USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 14
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tian behavior were the benefit bridge or bingo parties held after 1925 under the auspices of church groups. What a hundred years ago would have been labelled outright sin was now regarded as harmless diversion. Whatever made for wholesome neighborliness in the community could now be accepted as a function of the churches.
In adjusting to such new concepts, Naugatuck's congre- gations were helped by a succession of unusually long pas- torates at St. Francis', St. Michael's and the Congregational church. Catholic and Protestant both benefited from having priest or parson ministering to their parishes uninterruptedly over many years, a continuity that enabled each to give a special contribution to the community. Three priests at St. Francis' after Father Fagan's death in 1896, five rectors at St. Michael's, and three Congregational ministers spanned the fifty-one years from 1893 to 1944.
In one field, however, once exclusively that of the churches, other agencies began to appear about 1900 when separate denominational units could no longer fully meet community needs. The first humanitarian undertaking that was sponsored by a group outside any one church was the Working Girls Club. Since the inspiration of this club came from a number of lonely young women working in the rub- ber shops who in banding together for their own benefit started a self-help group, the club in a sense was not a philan- thropy at all. But to arrange for a meeting place and a teacher to give them instruction in fancy work, English literature, and arithmetic-their primary desires-the charter mem- bers had to enlist help. The person to come to their assist- ance was a teacher in the Salem School, Miss K. Maude Smith. Miss Smith not only arranged for the club to use a room in the Salem School and found people to teach but promptly interested other women in the town in the project.
In origin the club resembled the groups launched in the 1830's by New England girls working in the Lowell cotton mills, whose intellectual interests the Lowell Offering ex-
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pressed and whose attainments called forth the astonished admiration of Harriet Martineau. But the Naugatuck Work- ing Girls Club soon ceased to be a wholly self-propelling organization. Money to expand its program could not come from its impecunious members, and yet its aim, providing these women with a richer social and intellectual life, was appealing. So well-to-do women of the community assumed financial responsibility. It is hard to know whether interest of the members wore off as other means of diversion became general in Naugatuck and as the public evening schools widened the scope of their classes, or whether the well-inten- tioned patronage of wealthier citizens stifled the initiative of the women for whom the club was meant. By 1920 its useful- ness was largely a thing of the past and in 1921, after donating the remaining funds in the treasury to a community Christ- mas tree, the Working Girls Club went out of existence.
Meanwhile contact with members of the club had con- vinced Miss Gertrude Whittemore, always one of its staunch- est supporters, that a great need in the borough was a decent place for homeless working women to live inexpensively. Like her father, John Howard, and her brother, Harris, Gertrude Whittemore felt strongly the obligations of wealth. At her own expense she built Hamilton House which opened its doors in 1907 to about thirty residents, some of them women working in the mills, some of them school teachers and office helpers. For a generation the house served much the purpose of a localized Y.W.C.A. Then as it ceased to fill any particular want in Naugatuck, it was sold for an ordinary rooming house.
More valuable to the community as a whole was the Day Nursery. This institution for thirty-five years was the chief charity in Naugatuck run neither by any church nor by the public Welfare Board. It originated in 1911 when a fire in a tenement house burned to death a little girl trying to pre- pare supper for her widowed mother before her return from work. Horror at the tragedy and a sense of common guilt
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that such a situation could arise in a civilized community brought prompt action. Mrs. Howard B. Tuttle immediately set herself to the task of raising money, finding a suitable building, and engaging a competent woman to take charge of the small children of working mothers. Other women threw themselves into the work and in a few weeks' time Naugatuck's Day Nursery was a reality. A succession of tender-hearted matrons took charge. They lacked profes- sional training but their devotion to the children partly offset that disadvantage and made the nursery a happy place. About twenty-five children daily came to the Day Nursery-over six hundred altogether in the course of its thirty odd years. Fi- nancial support flowed in from men and women of all types, and their warm personal concern for the success of the proj- ect maintained it. In fact, every civic organization in the bor- ough, from the Rotary Club to the Chamber of Commerce, always gave it vigorous backing. In 1942 when the Connecti- cut Committee for the Care of Children of Working Mothers listed the requirements of a properly run Child Care Center, Naugatuck women learned that their Day Nursery did not meet all these specifications. But though it lacked a fireproof house, by state standards had inadequate toilet and kitchen facilities, and omitted some desirable features in its program, the Naugatuck nursery still served Naugatuck working mothers well.
