 Hello, welcome to Key News. I'm Jim Lusko, the Executive Director of Amherst Media. Today I'm really pleased to bring back an old friend, a production producer of a documentary a few years ago in 2012 that was done out of here in conjunction with his work up in the North Adams State College at the time. Maynard Cedar, welcome back to Amherst Media. It's great to be here. Some very, very good memories here when we produced the film. And what was the name of that film again? Farewell to Factory Towns. Oh, yeah. And I heard you've really produced that around the country, showing it at a lot of film festivals. I did. I mean, what I found out that there are probably thousands of film festivals, and so I entered a bunch sort of a little bit under the radar and met some good people and got to show the film. Well, I was really pleased when you were able to finish that because it was a labor of love for sure on your part. Thank you, yeah. We're here because you've now taken a lot of your work that you use both in the documentary and your 32 years of teaching up at what was then the State College of North Adams, I believe. Well, it has a long history, but when I started with North Adams State College, then it became Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, MCLA. Okay. And so in that 32 years, I mean, you taught sociology. You were part of that community. And before we get into that, I want to mention that your new book, The Gritty Berkshires, a People's History from the Housik Tunnel to Mass Mocha, is really, I've only been able to go through a few chapters, really finding it extremely informative and so reflective of the other New England towns and cities that were built by a river, by a waterway. Right. You want to talk about that a little? Yeah. I mean, in a way, I mean, the title, The Gritty Berkshires, to many people would be an oxymoron, because people from outside of the Berkshires and even people living in some parts of the Berkshires don't see the Berkshires that way. They see it as a vacation land. They see it as Jacob's Pillow. They see it as the Boston Symphony. They see it as theater. And they don't know that really significant parts of it, not just the North Berkshires, where I focus on really sort of rust belt areas. And the Housik River, on which North Adams is located, was a key reason for industry to be built up in that area, just as in Pittsfield, the Housatonic River was a key factor there as well. So in the early years, I was reading that it started off with cotton, both in woolen cotton textiles and shoes, which people forget New England was a major shoe manufacturer for a long time. Who are some of the people that were coming in? Well, there were large numbers of immigrants coming in, Catholic immigrants coming in from Ireland, from Italy, from Wales, from French Canada, from Poland, Jewish immigrants coming in from the Russian Empire. And they were coming into an area that was settled by the English, settled by mostly Protestants, who if we go way back, of course, where in many cases taking land away from the Native Americans, who were living there. I mean, you mentioned cotton. And when I first got the job at North Adams, I had no idea that the mills were there. And I remember driving, I think I was living in Amherst at the time, driving up from Amherst to North Adams and taking sort of a long way and going through the town of Adams, which is just south of North Adams. And there in front of me was a statue of William McKinley. And I thought, McKinley? I mean, I've seen statues of Washington, of Lincoln, but why McKinley? And it turned out that it wasn't because of, you know, taking over Cuba and Puerto Rico and Hawaii and all the rest. It was because McKinley, when he was in Congress, before he was president, was a big backer of a tariff. And the tariff helped the gentry, the elites in Adams and other parts around there, get their cotton mills going because they were able to produce clothing that they would have been in great competition with the British if they weren't, if that wasn't there. So I totally understand why McKinley. I mean, he did do a lot of trips through New England, and he seemed to always go to these towns. He had large factory towns, the Holy Oaks, the Laurences, the Adams back in the day. There was also, you know, a misconception, I think still to this day, that New England states were not involved with the slavery history of the United States. That was a Southern thing versus, and I think there was a quote in here I saw where it was like, it went from the lash to the loom, meaning that the connection to the cotton was so important. It was, and again, I was probably naive growing up in Connecticut. We were always taught that we were the good guys, they were the bad guys. And the more I looked into that history, the more you see those particular kinds of connections. William C. Plunkett, who was the first Plunkett to get involved with producing cotton garments in Adams, was also very much involved in politics. And in 1854, he was Lieutenant Governor of the state of Massachusetts, and the Fugitive Slave Law was very much in effect during that time. And he was Lieutenant Governor when, in a very important case, a former slave who already lived in Boston, Anthony Burns was captured. And while Plunkett was Lieutenant Governor, he was sent back to slavery. And the wig party at that time was very much divided between the cotton wigs and the more progressive wigs, and obviously Plunkett was a cotton wig, as were the other big manufacturers in Massachusetts. And one thing I don't really know the reason for, is the people back in Adams, when they were votes, they were very anti-slavery. But William C. Plunkett was obviously supporting slavery. Though after 