Bytes from the Bean by Joe Manning 2-11-9912:00AM / Thursday, February 11, 1999
Last December, my friend Art Boucher passed away. He was interviewed in Steeples. Art was neglected and mistreated as a child, worked for many years under very dangerous conditions in the Hoosac Tunnl, and lost his wife to cancer at a young age. He was left with four young children to raise. Despite all this, he built his own house, sent all his children to college, and became a successful building contractor.
Art was modest and proud, and a suprisingly strong and vibrant man even at the age of eighty, when i met him. I was very lucky to have known him. Below, you will find excerpts from his interview in Steeples
"My parents came down to Winooski, VT, from Canada in the 1890's. There were woolen and cotton mills up there. Things got overcrowded, I guess, so they came down here. Most of my family was into woolen and cotton, weavers and spool fixers, except my father, who was a carpenter. My mother, I don't know from the age of four. She had a nervous breakdown, and they put her in a hospital, and I never see her again. The family broke up. There was six of us including twins. One of my aunts took the twins. My grandmother took one of the younger boys, my other brother stayed with my father, my sister went to Springfield, and I was left in between.
I was kicked around from here to there, relative to relative. As long as they could stand me, I stayed with them. When I was six, I was goin' to the French school in North Adams, Notre Dame. This teacher took a liking to me. I'd go to school, and I'd be covered with bug bites, my pants had holes in them, and my shirts were dirty. The teacher would take me out in the hallway and wash my feet because they stunk so much. I also went to the Hoosac Tunnel School, and the Cheshire School, and the Adams School.
I lived with my grandmother from the age of six till twelve. That was in Cheshire on a farm on top of the mountain. My grandmother hated me 'cause she had to take me. She used to treat me like a dog. My uncle said years later that when they would have a family gathering at my grandmother's, I was the one that had to go outside and work, and if there was any food left, I'd get it. Then, it never bothered me. I just thought that was the way it was. If you don't have all this stuff you have today, you don't miss it. When I was out at the farm, I had a pair of pants, a sweatsuit, a shirt, and a jacket. That's all I owned. We never had a telephone or electricity or running water.
I was treated like a slave. I'd get up at five-thirty and go out and milk cows and go to school and come back home and feed the pigs and chickens and do hayin'. I used to go out and find where the chickens had laid some eggs. Sometimes, I'd find thirty or forty, and they were rotten. My grandmother would cook those for me. That's what I would get. And in the morning for breakfast, I'd get broken pieces of toast. If my youngest brother was there, he'd get a nice piece of toast all buttered. My lunch was always a head cheese sandwich. I'd always throw it in the garbage. I used to walk five miles to school every day from the top of the mountain down into Cheshire. In the winter time, they'd have a bad storm, and the teacher would tell me to go home at noon, and I wouldn't get home till five o'clock. I'd have to go up through some fields where the snow would drift thirty-five feet.
When I went to Drury, I lived on Central Avenue. The house was condemned. We had no windows, we had no heat. We had a little stove in the kitchen. My brother was stealin' electricity from the neighbors, so we could have a bulb in the kitchen. I was living with my father. He wasn't working. He was a good man. He smoked too much, three or four packs a day. I don't know where he got his money. He was a carpenter, but there was no work in those days, '29, '30, '31. One year was so bad, I went deer huntin', caught a deer, came home, and we cooked the deer with rotten tomatoes. That's what we ate all winter long. And we'd go down and steal coal behind the Windsor Print Works to keep warm. That's the way we spent the winters in those days.
When I got out of high school, I went to work as a laborer on the railroad, the Boston & Maine. That was March 25, 1936. Most of our jobs was inspectin' bridges and culverts. Bein' the war, they wouldn't let us tear up the tracks. Everything had to be done from the inside. So we'd crawl seventy-five or eighty feet under the tracks. The culverts would be caved in, and we'd have to refill 'em from the inside, with the water running through it at the same time. So, if the pumps failed, you had to get the hell outta there fast. The mason part mostly was jacking the stones back in place. One job we had about a hundred feet underground; we had to jack four foot pipes down through underneath the ground. Then we had to get inside and dig it out, and they'd keep jackin' the pipes as we went along.
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 fifteen hundred 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.
I've walked through the big tunnel many nights. When we were stationed over in Hoosac Tunnel, we'd leave eleven or twelve at night, and we'd walk through the tunnel without a light. If it wasn't foggy, you could see the trains comin'. When you're in the tunnel, you can feel the trains comin'. When it first starts in, it feels like something pounding you on the chest when they push the air ahead of them. So we would find a place to get off to the side. But in the tunnel, when you're walkin' in the dark, you think you're walkin' in a straight line. Next thing you know, you run into the wall. It would take an hour or so to walk through. It's about five miles.
They had track walkers at the time that went through the tunnel, and their job was to inspect the rails. They were all forty-foot rails, and where they would put them together, they would break. Their job was to walk from the town of Hoosac Tunnel all the way through to North Adams and then back again. They had three men. That's all you had to do, walk back and forth in one night and check it. Finally, the three guys got killed almost in the same year. We went in one morning and found one guy's shoes. Of course, we knew he was dead. He came right out of his shoes when the train hit him. And then the other guys got so scared, that they would sing all the way through, just to have some noise when they were walking. That was one job I never would've taken. It was a very lonely job.
There's been so many times I almost got killed, it isn't funny. I remember in the '38 flood when the culvert was blocked, and it was backin' the water up into the tunnel, which caused the whole mountain to slide. I was working there with the crane, and they told me to go down and pull out this big tree that was in the culvert. So I goes down there, and I tell 'em to pull it up, and as they did, the water behind it almost sucked me right down through that tunnel. Another time, I was on a washout, and I was in charge of the lights. We worked night and day on these washouts, 'cause you had to get the train through. I'm carryin' a whole box of bulbs on my shoulder, and I'm walking up the track. I knew a train was coming, but like a damn fool, I'm walking in the tracks, and the train almost hit me. They didn't even know I was there.
There's a big wooden tower up on the Mohawk Trail. Only half of it's left. I built the tower when I was workin' there. I had seven or eight guys with me. That's when we were using white lead. They talk about lead poisoning. We had five tons of white lead puttin' in the joints, and we were eating this stuff with our sandwiches and everything. It's never bothered me. Even on the farm where I lived as a kid, the pipe that fed the water into the house was a lead pipe that was three-quarters of a mile long.
Whenever we worked in New Hampshire or Vermont or New York, we'd get a whole penny raise an hour. That was big money then. We had an apartment in Greenfield for two dollars and a half a week. We spent two or three dollars a week on groceries. I went out and bought a car for two hundred dollars. I was payin' on that. By the time the week was done, we'd have a dime or fifteen cents left. My wife says to me one day, "If I can get in for a dime, can I go to the movies?" I says, "Sure." So she put on a short skirt and white socks and got in for a dime. I always said, I never had a wife, I had an angel. We were married twenty-two years."
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Email Joe at: manningfamily@rcn.com. |
