Available Jobs in City from 1880 to 2000 - Discoveries & Lessons in a Ghetto Town

Many years after leaving Lowell in September, 1963, and equipped with many personal, human interest stories coming from the mouths of friends and colleagues that I had encountered in other Massachusetts towns plus those in Pennsylvania, California, Brooklyn, France, Berlin, Munich and Albuquerque, I began to ask myself, again, how had I been fashioned or molded as a product of this post-industrial textile giant.

What lasting impressions had clearly been stamped upon my brain cells through my total immersion in Lowell’s working-class, immigrant mind set?

How had I perceived, over the many interloping years, my own early experiences while living with numerous, Franco-American relatives in the city from 1939 to 1963? What were the positive results and, also, what were the negative, or less helpful, attributes of this background?

Impressions, Attributes, Viewpoints, Prejudices – Local Culture, etc.

How does anyone become a typical Lowellian, who experienced the widely changing times during that interesting time period of 1939 to 1963? Those were personally my most interesting years of growth and adaptation just before WWII and during the early years of the Cold War.

So, for me, my response would have been loaded with a few, modest, academic achievements plus many social, economic and emotional forays into the lives of important others. Finally, these experiences were all neatly packaged into a healthy mix of happiness, discovery, surprise, childhood disappointments and a few quite painful losses. Even after my nine years of elementary school at l’Ecole Saint-Louis de France, my tiny brain was already forming a worldview, which was loaded with the unexpected, the eye-opening surprise coupled to a growing, internal sense that everything “out there” was tentative, at best. Seldom did I feel A-OK in an A-OK world. Where was that sense of safety and stability, which the kids on “Father Knows Best” enjoyed everyday?

Mother and Relatives Probably Knew Best

Our kitchen area was often the neighborhood gathering hall with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and friends. Of course, the main reason for our recognized, local popularity at the corner of Ludlam and Dana rested squarely on my mother’s broad shoulders and her inviting smile. She simply oozed with gracious hospitality. “Come on in and have a piece of fresh strawberry pie.” Her words still ring clearly in my mind.

It was in this central hubbub of our tenement kitchen that local truth was often recounted, again and again, by working-class people, who had personally experienced the Spanish Flu, the Roaring Twenties, the Wall Street disaster and the ten years of economic and emotional Depression that followed. Then, they also had had the chance to live through World War 2. Some of these folks could actually recall the days of Woodrow Wilson and Lowell highlights in the early 1910s when 60-hour work weeks were available for the physically strong immigrants, who were still pouring into the city.

Kitchen Table Topics

Red Sox better than the Yankees – No, Yankees better than the Red Sox
General Motors (GM) – Buick is the best – Bob Bolduc
GM is a going concern- My brother, Bob
Ted Williams better than Joe DiMaggio – Paul Bolduc
“Ted Williams, he’s a bum!” – Uncle Gerry’s thoughts
Birth control – l’empêchement de la famille – wrong and a sin – Everyone
The Democrats in government – “Crooks! all of them!”
Firemen in the city got those jobs through favoritism & political corruption.
“Hurricane of 38: the worst of them all with all that flooding in the city.”
The Bolducs in Pawtucketville think that their shit doesn’t stink.
Irish women can’t cook as well as our canadiennes-francaises.
Best cowboy in the movies? Gene Autry or Roy Rogers? – Bob and me
Times were tougher during the Depression than during WWII
Monsieur Pinard was the saint in our world. – All agree.
Danger: “Don’t walk at night in the Greek parts of town.”
“President Truman is a crude little man.” – My Mom’s comment.
“Abortion is a mortal sin – un péché mortel” – All agree.
“Fermes la porte. On ne vit pas dans une grange.” – Mom to the kids
“President Eisenhower will protect us from those Russian A-bombs.”
“Evolution is wrong! We don’t come from monkeys.” – All agree.
Premarital sex is a sin. End of story! – All agree.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Stay alert! – General agreement
“He is a snake in the grass.” Beware! He is someone you can’t trust.
For Lent, you need to give up a pleasure that you really enjoy.
Life sucks and then you die. – Some agreement
Life is like shoveling shit against the tide. – Everyone agrees
Life is not always a sunny day at the beach. – General agreement.
“In the mills, managers would spit on us as we walked down the spiral staircase.” – Aunt Florence
“You are lucky, Claire. You never had to work in the mills.” – Florence to my mother.
“You win some and you lose some.” – All in agreement

It was with this residential sack of accepted pearls of wisdom, that I set out on my personal quest for meaning and goals in our troubled world of ideological, political and religious misgivings. Could a guy with a fervent set of Lowell teachings under his belt manage well in a wide, wide world of non-Catholic, non-Franco-Canadian believers, who still clung onto their ethnic, linguistic and religious traditions going back to the late Middle Ages of the 1750s? That was the challenge.

