Hilltown Postcards

Hilltown Postcard: A Potato Farm Goes Barren

For decades, the town of Worthington could set its calendar by what was happening at Albert Farms. In the spring, when the ground was warm and dry enough, seed potatoes were planted in its fields. The plants sprouted, grew, and blossomed. In summer the farmworkers cultivated the fields and later in the season, sprayed a chemical to kill the vines that left a stink in the air.

Then, in September, harvesters, large and ship-like, crisscrossed the fields for weeks. Women keeping mother’s hours, teenagers after school, and those working full-time hours did the dirty job separating rocks and potatoes aboard the shaking machines. I learned that firsthand because when I was a reporter for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, I went on one for a feature story.

Migrant workers brought up from the South used to do the work. Until the harvest got mechanized, they dug potatoes by hand. The workers lived in a camp with Quonset huts on Prentice Road, near the farm’s highest field called the Old Smith Farm.

According to news sources, one man died of pneumonia and dysentery from the unsanitary conditions, and the state closed the camp after a fire destroyed the quarters where the women and children lived, so the workers were located elsewhere. Health officials said the farm would have to put in flush toilets and make other improvements. Instead, the farm began hiring local people.

When we moved to town, Ben Albert, the second generation, ran the farm although several family members worked with him. His father Alberie Albert founded it in the twenties.

After the state, Ben was the town’s biggest landowner. He also owned acreage elsewhere in the hilltowns. That status carries a certain weight in a small town. I once heard an old-timer say at a hearing she trusted Ben to do what’s best for his land. We newcomers who had seen the places we once lived damaged by that sort of thinking were skeptical. Anyway that kind of influence was waning in the eighties. So was Ben Albert’s business.

A couple of years after we moved to town, Ben’s massive warehouse burned in an early morning blaze, so out of control by time the volunteer firefighters arrived, the flames could be seen in the next town. Faulty wiring was likely to blame, the state fire marshal said.

The damages amounted to about a half-million, including the loss of seed potatoes for that spring’s planting and farm equipment. Worse, the water used by firefighters to douse the flaming mess unknowingly released nearly a ton of pesticide, Temik, from its barrels. The chemical flowed downhill, contaminating the wells of several homes, but the state bailed out Ben and the town by paying to extend a town water line.

Ben tried making money off his land in another way. He wanted to put in a subdivision of luxury homes clustered in one of the farm’s prettiest fields, across the road from the warehouse, which he never rebuilt. People in town joked Ben should call it Temik Acres. But the town told him no.

He also tried, twice, to build homes near the old airstrip, the one he used to launch planes for crop-dusting. Each house would have a hangar and the road would double as a runway. The people living nearby weren’t crazy about small planes flying in and out of their neighborhood. The town said no, twice, to that idea, too.

One morning in 1990, around 6 a.m., I got a call from Ben. He didn’t identify himself, but I recognized his voice. He wanted me to know about his case in federal court against Frito-Lay. I was a reporter then, covering a bunch of small towns for the Gazette, working out of my home, which I called the Hilltown bureau.

Ben was always the source I couldn’t get on the phone. “Sorry, don’t know when he’ll be back,” the woman who answered the office phone would say although I suspected he was sitting in the same room. Once, to get his comment for a story, about Temik Acres, incidentally, I drove around town in the rain until I spotted him in a field, and he was surprised when I walked, notebook in hand, toward him.

But Ben wanted to talk now. He had done business for 20 years with Frito-Lay, but he said the chip giant reneged on a shipment of seed potatoes, 17,700-hundredweight bags, for the 1985 growing season and a contract to buy part of his harvest. By that time, it was too late for him to find other seed to plant. It was a blow to the farm, and Ben had to sell pieces of his land to pay his creditors.

I went to the federal courthouse in Springfield a couple of times for his case. Frito-Lay’s take was that it didn’t have to give Ben the seed or buy his potatoes. Its lawyers said the farm had already been losing money. Ben sued for $1.1 million, and after a month of tedious testimony about potato farming, he was awarded $248,000.

Also that year, the state bought the development rights to the Jones Lot, the largest of the farm’s fields, 286 acres in the Four Corners section. It meant the parcel would be preserved as farmland. He got a half-million from the state, but that wasn’t enough money to fix his problems.

Six years later, Ben filed for bankruptcy after racking up over four million in debt, about half of that owed to the federal government. Albert Farms owed the town more back taxes than anyone.

Ben Albert told me he would never plant potatoes again. “Let it all go to weeds,” he said, but he did try growing soybeans and sunflowers.

The following year, he lost the field on Prentice Road, the Old Smith Farm, to a fertilizer company he owed a half-million. That company sold it to a cattle farmer.

The roof on the potato storage barn caved in and the Environmental Protection Agency oversaw a cleanup of pesticides and asbestos found at the farm. A third generation would not be taking over. Ben died in 2011. His wife, Frances, passed before him.

