Environmental Autobiography

My consciousness has certainly expanded, especially in terms of curriculum. I've done a fair amount of curriculum development; that's the primary reason I was hired as a technology staff developer the last couple of years. Technology is a useful tool, but only to enhance curriculum. After doing the portfolio projects below, I'm armed with a variety of new insights into the many personal, social, and historical directions curriculum can go.

I've always asked students to write autobiographies in their high school English classes, but I've limited them to college application narratives or moments of epiphany and transformation. These processes resemble what I now understand to be proleptic moments, but they can go much further. Students can link their lives to the past, present anf future in ever-widening contexts. They can aim higher, beyond prescribed formulae, to social reconstruction and transformation. Their love can move beyond the personal to the universal. Their stories can teach us all.

I continue to believe in global community, even if only for my own pedagogy. I better understand now how we can move incrementally from the local to the global, from the personal to the communal, the internal to the social.

Part of my career problems (changing positions every few years, losing the Title IID grant position) is that I have never been a follower. Nor have I been a leader. I've been an iconoclast. I've marginalized myself within the multi-tentacled NYC Department of Education. Now I feel more ready to lead, more grounded in theory, less isolated.

The spider at the center of the universe spins its inexorable web. We're all inside it, but we needn't be trapped. Each strand can be eternal.

            Loss of industry has devastated thousands, if not millions of lives throughout the world, particularly in industrialized nations. Many individuals never find other sources of employment after losing jobs they may have had for as much as 40 years. Towns and cities have been ruined, not only economically, but physically and culturally. Some cities, such as North Adams, Massachusetts, have recovered, due to the resilience, determination, hard work and activism of their citizens.

            Experiences of urban decline, so-called urban renewal, and economic redevelopment are rife with educational opportunities in every high school subject area. This paper will discuss how North Adams was affected by the relocation of the Sprague Electric Company in 1986 to Mexico, how the city recovered, and how curricular concepts of marginality, translation and love, through exploration of North Adams’ history, can enrich the education of high school students.

            According to Christia Mulvey, who wrote a research bibliography on Industrial Development and Labor History in North Adams in 1997 after graduating from Williams, the textile industry was the source of many jobs in the early part of the 20^th Century. The Arnold Print Works was a major employer until World War II. The Sprague Electric Company, which specialized in the manufacture of electronic components such as capacitors and resistors, moved into a facility at Marshall Street in 1941. The company expanded during the next 45 years. Their 13 acre plant, two blocks from Main Street, employed as many as 4200 people (in 1968).

            North Adams was essentially a company town during the heyday of Sprague Electric. Approximately 25% of the residents of North Adams worked for Sprague. The workers formed a union in order to increase wages and benefits. “Sprague physicists, chemists, electrical engineers, and skilled technicians were called upon by the U.S. government during World War II to design and manufacture crucial components of some of its most advanced high-tech weapons systems, including the atomic bomb.”  (http://www.massmoca.org/about.html)   

            Charles Tompkins, whose interview is recounted in Disappearing Into North Adams by Joe Manning, was hired as an engineer by Sprague in 1959. “The salary was good. It was around $100 a week.” (pg 137)  According to Tompkins, Sprague actually had more positions than available workforce, so they began smaller operations in Sanford, Maine and Concord, New Hampshire.

            Another person interviewed for Disappearing Into North Adams, Paul Garnish, began working for Sprague Electric in 1952.  Because he had graduated from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, he was hired to work in the facilities engineering department.  He and his wife lived on Veazie Street in North Adams. “They had about 3500 employees working three shifts around the clock. It was interesting, because we were able to work throughout the facility with no problems at all…you always felt like you were contributing to keeping the company going and adding to the profitability of the company.” (pg 140)

            Garnish worked for awhile in the Concord plant and helped build the Sanford plant as well as a new plant in Plymouth, New Hampshire. By 1969, when Sprague was at its peak, they built a plant in Wichita Falls, Texas and later in Juarez, Mexico, where labor was cheaper and restrictions were fewer.

            In 1970 the union went on strike and Garnish, as a manager, had to cross the picket lines. R.C. Sprague, the company’s founder, “was really crushed by it. After the strike, he started giving the other plants more priority.”  (pg 141)  Tompkins  said that “R.C. had promised his engineers that the strike wouldn’t cause any problems. A year and a half later, there had been all kinds of people let go.” (pg 138)  The company went from 4200 employees to 400 by 1985. A newer, smaller plant was opened at Curran Street. The Sprague managerial offices are still located there today, even though the main plant at Marshall Street closed in 1986.

            The gradual diminishing of the Sprague workforce, coupled with the demolition of many North Adams landmark buildings during the urban renewal movement of the ‘70s plunged the city into despair. The closure of Sprague Electric devastated the local economy. Unemployment rates rose and population growth declined. In 1986,  just a year after the factory's closing, the business and political leaders of North Adams were seeking ways to creatively re-use the vast complex. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Adams,_Massachusetts) Thomas Krens, the Director of Williams College Museum of Art and later of the Guggenheim Museum, was looking for exhibition space. Mayor John Barrett III suggested the Marshall Street building formerly owned by Sprague Electric.

