Been to Hoosick Falls lately?

If not you’d better hurry because the village is seriously considering dissolving itself as a unit of government. The problem as I understand it is that the village has been experiencing negative growth for a long time (the present population of 3500 is half of what it was in 1910) and there is no longer enough revenue to provide basic services. Don’t know what affect that would have on the physical village or its inhabitants but I hope it wouldn’t change because it’s a fun place to visit.

We were in Hoosick Falls because we’d driven from Brattleboro Vermont to Berdnardston Massachusetts for an early breakfast, then drove to Bennington Vermont to check out the museums and the Battle Monument after which we had brunch, and decided that it would be cool to eat a late lunch in New York. We chose Hoosick Falls mostly because it was close, but also because we’d learned it was the home and burial place of Grandma Moses (more on that later).

Approaching Hoosick Falls from the east on Route 7 will take you past the Big Moose Deli. We didn’t stop, but there were a ton of cars parked outside and lots of photos on the internet so I assume it’s a popular tourist attraction. What it does is create the expectation that maybe Hoosick Falls is a fun place to be. And we did enjoy our visit though I think we brought most of the fun with us.

While eating lunch at the Falls Diner on the outskirts of town we inquired about the location of the tourist information center: a sign on route 22 indicated there was one, and about the location of the grave of Grandma Moses. We pretty much got blank stares for responses. Undaunted, after finishing lunch we set out in quest of Grandma’s remains.

The Hoosick Falls downtown area presents a pleasing appearance. Streets and sidewalks are clean and the building exteriors are well maintained. It doesn’t at all look like a dying town. But where was Grandma Moses? People on the streets were familiar with the name but nothing beyond that. Having driven through the town twice we were about to give up when I spotted a senior center. Surely seniors would know about Grandma…after all she died in 1961, not all that long ago. I asked the woman at the desk if she could direct me to anything in town related to Grandma Moses. After a few moments of hemming and hawing she admitted she vaguely remembered hearing the name. But she was young. She more than made up for her lack of knowledge by taking me into a large room where a group of about a dozen seniors were engaged in various activities. The young woman announced that “…this man is from Peru and looking for anything to do with Grandma Moses.” Silence. Everyone was searching the faces of the others, apparently in the hope that someone would know something. After a few moments Paul stood and volunteered that he knew where she was buried because his parents were “….only a few plots away.” That broke the ice and there followed about 10 minutes of warm conversation. Finally Paul offered to show us the way to the cemetery and we turned to go. I will never forget the comment a woman shouted out as we were leaving…”Come back and visit us sometime! We don’t know much but we’re friendly!”

We followed Paul to the Maple Grove Cemetery where he led us to the grave. Both the headstone and a commemorative plague had accumulated a coating of mold and were difficult to read. We happened to have a brush in our car and used it to remove the mold as best we could.  The cemetery is located on a hill and Grandma’s grave appears to be on the highest point. Paul used the view to point out various buildings and places and to talk about the glory days of the town.

Just one block from the cemetery is the Ice Kreme Kafe. It was a hot afternoon and after the work of cleaning Grandma’s headstone (I wonder how many people can say that) we stopped for a cone. Maybe it’s the clock, or perhaps what looks to be an old railroad station sign. But for whatever reason this photo is one of my favorites. Hoosick Falls was a memorable experience. 

About Bellows Falls Vermont

We began to notice the difference shortly after entering Bellows Falls from the south on highway 5. We had left the town of Brattleboro, where we were based during our recent visit to Vermont only a brief 30 minutes ago. Though the towns are only 20 miles apart, it is much more than distance that separates the two.

Brattleboro, like most small New England towns has its history and has attempted to capitalize on that history while encouraging modern growth. That it has done that successfully is shown in the downtown area where the old stands alongside and merges with an eclectic, urbane, cosmopolitan atmosphere reflected in its buildings and inhabitants. Much of the literature available at the welcome center and chamber of commerce stresses the existence of a “sizable and hip artist community.” Walking the streets it’s not difficult to equate the town’s culture with parts of Boston located only 100 miles to the east. Brattleboro speaks of a past and a present. Bellows Falls whispers only of the past.

