Kenneth Martin

Description

Biographical Text

Ken Martin is a photographer, photojournalist and educator originally from Worcester, Massachusetts.  Ken works for a variety of agencies and clients, mostly in the greater Boston area. Many of his clients are in the human services and legal services fields including The Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation, the Volunteer Lawyers Project, More Than Words Organization, Health Care for All, the Massachusetts Legal Reform Institute, and others. His work has been exhibited and published widely over the years. An early major project was photographing the first Legal Needs Study of the Poor in Massachusetts. Later, he was assigned by the Impact Visuals Agency.

Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Photography and Photojournalism in the Communication & Journalism Department at Suffolk University in Boston where he has taught for 30 years and taught in the Graphic Art Program of the New England School of Art & Design at Suffolk University.  He created and has led study abroad classes at Suffolk’s campuses in Dakar, Senegal, and Madrid, Spain, also at the Lorenzo de Medici Institute campus in Tuscania, Italy. Martin also taught in Dakar, Senegal, for the School for International Training and has traveled to Nicaragua and Cuba with art and educational groups.

Recently, the opportunity to teach a course at AUA, the American University of Armenia, became a reality. The most important aspect of work for photojournalists is to report stories from the front lines of history and with his AUA class the capital Yerevan and its neighborhoods and outlaying regions fell under the coverage of his Lens on Yerevan, Photography in Armenia course students

