EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final installment of a farewell series in which former Editor Larry Parnass returned to a few of the places featured in his Gazetteer columns in the 1990s.
I knew Kurt Wolter was my sort of guy when, after answering my questions about Harvest Farm in Whately, he quipped, “A bad day of farming still beats a day in the office.”
It was the week after I left my job as editor of the Gazette, but I wasn’t really gone.
The paper allowed me to spend five days roaming the Valley, hunting and gathering stories. After more than 28 years as an editor at the Gazette, I had decided to assign myself a final road trip.
Because a day of reporting a story also beats a day at the office.
I thought about some of the places and people I’d encountered in the nearly 10 years I’d written the Gazetteer column — and decided to see what was new. It was time to check the traps, as my former colleague Joan Livingston liked to say.
What I found on a late-October ramble isn’t big news, but it helped me close the circle as I prepared to return to full-time reporting as investigations editor for The Berkshire Eagle. I heard about the power of kale, kicked the tires on the economy and checked in on a neighborhood tragedy.
I was schooled in the right and wrong ways to navigate the Manhan River in Easthampton, absorbed the miracle of vinyl and limned the tough paths of two Catholic churches. I verified that a promise had been kept in a Williamsburg cemetery.
I found, once again, that while roads bring us close, we need stories to connect.
At Harvest Farm, a big truck loaded with produce was pulling out for distant markets — and kitchens and dinner tables — when I rolled in the other day on Long Plain Road in Whately.
I’ve always felt connected to Harvest Farm. Soon after I joined the Gazette in 1988, I assigned a young reporter, Daniel Gonzalez, to spend two weeks working at the place and chronicle the experience for readers.
Gonzalez now reports on immigration and border issues for the Arizona Republic and has won national journalism awards. But this was nearly 30 years ago and he was working his first newspaper job.
For Gonzalez, a day of farming was tiring enough, and then he had to come to the Gazette, pound out installments of his summer farm report series and sit with me during editing. He was hungry to learn and knew he was onto a good story.
I decided to see how Harvest Farm was coping without him. Wolter, one of the farm’s most veteran managers, looking very 19th century in a wide-brimmed hat, stopped his chores in a sorting and shipping building to clue me in.
The watchword today is kale. The farm grows a lot of it, along with collard greens, but kale is king. Wolter credits farm owner Gary Gemme with figuring out how to cultivate kale in the most commercially successful way and timing it to the vegetable’s rising popularity.
“He’s real diligent and stays abreast of recent developments,” he says. Both Gemme and Wolter are nearing retirement age. “I hope the fad holds out till I’m 70.”
Over the years, Harvest Farm has worked to simplify by removing variables, Wolter told me. That makes good business sense, he said, and simplicity has its own logic. “We’re not getting any younger.”
Kale was starting to sweeten in the fields, as first frosts came. Up the street, a field of rosemary lay under cover to protect it from the nip.
Having been in farming for many decades, he admitted he was enjoying the relatively new community support for growers, and loves young people’s interest in farming. It seconds his emotion, as it were. “This is some of the best farmland in the world,” he said.
When Wolter got into farming as a young man, nobody was patting him on the back. Quite the contrary.
The community farmer, he said, has vaulted from “underachiever to American hero.”
I headed south toward Hatfield. On Depot Road, near Cronin Hill Road, a team was chopping field corn. Farther on, Szawlowski Potato Farms Inc. trucks lumbered up Main Street toward the company’s warehouse.
Wanting to get another look at the best farmland in the world, I followed South Street to the open fields below of Hatfield center and up and over a dike, near where the Connecticut River swings west before flowing under the Coolidge Bridge. The dry soils lifted in clouds behind my car. I stopped and called up a map on my phone. I sat in the midst of a sprawling factory without walls, a place that makes food.
A few miles farther on, I pulled into the One-Stop Career Center run by the state Office of Labor and Workforce Development in the Northampton Industrial Park. We’d run a lot of stories over the years about layoffs and I wanted to take the temperature of the place. This is where people used to come to file claims, until the state revamped the system in 2013; it now requires people seeking jobless benefits to apply online.
An office worker explained to me that while, yes, people used to line up outside, jockeying for help, the center now focuses on career counseling and resume writing. A board listed openings for a materials handler ($11.5 an hour) and a molding maintenance tech ($20 an hour) at Pelican Products in South Deerfield. Other slips advertised openings for a tax preparer and for a city engineer for Easthampton ($31 an hour and up).
A recent job fair the center sponsored drew a lot of employers but not many job-seekers, a sign the economy isn’t doing so bad.
About 100 years ago, when George Gosselin was a boy, his mother used to lead livestock to the little brook that flows west off the high ground of the Mount Tom range in Easthampton.