We were in Vermont both to pursue our ancestors and to explore the offerings of the state. This photo of the Bellows Falls ‘square’ circa 1908 is what our grandfather would have seen when he arrived in 1910, having decided to leave forever the tiny village of Jaskiewicze in what was then Russia and today is Belarus. Grandfather Michael was coming to join his brother John who had arrived a year earlier along with hundreds of other immigrants to work at the huge International Paper complex. In 1910 the economy of Bellows Falls was growing quickly and was based on largely unskilled labor. Beside the paper mill there was the Vermont Farm Machine Company…a world leader with patents on several types of farm machinery, and many other employers eager to hire the immigrants arriving daily at the train station.

The new arrivals needed housing which resulted in an explosion of three, four and even five-level square multi-family buildings being erected throughout the town. Most of these still exist today in various states of repair or disrepair. In this photo is a house where our grandparents lived in 1917 - 1918.

Bellows Falls was a healthy and vibrant if somewhat raw community but all of that changed abruptly when the paper mill decided not to deal with a labor strike and instead closed its facility. That closure had a mushrooming effect and before long the Bellows Falls immigrants were forced to look to other communities for employment.  In our grandfather’s case he moved to Windsor to work at the Cone Machine Company, and it was here that our father was born. For reasons we can only guess at the family moved back to Bellows Falls two years later.

Beside the economic woes in 1918 an influenza epidemic ravaged most of southern Vermont. Our grandmother Teofila was one of its victims. She died on October 26, 1918 at the age of 25 but not before giving birth to three sons. For me one of the biggest highlights of this visit was the moment we discovered her grave marker at St. Charles Cemetery in Westminster Vermont. We were also able to locate most of the houses they lived in; the church they attended and the factories grandfather worked at.

This is the Bellows Falls square today. There is a different clock tower; the streets are paved and the hoop skirts and horses are gone but our grandparents would have recognized it. And they probably would have noticed the lack of activity. Walking main street in Bellows Falls is like walking through a museum. It feels like a representation of what used to be. There is an occasional person on the street and a car passing by. There is a Subway restaurant and a couple of other small businesses open, but the feeling is that they are the reluctant ‘last blooms’ on the tree among the many vacant store fronts and are waiting to fall. The welcome center was closed on two consecutive days and no one we asked could tell us when it would be open. Even the people in the businesses we entered seem to be just going through the motions; showing little interest in their visitors.

There are many things of interest to see and do in southern Vermont and we spent many enjoyable moments discovering them. Some of them I would like to revisit and spend more time exploring. While Bellows Falls was a necessary and enjoyable stop on our tour it is not on that list. 

Mother…the Color of Life

That’s the name of the art exhibition that is currently showing at Chiclayo’s Cultural Center through June 14th. The building has the appearance of a remodeled hacienda that had been carefully maintained.

There are three smallish exhibition halls that for this showing contained paintings and sculptures from local artists representing the communities of Chiclayo, Ferreñafe, Trujillo, Cajamarca and Piura.

The exhibition theme is intended to be a celebration of Mother’s Day, though to my untrained eye in some of the more expressionist paintings it was difficult to see a connection between what I was looking at and the honoring of mothers. 

The photos are scanned from the brochure handed out at the door and unfortunately do not accurately depict the vibrancy of the colors and contrast. 

Comparing this photo I took with its counterpart above in the brochure will illustrate the difference.

I was impressed with all the works on display, but there was one painting that I returned to several times during our tour. There was something about the woman’s expression that spoke to me. Maribel claimed to appreciate it also, though I don’t believe she did. We stopped at the administration office on our way out and got the phone number of the artist. We phoned him and a day later met at a restaurant for lunch. In discussing his painting he explained that the woman was his mother; that she had had a hard life and that both her expression and the surrounding symbolism  was intended to portray her courage, strength and dignity as she faced her difficulties and carried out her responsibilities without complaint. I think that’s what I saw….that’s what she was saying to me.

I made him an offer. There was some discussion. We shook hands. He chuckled and said, “I can’t believe I’m selling my mother.” I think his mom will approve.

