Voices in the Hills: Four Vermont Workers; Part 2

Voices in the Hills: "Four Vermont Workers" is a WoodSmoke production. I never workeH for nobody after I come up there after 25 years all old when I'm on, I've been on ever since to write and put bread on the table. That was something I didn't need to be told. I didn't need to think is just my goal. This was that. And and I grabbed you know, I was 16 years old and I'd already been told that if I was going to work at a shop or you want to get Jones Williamson and, you know, so that's what I wanted and that's what I got. Well, you know, today my son is 14 and he's ready to go into the machine tool business or in that, you know, has that decision now. And I told him that I'd shoot him if he went into the machine tool business once. I know that the support of my children depended totally on me. And I knew I knew that I was going to get out there and I was going to make it and I was going to make the money, whatever it took to to see to it that the children were fed and they had clothes and we had a place to live.

Paulette silly office worker Brian did. And machinist Barney Crosier, newspaperman, now Brenda Sawyer for Vermont workers whose stories we'll be hearing on voices in the Hills. My father, Lambells and Sady Bill and Mother is they were she was our home wife and he worked most time in the mill and logging. We had a boxer and my father used to teach me how to file. And and we used a crosscut saw, you know, on big logs we brought and we didn't even have a gas engine back in my days, you know. And the first did I ever see was horsepower. Treadmill, I don't if I said it was in wintertime,

February and I'd been 16 that spring and school, I'm going back good. So I want to go get my father down me. I could go diving team time and we were going logs into the mill right there in West Jamaica. Now, Bendel's was born in 1984 in Roslindale, Vermont, after working for his father. Bill was married and went to work on a farm, but farming didn't agree with him and he soon found another line of work. So I had a blacksmith shop and a garage and I shot the horses and I worked as a mechanic and he wanted one. So I went to work for him and I got three dollars and fifteen cents for nine hours. So he let me out for a while and I was pretty good welder and I could shoot horses, beat him. And he was an old man.

I was born on a farm in Wilmington in 1922 and my father had a very small farm, about six or seven milking cows, and he had a team of horses. And in addition to using the horses on his own farm, he worked out with the team quite a lot and earned extra money that way. We, of course, had all of our own potatoes and vegetables and we had a flock of hands and always had pigs. So our meat, our eggs, milk and cream and butter and all of that was taken care of. The food was there. Barney Crosier has been writing for the Rutland Herald for more than a quarter of a century as a boy, however, closure never imagined making writing a career. Instead, he entered the State School of Agriculture and moved more in keeping with his

father's practical attitudes to my father. Whom I admired very much, a person didn't work. If he did what I'm doing, what a banker does or what a lawyer does. I had an uncle who was a businessman in Wilmington and we were riding on the lumber wagon past his house. And it was a hot, hot summer day. My uncle was sitting out there in the rocking chair, fanning himself from the white shirt on, look up by just a little ways. And my father said to him, cussing at work today in his life and he can make more money sitting on his porch than I can mowing hey with these horses all day. And there wasn't betterness, but it was astonishment that people could get paid for not working at gas because to him, the person who work was the person that had calluses. Who who shovel, who chop, who split what, who, who handled the plow. And anything that was backbreaking was honorable.

OK, I was born in Springfield in 1949 and I went to school all 12 years in Springfield and I'm still in Springfield. I have moved very far from home. Brian Bibbins began learning the machine tool trade in his High Schools Cooperative Vocational Program. He's worked for the Jones and Lampson company ever since. We used to call it the country club. I mean, it was a great place to work. In fact, when I went there as a co-op, I sabotaged everything I did at every other plant because I wanted to get to Jones. Johnson lamp's. When I went to when I went to Parkson Wilson's, I told him I'd quit the program if they if they picked me. And when I went to to Bryants, I told them the same thing. I said, I'm don't want to work for you. I got to come for the interview because the school says I do. But I don't want to work for you. I want to work for Jones Lansing because I knew some guys that Jones Williams and I've been through the plant. They were always the height, the technology, all their equipment was in good shape, but they had a complete co-op