Gosselin grew up on Chapin Street and stayed. When I met him in the early 1990s, he was 74. He and his wife, Jennie, had allowed me, in a time of grief, to come to their home and see their backyard, and the brook.
I wrote this:
It is the kind of backyard a boy would love: A swing suspended from a branch of a large tree. On the sides, long hemlock hedges. In the rear, a brook, with fingerling trout, that flows by in a shallow ravine, one bank planted with pachysandra. A bridge over the stream. A high hedge far back, with a shrine to the Blessed Virgin which George illuminates at night.
There’s an outbuilding they call the “camp,” which inside is everything a remote hunting lodge might be. A shed with Grandpa’s tractor. A bird whirl-a-gig. A bird bath set out with two small swans. A rectangular garden edged with marigolds, its blueberry bushes blanketed underneath with pine needle mulch. Wren houses and bird feeders. Trees to climb. Fences to scale. Stones to throw.
All those things spun like constellations around a smooth grassy yard rich in clover, tucked behind the tidy white house.
The Gosselins had just come from weeks at Hampshire Superior Court, where Sandra Dostie, the stepmother of their grandson Eric, had been found guilty of smothering him with a pillow in August 1994. The jury saw through her story of a home invasion.
Gosselin died in 2003 at age 81. I knocked on the door of his home and woke a dog. I looked into the backyard.
Across the street, I found Lynzi Wildheart in her own yard, performing Qigong exercises. She came to her fence to talk and said she never knew the Gosselins. She confirmed that new people were living at 12 Chapin St.
I told her about what had happened to the Gosselin and Dostie families — and about Eric. She said the neighborhood remains a place that nurtures childhood, almost a ’50s-era street. “You see the kids riding their bikes,” she said. “You can’t ever leave here, once you’re here.”
While in town, I thought I’d check out the Gazette’s former office at 28 Cottage St. It is home today to Platterpus Records. That’s a change, and so is the feel of the street.
When the newspaper rented space here, Cottage Street wasn’t much of a commercial destination; today, after a slow, block-by-block campaign by determined retailers, it is as much a magnet as any street in the city.
Dave Witthaus, owner of Platterpus, likes being tucked between Nashawannuck Pond, with its new promenade, and the popular ice cream shop. He ran his shop for more than 20 years in Westfield and then a few more in Hadley before finding his way here about five years back, just as vinyl was making its comeback. He admits it’s a bit of a long, strange trip.
“If you’d told me 20 years ago I’d be selling vinyl I’d have told you you’re crazy,” Witthaus said from behind his counter, as a half dozen customers pawed through record racks. “I’d like to tell you I knew that would happen, but it would be a complete lie.”
Many of his customers are under 30, but people of all ages stop by, he said.
If I was feeling a little nostalgic for my days in the Gazette bureau, the feeling isn’t out of place here. Witthaus’ customers live happily in a sort of time warp. Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” is a big-selling album on vinyl, sometimes fetching a lot more than it did when it came out in 1977 and won a Grammy as album of the year. “Second Hand News,” anyone?
“Certain records have become insanely priced. I don’t get it,” Witthaus said. He tries to keep his inventory in the $6 to $12 range. “I look at myself as a blue-collar record store.”
That’s the spirit of the Cottage Street I remember, back when I used to toss a baseball out back with Douglas Clark, a Gazette staffer then working as a reporter and bureau manager.
Janice Beetle worked in the office around that time. One summer day we cooked up the idea of taking a canoe down the Manhan River, from just below Route 10 to the Oxbow. I trucked a beast of an Old Town canoe down from my home in Ashfield.
We floated. We paddled. But, mostly, we pushed. It took hours navigating up and over dozens of fallen trees.
After leaving Platterpus Records, I stopped at the river to look at the new fish ladder and ponder our voyage. Right below the new bridge there, I noticed a kayak and a canoe on the Mill Street side of the river and, on a hunch, tracked it to Paul Karella, a retired plumbing and heating contractor who’s lived here since 1976.
When’s the last time you went out? I asked.
“Yesterday. And almost every day that I can,” Karella said.
I told him about the agonies of the USS Gazette, and he smiled. Was it pure madness? I asked. Lots of downed trees have been removed, he said. “It’s a good ride, but the water’s got to be a lot higher.”
Karella paddles upstream instead. “It’s good exercise and good therapy, just being there where it’s quiet.” He canoes through the winter, when open water allows it — and when there is enough flow. “The kayak is just barely making it over the sand spots in the river.” He told me about a night trip he took last year, gliding along and annoying the beavers.
Once, Karella made it as far upriver as the Pomeroy Meadow Bridge. “Until I gave out,” he said. It took two and half hours to get that far, but just a half hour back. “It’s a little scary. The water’s going to take you where it wants.”
Mostly, it takes him back in time, in a way, to his youth growing up on Lyman Street and occasionally prowling the river’s edge, testing the end of a domestic tether. “It was always a lot of fun — with my mother’s shouting to come back home.”
