Writing a blog regularly has some strange ups and downs. It is more than not knowing what to write on some days. It is more about quietly paying attention to why you can’t seem to start writing on a particular day. In my case, I often write about a memory that was prompted by a song from the past that triggered the memory. Strange associative memory prompts allow me to go down the path of storytelling.
Yesterday I was testing a printer that I had repaired, and I needed to test a printout of a web browser. For some reason, I chose to look up the front page of the Torrington Register, the newspaper from the town I lived in, in the northwest hills of Connecticut, from 1974 to 1979. Here in Torrington, I went from third grade through seventh grade at three different schools. We lived in three different houses in Torrington during those years. The first house we lived in was right across the street from a major manufacturing plant called the Torrington Company.
When I navigated to the Torrington Register website now known as the Register Citizen, I was taken aback by a news story about how the Torrington Company buildings were finally set for demolition. The Torrington Company started in 1866. The factory was sprawled throughout Torrington and factory buildings splattered all through the center of town and leading out in multiple directions. It is a company that has enjoyed incredible success and has fed, supported, and shaped countless families for over 150 years.
During that time that I lived in Torrington the factory across the road was alive and jumping every day. The parking lot was completely full, multiple shifts, always alive. The Torrington Company was preserved in my 1970s memory, safe and sound, never-ending, protected from the corrosion of time. I own my ignorance. A few years ago I carefully scoped out those roads on Google Earth noting empty parking lots and abandon looking factory buildings and then tried to forget about it.
In the 1970s Torrington had saved us. I had mostly lived in Bristol for the first nearly 9 years of my life. As my parents reconciled from a year-and-a-half-long separation in August 1974 we moved to New Britain. We moved into a large house that was surrounded by highway construction which would eventually become Route 72, an interstate-like highway that spurred through the city. From my nine-year-old standpoint, these were wonderful days. A very large old second-floor apartment in a house that was built in the 1800s with 9 1/2 foot ceilings, the old brass gaslights still protruding from the walls from a time long ago. It also featured a dumbwaiter, which was a small freight elevator of less than a cubic yard for the purpose of transporting trays of food from floor to floor. These became popular in the 1840s. It was not unusual to find one still working more than 100 years later. The house still had steam heat, which for me in my memory always brings sweet nostalgia in that each room had a personality. Those old cast-iron registers each singing their own indigenous song of whistling hissing and banging and tapping. You could always tell what noise was coming from which room.
In the fall of 1974, in New Britain Connecticut, children were disappearing. Just around the corner from where we lived there was a brutal shooting at a local convenience store. Our landlords and their friends up in the incredible hippie pad on the third floor were also tough to live with. In December our parents deposited us in the safety of our grandmother’s house in Bristol and we didn’t come home until we lived in Torrington.
With the move to Torrington, everything changed for us. Torrington was a city of first at 30,000 people but it had a small-town feel to it being nestled in a valley up in the northwest hills of Connecticut. For being a small place it was a rough place to go to school and yet somehow great at the same time.
We lived on James Street in Torrington from December 1974 until April 1976. During that time we were part of the heartbeat of the Torrington Company. We met people who work there, and we saw the same people every day, it was a place that seemed to have always been there the place that would never go away.
Two of my uncles worked at the Torrington Company. Its legacy of manufacturing began with sewing needles, evolving into bearings, 60-plus years of bicycle pedals, and many heavy equipment parts as well. In the 1970s, it was unimaginable that this powerful American industrial machine could disintegrate and migrate to other continents. There were people who saw it coming. There were accurate assessments as to why it was happening. Ten short years later, companies all over North America were breaking apart like satellites burning up in the atmosphere.
The great determined people within these companies fought hard to diversify, to downsize into smaller, efficient, specialized shops. In the backdrop, the old factories, the great dinosaurs of the industrial revolution, were dying and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
All over North America, these once great carcasses of better days have sat. Those of us living nearby, stressing through our inflated busy lives with blinders on, never looking at what these wastelands say about where we came from, and who we really are. We drive on in an age in which automation promised more leisure time to rescue us from the very life these cities of manufacturing provided. Instead, we overtook our daily life with over-documentation, overindulgence, overthinking, over-anxiety, and self-absorption.
It can be said what is there always was. The structure of the old ways just made it not rise into public view. The decay of this way of life has certainly had its casualties, and its victories too. Whatever the case, I remember you. As these buildings come down, the great monuments to the lives you put into them, I remember the great men and women who marched by my home every day in my 10-year-old life. You were amazing.