Tag Archives: rural life

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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Hilltown Postcards

The Plow Comes Full Circle

I wrote this post when our son, Nate, plowed roads for a contractor during the winter. He’s since moved on from that kind of work.

Nate calls while I’m making supper. “Hey, Mom, guess where I’m plowing tonight?”

From the eagerness in his voice, I’m supposed to know. “Route 112?”

He chuckles softly. I do, too.

“Yeah, how’d you guess?” he asks.

Route 112 is a two-lane paved road that’s technically a state highway in Worthington and Huntington, the town next to it, but it’s no larger than most good country roads in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts.

The route goes past the house we rented for nine years on the other side of Worthington and where Nate spent most of his earliest years. This is the Ringville section of Worthington, a cluster of modest homes hugging the road’s sharp curve. Except for the large field across the road, drivers passing through would not be impressed.

Our house, the smallest, could never hold a coat of white paint on its clapboards. We only heated with wood, and the walls were insulated with newspaper, so the windows in the kids’ bedrooms upstairs were covered inside by ice most of winter.

Nate, the fourth of our six kids and the middle son, is the one who favors me most with his dark hair and complexion. But unlike me he didn’t like school. He did whatever he could to get out of it, pretending he was sick, but I wouldn’t let him. Kids have to go to school.

Nate wasn’t interested no matter how much his teachers or I tried. Some teachers didn’t want to bother, like the band instructor who tried to kick him out his class. Nate wanted to play the drums, and I had to meet with the teacher to explain my son learns in a different way from others. And, he was going to stay in his class no matter what. Nate did, and music was the one thing he enjoyed in school. He doesn’t play the drums as much now, but he does the guitar and keyboard. He started a band that played gigs in local bars, doing the moody, thoughtful songs he writes. He records them in a sound studio he built in his home. He’s helping me create audiobooks.

As a boy, Nate was all-truck. You know the type. He was the kid in the backseat of the car, moving his hand like he’s yanking on an air horn when a tractor-trailer drives close on the highway.

In winter, he’d shout and run to the window whenever he heard a plow blade scrape over the surface of Route 112. Or, if he was playing outside he’d stand watching in our front yard as the truck’s yellow lights strobed their warning and the snow curled in one magnificent white wave from the edge of its plow.

Year-round Nate played in the yard with his fleet of Tonkas – dump trucks, graders, and backhoes, even a steamroller. He got them for Christmas and his birthdays. Sometimes his younger brother, Zack, joined him, but as Nate says, he was strictly a part-timer.

When it snowed, Nate got on his winter clothes and boots, and working by the house’s front light, he used a truck rigged with a wooden plow made by his father to clear the dirt walkway extending from the door to the driveway.

I have photos of him playing in the dark. He’s bundled up. His face is bright and interested. I know what’s on my boy’s mind. He’s inside that cab, plowing a much bigger road than the path in our front yard.

When Nate got older, we’d let him go along with the town’s highway crew when it stormed. He waited at the top of our driveway until Ernie, his friend and the crew’s road boss, stopped his plow truck. Nate rode with him for hours. Happy for the company, Ernie joked and sang off-key on purpose until he dropped him back home.

Like many country kids, Nate learned to drive long before he was of age. He helped his highway pal, Ernie, a part-time farmer, with the haying. Nate drove the pickup while men tossed bales onto a trailer. He was only a kid when he first did it, and he had to scoot forward on the edge of the pickup’s seat, so he could reach the pedals.

The day Nate turned 17, he passed the driver’s test without a learner’s permit or taking a lesson. Then, he got his CDL, that’s a commercial drivers license. He went to school for that, and his oldest sister helped him study for the test.

Nate can operate just about any piece of heavy equipment, or as some old gent remarked the time he watched him handle a dozer, “Boy, you’ve got the touch.”

Most of the year Nate works in construction for a loud and excitable man who calls everyone “Big Boy” including his own wife. He also has new Mac trucks, a real plus in his mind. Nate drives a fourteen-wheeler – just say tri-axle he tells me – with a wing plow and bulldog decals on each side of its massive hood. The truck is thirteen tons stripped down, he says. Add about five tons more for the plow and sander.

Nate has been plowing for eight years. During his first, he took care of a long stretch of Route 2 to the north in Western Massachusetts. Then he did other highways. He feels good about the job he’s doing. Often, he’s the only one on the route during a snowstorm.

“I feel like I’m the savior of the town,” he tells me.