The next morning I drove from home to the Village Hill Cemetery in Williamsburg to visit the grave of Harold Seewald. I had no idea where to look. Luckily, its superintendent, Don Nichols, was there doing early-morning chores and he agreed to help.
Seewald died of colon cancer on July 5, 1995, at the age of 46, surrounded by friends. One of them, Mary Kasper, was holding his hand.
Because he’d never married or had children, friends escorted him out — and then they helped to carry out his dying wishes. One of them was to create a foundation in his name that would help people. He called it the Fantasy Salvage Foundation, a thing that could help people stop giving up on their dreams.
One Friday the spring after he died, his friends returned to his house in Haydenville to prepare his possessions for a tag sale, with the proceeds, along with the sale of that home and his boyhood home in Queens, to feed the foundation.
I watched them go through his books, his records (heavy on the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and the blues). They put stickers everywhere, including on three computers in a guest bedroom and on seven harmonicas.
Seewald’s will named a Northampton psychologist, Mark Karpel, a friend from youth, as his executor. I caught up with Karpel that day in 1996 and wrote:
They’d been born the same day. At his friend’s old house on Friday, Karpel was remembering many things. Seewald’s old stuff was all around. A yellowing poster showed blood streaming from the dead body of a slain Kent State student, with the words, “Why, Nixon?”
Seewald’s politics were clearly of the left, Karpel says, but he wasn’t doctrinaire about it. Yes, the big library dispersed at the tag sale on Saturday had copies of the journal “Socialist Revolution” and scores of political pamphlets (like “Theory of Misery, Misery of Theory.”) But he had a sure eye for hypocrites. He loved bad puns and humor books. He’d played blues harp for “The Self-Righteous Brothers Band.”
Though Seewald worked as a machinist for a time, his heart lay in tinkering with the way society is built.
In his job with the Hampshire Community Action Commission, Seewald helped people get subsidies to buy fuel oil. That little financial tinker helped people he never really knew — nor they him — get through the day.
His friends had told me about the stone they wanted to have made for Seewald. This fall, two decades on, I wanted to see it.
Nichols said he could remember the stone, but not where it was. He powered up a laptop in the cemetery’s office, but had trouble locating Seewald’s plot. The late man’s friends had paid $350 in 1995 for a 10-by-4-foot site; today, that plot goes for $900, Nichols told me. But more and more people are opting for cremation, so the cemetery is creating a special area for those burials, where the plots are smaller, and cheaper.
Nichols had to run to an appointment, but suggested I look in an area down the hill. He pointed it out. “He’s got to be down in there,” he said.
The day they were preparing for the tag sale, 20 years ago, one of them had told me the epitaph they had in mind, and how they wanted the stone to be engraved.
When I found Harold Seewald’s resting place, it was just as they’d vowed: A Star of David on the front with his name, and an engraved rose like the one pictured on the cover of the Dead’s “American Beauty” album.
And there on the back, tickled by lichen, were the words they felt best summed up Seewald’s life: “Great of girth, mirth and worth.”
The name of the Fantasy Salvage fund sobered up a bit, becoming the Harold Seewald Charitable Foundation. Within a few years it was dispensing the big man’s generosity anew. In 2002, it presented a $25,000 matching grant award to expand and renovate the Meekins Library. The next year, it gave $2,000 to help back the Northampton skateboard park. And in 2007, the foundation helped the Haydenville Library get online. A small fantasy, perhaps, but consider it salvaged.
I then took the back way to Leeds, passing both the Haydenville Library and Seewald’s old house, and parked alongside the long-closed St. Catherine of Alexandria Church. Next February will be the 10th anniversary of its final Mass.
The 1911 church building and the rectory beside it remain on the market. I walked the grounds and jotted down the phone number of the broker handling the property. Birds were still intent on roosting in the steeple, which I remembered from other visits here, including one on a Sunday in 1997 at which couples who’d been married for 50 years renewed their vows.
The Rev. Vincent M. O’Connor, who’d come on a temporary assignment but stayed until his retirement, led the service. My column on the event included this:
Marriages are about children, the priest said. Anniversaries have a way of taking a roll call of who’s gone.
Leona Thomas, standing at the altar with her husband, Thomas, found her eyes flooding when it was her time to speak. O’Connor wanted to put her at ease. He looked at Leona and smiled. “It can’t be as bad as all that,” he said. The laughter was so full that Bette McGill heard it downstairs, where she was setting tables and getting a lunch ready. She wondered what the joke was.
Leona cried because she was thinking of her son, Robert, who died a few months ago of lung cancer. The vows tapped her deeply. She realized her son’s marriage would grow no more. “I saw he wouldn’t have a chance to reach this. It brought our whole life back to me. What we’ve been through, and how we’ve beared up under it.”