54, the wig party basically dissolved. They basically were no longer a force in politics. But the underbelly had already been established within that class, if you will, between the owners and the workers. Absolutely. And what you find, and you probably know this being in this area, it was not uncommon during that time for even ministers to have slaves in this area. And the founder of Williams College, Afrayim Williams, had three slaves. And in his will, he left his fortune including the slaves to his family and what was left over to start a new school in what became Williamstown. And so the founding of Williams College really was based to some extent on slavery. So yeah, New England was very much tied into the Southern. We don't want to start naming names, but a lot of the colleges throughout New England have a long history to slave trade. What are the major moments in the history of the area that you write so magnificently about in such detail? It's the building of what was called the Big Dig of its day, meaning the Huzik Tunnel. Right. And what was the rationale for that project? Can you give some background? Yeah, there were manufacturers in the east and Fitchburg and even further east than that that wanted an opening to the Midwest, into the markets in the Midwest. And as they saw it from, let's say, the Fitchburg area and so on, just going directly to the west would have to go through the North Berkshires. And the Huzik range stood in its way. So they got money from the legislature and other investors as well to try to dig a tunnel through the Huzik range that would open up, go towards Albany and further west. And it was a project that had all kinds of obstacles, just like the Big Dig in Boston did. And it's almost five miles long. It was finally finished, perhaps as many as 195 men died in the building of that tunnel. And it wasn't finished until the late 70s, 1870s. And by the time it was finished, there were other paths to the Midwest. So it didn't really establish the kind of renaissance, economic renaissance that people were hoping for. But it was a way that the freight trains went through and there was passenger service also. Well, up to that point it was to get the goods from Boston area, should we say. Had to go all the way down on the route by the seashore, come up back up through the Springfield, the Connecticut River Valley. I mean, there was some through Worcester. This was an opportunity, they thought, to bring it quicker over to the Albany market and beyond and, more importantly, bringing the Midwest goods coming to east. Right, it would go both ways obviously. And I read in your book about 125 trains a day were going through that tunnel at its peak. I mean for us today that's just unheard of. Right, not only the trains, but in the 25 years or so of building the tunnel, they talk about North Adams and Florida Mountains almost being a frontier town because there were people living in shanty towns, mostly men, it was very, very difficult work. There were strikes from time to time. And the thing was finally done, but as I said, when it was finally done, it didn't really bring what people had hoped it would. Matter of fact, I think I read in the book where it hurt some of the factories in the Williamstown area because the goods, the cotton goods were coming in cheaper from Boston into the immediate area, so all great plans. Right, little collateral damage. But the amount of individuals who lost their lives building that, you mentioned 195. Right. Is there a monument to them? There are a couple of memorials. There's a memorial stone in North Adams and there's a memorial stone or two on Florida Mountain, which is sort of the high point of the terrain there. But there's no statue. There's no statue to the men who lost their lives. And one of the problems with some of the history that's been done, it really hasn't been a social history of the workers of the Housetunnel. There's been technological, there's been economic, there's been political. But as far as knowing a lot about the daily lives of those men and what the work was like, they're bits and pieces, but no real concerted deep effort to really find all that out. And in fact, in some cases, we don't know all the names of the men. And one of the things that I was gratified to find out when I was in North Adams is that there's a local historian, a man named Chuck Kahoon, who's made it his business. He's now head of the North Adams Historical Society. He's made it his business to try to find out the name of every one of those men who died. And he's still working on that project just to give him the dignity of a name as opposed to an Irishman died last night or something like that. And the records would be the transcript was the newspaper of note there at the time, I think. Right, and he would go to death notices and things like that. But would be a worker died versus the name of the worker. Right. The other part, another issue I found really interesting was that it was a shoe manufacturing town. I tend to think of Lynn and other cities and towns in the eastern part of the state more for shoes. But it became a labor movement part of the Knights of St. Crispin. And could you talk a little bit about that? Sure. They were mostly French-Canadian workers in North Adams. A lot of people came down to Holyoke and also North Adams during that period of time trying to make a living. The things were tough up in Quebec. And they worked for a major manufacturer named Samson. And they were very strong men. They were fighting for their rights, for their dignity, for their wages. They often went on strike. Samson would bring in outsiders, but the workers would keep them from working or they would convince them not to work. And finally, what Samson did, it