In trying to answer this question, I was first interested in knowing how the various immigrant groups had fared job-wise in the city during the decades before my arrival on the scene. What were the employment pages of the Lowell Sun saying about the jobs/work situation plus the exciting new career opportunities then available in the city over the years?

After the advent of optical character recognition, OCR, a digital advance that made access to old newspaper copies possible, any researcher could look into the details of the job market in any locality in the USA over the previous decades. This is the information that I found very useful in better understanding the work-a-day world of life in my hometown.

The job categories of people whom I knew personally or indirectly fell into classes such as: laborer, hair dresser, operative, taxi driver, plumber, nurse, teacher, cobbler, fireman, bricklayer, etc. Other classes like biochemist, scientist, technician, contractor, lawyer, biologist and more were also occasionally mentioned but these people were, generally speaking, outside our immediate set of contacts.

Given below, the reader will find a time correlation display of job opportunities open to some familiar classes in the city.

The call for firemen gradually increased from the 1920s through the 1950s. As a working class category, that of a fireman remained an excellent job for the few, who managed to make the grand.

Having the background of a welder, especially, during the 1940s (war years) was a super skill in great demand. We, personally, had no direct connection to any welders in our set of acquaintances.

Bricklayers represented craftsmen, who were clearly quite busy at work during the 1920s through the 1950s. One was quite fortunate to have a dad employed as a bricklayer.

Laborers were people having a broad set of practical skills, who could manage to fit into several work situations. Note that in the 1950s and 1960s, their role in the city’s working environment dropped significantly after WWII. Specialization was apparently becoming more and more a sought-for trait in a worker’s set of skills. My father, Ben Bolduc, fit into this category in trying to keep our family above water by working at four jobs during the typical week. Naturally, he had his principal job as an operative working at the Navy Yard in Collinsville some 40 hours a week. That was his mainstay. Also, on Friday evening and on Saturday all day, he helped Monsieur Pinard at our family market as a meat cutter or butcher. Often, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings, he would be driving a taxi for our neighbor, Spike Beauparlant, the owner of East End Taxi located at the corner of Aiken and Lakeview, which we all called the Corner. Saturday nights, he would spend time at the Centralville Social Club on Lakeview Avenue with his Franco-American buddies. Finally, often, on Sundays, he would be managing Ouellette’s black hearse to pick up a corpse needing embalming at Ouellette’s Funeral Parlor. My Dad was a busy guy.

My mother and my aunt, Irene Bolduc, each had skills of the beauty parlor variety, but the appeal for such talent dropped greatly in the 1950s when my recently widowed mother most needed to earn a substantial, personal income .

For many years, Lowell’s economic well being had rested heavily on the hard-working bodies of financially desperate, destitute and frightened immigrants, who had nothing to sell to the mill owners except their cheap labor – some were chilren – even when the working conditions were unsanitary and often quite dangerous.

When I was growing up, plumbers were considered very expensive home repair specialists – they also worked in industry – who would charge you an arm and a leg even for a simple repair, which you as a renter could not do on your own. Life in the Big City was often a painful learning experience. From the 1950s through the 1980s, these sanitary engineers were in great demand. Unfortunately, we, Bolducs, did not personally know any expert in this field, so even minor toilette repairs were left to my Dad and, sometimes, to Bob and me.

The importance of architects in the city varied greatly over the years directly related to the years of importance in my stories. In the 1920s, homes and multifamily tenements were still going up in Centralville and elsewhere. And, in the 1930s, in spite of the crash, **architects** were still finding work in Lowell. The years of WWII were apparently hard on individuals with this talent. In contrast, the city experienced a vigorous building renewal from the 1950s through the 1980s. This trend was followed by a significant drop in new building contracts from the 1990s through the 2000s.

The listing above covers work categories that were actually filled by people that we personally encountered in our daily dealings in Centralville, Dracut, Pawtucketville, Tewksbury, Tynnsboro, the Acre and elsewhere in the city. Other classes of workers also made important contributions to the local economy, but, generally speaking, these individuals were especially trained in a career fashion to reach a higher status of recognition. In contrast, their corresponding job classifications are given below as typical examples.

Electronics were widely available after the big war. — The field of electronics became an everyday concept in the lives of Americans after the end of WWII. Better radios, turntables, recordings and TV sets became widespread in popular society. Such gadgetry was made available to all of us at distribution centers like Pollards, the Bon Marche, the Giant Store, etc. Naturally, any person with a particular training in electrical circuitry, vacuum tubes, elementary E&M theory and more could hope to find work in the sale and repair of electronic devices. Often, former military personnel had obtained this special training as soldiers, sailors and airmen in the services so their chance of landing a better than average job in town was greatly enhanced. As a teenager in Lowell, I quickly concluded that a guy (girls were still excluded from such careers) ought to look to the services to find a good paying career instead of focusing on academic training.