When my mother was a little girl of about four years old, she lost her own mother to tuberculosis, a common and deadly disease that was widespread in the mid-1910s. As a result, my grandfather, Paul T. Charbonneau, suddenly needed to find new living arrangements for his four children since, as a railroad laborer, he had but limited means to properly nurture and take care of his four offspring.
So, my mother was shipped off to a trusted family called the Majors (not les Majeurs) that managed to nurture her well enough so that, decades later, even in the 1950s, Simone (Major) Dorval (she had married Georges Dorval in the interim) remained a good and loving friend. She lived about one mile away from our house, not far from Hovey Square. Maybe, friendships formed under tough situations last the longest?
In the Depression (1929 – 1939), stranded persons, sometimes, found a
convenient living arrangement by moving in with a neighbor or a close relative. Every other family in our Lower Centralville neighborhood provided room and board for ailing and aging relatives, who, otherwise, might have found themselves on skid-row or in a makeshift shelter. This generosity allowed orphan children a semblance of safety and home life. My mother benefited from such hospitality for a few years until my grandfather – we called him Pépère – found a new wife called Elizabeth. She, then, became our new Mémère, but that happened years before my physical appearance on the scene in 1939.
These were very hard times for the majority of Lowell families just as the local textile companies were struggling to compete with similar firms in North and South Carolina. There was clear writing on the wall that Lowell’s glory days of steady work for every able-bodied person, male or female, who was willing to work from 6 A.M to 8 P.M., Monday through Friday, and half days on Saturday for a modest salary would soon be pure fantasy for many. Times, they were hard and despairing for the unemployed masses.
The system’s economic disaster and its psychological repercussions, which the whole country would feel with full force in 1929 after the Wall Street Crash shed a foreshadow of distress, doubt and dismay on Lowell’s main streets and side alleys, a decade or more earlier than on Wall Street’s suave, grand avenues.
The city needed help, and quickly! But, would the City Fathers working closely with the remaining investors from the textile world conjure up several plans for an economic, and, hopefully, a technical revival to successfully employ the existing manual labor-force that had, once, transformed East Chelmsford into the dynamic engine of industry known throughout the world as “Lowell, the Spindle City on the Merrimack?”
Such expectations were alluded to, years later, by sociologists and economists, who examined the city’s many woes of the period. It remains a difficult issue, even today, on how to revitalize previous, economic centers such as Ohio’s industries and Michigan’s auto plants, today.
Who, then, in Lowell had the needed insight to make the essential preparations and changes for a more hopeful future? Such persons may have existed, but exciting visions for future progress usually take many years, and sometimes, decades to materialize.
What does one do in the meantime when the city’s infrastructure – roads,
buildings, bridges, water pumping stations, etc, – was going to hell in a hand basket? Where does the average person – this individual was once called “the man in the street” – find real peace of mind when food and housing for the family was a daily concern?
This, then, was the social/economic background upon which my extended family members such as grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins based their personal opinions, attitudes and beliefs. By osmosis, naturally, their point of view became my own, too. Immigrant groups throughout the world form strong family bounds through shared religious beliefs, language, customs, ceremonies, and political affiliations.
This attitude is, especially, true when they live amongst other cultural groups that espouse different attitudes. Maybe, as a result, the former Irish, Greek, Polish, Jewish, ….. , and Lithuanian minorities clustered around themselves and remained safe, but very isolated. In this manner, they could protect themselves from the challenging influences of
more established outsiders, whose beliefs, goals and attitudes came into conflict with their innate values coming from towns and villages from the Old Country.
My wide network of local relatives represented for me a valuable and practical resource on how to survive within the city’s many sub-neighborhoods. Being, often, a generation older, these relatives had grown up through the “school of hard-knocks”. Their “street-smarts” were like a textbook of practical knowledge needed by any immigrant, whatever the flavor, in managing the city streets.
As a puny, ten-year-old lad from Centralville, I might not have known the proper etiquette expected from a stranger walking up or down Market Street in the Greek Acre part of town. But, the handbook of local “street-smarts” could point out the recommended diplomacy to use to avoid a possible, cultural misunderstanding.
“Be invisible, quiet and respectful of others” received high acclaims as a first recommendation – certainly, a good start. Kicking up a fuss as an outsider in foreign territory would quickly mark you as a trouble-maker needing some corrective attention from the local authority figures such as rough and tumble kids in the neighborhood.
Everyone in the textile town needed a personalized users’ guide to civility. The mini-bible of accepted “street-smarts” – a printed version has never been unearth, yet, by Massachusetts archaeologists, however – served that purpose through retold, family stories shared from grandparents to mother and father and all those uncles and aunts, everywhere.
All these respected “dos and don’ts” lead to some quiet charm throughout the City of Lights (a beautiful name we gave ourselves), thus, making the lives of local reporters for the Lowell Sun less exciting than more horrific challenges available at the Boston tabloids.
What streets were okay for a Franco-American kid to walk down and what were the “lessons learned” when dealing with the multi-ethnic cauldron of the city, i.e., the once great, but now practically shut-down town?
[Stop for now – more later]