The man from the state highway yard calls as soon as the storm starts. If it’s night, Nate can’t sleep waiting for the phone to ring although later when he’s on the road, he regrets he didn’t. He’s worked in some nasty storms, the longest 32 hours straight, pulling into a place safe off the road to nap in the cab of his truck. He missed most of Christmas one year when he got called out, and he was late to eat on Thanksgiving. We saved him a plate of food. He smelled like diesel when he hugged me hello.

Sometimes Nate calls when his cell phone has a signal, or if the timing’s right, he’ll stop at the house for something to eat, parking his truck at the top of the driveway with its lights flashing so it’s visible to anyone driving that way. Nate’s taken his father and brothers on his route. I went for a short trip to test drive a new truck. The sound of machinery was deafening inside the cab. I watched as Nate’s hands flew about the controls. It’s all second nature to him now. He says he wants me to go for the full 17-mile run during a storm.

Tonight we’re supposed to get several inches of fresh snow, nothing surprising this time of year. The hilltowns east of the Berkshires get a real winter that starts in November and lasts sometimes through April. He’s calling me on his cell phone, and soon he will lose service as his route climbs toward Worthington and then past the house where we used to live. My son is in that cab, making that big wave of snow and ready to toot the horn if he sees some small face watching through a window.

“Nate, remember how excited you got when the plow truck passed the house?”

Nate made a good man’s laugh.

“Yeah, Mom, that’s why I called.”

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Hilltown Postcards

Friday Night at Liston’s

Here’s another Hilltown Postcard I found stashed in my computer, in which I wrote about the great Friday nights we had at Liston’s in Worthington when it was owned by Steve and Diane Magargal. Steve also sat for an interview for this story I crafted many years ago. Liston’s, which was bought by a group of locals in 2021 and rebuilt, is still a popular place

It’s 9-something on a Friday night, and the band is into the first set at Liston’s. The tables are filled so Hank and I sit at the bar, a good idea because the band bought larger speakers since the last time we heard them. 

Owners Steve and Diane Magargal had the pool table pushed to the side and covered by plywood. Tables and chairs are stacked outside and the Budweiser Beer light with the Patriots insignia is unhooked from the ceiling. The musicians are backed against one wall, but even so, the dance floor is no bigger than a dining room in a split-level ranch.

The band is starting strong with danceable tunes but they have no takers. Billy is feeling extra-good tonight, clowning around with some solo dance moves on the floor and then doing a goofy stunt with a Patriot’s football helmet. His mother, Shirley, who lives in the senior housing down the road, is laughing on the stool beside mine. A man asks me why I’m laughing, too. Billy, I tell him.

When Hank’s ready, we’ll be on the floor nearly every number. He leads. I follow. Our style is sort of swing. Holding hands. Back and forth. Stepping together in some fancy footwork. Nice and loose. Spinning. Twirling. People often remark they like to watch us. 

We tried a lesson but that didn’t work. It’s hard to break down what we do naturally. We were also getting ticked off at each other. I’ve only danced with a few other men, including one heart-thumping Wanda Jackson number with a family friend. I’m here to have fun with Hank.

Liston’s dates back to 1933 when it was founded by Fred Liston. The bar used to have gas pumps. 

It’s only three miles from our house, a good thing because sometimes it’s easier to get to a bar than to get home from one. 

Steve, whose family goes way back in Worthington on both sides, remembers biking here as a boy, he and his buddies going swimming, then stopping for penny candy, Coke in the bottle, and the shuffleboard machine. At the time, Liston’s wasn’t the only bar in town. Frankie’s was in West Worthington, nothing more than a joint that served ice-cold beer. On Saturdays, Steve’s dad and his Uncle Bevo rounded up the neighbors’ garbage to haul to the dump, and when they stopped at Frankie’s, he and other kids played Wiffle ball outside. 

Steve says Frankie’s could be a rough place. Hell’s Angels robbed it one time, and the bikers shot the dog. When the place burned to the ground, the owner didn’t bother rebuilding.

Later, when Steve was old enough, it was the Drummers Club on Friday nights after softball. It was Liston’s on Sunday nights after pick-up basketball in Town Hall. The bar didn’t have a large selection. 

“But the beer was ice cold and Irene had the TV set on,” he says. 

Liston’s wasn’t a late-night place then. Irene, the owner, discouraged it. Two bad accidents involving patrons a few years apart shook her up. Now, Steve and Diane own the place. 