Looking Back

Three years ago I started to write a memoir. The purpose was to hopefully help my grandchildren to better understand who I am, and to try to preserve, at least for myself, the memories of people, places and events that no longer exist as I knew them. A couple of weeks ago I completed the first draft. It consists of 312 pages of rambling, disconnected, disjointed words, sentences and paragraphs completely lacking in literary form or merit. But despite its crudeness I think it comes close to accomplishing my purpose. It took three years because frequently I walked away from it; deciding that what I had written for the past hour was garbage and the entire thing was trash and I should tap the delete key and be done with it. But I could not bring myself to delete it, and each time after several months had passed I’d take a hesitant look at it; decide that it really wasn’t too bad and could perhaps be salvaged. And so I plodded on until it ‘felt’ finished. I have printed it, had it spiral bound and placed it out of the way in a desk drawer. At some future time…I don’t know when, I’ll pick it up again, read it from cover to cover, and at that time if I think it’s worth the effort begin the lengthy process of rewriting…rearranging, adding, eliminating, expanding and contracting. In other words, as Stephan King has labeled it, I'll do the housecleaning. Finishing it would be solely for my own satisfaction. It will never be published and only a handful of people at best will read it before it’s consigned to a landfill somewhere.  But even if no one reads it, it was worth the effort, in part because it set free hundreds of moments in my life that had been locked away in the recesses of my mind.

In the 1940s coal was delivered to our house once monthly. Each home had a room in the basement called the “coal bin.” It had a window accessible from the street where the coal truck would park and lower a chute into the room. Two to three workers would pour coal from buckets onto the chute. I remember how black the clothes and faces of the men were, and how coal dust settled on everything in and outside of our house.

To get Ice for our ice box we put a sign in the window. On one side of the sign were the numbers 25 and 50. On the other the numbers were 75 and 100. Depending on how you placed the sign told the delivery truck how many pounds of ice you wanted. Later, when things settled down after the war most of the homes in our neighborhood bought refrigerators and ice delivery stopped. We didn’t have a refrigerator so it was my job to take my coaster wagon to the ice house about eight blocks away to get ice when we needed it.

When my parents decided we could afford a telephone mom went to the neighbor and used their phone to call Ma Bell at the telephone company. The person who answered asked if we wanted a desk or wall phone, and if we wanted a private or semi-private line. It cost less for a semi-private line so that’s what we chose. It was that simple. Two days later we had a black rotary dial phone and anxiously waited for it to ring. If it rang just once the call was for someone else…you never knew who you shared the line with. When it rang twice the call was for us. If you wanted to make a call and heard someone talking when you picked up the phone, you hung up and tried later. To this day I remember that phone number.

School environment was completely different in those days. Teachers and other authority figures – doctors, priests, lawyers, police, etc were respected. Misbehavior in school was rare and limited to petty infractions with sometimes amusing consequences. For example if you were caught chewing gum, you were made to stand in front of the class with the gum on your nose until class ended. If didn’t bother us guys but the girls were usually embarrassed.  

And then there was the ragman. Toward the end of the 1940s horses had pretty much disappeared from Milwaukee’s streets. There were still a few horse drawn milk delivery wagons but if you heard the unmistakable ‘clop-clop’ sound of iron on asphalt you knew that the ragman was in the neighborhood. He would announce his presence with a singsong cry of…”Aaaaa raggggs.”  We kids would always rush up to the horse and pet it while asking the ragman, “What’s the horse’s name?”  Apparently most horses were named “Getouttahere!” If our mothers had rags to sell the ragman would weigh them and pay a few pennies per pound. The woman always complained among themselves that the ragman’s scale was wrong and he was cheating them, but they’d be out there again the next time he came through.