The last year we lived in Worthington, that is 2006, someone grew squash at the Jones Lot and in September a team of migrant workers picked most of the crop by hand. Now, I hear other farmers are trying to make a living off the land once owned by Albert Farms.

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Memoir

My Grandmother Learns to Read

As a girl in the Portuguese island of Madeira, my grandmother Angela Ferreira was a companion to the child of a wealthy family. Her older sister was a servant in the household. My grandmother or Avó was the youngest of a large, poor family. I am guessing her parents didn’t mind having one less child to feed at home.

My grandmother’s job was to play with the little girl and carry her books to and from school. While the girl was in class, she sat in the back of the room until it was time to return home.

One day, the teacher caught my grandmother trying to read with the rest of the class. But instead of getting her into trouble, the teacher approached the wealthy parents, who consented to let her attend the school. That was how my grandmother learned to read when so few did then.

When she was 16, Avó left with the same sister, Maria, to live in the U.S., and never saw her family in Madeira again. I heard the story of the large storm their ship encountered in the Atlantic, how people were swept overboard and everyone prayed to get through it. My grandmother and her sister stayed mostly below. The photo on this post shows my grandmother Angela, on the right, and Maria shortly after they arrived in the U.S.

My grandmother settled in New Bedford, Mass., where she worked as a weaver in a textile mill when that industry was booming there. She married a man, Manuel, from her village in Madeira and raised three daughters, and later a grandson.

She and my grandfather moved to a small town where they lived off the land while they continued to work in the mills. They took classes to learn English. It was not a happy marriage, however, due to my grandfather’s problems. I am surmising it was a struggle for him to adjust to life in a new country. There’s more to that story, but this one is about my grandmother.

We called her Vovó out of affection. She was an interesting grandmother, with a goat barn, grape arbor, a field for ballgames, and interesting nooks in her home. We saw her almost every weekend. She baked us chocolate chip cookies, always enough to take home when we were done visiting. However, I can’t say my sisters and I enjoyed her main dishes, which always had an odd flavor. We used to say it had “grandma’s secret spice.”

Avó had a poodle named Sonny Bono, a series of shelter mutts called Lassie, and a bird named Bobby Vinton. She loved TV wrestling, Elvis, and because she could read, the National Enquirer. She saved the copies for me since she knew I loved reading about celebrities.

It’s been many years since Avó left us, but I am still inspired by her quest to read.

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Life lessons

Hello Old Friend

Years ago, Jeff found me on classmates.com. I only registered on the website, but he paid money to contact the people he knew. I hadn’t seen Jeff since we were 14 and freshmen in high school.

I was happily married with a large family. He was married with kids of his own. This wasn’t that kind of a thing anyway.

We emailed back and forth, catching up what we had done with our lives via long messages. He had done well with his. And then, he hit me with this revelation, “I have cancer.” Jeff wrote he had cancer before and now it was back. The prognosis was not good. Jeff told me his parents and brother all died from it. He said it was his family’s curse.

When Jeff was a boy, he had polio. He wore metal braces on his legs, and at times, used a wheeled chair he propelled by hand.

I first met him in fifth grade when I and other kids attended advanced classes in one of the town’s schools for science and writing on Wednesday afternoons. Then, I got to know him better in seventh grade when we were in the same classes at the town’s junior high.

When it came to Jeff, I didn’t hold back, joking with him about silly stuff. I remember once when he was teasing me, I hit him over the head with my books. Not hard, of course. But he laughed his head off. He liked that I didn’t treat him with kid gloves.

Once, I even got him to dance semi-fast with me at a school event.

Yes, I had a crush on Jeff. I knew he liked me. But coming from an overly protective family, I was timid to act on it. One time, when a group of us had gathered at a pizza place, I didn’t realize he had begun following me as I walked home. After all, we both lived on opposite ends of the town. But he fell. I honestly had no idea that happened. He and my classmates misunderstood. I felt so badly.

Jeff ended up going to a private boarding school his sophomore year. We lost track of each other until decades later.

After Jeff found me on that website, we emailed back and forth for a couple of years. He spent time in South America. He kept bees. He was interested that I was a newspaper editor, and that I wrote fiction, so I mailed him the manuscript of the first novel my then-agent was trying to sell. For Christmas, he sent me a package of grapefruit from Florida, where he and his wife had moved. I still have the special knife that came with it.

Then, he wrote his health was declining.

We spoke on the phone only once. By then, Jeff was bedridden. Although it was February, I stepped outside the newsroom so I wouldn’t be interrupted. For that hour, we shared our old and familiar connections. I tried to offer him words of comfort and to make him laugh. He told me he kept my manuscript beside his bed.

I didn’t talk with Jeff again. When I searched the internet, I found his obit. He had died a few days after we had spoken. He was only 53.

Good-bye old friend.

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Uncategorized

Hot Schmaltz by Ethel Schwartz

This is the true story of how I got the pseudonym Ethel Schwartz. Of course, it began as a joke.