Transcription

00:08 - 00:12
Gregory Jundanian (GJ): First of all, thank you for joining me today for this interview.
00:12
Kenneth Martin (KM): Sure.
00:13 - 00:39
GJ: I wanted to do this for a long time. We're here for an interview for the Armenians of Whitinsville Project, and we're interested in learning more about, from an archival sense, the history of your family as it pertains to Whitinsville, but also the history of the other side of the family that may not have come through Whitinsville.
00:38 - 01:14
GJ: And ultimately, we're interested in how all this history--your background, everything--plays into who you are as an individual today. Why? What has shaped your identity? Because of your particular background being Armenian. And to some extent, if there is an influence from being in Whitinsville, that also. So why don't we start with your name and date, where we are today, your birthdate, and then we can get into talking about some of the origin stories behind your family coming here.
01:14 - 01:18
KM: Great. You give me some prompts along the way, and I’ll remember all that.
01:19 - 01:30
KM: My name is Ken Martin—Kenneth Martin. I was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Date? 1952.
01:32 - 01:39
GJ: And how did your family come to Whitinsville? Because you don't live there now, but your mother I know grew up there.
01:39 - 02:08
KM: Right, right now we live in, here we are now in Bolton, Massachusetts, which is about 15 miles outside of Worcester. We sort of settled here when our child was born, and his name is Craig. And we were looking for a place and we found something sort of in between Worcester and Boston. My in-laws lived in Watertown, Massachusetts and it was nice to be sort of half way where we could go to either family to help as they needed it.
02:12 - 02:32
KM: So this is a really nice country area and we love it. I've always been kind of a nature boy, they used to call me. I love fishing and hiking and doing outdoor things, which led me to become the nature counselor at Camp Haiastan in Franklin, Mass. Not too far from here.
02:33 - 04:21
KM: Yeah, so, my family arrived in two different periods. But let me start with the second period first, and that would have been my maternal grandparents. And they wound up living for about 30 years in Whitinsville, Massachusetts, all after what is known to us Armenians as the genocide. And in 1915, my grandmother, Zaroohi Boghosian, was living in a place called Keghi in a province in eastern Turkey called Garin, which is the Armenian name, and Erzurum, which is a Turkish name, which interestingly enough, a Iranian friend that I had made, translated it for me. For me as an American kid growing up, it was Erzurum, Erzurum, they come from Erzurum, we didn't think it had a meaning. But the Iranian friend told me it was as Ard-ar Rum, Erzurum,  Ard-ar he said was the border, with -rum, rum was Rome, it was the border with the Romans. So in ancient times when the Romans came into the area, into Armenia especially, and fought with the Persians, they took so much land and they had a border between them for a long time. Eventually the Romans lost but that was the Roman border. That's Erzurum.
04:22 - 05:12
KM: So grandma was from there. She was from Keghi-Kasaba, and Kasaba was the central city of, outside of Erzurum proper. And it was a fairly prosperous place. And grandma lived there in the center. Her dad, whose name was Hovsep Boghosian lived right in the city and someone showed me once, someone who lived there, showed me a picture of the town in a map where they lived up on a hill towards the center. And he owned a, well, my family says he owned a bar, but I'm sure what he owned was an inn where there was a bar, restaurant, that sort of thing. So they were in the food business.
05:12 - 06:30
KM: And when 1915 came along, he was jailed and killed. Grandma had five or six brothers who only one of them survived. And she and her mom, whose last name was Harpootian or Harpootlian, Boghosian were put on the road basically and had to march out of town with her sister, her sister in-law, and the other women from the town. The men were disposed of, and the women began their march. And, you know, this is near Bingöl Mountain. They had to cross the mountains and the Taurus Mountains and eventually into the Syrian desert. Along the way, and grandma told me this, she said that she had been given responsibility to hold on to a little silver chest with objects, you know jewelry, money and those sort of things. That's what she had to carry along the way. Of course, they were allowed to take things with them until it was decided they should be robbed and worse.
06:30 - 07:58
KM: And they were brought to a gorge. I don't know if it's what's referred to as a ”doon doon” gorge  or it was a gorge near the city or the town of Palu. And she said they were in line with the other women and the women were being robbed at knifepoint and gunpoint and then pushed over a cliff into the gorge. And she said they were in line to do that. While they were, shall we say, waiting their turn, a young Turkish man came up to them and saw she had the silver box and tried to take it from her. She fought the man pulling back and forth with the box until her mother saw what was going on. And the young man opened his cloak, and she called it a cloak, and I've since read about events of the time and some of the Turkish shepherds and people wore these felt cloaks that went over their shoulders, and he opened it, and it was full of knives and weapons. And that was his threat that he would use them if she didn't give up the box, so her mom said, “just give it to give it to him, for God's sake, let him have it.” He took it, he walked away. This incident caused them to drift out of the line for the cliff and they just wandered away while the other women were being stabbed and forced over.
07:59 - 09:41
KM: So in a strange set of circumstance, they were saved by this thief and they went along into the Syrian desert. They went through all kinds of horrors and even I can't mention them all, and eventually made their way to Syria to, I think, Der Zor, then to Homs they were in for a while. And then to Aintab, or Aintab then Homs. It's not very clear the path that they took, but the paths are listed in a lot of the documentation. And when they got there, with the other women there, her sister had disappeared. She was taken away by a Muslim family and was living in a Muslim home with her child, a young boy. And so, they got by once they were taken care of by whatever resettlement was going on there, they got by by making candy. I don't know what candy it would have been. Well, when we were kids, we used to have, you know, fruit leather, we called it bastegh. And I know it's called lavashak by the eastern Armenians or there's probably even another name for it. They used to make that in Worcester every autumn. And rojig was another one they called, and that's, Armenians called that  sujuk candy, with walnuts in the center. So they might have been selling that, she said they were selling it to British soldiers so they were in a British zone of occupation.