shop that was separate from the whole plant. And you could run any machine you wanted and make anything you wanted. It was just a just a great program. So when I went to jail, I did everything I could to make that company notice me. And I was picked first and I was so happy. I quit high school in tenth grade. And I had Christine when I had just turned 16 when she was born. And then when I was 17, I was expecting again and I had twins. I was eighteen. And actually for me it was a treat. It seemed it was more relaxing. It was on my own. It wasn't under under somebody else's saying, well, you're going to do this next year, take care of these kids. They were my own kids. They were my own children. And I took care of them my own way. Pilot Sally was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1953 and moved to Vermont with her family when she was three at the age of 19, married and with three

children, she began working in a New Hampshire shoe factory. I started out as a spare and I learned every job on that floor, the finishing jobs. And then I ended up being inspector. And another job I had to learn was to listen. And that was those were piecework jobs. And when I got in there, like lacing shoes, it was fifty cents for a case of shoes. And there were seventy two shoes in the case. But when I got to be inspector, I went on flat rate. That's not a piece, a job. And that was I was making a dollar and sixty cents an hour, but it was my first job and it was really the first time I had been out working side by side with other people. And factory people are a lot tougher. Then say office people, if you work in an assembly line and it's police work they want, different jobs are easier to do and you can make more money on them

and they're all going to fight. Over the easier types of shows, because they know they're going to make more money doing it. And they're just they're out there for themselves. You know, they're they just shoulder to shoulder and they're just going to fight to make that extra 50 cents, if that's all it is. And see, I was living in Groton, Vermont, so it was about a 25 mile ride. So I used to I used to get up at four, 30 and do anything I had to do in my house, go all the way to New Hampshire and work two straight hours and then turn around, come back home. I fed everybody and then worked with my husband. My husband was setting up an auto body and repair shop. We need the extra money. He was working full time. I was working full time. Plus we were trying to get this business on its feet. So we both worked in the body shop at night.

Well, I had a chance to buy a garage and blacksmith shop right down in White Bell and we moved back. Yeah, I was twenty four years old. My wife is twenty two and we were the depression time in nineteen thirty and thirty one and I lost everything I had there and I moved on from here and I my old house is bad and bad, just bad. And I made up my mind. I work and get me a little and lumber. And that's where we turned out, I turned into a big man with a steam engine. Sign ten thousand a day, night, eight hours of work. And I run from. 1935 until 1966, and I turned it over to my three sons, and they've been running ever since from the time I was a little kid, I remember people

coming to visit my father, like when we were seven or eight years old. All along, you got two boys, a good husky boys. They to be a real help and get you on to a bigger farm. Now, the whole direction was that to be successful and to really count, I would use my muscles and my brother would use has. And it was honorable to work from down until dark. And anybody who was lazy, I think I think thievery wasn't is as big a sin as laziness. I left the agricultural school because I needed more money. I was thinking still in terms of an agricultural job, but I thought I would get one down this way in Springfield because my wife's folks were from here and her father made very good money and a machine tool shop. And my idea was anything that I could do in the Springfield area

would bring me more money than what I was making. So I came down here without a job and I was bound to take the first one. I didn't want to be without work. And I got here on a Friday and I saw some plumbers working on a renovation job at a house. And I saw them and got a job as a plumbers. Halpern And that turned into something I thought was just temporary. I stayed with them for six years and became a model. Smith and Allburn, a serviceman. I worked with him six years. I still didn't want it for a lifetime or when I came there, which was, you know, only nineteen sixty six, it was there were so much better atmosphere. I can remember. I could care less about having a vacation. I enjoyed going to work. And up until about seven years ago, you know, I know of probably ten people that didn't take vacations. They actually worked and got paid for their vacation extra, which,

you know, some of them did it for the money and others did it just for the fact that it was a it was a relaxed atmosphere. And I enjoyed going to work. But in the last seven years, it's changed so that I feel so bad going in and out of there and to see what they're doing to the people that have bent over backwards for them in years past, working 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And it makes no difference anymore. You know, if they want to get rid of you, they don't care what you did yesterday. If you can't do it today, you're gone. My husband and I were separated when I was twenty one and the girls and I bought a little time because it was closer to where I worked. And I was still working in a shoe factory then. And I worked see, we worked 40 hours during the week and then we worked for hours on Saturday and I still did body and Fender work, but not with my ex-husband. And the factory closed twice during the time that I was there

and was taken over by someone else. So you went on to unemployment until you could get back on your feet and get back in. And that's why I finally left New Hampshire and came back to Vermont because it was impossible. Three shoe factories had closed down into town, side by side to small towns. And almost every person in those two towns were people who had always worked their whole life in a shoe factory. So the employers had all kinds of people to pick and choose from. And if you did work for them, if you didn't tell the line, it was nothing to get fired because they knew there was a hundred people waiting for that job to open up they college and recession. Now, we haven't worked in the time that I've run here. I've seen good many times when we were down just bad. We knew there was no work in depression time from thirty up and thirty four and five.