The other principal outlet for community generosity was through the Red Cross. The local chapter, chartered in 1917, enrolled nearly 11,000 people that first year and from that day to this never failed to "go over the top" on its fund drives, although its quota was always high. Still more significant was the wide-spread, deep interest in Red Cross service. Many communities during the excitement of the first World War organized Motor and Canteen Corps and made fine records in producing surgical dressings, knit socks and sweaters, but few kept any considerable program after the war. Women of the Naugatuck chapter, however, now turned their atten-
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tion to local needs. Remodelling old clothes for European children in the bitter winters of 1919, 1920, and 1921 sug- gested a way of helping ignorant needy women in Naugatuck to help themselves. So the chapter rooms were opened to classes in sewing, and under the skillful direction of mem- bers of the "Production Corps" foreign women who had never before seen a sewing machine learned how to remake clothes for their own families. These classes had double benefit: women learned new useful economies and at the same time established direct relations with women of other social classes. Later when this particular project lapsed, other work took its place-Junior Red Cross, First Aid and Life Saving, and an especially active program of braille-transcrip- tion.
In the middle twenties the chapter opened a baby clinic where two Red Cross nurses weighed and measured the babies weekly and gave inexperienced mothers instruction in infant care. The ensuing decline in infant mortality was attributed in considerable part to this public service. The nurses acted also as community visiting nurses whose activi- ties compensated in part for the lack of a hospital in the bor- ough. So the Naugatuck Red Cross, by taking over some functions which in other cities were left to public agencies or to other philanthropic groups, occupied a peculiarly vital place in the community life. It provided the borough's only family welfare organization. Unlike many small chapters where work for the Red Cross was popular chiefly because it carried a special social prestige, the Naugatuck chapter could rely upon men and women who participated in its program because they were genuinely concerned for its success as a community enterprise.
But Naugatuck naturally did not give all its leisure to good works. For entertainment young and old gradually altered their habits in keeping with changes taking place in all America. As long as people customarily worked ten hours a day six days a week, diversions were necessarily few. On
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Sunday afternoons families went for walks or, if owners of horses and buggies, father, mother, and children drove out into the hills. When the electric street railway established inter-urban runs, an afternoon trolley ride, particularly on the open cars in summer, became a standard pastime. And then, as automobiles became common, the Sunday afternoon ride came to be the event of the week. Movies, first shown twice a month in the Gem Opera House and then once a week at a little theatre on Church Street, before about 1907 were not universally accepted as "quite nice." But prejudices melted away before the excitement of seeing "The Clutching Hand" and "The Perils of Pauline," where virtue never failed to triumph. When another movie house, the Alcazar theatre, opened in 1912, it was packed nightly to the doors just as the first one was.
Meanwhile the reduction of working hours by closing local factories at noon on Saturdays after 1912 brought new leisure and new recreations. Though in the past boys and men had always found some time to play ball, to bicycle, to swim, to skate, to fish or to hunt, a free afternoon every week now gave impetus to organized athletics. While members of the Naugatuck Fire Department from 1905 on had had active ball teams and had acquired an athletic field on which to play, most men in hard-working Naugatuck had had too little free time to join in. Now industrial leagues sprang up all through the valley and, whether men played or watched, they followed their own team's performance with passionate par- tisanship. High school athletics similarly gained in impor- tance. Where teachers and pupils, together composing the high school teams of 1906 and 1907, played easy-going games with neighboring schools, ten years later the Naugatuck "High" was expected to play its hardest to win: Naugatuck honor was at stake. Stress on this kind of professional amateur athletics scarcely lessened until the war. After 1922 the high school coach, Peter Foley, developed a number of athletes who attained country-wide fame, notably Billy Burke, in
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1931 National Open Golf Champion, and Frank "Spec" Shea. Today Naugatuck takes particular pride in remember- ing the years that "Spec," now pitching for the New York Yankees, pitched for the Naugatuck High School.
Fortunately athletics and casual outdoor recreation were not limited to members of factory or school teams. Vacant lots and playgrounds near the schools gave little boys and big a chance to play catch, Baby in the Hole, Cops and Rob- bers, marbles, and other classic games, while the opening of the Recreation Field and then the golf links made tennis and golf available. Public acquisition of the Recreation Field, the nineteen and a half acres of Culver's Meadow along the east bank of the river south of the bridge, was the result of new awareness of the value of public playgrounds. When the Hop Brook School was built, Harris Whittemore, its donor, had laid out a school playground, equipped with swings and enough open space to give children room for games. The enthusiasm with which children used this con- vinced the taxpayers that playgrounds in other sections of the borough were highly desirable. So under the leadership of the new Chamber of Commerce seven thousand citizens raised $68,000, bought the Recreation Field, and organized the Naugatuck Playground and Recreation Association. Later three smaller playgrounds near public schools were opened.
One consequence of these public parks was the new op- portunity for girls to enjoy athletics more generally than had been possible when the classes in physical education once a week in the high school gym had been the only provision for girls. The good tennis courts and the volley ball and basketball fields soon were used as much by girls as by boys. After 1921 the Board of Education put directors in charge of the playgrounds every summer, so that supervised play became a regular part of the public recreation program. Somewhat later the playground directors focussed special at- tention on games and story hours for small children.