was sort of an historic moment. He sent his foreman by train to California and he came back to North Adams with 75 young Chinese men to work in the factory. I think many of them probably didn't know they were brought to be strike breakers and he had a contract with them for three years. So you have a spectacle in North Adams where people in the community are down by the train station waiting for these 75 young men to come. And many of them had probably never even seen anyone from China or from Asia. And it was actually a very nonviolent greeting. It was mostly people just sort of in awe of what they're saying. As you say, the young Chinese men did not realize they were contracted. It was a three-year contract, 11-hour days they were contracted for. So that was quite a, oh, how do you do? Going to your background, jumping ahead now to 1978, you arrived in North Adams to start teaching sociology at the college. How'd you get involved with the community? I'm assuming that you embraced and got out there and started meeting. Yeah, well, I grew up in a union family. My dad was a union postal worker. My mom was a seamstress, I-O-G-W-U. And I was always interested and supportive of unions. And Sprague Lecture Company, which was the dominant industry in the late 70s when I was there, was still going strong. And the thing about being at a small college in a relatively small community is possible to sort of get an overview of the community. It's not like being in New York or Detroit or something like that. So I became very interested in the people who were working there. And many of them were the children of the workers were my students. So they were interested in the community as well. And so I began to have classes where students would do oral histories, where students would, let's say, be interns at some of the places where their parents worked. And I just got more and more interested in doing that and trying to trace the history that brought us to that particular moment. The oral history is so important because, as you pointed out earlier, the written documentation of the workforce is not there in the typical way of other writings, meaning they're a figure. They were how much was spent by the industrialists or how many people were sick or what the strike was, the need. So getting families to even recognize their own history and to celebrate their history by asking their elders is very informative. It is. And in the late 80s, there was a project throughout Massachusetts called Shifting Gears. And it was a project that was put in every heritage state park in the state. So, for example, Holyoke had one. North Adams had one. And they had money available to higher professional historians who would then do oral histories in the community. So the historians in North Adams would also work with middle school and high school kids. And they would train them to do oral histories, often of their parents and grandparents. And those transcripts are available. University of Massachusetts at Lowell has those transcripts available. People should know that. And so what you find out is not only what was life like working at Sprague Electric, but these were folks who were that time, maybe in their 60s and 70s. So they also talked about growing up in the 30s during the Depression. What their parents did, yeah. So you have that material as well. Jumping ahead from Sprague, I mean, I know they made a lot of the electrical wiring was tied into the war effort, the Vietnam War and the military in general. In 70, it was 85 when they finally closed. They started moving big time out of the... What did that do in devastating terms to the... Well, Sprague always had a lot of foresight in terms of having plants outside of North Adams, in the South, in Europe, in the Caribbean. And in the early 70s, Sprague was sold to a couple of other companies, the last one being Penn Central. And Penn Central at that time was just really interested in milking those companies and then getting rid of them. So basically in 85, 86, Sprague Electric closed. North Adams was devastated. Unemployment rate was really high. That's 35%, I think, if they remember correctly. It was one of the highest, one of the highest in the state. And so then the next question becomes, what's next? Which is sort of a question that a lot of factory towns had a deal with. And what did come next? What came next was a huge museum, which still exists very much so in North Adams, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Known as Mocha. Known as Mocha, right. And the idea for it came from a guy who was running the Williams College Museum of Art, a man named Thomas Krenz, who later became associated with the Guggenheim. And he saw those huge buildings, really a campus of more than 20 buildings where Sprague Electric was, was Arnold Printworks. And he saw it, I think, originally as a place where they might store some of the art that they couldn't fit into the Guggenheim Museum in New York. But it then ultimately became a museum. Governor Dukakis at the time liked the idea and the legislature gave $35 million to start the museum. Well, I know in your documentary you touched on that a lot. Very well, The Factory Town. The promise is made of jobs. And it doesn't appear to that it's really benefited everyone. And some people have come in and taken advantage of that new, the new life that it's bringing to that town. But it also ties it back into the Berkshires, as you mentioned in the very beginning, that's not gritty. It's part of that art world. Right. I mean, one of the things that the museum has done, we talked about, you asked a question about immigrants earlier. So in a way, it has brought in a number of artists to the community. So in a sense, the new immigrant group are