The street in Milwaukee that for many years was my neighborhood, and the house next to Linder’s grocery store where we lived and had coal and ice delivered. This is a recent photo but nothing has really changed in these past seventy years. The Lindner store is long gone (I altered the photo to try to recreate it) and the residents are mostly Hispanic now, but the street, houses and trees are pretty much the same. Often my mother would send me to the store to buy some small item she had run out of…butter, bread and other things. I distinctly remember her giving me ten cents to buy lunch meat for sandwiches. Ten cents! And if I asked him, Ed Lindner would give me a large chunk of beef liver so me and my friends could go crabbin’ at Jackson Park lagoon. If I caught enough crabs I’d take them home and mom would boil them with some ingredients I’ve forgotten and after they cooled, me, my sister Joyce and our parents would sit at the kitchen table and peel and eat them.  There wasn’t much meat on them but they sure were good eating.

Those are just a few of the times in my life I’d forgotten about and through writing a memoir was able to experience them again. Thinking of them warmed my heart and brought a smile to me face. I don’t think being old is necessary to write a memoir. I do think that having the maturity to objectively look at the past and your role in it is crucial because not all memories are pleasant. Like everyone, I’ve had moments of elation and despair; triumph and failure. And like everyone, I’ve done things I’m proud of and others I’d rather forget. In that vein there were some things that were painful to write about but I considered necessary to present a balanced picture of myself to my grandchildren. Other memories were left buried simply because they were too personal to write about.

In looking for information to fill gaps in my memory I discovered what historians already know…memory is the worst tool we have for accurately recording and recalling events. Often I discovered that I remembered things as I wanted them to be, not as my research later proved them to be. It’s hard to give up long held beliefs when confronted with evidence to the contrary. That’s why I say maturity; as well as courage is necessary to write an objective memoir.

Writing a memoir has proven to be much more than I’d anticipated. I was expecting a purely intellectual process involving the arrangement of numbers, dates, places and people in some logical order. I was not prepared to sometimes be put through an emotional wringer, being forced to continuously ask myself “why?”…why did I act as I did…why did I make the choices I made? Why and how did I form the beliefs, values and perceptions that I did? In being confronted with those questions I developed a different, and I hope wiser perspective of the environment I lived in, the people I knew and more importantly, how I became the person I am today.

Managual Restaurant…A Review

It is a foregone conclusion that on Mother’s Day it will be very difficult to get prompt seating at any reputable restaurant in Chiclayo, so Maribel and I were surprised when we decided to try a new restaurant in our neighborhood and found it to be only half-full.

Managual opened April 27th and based on the quality of furnishings and large seating capacity in three separate dining areas apparently intends to be a contender in the Chiclayo restaurant scene. The interior has a blue-white nautical décor of the Amazon River variety. A connection to the Amazon was further confirmed when the waiter who promptly seated us served compliments of the house siete raices, a liquor common in Amazon jungle towns such as Iquitos, Tarapoto and Pucallpa. Also, listed on the menu is camu camu…one of my favorite Iquitos drinks. There were an unusually large number of employees dressed in white shirts and black pants and seemingly experienced in their duties. So far this was looking like a pretty good choice.

Maribel ordered Causa Ferreñafana while I selected grilled fish. While we were waiting for our food the restaurant gradually filled to capacity, and we watched waiters place additional tables and chairs in aisle areas, making it difficult for staff and patrons to move freely. We began to hear people who had arrived before us complain about not receiving their food. Maribel and I glanced uneasily at each other.

Exactly forty-five minutes after ordering Maribel’s meal was served. It was attractively presented and Maribel said the flavor was not “wow” but okay. The quantity was surprisingly sparse. Five minutes later a woman whom we assumed was either the manager or owner approached our table and asked if I had ordered fish. Five minutes after that a waiter approached and asked the same question. Maribel and I glanced uneasily at each other.

At the one-hour mark, after Maribel had finished her meal my order was served by the same waiter who had seated us. He apologized for the delay, attributing it to Mother’s Day while gesturing at the crowd. I responded that the restaurant was only half-full when we arrived, and that one hour service was not acceptable under any circumstances.  And what was even more puzzling was that two uniformed employees were outside and kept urging passersby to enter even though they could not properly seat nor serve the people already inside.

I had ordered grilled fish fillet with white rice and fried potatoes. What I received was approximately two ounces of fish, a cup of rice and three tiny pieces of yucca. When I finished my meal we half-joked about where to go for lunch.