With community support and major contributions from the private sector, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art was established at Marshall Street. MASS MoCA opened in 1999, and North Adams is experiencing a renaissance. Tourism, culture and education have combined to revitalize North Adams.

Susan Edgerton, in Translating the Curriculum, describes a curriculum theory around cultural studies and autobiography. The concept of Marginality plays an important part in her theory. The experience of the Sprague Electric employees losing their livelihoods can be seen as a marginalization of the workforce. Unemployment certainly marginalizes many people; their self-esteem diminishes along with their resources.

Essentialism, which Edgerton defines as “reduction of ideas, phenomena, social actors to positive transcendental essences” (pg 8) is another relevant concept to the loss of industry. Workers not only take pride in their industriousness, but they often identify themselves, or describe themselves, in terms of the labor they do. Their sense of self, or essence, is strongly linked to their careers. To remove a worker from his long-term career setting is to undermine his own sense of self—self-worth, self-esteem, connectedness to community and nation.

Translation, another important concept in Edgerton’s curriculum theory, occurs when the experiences of marginal subsections of the population are described and disseminated through autobiography. This translation, when understood by the larger (or dominant) population, enriches their own experiences and enhances their education. Many connections can be made to the loss of industry in American or European cities, so the experiences described by Tompkins and Garnish can be translated into a curriculum for self-development and social reconstruction.

One such translation connects the workers of North Adams to those in England when the mines and colliery there that had been the center of the townspeople's lives closed down.  In October 1992, the British government announced the largest mass layoff in its history, as it revealed plans to close 31 coal mines - more than half the country’s coal pits - and to axe 30,000 jobs. “As tens of thousands of miners faced the layoffs that haunted so many workers, the public began to question why the closures had been ordered. Today, the public is incensed over the way the government has treated the miners.” (Helen Beatty, The Price of Privatization) Students of American history can translate the experiences of the Sprague Electric workers to those of the British coalminers.

“This translation,” Edgerton writes, “cannot be understood outside notions of love…What knowledge best enables us to care for ourselves, one another, and the nonhuman world?” (pg 9-10)  Surely love had so much to do with the transformation of the old Sprague Electric facility to

MASS MoCA—love of North Adams, of its people, its history, and its culture. This concept of love as a vital and overarching cause of social and economic activism has many pedagogical implications.

            How did Americans survive the Great Depression? Which orators and writers through sheer power of love helped inspire us to fight adversity, endure crises and overcome hardships and hard times? There are numerous interdisciplinary curricula that stem from the story of Sprague Electric and MASS MoCA: economics, civics, physics, Language Arts, Fine Arts, and mathematics.

            Local histories, recounted by those who experienced them, are natural starting points for true learning—learning that serves the highest purposes of self-transformation and social reconstruction. We all can make crucial connections, from local to global, from self to universal, and from marginal to center.

 

Bibliography:

Beatty, Helen; The Price of Privatization

Edgerton, Susan Huddleston; Translating the Curriculum: Multiculturalism into Cultural Stdies

Manning, Joe; Disappearing Into North Adams

http://www.massmoca.org/about.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Adams,_Massachusetts

Click on each image for larger view.

I live two blocks from Prospect Park, which Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux created in the 1860s to serve a rapidly growing urban population. Even though they designed New York's Central Park and Boston's "Emerald Necklace," Prospect Park is often considered their masterpiece (http://www.prospectpark.org/hist/).  I spend a great deal of time there, and I must have walked nearly every trail as well as starting several of my own.

Impressions:  Biking aroound the park. The bike lane and jogging lane are always busy, a steady stream of exercising humans all moving in the same direction. In this case, the Other is the one who bikes or rides clockwise. Horseback riders on our left, then past the pond with the ducks and swans and people tossing pieces of bread.

                                    

Third Street playground--Modern jungle gyms form the periphery. A sandbox, swings, a water fountain, pigeons, spiral-footed plastic rides. Parents or babysitters or nannies or grandparents with strollers. A racial and ethnic mix.

 

The Long Meadow is packed on weekends and summer days. Frisbee throwers, volleyball or baseball players, dogs, babies, picnics, birthday parties, sunbathing. Couples lying on blankets or strolling hand-in-hand.

                                   

Sledding--Several good hills, but the best for sledding is located near the Pincis House. On Snow Days dozens of people use that hill. Sleek sleds with shiny runners, toboggans,  plastic sheets, round boards. The long walk up the hill. The shrieks of joy. Adults running over kids, making them cry. Angry looks from parents.

 

Carousel--Of the 6,000 carousels constructed in the United States during the golden age of carnivals in the early part of the 20th century, only 200 remain intact. The Prospect Park Carousel is one of them. (http://www.prospectpark.org/hist/main.cfm?target=../dest/caro_hist) I've taken both of my children there, often walking across the park to reach it. Happy memories here. Zack and Lila have outgrown carousels now.

 

Bandshell--I make sure to go to as many concerts, performances and special events as I can as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn festival every summer. Already this summer I've seen Laurie Anderson and Natalie MacMaster. Other summers I caught The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, Fritz Lang's Metroplis on a huge screen with Pere Ubu playing live film music, The African Music Festival, Yo La Tengo and Burning Spear.

