LOWELL SPEAKS AGAIN

In “Voices of a Vanished Amoskeag” (October/November, 1978), men and women spoke of what it was like to work and live in Manchester, New Hampshire, when the great mills of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company composed the largest textile center in the world. Established in 1837 and patterned along the same company-town lines as the more famous Lowell, Massachusetts (and built and controlled by many of the same Boston-based interests), Manchester, as we reported, went through a period of accelerated decline through much of this century, until by the late 1960’s there was little physical evidence remaining of the old way of life. As one former textile worker recalled, “Today, everything is falling down. If our old parents, who worked so much in these mills, if they’d come back today and see how these mills are, it would really break their hearts.”

Much the same could have been said of the mills of Lowell, for many of them, too, had succumbed by then to the shifting demands of modern industry. The town itself, America’s first planned industrial city, had long since slipped into a kind of grimy lassitude, and the vast red-brick mills stood empty, ignored even by the urban renewers of the 1950’s.

In the early 1960’s a Model Cities community group proposed a revitalization program for the city based on its history. In 1972 the Lowell City Council refined the idea into what it called a “historical park concept,” and which eventually won the backing of city, state, and federal governments. On June 5, 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed an act creating Lowell National Historical Park, the first such park to be devoted not just to a place, but to an industry. Full development of the park—which eventually will include the 5.6 miles of canals that once powered the mills, the mills themselves, and company housing for the work force—is not foreseen until sometime in the 1980’s, but the National Park Service hopes to begin its first walking tours in the summer of 1979.

Lowell, it appears, will soon be speaking for itself.

“AUX BARRICADES!”—TUXEDO PARK HANGS ON, SORT OF

As Frank Kintrea noted in his article on Tuxedo Park in the August/September, 1978, issue, that once-posh enclave of the very, very rich has lately been struggling to maintain what the Tuxedo Park Association has called a “creative tension” between the exclusivity of the past and the rampant democratization that threatens it on nearly every side. However creative the tension may be, author Kintrea wrote, “there seems no place for Tuxedo Park to go socially except down.”

That may be, but Tuxedo Park nevertheless has managed to retain more than a ghostly image of its traditional privacy, as reader Julian H. Salomon of Suffern, New York, reminds us: “Should any of your readers be inspired to visit Tuxedo Park … they will find that while the fence may have come down, the ‘imposing gateway’ pictured on page 72 of the article still firmly stands and that the police who guard it will firmly bar their way. That’s because the Park is the only incorporated village in the country to which the general public may be denied free entry.”

This remarkable state of affairs, it seems, came about in 1952 when the residents of Tuxedo Park—after being governed solely by the town’s Association since 1886—decided to incorporate themselves as a village according to the laws of New York State in order to receive certain tax benefits and other appurtenances of the latter twentieth century. Ordinarily, incorporation would have meant a municipality open to anyone who cared to wander through, but when a New York Times reporter asked an Association spokesman if the action would bring any changes to the essentially private nature of the town, he replied, “None.” He was right, for in approving the incorporation, state officials also allowed the Tuxedo Park Association to retain a privately owned, fifteen-hundred-foot-wide strip of land that completely encircled the “public” town—a sort of early DMZ, or demunicipalized zone. Anyone who wants to get into Tuxedo Park, therefore, must breach a genteel barricade, perhaps the last vestige of true Privilege left in a town that once was the living definition of the term.

CHICKEN-PLUCKIN’ CONTROVERSY

The article on the history and sometimes bizarre whims of tornadoes, “The Winds of Ruin” (June/July, 1978) by C. W. Gusewelle, noted that researchers had never found “real proof” to confirm the prairie legend that the great winds sometimes pluck chickens clean. Joseph G. Galway and Dr. Joseph T. Shaefer, meteorologists with the National Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City, Missouri, have written in to disagree. “While it is not the mission of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center to record tornadoes which deplumed fowls,” they say, “enough events of this phenomenon have been documented over the past one hundred and forty years to warrant acceptance. …” Rather than deny the reality of such weird incidents, they continue, most investigators have tried to find out just how they occur. One such indefatigable researcher was Professor Elias Loomis of Western Reserve College in Ohio, who in 1842 attempted to simulate the tornado’s plucking power using a cannon, then meticulously recorded the results: “The gun was charged with five ounces of powder, and a chicken just killed added for a ball. As the gun was small, it was necessary to press down the chicken with considerable force, by which means it was probably somewhat bruised. The gun was pointed vertically upwards and fired; the feathers rose twenty or thirty feet, and were scattered by the wind. On examination they were found to be pulled out clean. … The body was torn into small fragments, only a part of which could be found.”

Science marches on. Still, no one since Professor Loomis has come any closer to determining precisely what happens when chicken and tornado meet. Are the feathers simply blown off by the three-hundred-mile wind? Is the electrical field in the funnel’s vicinity or reduced atmospheric pressure inside it responsible? Or does the bird’s anxiety (understandable) in the face of the big wind cause it to molt instantaneously? Whatever the cause, that they do get plucked seems amply documented.