A group of guys were goofing off outside the college’s administration building when they decided among themselves that the next girl who walked around the corner would be named Ethel Schwartz and she would be the campus’s official sex symbol.

Yes, it was me. However, I don’t know if I fit the role of the campus’s official sex symbol.

I can take a joke. Besides the guys were in my circle of friends at Bridgewater State College, now a university. They were among those who ran the student paper, which was first called Campus Comment and then Hard Times, and the lit magazine, Roots and Wings and then Conceit. They went to the coffeehouse Friday nights and were in the middle of any protest. We all hung out at the coffee shop downtown and at friend’s apartments.

And, they were probably stoned that day. 

A few of them called me Ethel for a little while. But I went a step further. I decided to name the newspaper column I wrote “Hot Schmaltz by Ethel Schwartz.” Schmaltz is rendered chicken or goose fat. Schmaltz can also mean extremely or excessively sentimental music or art. Frankly, I just liked the way the five words went together.

As Ethel Schwartz, I got to write whatever I wanted like the time I went to a drive-in theater that was showing two Russ Meyer flicks. Meyer produced low-budget, sexploitation films like Vixen, one of the two playing that night.

Above is a clipping of a column I found tucked in an old lit magazine from long ago. (Schwartz was spelled incorrectly.) In it, I reviewed three books by Rod McKuen — in poetry form. They were: Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, Listen to the Warm, and In Someone’s Shadow.

Rod McKuen made a lot of money writing schmaltzy poetry. The girls in my dorm — that’s where I borrowed the books to read them — loved his stuff. I thought he was a hack. In those days, I fancied myself a poet.

Here’s how the column’s review begins:

At times I feel

there’ll be no flag days any more

and, then you come, Rod McKuen

waving yours.

And how it ends:

The moon is a hello navel for the sky

and beneath its belly

you write a journal of love’s top and bottom

inside and outside

under and over

down and out.

Rod, but there must be something more!

Okay, if McKuen’s poetry wasn’t bad enough, the review was, too. But it was written by Ethel Schwartz, my persona in a previous lifetime, which was the inspiration for two books: Peace, Love & You Know What and Professor Groovy and Other Stories. (By the way, Prof. Groovy will be free on Kindle on April 13-14.)

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rats

Rats: My ‘Worst Thing in the World’

My grandfather once spoiled a family party by bringing a dead rat into the house. He was pretty proud he had trapped it in one of the barns.

The rest of the family was horrified. Me, too. I was just a kid. It cemented my fear of rats, which, by the way, has a name: musophobia.

I recalled that experience when I read Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. In the first scene, Bigger and his brother, Buddy, try to kill a rat in their city apartment. Their mother and sister were frantic about it. From Wright’s description, I know he had personal trouble with rats.

“He kicked the splintered box out of the way and the flat black body of the rat lay exposed, its two long yellow tusks showing distinctly. Bigger took a shoe and pounded the rat’s head, crushing it, cursing hysterically: ‘You sonofabitch!’ ”

More than any other animal, we associate rats with poverty.

Then, of course, rats make an unwelcomed appearance in George Orwell’s novel 1984. I felt for Winston Smith when he is confronted by O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, who tells him “the worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual.” Of course, in Winston’s case, that worst thing was rats.

I could relate.

The rat at the family party wasn’t the only one concerning my grandfather, Manny. He hid dollar bills in the chicken barn, a few hundred, by my father’s telling. One day when he went to get the money, he discovered rats had eaten most of the bills.

The slum apartment I had in college was infested with rats. I heard them fighting in the walls. At night I suspected they made their way inside, and I finally had proof when a rat fell into an uncovered pot of beet soup on the stove. Large, red paw prints were everywhere in the kitchen. The landlord didn’t care. I did. I moved out. I haven’t made or eaten beet soup since.

In Mexico, where Hank and I rented a small house, rats raced across the tin roof and down the fireplace’s chimney. We stored our food in a thick wooden box we put inside the car, but still the rats searched. Hank kept a flashlight and hammer beside the bed. He blinded them with the light, and then smashed them with the hammer. The rats didn’t stop coming.

In a house we first rented when we moved to the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, rats got through a drainage pipe in the basement and then into the kitchen. Our cat killed the first. Hank fixed it so more couldn’t get in. I heard him yelling in the basement when a rat stuck its head through the pipe’s hole.

When we lived in Taos, New Mexico, rats built nests in our stacked firewood. The clever beasts dragged leaves of cactus to the stacks and positioned them thorny side out to shield their nest. I removed the cacti, being careful as rodents in that area could have hantavirus.

Knock on wood, we haven’t lived with rats again. Mice? I don’t like them either. That’s one reason we have a cat. Our Maine coon cat, Stella, is officially the protector of our realm, and there are times she leaves mouse parts she doesn’t want to eat on the front welcome mat outside or a whole body as a gift. Early this morning, I accidentally stepped on the head of a mouse she left in the living room. Somehow the creature got inside. I kept my composure and got rid of the part she didn’t eat. Thanks, but no thanks.

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