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Naugatuck's social life in one respect was unusual: at its top level, it was without snobbery. Not only did self-made men command civic respect, they were welcomed as social equals in the homes of the most sophisticated. Good manners born of "courtesy of the heart," honesty, and interest in Nau- gatuck, gave full social entree to people of humble origin and limited means. Such a situation was rare at any period in America, and particularly in industrial New England in an era when growing wealth was emphasizing class distinc- tions. In many cities when men had made money and were securely established in the business world, they tended to seek a part in the society world of larger communities where wealth fortified by taste opened up a widened stage. But Nau- gatuck's industrial leaders continued to find satisfaction in Naugatuck. Parties given in the roomy, dignified, unpreten- tious Whittemore house on North Church Street included citizens of all ranks and gradations of importance, and the Whittemore home for thirty years was the scene of a gracious, friendly hospitality that recognized no artificial social bar- riers. Here the fine paintings John Howard and Harris Whit- temore acquired in Europe were open to view by anyone possessed of the interest and taste to enjoy them. The out- going kindliness of host and hostess extended its warmth to all who, like themselves, were devoted to the well-being of the community. In spite of later occasional uncertainty over the long-term benefits of Whittemore largesse to the bor- ough, people in immediate contact with such friendliness could not be critical.
It is easy to understand why the death of John Howard Whittemore signified to his fellow townspeople the grievous end of an epoch. In the succeeding years the younger genera- tion was unable to maintain the same degree of community social solidarity which simple neighborliness formerly had made so distinguished. New conditions in all America after World War I imposed inescapable change.
Following the first World War, as movies and radio broad-
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casts brought every American city and village into closer touch with every other, social life and diversions here began to adhere increasingly closely to the general American pat- tern. Miniature golf, ping-pong, roller-skating, badminton -each waxed and waned in popularity according to some inscrutable wave of fashion. Dancing parties, card parties, and later cocktail parties went on here just as in neighbor- ing communities. Early in the 1920's the United States Rub- ber Company employees established a Recreation and Edu- cational Association which conducted parties and picnics, and about 1935 girls employed in the offices started a Girls Club of their own. The Girls Club minstrel show became a great yearly event. Concerts and lectures run by the Congre- gational Parish House Association, the high school com- mittee, or other semi-public organizations continued to command good audiences, although the tendency growing everywhere to shun "highbrow" functions cut in somewhat upon patronage of anything smacking of "uplift."
Still clubs devoted to serious matters held their own. The Woman's Club formed in 1932 had 248 members at the end of its first year, and a Delphian Society, that typical mani- festation of American women's passion for self-improvement, answered the needs of some. Most important and oldest of all, the Women's Study Club maintained its place in Nau- gatuck's social life. Organized in 1894 "to promote general intelligence and culture," the charter members set them- selves to develop Naugatuck's literary tastes. Every member was required every year to contribute a paper upon an as- signed subject, ranging from the "Religions of the Orient" to the works of Dante. Once a year the club held an open meeting with an outside speaker, an orchestra, and a caterer. It was in 1916 when the club imported the Yale Dramatic Association to give Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, that the Yale coach, Monty Woolley, forecasting his part in The Man Who Came to Dinner, sprained his ankle. But both the annual open meeting and the fortnightly study sessions
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loomed large in the lives of club members. Election to mem- bership, soon limited to sixty, for many years constitute the sure mark of social distinction.
Intellectual life, however, was not confined to the socially elite, if patronage of the public library be an index. In 1894 upon the completion of the Howard Whittemore Memorial Library-the fine, well-planned building that gave ample space for new books-the Library Committee and Miss Ellen Spencer, the librarian, made a careful selection of books that would appeal to Naugatuck's diverse, rather cosmopoli- tan population. Thought spent on acquisitions built up the original 900 volumes to a well-rounded collection of 10,000 which circulated rapidly. Endowed by John Howard Whitte- more with a fund, later increased by his daughter, the li- brary was never dependent upon public support. But citi- zens were appreciative. Here Thomas Sugrue, later to make his mark as a distinguished novelist, spent long hours avidly absorbing from the books spread before him some of the wisdom that was to color his own writings and particularly enrich Stranger in the Earth. Other readers were scarcely less eager. Fifty years after the new library opened about 3,700 men and women were regularly borrowing its books. When a separate children's library made rearrangement of the adult library feasible, open stacks added to its usefulness. Now anyone might roam past the shelves to select whatever pricked his imagination, a scheme, librarians had learned, that often aroused a curiosity not stirred by reading a title in a card catalogue. At the same time a special committee weeded out volumes no longer of interest in order to make room for works of more permanent value.