There was very collarless, you know, recession, depression, you know, either one. Not my knowledge. I lived through the real. There was no work at all. You couldn't sell no lumber, anything, you know. And it was pretty hard. Keep going. On evening I was reading the Rutland Herald and I always check the want ads and just browse through them and help wanted. The Herald itself was advertising for a correspondent for the Springfield area. Wasn't as big a paycheck as. Workers in Springfield shops were getting at that time, but it was secure. I had hesitated about going in the shops because of what is happening right now. You keep getting laid off. And I didn't want to be without work. And I figured the security offset the difference in pay to some extent. I never remember a moment of doubt in my mind that I could do the job.

I felt I can write. I've read the papers always. I know the style and I read the Herald a lot. And I never recall a moment of doubt that I could do the job this was doing, doing what I'm sure I'd really wanted to do all my life. But I just never considered it because of my background and my attitude toward work and what work is. And I think that writing for a living reporting news, which requires writing, if I'd given it any thought when I was in high school, it would have been the one and only thing that I would have considered doing the first 10 years I worked. I work fifty five hours a week, never anything less. Fifty five hours a week, and I loved it. I couldn't wait to go to work. I used to go there an hour and a half early just because I work nights. I used to go there an hour and a half early just to make sure I

knew what the demand did to make sure that everything was running right and that the machine was all set because we were just developing when I got there and I was really enveloped in my work and I really liked it. Now it's just the opposite. I still like the job as far as making the machine run and and doing working with the computer, working with the machine and the fact that we are highly technical and we're up on the top. I mean, the next step is talking to our machines because we've done everything else. We you know, there's there's no they're at the top of the line. And it's nice to to be that far along. And I enjoy it because it keeps your mind, you know, just boggles. Ten years ago, I didn't think they could get any further, you know, and then five years ago, I didn't think they could get any further. And today today I'm really on the verge

of thinking that they've had it. But but I hope they haven't, because it's it is it's a it really keeps you at a very high sense of technology. You know, you're right there with the space people. So we move back to Vermont. And I moved in with my sister, my daughters, and I moved in with my sister and we moved to Barry. And the first thing I did was went to Vermont Jobcentres. And I had said that I had always I would have always liked to work in an office. But in the same breath I told them I would take any job they had an opening for because I wanted a job then and I didn't feel that I could wait until something was going to open up. And I didn't have a high school education on top of it. So they suggested that I go try and take my GED, which I took and passed without. I had absolutely no problems doing it, which made it, which gave me some confidence.

I had never taken a bus in my entire life. I don't drive. I never had a license. So I had to depend on the bus to take me from there to map here. You figure out what building I was going to be in the whole thing the first day. I was absolutely terrified. Just just getting on that bus was a big step for me, being able to know that I could get from Biery to Montpelier without anybody helping me do it. And as luck would have it, my first temporary job was with job service. I was making three thirty five an hour. Absolutely no holiday pay. You get no raises. You don't have money to buy clothes, which is another situation. When you go into a factory, you can wear jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers. If you work in a front office, you have got to have some type of an appearance and most officers have a certain dress code.

I mean, it makes it very hard when you're on such a limited income and you have three children that you're feeding and clothing and to try to figure out how you're going to take care of yourself, too, I think some people handle it better than other people. And I also think that one of the things that makes it easy is how bad you want this job. How bad do you want to be? Have a. To work in this office area, do something you've never done before, your drive has an awful lot to do what you can get through anything if you have to. I mean, if you want to survive, you'll do anything you have to to survive. They die about there's no work. Nobody can find a job. You know, I never believed in that. And all my life, I think that you can find the job. You want one. If you are too fussy, you can either take any kind of job. I mean, there was I was in debt for years here, but

boys ain't never got in debt. And they stayed out. I tried to keep them out and we're not dead. And that's one thing that I never try to do is get too big. I'd rather be rich, poor man, what I am. To me, the mere fact. That somebody would pay me for writing, I never could quite come to grips with that, I was just just overwhelmed by that idea. That is something is sit at a desk. You you write, you go breezing around, looking for something to happen and then come back and if you can put it together in words to pay for it. And so I was completely taken up with that and I made it just about a full, full time job. There was no limit on the hours. I mean, I would if I heard of something happening, I'd go out at six o'clock in the morning, 2:00 in the morning, whatever time.