the artists. And some of them have gotten involved with the community and they brought in sort of new ideas, which has been great. What hasn't happened is the museum hasn't produced the number of good quality jobs that they promised it would produce. And a lot of people who go to the museum don't spend money on Main Street. They just get in their car and they go elsewhere. As most like malls or casinos, shall I say, do the same thing. Right. Towns and cities. And you said there's another project on the board, a planning board right now by the same gentleman, right? Right. Thomas Krenz is now done with the Guggenheim. He lives in Williamstown and he's got plans for four or five museums in North Adams. And the biggest one is what he calls an extreme model railway museum based on a museum that he saw in Hamburg, Germany. Okay. And he's got an architect lined up. He's trying to get investors for it. And if it happens, the economist who does that kind of figuring thinks there might be as many as three-quarter of a million tourists coming to North Adams to see Mocha and also this extreme model railway museum. And I should say, while they'll be coming to see extreme model railway, there's no passenger service into North Adams. So they'd have to be coming by car. And that's a whole environmental question that really has to be dealt with. Absolutely. And one that people seem to be getting more and more aware that this is a real issue. Right. But for not going to provide public transportation in a better, meaningful way. So we have about five minutes left or so. Sure. I wanted to ask you about your other, you're not living in the area anymore. You're on a tour with your book. You just recently had a, weren't you up in North Adams for your first book? Right. About a week and a half ago, we had the book launch in North Adams. And we had a wonderful local folk music group called Wintergreen. That actually did the music for the documentary. And it was just a wonderful group. We had about 75 people. We had a really good time. I did another book launch the next day in Leverett, Massachusetts. And one of the nice things about having the book and trying to sell the book is it gave me an opportunity to ride all around the Berkshires and Southern Vermont to bookstores and to talk to them about taking the book on consignment. Well, I know we have a couple of bookstores in the immediate area that you probably should try to get into. I already have. Oh. Amorous books and also Broadside. And the one in South Hadley. Odyssey? Odyssey, right. Joan Arie has you over there? Yeah. I don't know why I can't think of the name Odyssey. My son teaches classics that should come to mind right away. But anyway, I was looking on that. Joan and John, John who was involved with Jobs for Justice forever. Yeah. And I'm sure you both know each other. He blurbed the book. He blurbed the book. Yeah. And I got to say for people, I really find that this is a book you can pick up and start at any point because it's so rich. And it really, you tell it in a very accessible way. And that's not putting it down. It's saying that I immediately want to know more. And you look at the details through the eyes of someone that cares about the working class. And that's not that common. You're even referred to as Howard Zen. Being likened to Howard Zen is quite a compliment. And I think it's deserving. And I really congratulate you. This has been a life work of yours. Right. I've been teaching all the way to the documentary to now the book and the previous book. So what's next for you? I mean, where are you going from here? Well, it's an interesting question. My wife is a writer. She's a poet. And I'm there with 100 books and looking for end notes and foot notes and so on. And she's creating this beautiful poetry. And I'm a little bit jealous of that. It gets done a little quicker? Yeah, a little bit quicker and a little bit less obsessively. So I'm not really sure. I mean, one of the things that I really hope for the book is that it will be in local libraries. It'll be in local schools. It'll be in local colleges. And young people this year, next year will pick up and read a chapter. And they'll become interested in it. And they'll do some of the digging that still needs to be done. One of the problems that I found in talking to teachers is they have very little time, unfortunately, to do local history. There's so many demands on them with the test, the standardized testing and so on. But that's really my ultimate hope for the book. Well, I'm also hopeful in that you're touching upon so much of what the initial immigration of different people into this country. And who made the things that we came to use and need. And right now we have such a backlash towards immigrants from our political leader. That's true. And I think it's important for people that they forget. I mean, I don't care who you talk to in this country, unless they're a Native American, they are all immigrants. And as soon as we have to get people to understand that. You might have been here two or three generations, but your family was still an immigrant family at this point. Absolutely, right. So they could see how this country was built on the backs and the labor of immigrants. It wasn't always pretty by any means. Not at all. And that's what I love about the grittiness of this. The gritty Berkshires, people's history from the Housik Tunnel to Mass Mocha, Maynard's Cedar. You've done a great job and a service for everybody. It's not just a North Adams story. It's an American story. And I thank you for it. Well, thank you, Jim. I'll talk with it as you travel around the country. I hope people pick it up. Okay. Thank you very much. It's great being here. It's great having you here. Thank you.