I can understand a new restaurant being unprepared for a major holiday. That alone would not deter me from going back. It's the skimpy quantities combined with higher prices, and being served other than what was listed on the menu that will keep us from returning. Their advertisement claims they're open 25 hours. I would hope that they use that extra hour to take a fresh look at their operation.

Ushering in Mother’s Day at Todos Vuelven

There were Mother’s Day celebrations last night all over Chiclayo. Our group chose to attend a party sponsored by Todos Vuelven, a restaurant that opened recently near our apartment. The advertisement said the party would begin at 9:00pm and conclude at 5:00am. We arrived at 10:30pm and were the first people there.

The reason we chose this location was because they advertised a type of Peruvian music known as vals. The Pisco sour is regarded as the national drink of Peru, and if there is a national music, vals would have to be considered as a contender. Just as it did last night, hearing it brings out a high degree of emotion in Peruvians young and old as evidenced by lusty hand clapping, swaying body movement and a near fanatical expression of patriotism on their faces.

The music began at midnight when about half the tables were occupied. At 1:00am the place was packed and the staff was placing tables and chairs outside on the sidewalk. Though the prices for food and beverage were high, the service was excellent and the festive atmosphere created by the music and patrons was well worth the cost.

The roses given to each mother was a nice touch. Happy Mother’s Day to Marta, Magali and Maribel, and to Joyce, Cindy, Jan, Natalia, Carol, Mary, Rocio, Nancy and all mothers everywhere.

Edith went Shopping

We’ve discussed in previous posts the poor circumstances Edith and her family live in. Given her situation we wondered what Edith would do if told she could go on a shopping spree with what to her would seem like an unlimited budget. We had the opportunity this morning to find out.

Edith Fuentes works at a store in Chiclayo from 9:00am to 9:00pm seven days per week. She earns $203 per month. She leaves for work at 7:30am and returns home at 11:00pm so really has no personal time. She asked for and was given permission by her employer to take the morning off so we could take her shopping. We met her at the Makro store in Chiclayo at 8:00am. When we began Edith was at first hesitant, looking at us for approval before placing each item on the cart, but when she realized we were serious about no limitation she shopped quickly and methodically. We didn’t stop her…she stopped herself. After placing a fresh chicken on the cart she firmly announced, “No mas.” These are the items Edith purchased:

Rice...........................108 lbs..........$35

Sugar.........................110 lbs..........$29

Beans........................22 lbs.............$16

Noodles.....................22 lbs.............$11

Peas..........................22 lbs.............$12

Oats...........................11 lbs.............$7

Milk............................24 cans..........$19

Peaches....................3 cans............$18

Tuna...........................6 cans............$11

Chicken.....................1 whole..........$6
Cooking oil................5 liters............$12

Laundry soap............10 lbs.............$12

Toilet paper...............24 rolls...........$4

Candy........................1 bag.............$1

Juice glasses............6 pack............$1      

                                   Total.............$194

Depending on where a person lives and what their circumstances are this list may not look very exciting. To a family like Edith’s, where money is scarce and regular meals are not always a sure thing these items represent a bonanza. For Edith they also represent nearly a month’s wage.

Before delivering the food to Edith’s house we stopped at the school in Casa De Madera to drop off the new dry-erase board we’d promised, along with the hardware to mount it. The teachers assured us that one of the village men would have it in place for classes on Monday.

As the truck neared Edith’s house we saw Leslie and Janina excitedly jumping up and down and waving signs to greet us. It’s a nice gesture that we appreciate.

With Edith’s approval we’re going to hold on to the remainder of the money donated for the Fuentes family while we explore the possibility over the next few days of using it for seed money to raise the needed cash to get Julio out of prison. We’re going to look at raffles, bake sales and any other fund raising activity we can think of. If this turns out not to be practicable we’ll give Edith the remainder of the donated money. That’s not normally our practice but we trust her to use the money in the best interests of her family.

To those who donated…thank you. You’ve fed a family of seven for better than a month, and for awhile at least have given peace of mind to Edith and her husband. You can feel justifiably proud of what you’ve accomplished.