Hank and I have moved to a booth. The cold air leaches through the wooden walls although hay bales wrap the outside. The five TVs, including the one above the band, are tuned to a basketball game with the sound off. In the summer, it’s usually a baseball game. Red Sox and Patriots fans rule at Liston’s. (Steve and Diane organize a couple of bus trips to Fenway each summer.) Sometimes it’s NASCAR or a rodeo. One night, hunters were killing deer on the screen.

Admittedly, Liston’s and other watering holes have been an inspiration for my adult fiction, which have a bar in every book.

When Liston’s doesn’t have a band and we still feel like dancing we’ll go elsewhere, usually the Ashfield Lake House, where you dance between two rows of tables, or the Home Club in Hinsdale, where they serve Bud in cans, or to a friendly biker bar in Easthampton. We rarely know a soul even though they’re not that far from Liston’s, our place of preference. Here, we know most everyone. Many have worked with Hank. Others just live in town or one nearby. Some are kids who went to school with our kids but haven’t left town.

I’ve seen two or three generations here at the same time or so many members of one family drinking you’d think they’re having a reunion. One kid, who sipped sodas while his pop drank beer, got a birthday cake on his twenty-first birthday. 

There’ll always be a little barroom hanky-panky, but people have to be on good behavior. No swearing. No fighting. No acting up so others feel uncomfortable. Or they get tossed for several months, long enough to realize how much they miss the place. If the mess-up happens in winter Steve tells the offender to see him when the grass is green. If it happens in summer? “I tell them to come see me at Christmas.” But some don’t learn their lesson. Six people in town are permanently banned from Liston’s, and I know all six. Unpredictable sorts.

I get up to use the women’s room. The women’s room is clean and smells good, because women won’t put up with anything funky. The door is located next to the bar, so guys lining up to get drinks have to step aside to let you in. The women’s room is also close to the part of the bar where the band plays, and if they’re loud, it feels as if they’re in there with you.

By the band’s second set, the dancers are on their feet. The dinner crowd is gone, and those who remain are here for the music. The parking lot this time of year is usually packed with snowmobiles but we haven’t had enough snow this winter so the trails in the woods are thin. 

The band plays something from the Rolling Stones, then Johnny Cash, and those in a dancing mood are loving it. We’ve found our feet and are on the floor with them. The floorboards are smooth from ground-in dirt and drinks.

The man who sells us firewood, a lean guy who wears a ball cap pulled down on his head, holds his arms tight and does a nice shuffle. So does his buddy, Kyle, who later sings with the band. Another Kyle, a sheep farmer, wraps his big arms around a woman in a tender way like he’s carrying her. Gerry, who is sometimes called Freddy, is jumping around like he’s stomping out brushfires. A young girl who grew up with one of our sons, of age to drink, shows off a trick she can do with her cowboy hat.

Most bands play cover tunes. A few make up their own. Mostly it’s some blues, some country, and a lot of rock and roll. Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers, who lived in a nearby town, has played sax with local bands a couple of times, including a benefit Steve and Diane held for New Orleans musicians displaced by the hurricanes.

Bands can be on one night and flat the next. They get better or worse or call it quits. You know a band’s in trouble when the lead singer goes to the bar for a beer in the middle of a song. Or they’re just too weird. 

One night, Steve hired a two-man band as a favor. The guitarist, a small man, dressed like he was the reincarnation of Stevie Ray Vaughn with a satin shirt and a black, flat-brimmed, Billy Jack-style cowboy hat. He tried playing like Stevie while the drummer wailed away with his sticks. 

Hard-working guys. But no one left their seats. 

You could only watch.

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Hilltown Postcards

Ernie Nugent — One of the Good Guys

I wrote this piece about Ernie Nugent after he left us eight years ago. Here it is slightly revised for this Hilltown Postcard.

We knew Ernie and his large, extended family when we lived in Worthington, a hilltown in Western Massachusetts. He worked on the town’s three-man highway crew for over three decades, including as its road boss before he retired.

Ernie and his wife, Deen, who have two daughters, lived a short distance from us and across the road from a brother named Bert. Brothers with those two names has always been a source of amusement.

Our son, Nate, knew him best. Ernie hayed the farm across the road in the Ringville section, where we lived first in that town. He also raised pigs there. They were good buddies.

Through Ernie, Nate got to know the part of country living that was close to the earth — and all about machinery. When he was a teenager, Nate was Ernie’s extra hand, driving a tractor or farm truck. I recall looking out the kitchen window when I was washing dishes to see Ernie take down a hog with one shot, and then Nate helping him get it ready for butchering.