While fiction was the mainstay of the collection, there were also many books only less in demand covering a wide field of cultural and scientific subjects. The growing range of the public's reading interests suggests a steady enlarge- ment of intellectual horizons. Perhaps particularly admir- able was the collection of manuscript and printed materials
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bearing on local history. This appealed alike to genealogist, antiquarian, and schoolchild, and was a source of informa- tion heavily drawn on when citizens presented their centen- nial pageant in 1944. Books in foreign languages of current interest to the Polish, Portuguese, Lithuanian or Italian- born people in the borough became another feature. Later this supply was supplemented through regular inter-library lending among several of the smaller town libraries of the vicinity, so that the variety of reading available for people with a meagre command of English was greatly increased.
The Children's Library, given by Miss Gertrude Whitte- more in 1928, was moved two years later into the building next to the main library in quarters originally built by the Naugatuck National Bank. Donor and staff gave utmost at- tention to making the rooms attractive and the 3,600 books of the best. Every week a children's story hour was held. Nau- gatuck children from homes of every class quickly learned what pleasure awaited them here, and a circulation of nearly 33,000 children's books every year proved that the younger generation was making the most of this opportunity.
So wider reading, frequent movies, the radio, and more personal contacts with the world outside wiped out much of the provincialism of the town of the nineteenth century. The nearly fifty years since the establishment of borough govern- ment had seen many changes, some plainly visible, others more subtle. Changes in physical appearance had been ac- companied by an increase in population to about two and a half times the number here in 1890 and of far greater diver- sity of background. New points of view about public re- sponsibilities had emerged along with new concepts of what constituted a satisfying social life. How had these develop- ments affected citizens' attitudes toward Naugatuck as a com- munity?
Belief that the town had much to offer to industrial Amer- ica had prompted campaigns to bring in new industry, and citizens in the nineties frequently advertised the peculiar
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advantages of living in this borough, beautifully located in the New England hills, easily accessible to big cities of the seaboard. Satisfaction with what already existed did not in- terfere with plans for improvement. Community action had built the Whittemore Bridge. Community enthusiasm in 1919 launched a great homecoming celebration for the 836 servicemen returned from the war, a gala occasion which had included a huge parade, luncheon on the green, and a pleas- ant final ceremony of presentation of a gold medal to each veteran. The atmosphere of this fifth of July welcome home was that of a united community, proud of its past, interested in its present, hopeful for its future.
But in the next twenty years some of this unanimity of feeling disappeared. The same thing was happening in other small American cities. Criticism stemmed both from young men born and bred here, who went off to school and college and then to jobs elsewhere, and from men who came from other towns to the local laboratories and mills. As greater ease of travel made opportunities to compare Naugatuck with other cities, some young people, irked at the limitations of the social life of so small and so industrialized a commun- ity, failed to find Naugatuck ideal. Disapproval voiced by departed native sons was recognized as unimportant and sometimes undiscriminating; it was the common lot of small cities. More disturbing was the attitude of newcomers. For the greater transiency among junior executives and labora- tory technicians, an increasingly common phenomenon in American industrial towns, was giving an impermanence to the top levels of Naugatuck's population. Whereas one hun- dred and two hundred years ago it was the craftsmen or the laborers that were the journeymen, the transients, now fac- tory operatives were relatively stable and the rank above moved about. Among the upper hierarchy the result was a more critical citizenry, but a group not always ready to take responsibility and unwilling to make efforts to change what they disliked.
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Equally disconcerting to people concerned with Nauga- tuck's future was the tendency of people of means to build homes outside the borough. Residence in the charming old hill towns nearby, Middlebury or Woodbridge or Oxford, had natural attractions that industrial Naugatuck could not offer. But Naugatuck by these removals of influential people lost both income from taxable improvements and the in- tangible support and interest that any citizen gives to the community in which he lives. The automobile made much of this commuting inevitable. Like a big city into which sub- urban dwellers pour daily to earn their livings, Naugatuck more than formerly became the place of business to which every morning people flocked but from which they departed again at the end of the working day. Though this draining of vitality from the community was slow, by 1940 it was per- ceptible.
But another factor affecting local attitudes, more subtle, more difficult to identify, but probably more far-reaching, was the change in citizens' thinking about the United States Rubber Company. When in the late twenties centralized control of the separate units that made up the United States Rubber Company began to go into effect, Naugatuck awoke to the realization that its most important industry was ab- sentee-owned. For nearly forty years, to be sure, ownership had not been centered in Naugatuck, but as long as the local plants were managed by old residents, Frederick F. Schaffer and W. T. Rodenbach, survivors of the days of independence, citizens had cherished the illusion that the company was a local concern. Although theoretically people had long known that Naugatuck's rubber industry was only one small seg- ment of a very much larger whole, full recognition of that fact had been slow. Now the confident pride in Naugatuck's importance began to be shaken. Company officials in New York would determine policies for Naugatuck, not local leaders. True, company directors continued to appoint Nau- gatuck men to positions as superintendents and managers.
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