immigrants also have a special place and function in the workings of the Big City?