And on holidays I can think of two Christmas days in which I've had to leave and go to a fatal accident. But to me, it was a part of it, part of the job of writing. They were depending on me and I was bound. I was going to cover the cover the town and cover it like it had never been covered before. And I think most of us think we're crass people. It's not like it's not like building a house where you can go back and look at it five years from now, because when that machine goes out the door once in a while, you go to fix it. But in two years it it's pretty well gone. It's not a thing that, you know, where you make a sculpture, it brings value in and people appreciate it. You make the machine tool and people abuse it. But we have fake automatics and flat doctorate's that

are, you know, made nineteen nineteen or eighteen eighty six. And then babies are still running the day making packs and these job shops. Now that's, you know, as something to say for Springfield, Vermont and Gaono and Brian's newspaper and all in the same way we have shapers in general only they're nineteen thirty two, they're put in there and they're still making good news today and but they don't look much like much. But I feel it. You know, I can take a machine and when I get done with it, that machine will will do anything. You tell it within forty minutes of an inch. No, that isn't craftsmanship. I don't know what is. You know, I work for the Department of Banking and Insurance and this office regulates all the banks and all the insurance companies that are licensed to do business in the state of Vermont, which

is over eight hundred insurance companies. So it's it's a very, very busy place to work. You're never bored. It's always something going on. Now, I've been there. You're mad. I'm going to start taking insurance exams this fall for health insurance. I'm going to specialize in one field. And the pay scale is the difference is incredible because I pay scale for an insurance analyst is pay scale nineteen. So if you can get through the course, you know, and pass it on, which I'm not saying I can because I'm just starting this, but I'm certainly it's something that's opened up for me that I haven't had a chance to do before. And what I'm really proud, proud of today is that I raised a pretty

nice family all around here. I built them all help build a home for all of them and give them land and everything else and put the boys into the milk business here. But is this. I don't think there's anything that would change because I don't think there's anything else that I know it I could do, you know. I was born in me, I guess, in Melbourne, Bills is a retired lawyer and mill owner from Wardsboro, Vermont. To me, while I love writing, the satisfaction isn't so much in publishing as in the writing the expression. So I have never had a great big, overwhelming yearning to to become, I will say, a novelist or a noted poet.

Poets are noted for not to Barney Crosier, who lives in Springfield, Vermont, and is currently a special correspondent for the Rutland Herald. They do not think of you as a human being. You are either a working robot or you're out the door. And I myself, I just I would if I could find a nice job. I take it today, if I could find something that was only for half the money, I would do it today. It's a crazy thing to think that I place that 10 years ago you couldn't keep me away from is a place that I wouldn't let my son even begin to think about going to. You know, it's a crazy situation. Brian Bibbins is a machinist from Springfield, Vermont. I know I can do anything that I want to. I know that now. And I'm not I'm not worried about taking on a new challenge. Insurance is very complicated, a lot more so than I would have ever dreamed it would be. But I know that if I stick to the books, you know, if it's something that I really want to do, I'm going to get through it and I'm

going to be right up there. And it took me a long time to get over that feeling that women especially are going to have that chance because we weren't raised to be that way. We were raised to be home. And now I don't feel that way at all. I don't think that just because you were born female, that you should be somebody's wife and somebody's mother. I mean, you have a chance to be something that you want to be first and everybody should. And I certainly want my girls to grow up that way. Paulette Cyle works for the Vermont Department of Banking and Insurance and lives in Barre, Vermont. Voices in the Hills: Four Vermont Workers was written, produced, recorded and edited by Mark Greenberg and Mary Kasamatsu for the Center for the Arts and Public Issues. The studio engineer was Steve Zinn. The title music was written and performed

by Dick McCormick. Advisers to this program were Karen Lane, Christina Johnston and Richard Hathaway. I'm Linda Hogan. Voices in the Hills is a WoodSmoke production, funded in part by a grant from the Vermont Council on the Humanities and Public Issues.