 

Days after my relationship with the first woman I ever lived with ended, I went camping with my college friend and his wife at Acadia State Park in Bar Harbor,  Mount Desert Island, Maine. It was the only time in my life I've been there, and I remember it as a healing place. I've camped many times since then, but never there.

In 1916, Sieur de Monts National Monument was created with 6,000 acres of land donated by individual landowners. In 1919, it became Lafayette National Park, the first national park east of the Mississippi River. In 1929, the name was changed to Acadia National Park. Today, Acadia preserves about 40,000 acres of Atlantic coast shoreline, mixed hardwood and spruce/fir forest, mountains, and lakes, as well as several offshore islands. (Info taken from the National Park Service)
 
Under the canopy of trees, insects incessantly circled and bit, or else hovered, usually  to their deaths, too close to  lantern lights or campfires.  Dave was a great cook, and he fed me well that week. I must have been a terrible companion as I often broke down in tears, lamenting the loss of someone who now, 25  years on, I remember with some fondness, but no regret.

Always an insomniac, my sleeplessness was particularly bad that week, my nightmares flooded with images of her deception. One night, after hours of fighting sleep demons in my tent, I decided to walk to the shoreline to await the sunrise.

I sat on a large rock, my feet dangling in the cold stony water, gazing at the constellations. (To this day, I do most of my stargazing when I camp; New York is no place for stars.) Here, on the east coast of the easternmost state in the country, I watched the sunrise, while crabs scuttled among the rocks or through the sand, terns flew and sanpipers danced. I'll get through this, I told myself.  This, too, shall pass.

When I was 10 years old, my father accepted a job for the New York State Court of Claims, so we moved from Brooklyn to Albany.  However, my parents' social life continued to be based completely at Brighton Beach Baths (see previous post).  Consequently, we drove three and a half hours each way every weekend every month except January until I went away to college.

Countless hours spent confined with a car with two brothers in the back seat and a troubled marriage in the front, on the New York State Thruway. That major highway was the sinuous cord that connected, at least hypothetically, both halves of our lives. In retrospect it seems inconceivable that parents would unthinkingly subject their children to endless hours of yelling, hitting, crying, and waiting.

The view along the thruway is not particularly scenic. Countless trees, exploded hills, small towns, service areas, roadkill. Hawks circled above us, looking for prey.  We'd see occasional deer springing gracefully in the woods beside the road.  Toll booths, reflectors, lonely exits.

Instead of an exciting double life, those years were schizophrenic, divided, incomplete, glimpsed. Weekdays and school in one city, weekends and summer in another, hours and lifestyles away. Fractured relationships like the broken lines along the Thruway. Yearnings for continuity shattered like all the deer that lay broken and dead along the shoulders of the road.

I still know the names of all the service areas and exits. I remember places, always associated with pain. The one weekend in 10 years that my father had to turn the car around because of my mother's asthma, so resentful. Years later I allowed the truths to enter my consciousness. The Brooklyn life was his alone, filled with sports, alcohol and furtive affairs.

And I remember the automobiles, of course. The '63 Rambler, the '69 Buick, the green station wagon. The interiors of these cars were a living landscape of captivity and longing.

    My youth was inextricably tied to the environment of beach and ocean. I spent every weekend and all summer at Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. My world consisted of sand, shells, waves, breeze and sea life. Hot sand under my feet, coolness under the boardwalk. In fact, "under the boardwalk" took on an almost mystical allure. It was a relatively private spot, shadowed, separate, unseen As a teenager, I hid there to smoke. And I would look under the boardwalk for treasures dropped by the thousands of walkers.

    My grandmother had a daily routine involving canasta games at the beach club, Brighton Beach Baths, then a slow, paced swim between. Bay 2 and Bay 3, then steamroom and shower. In fact, one of my early memories is of my grandmother taking me with her into the women's locker area and women's showers. Everyone was wrinkled and tan. Many spoke Yiddish.

 
  Brighton Beach Baths had a culture, a Gestalt that is now long gone. Sports, tanning in a solarium, card games Mah Jongg, gossip, drinking. And the ocean itself--majestic, salty, home to millions of jellyfish, clams, mussels, crabs, occasional washed-up sharks, a rare whale, porgies, dragonfish, bluefish, flounder. And sea gulls, persistent, vociferous, watchful.

 
  By the time I was a teenager, I had become quite marginal because I was not athletic. I was mediocre at paddle tennis, pretty good but not terribly interested in handball, and downright awful at basketball. My family's social life continued to be centered around the Baths, but I no longer wanted to be there. The streets of Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island and Gravesend were much more alluring, with their promises of intrigues, exotic girls (as in "not Jewish"), and more... illicit activities.

 
  I stopped going to the beach during the days but I loved going there at night. Sitting in the lifeguards' tall chairs, looking out at the expanse of stars, at that magical space where sea and sky kissed. Those nights, when I was16 and my life was as wide open and possible as that ocean, are enduring memories. My life was that beach. But no more. Never again.