It was a heartbreaking day. Another former bride, Mary Foley, shared the story of the tragedy that she and her husband, Charles, had to overcome. When they were first arriving in the Valley — mom in front with the kids and dad following in a truck with his plumbing equipment, her car collided with an ice cream truck. The couple’s twin sons, nearly 7, died, as did their sister, 5. And Mary lost the child she was carrying in the womb. She and Charles began a new family. I tried to do their story justice:
“No one on the face of the Earth can realize what it is like, unless they’ve experienced it,” Mary says of the deaths. “It surfaces every once in a while. There’s no answer to why you’ve lived so long. It puts a different pinch on life.” She and Charles started their family all over again. Later Sunday, Mary went back up the nursing home’s long driveway. Charles wanted details of the service. They sat together in the sun. She told him how it went and they quietly considered each other. “His religion is something to see,” Mary says of Charles. “He has a beautiful set of values. He has a good soul and he is a good friend.”
I went to see Charles at the nursing home, where he lived, and asked him what he loved most about Mary.
“Really, it’s about everything,” he says. What makes a marriage last so long? “You’ve got to work together on everything,” Charles says. “That’s about the size of it.”
The Gazette came back to the St. Catherine in February 2007 to cover the closing.
Inside the church today, a calendar on a wall remains open to March 2007. I know because while walking around the church I found the caretaker, Garry Michaud, and he agreed to give me a look inside.
Michaud stops by regularly because he’d detected attempts to break into the church. He patrols when he can. “Usually during the day and before it gets dark.”
The air inside was cold. All the pews had been sold and removed, exposing an expanse of blue carpet. A statue of Jesus stood on the altar.
In back rooms, it looked like people had been going through open drawers, but seemed uninterested in what they contained. Michaud and I walked the whole church, then stood in the sun talking.
“I’d love to see these places get sold,” he said, gesturing at the rectory and church. “Or make this into a veterans’ place. It’s just amazing that you’ve got these people who want to break in all the time.”
I made a few other stops that morning, including a visit with Frances Crowe in Northampton. I went downtown to look again at the First Churches — where I’d gone often for stories and columns. Out front I noticed that a step carried a historical notation, identifying it as a stone from the “Third Meeting House, 1737-1812.”
One other church, a far newer one, was on my itinerary that day: St. Valentine’s Polish National Catholic Church, at 127 King St. I’d gone to the rectory, years ago, to seek comment from a former priest, the Rev. Julian Pagacz, during a time of crisis for parishioners.
Pagacz had been charged with indecent assault and battery in connection with a September 1991 incident in which a teenage girl said he touched her indecently. The day before he was to go on trial, the priest submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a guilty finding, as the legal language goes. His attorney at the time said his client had been drinking with the girl and didn’t remember assaulting her, but did recall having her push his hand away. Pagacz got a year’s probation and was ordered to undergo counseling; he remained a priest.
I had gone to see him in 1996 because the incident fractured the church. A dissident group broke away, even once holding an Easter season celebration at the Polish American Café on Route 9 in Hadley. I called him later that year because he was up for consideration to take charge of a church in Connecticut also administered by this faith, which is separate from the Roman Catholic Church.
At the time, the Polish National Catholic Church bishop, the Most Rev. Thomas Gnat, had told members of the St. John the Baptist Polish National Catholic Church in Manchester, Connecticut, that what people had heard about Pagacz were unfounded rumors. One of the members, however, had lived in Hatfield and knew of the plea and sentence.
And so the other day I was back knocking on the rectory’s front door, wanting to know how the church is doing.
The Rev. Adam Czarnecki invited me to sit with him in his study. He shared a leaflet about the church’s harvest dinner, which was coming up. He’s been working to build membership in the years he’s been leading the parish, but said it remains difficult.
“This community was broken by the spectacularly stupid thing that was done here,” Czarnecki told me.
Church membership stands at about 40. “We have some new members, but it is not enough still.”
To open the door wider, Czarnecki offers lessons in Polish, which he speaks as a native, and has more than 15 students. He runs Bible study as well. One of the leaders of the dissident group, Chris Newman, has returned to the fold, Czarnecki said, but he’s had difficulty winning back others, at least those who are still alive. After finding other homes for their faith, many former parishioners aren’t inclined to make a change.
“They are more bound to some place,” the priest said. “They prefer to stay where they are.”
But he keeps trying to reach out to keep St. Valentine’s going. “This church is open to everyone, not just Polish people.”
I thanked him for his time and for his willingness to speak about his world.
That goes for all those who took time to speak with me on this ramble and through my years of reporting in the Valley. I asked. And generous, thoughtful and community-minded people so often answered. I felt honored to be entrusted with their stories.
Larry Parnass can be reached at lawrence.parnass@gmail.com.