Nate and Ernie had a special bond. He often joined Ernie when he plowed the roads, riding for hours in the cab of the truck. Ernie would stop the truck at the end of our driveway for Nate to join him.

One year, Ernie rigged up a plow to an old rider mower so Nate could clear our driveway. (I guess it stuck. Nate works as a union heavy equipment operator.)

I knew Ernie from when I was a reporter, covering the hilltowns. I’d call the highway departments for an update whenever we had a bad winter storm, or in the midst of mud season or a road project.

Ernie wasn’t a talkative guy. I recall covering one Worthington Town Meeting, where residents were voting on the budget and other items. On the agenda was the purchase of a new dump truck for the highway department.

A smart-alecky newcomer got up and wanted a justification for the purchase. So the moderator asked Ernie, who was road boss, whether the town needed to buy a new highway truck. Ernie stood, said “yup” and sat down. And, after a good laugh, the voters passed it.

Here’s to Ernie Nugent who lived and worked well. He was the salt of the earth.

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Hilltown Postcards

Nigel the Hermit

Here’s the next Hilltown Postcard — stories I wrote years ago about our life in rural Western Massachusetts. My agent at the time wanted me to write a tell-all book with lots of dirt, but I didn’t have it in me to do that. Rereading those stories has inspired me to write more. In some instances, I have changed people’s names. That’s true for this story.

I used to see Nigel pushing his bicycle up Mason’s Hill toward the general store in Worthington. He wore a porkpie hat and tinted aviator glasses, stopping at times on the steepest part to rest. It was an old-style bike, one speed, fat tires, and a metal basket on the front.

If there was a hermit in our town, he was it. He lived on Dingle Road, in a house that hadn’t had a coat of paint in years, one of those New England stringer homes, where buildings get added on in a row like blocks. The grass grew tall and dried. The place looked unwelcoming, and that’s probably the way he liked it.

Nigel may have shunned people, but many years ago he stirred up his neighborhood. It was a quiet Sunday summer afternoon when Nigel dressed in winter clothes took shots at his own house from the outside.

Neighbors called the town police, but the chief realized this was beyond him and called in the state police. Things were quiet when the cops came, but Nigel had barricaded himself in his house with several loaded guns and ammo.

The police moved the neighbors out of their homes and used a loudspeaker to get him out, but he wouldn’t budge. A Special Tactics Operation Team surrounded the house. Finally after seven hours, police launched a canister of tear gas into the home, which finally drove him out. He was taken to a ward at the VA hospital, where he stayed for a couple of years.

Turns out Nigel, then nearly 60, used to teach math and physics, but he got fired when he hit a fellow teacher. He didn’t deny doing it nor did he explain why. He sued successfully for back pay. He also wanted to be reinstated but that didn’t happen. 

After the incident, neighbors said Nigel was quiet and kept to himself although one got to know him when they repaired a water line they shared. She said he was intelligent and well read. He was profoundly hard of hearing so she made sure she faced him when she talked. An elderly brother dropped off groceries.

Nigel once asked Hank if he worked in Northampton because he needed a ride, but he didn’t. He told him of another man in town who did and that arrangement lasted a while until he moved.

Another man inherited Nigel. Bruce said Nigel would call him from the pay phone at the store to arrange a ride. He’d be waiting outside his home, and Bruce didn’t mind going out of his way to drop him off at the law library. He didn’t explain what he was researching or much about himself. They rarely talked.

One fall afternoon, I was stacking wood and lost in thought until I looked up to see Nigel staring at me. (We had moved across town to a house we built near Mason’s Hill.) He held his bike so quietly he could have been an apparition.

Nigel didn’t introduce himself, but, of course, I knew who he was. I don’t know if he knew my name, because he didn’t use it. He wanted a ride back and forth from Northampton.

His hearing aids weren’t working, so I couldn’t explain how we could arrange that. I found paper and a pen. I would be leaving at 6:15 a.m. and I would come by his house.

I went the next morning. It was before the change in time so it was still dark that morning. It had rained that night, so everything was black and shiny in the headlights. I stopped in front of his house. No light was on inside. No sign of movement.

I thought to sound the horn or knock on the door, but I didn’t think he would hear either. I wouldn’t even know which door to knock. I waited fifteen minutes, and then drove off.  

I didn’t see Nigel again. Two years later, in the middle of February, he died alone in his house. The medical examiner ruled it was from natural causes, likely a heart attack. He was 72.

The police found him locked inside his home after the person who delivered him meals felt something was amiss. Nigel had lived in town for 20 years and the police chief noted he was a man who didn’t want any outside help.

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