09:43 - 11:21
KM: And so that's how they were getting by. And so her story stops there for a moment. And we go to her husband-to-be, my grandfather, who was from Bursa, Turkey, which is in western Turkey, north of, northeast, I think, of Istanbul and north of Smyrna. And his family were metalsmiths, and they had a very prosperous business. He told me about all the different objects, pots and pans, and things that they would make. And he said they had a secondary business, which was doing embroidery, and dede, we called my grandfather “dede,” the Turkish for grandpa, or medz hayr. And he said they made the embroidery designs, floral designs and other patterns, for Turkish clothing that they would sell or Turkish tailors would bring that to them and they would add the embroidery to it. In much later in life, after my grandmother died in the late 1970s, he, he asked us for some art supplies and we gave him we gave him some crayons and pencils and paints and art paper, and he started drawing those patterns. That's how he kept himself busy after grandma died. And he said, these are the patterns that we would put on the clothing, and I've saved those. So I think it's something important that I have. He used to sign them with his name and things, and he was very creative, actually. So one wonders what he could have become had he not gone through such disaster.
11:21 - 12:06
KM: So he remembers he had two sisters who had red hair. When he left home as a young man--they were twins, actually, twin sisters with red hair. And when he left home at a young age, late teen years because he wanted to make it on his own, he made, it was the last time he saw his parents and his sisters, and he made his way to a couple of different towns along the way. And he finally got to Smyrna, which was the most cosmopolitan city, the richest city in the Middle East, and called İzmir later by the Turks.
12:07 - 14:07
KM: And he met a Greek fellow there, who might have been a friend previously, and they were always interested in food, so they opened a restaurant together. He said they were doing a really good business. And then the Turkish military came along and basically shanghaied him, an expression to pull someone into the military. And he became a Turkish soldier. Ottoman soldier.His next appearance is in Mosul, in Iraq. Today's Iraq. It didn't become Iraq until after World War I, when the allies divided things up. So it was still an Ottoman territory. So he went to Mosul because that's where the British were invading and he was sent with the military there. This would have been 1915, 1916, probably. And he describes marching through desert-like conditions in very hot, hot atmosphere. And the Turkish soldiers in front of him walking single file, exhausted from the heat, throwing off their ammunition belts. And this was a fascinating story for a young man to listen to. And I said, “dede, what did you do?” Eench ereer ayd pambooshnereen hed? (Armenian for, what did you do with the bullets). He said, “I was strong” and “I picked them up and carried them on my shoulders because I thought now I've got more bullets if I need them.” So that's the kind of guy he was.
13:37 - 14:07
KM: And he learned about marching and developing himself in those days and years later in Worcester, where he eventually settled, he never drove. So he walked back and forth to the job he had there. He walked back and forth to the grocery store. And one of the neighbors, non-Armenian neighbor, said, “Oh, your grandfather's really something.” I said, “What do you mean?” “Look at the way he walks. I've never seen anyone walk so fast to get to some place.” It was a military experience coming back to him.
14:08  - 15:49
KM: So from there he was at some location, might have been Jerusalem because he had a tattoo. So haji or pilgrim tattoo, Christian Tattoo that he had been to Jerusalem. And he said that he went to a train station and a train car came through and stopped. And he was standing at the station and he, looked, he did a double take and he looked and he could see people looking out of the car. It was a cattle car. And he went up to it and all these people inside were crying and they saw him and he said they put their hands up like this [arms up]. And they went back and thought he was a Turkish soldier. They were afraid of him. He said, “I'm Armenian, don't be afraid of me.” And they didn't believe him because why would an Armenian be in a uniform? They'd been punished by men in the same uniform. So, at that point he decided something was wrong here and maybe he would be next because it was known he was Armenian, even though he spoke fluent Turkish, that was his first language, actually. And he deserted and he joined the British forces. He stayed with them for a while. I have a little postcard of a picture of three Brits sitting on a bench with a little puppy and they had written on the back of it. They were friends of his, so they signed the card. But he left them and he joined the French and he eventually got tied into the French resettlement program. And he worked for a captain. He called them his “capitaine,” he learned, my grandfather learned French. They both, grandma and grandpa, learned multiple languages.
15:50 - 16:50
KM: And so he wound up becoming a cook for them with his skill. And I also noticed on some of his paperwork describing his occupation, I translated from the French with Google and it said he was a woodpiler too. So kind of what learned My grandfather was a woodpiler too, what is a woodpiler? My grandfather was a woodpiler? He probably he brought the wood in because they cooked in woodstoves or something to prepare the meals. And so he stayed with them. And they're the ones who helped him out, got him permission to travel within the war zone anywhere that they would send him. So he did messenger and things like that for them. And while he was out one day, he met my grandmother. This was in Aintab, which is Gaziantep today, and it was prosperous, very Armenian city at the time, and lasted well beyond the beginning of the genocide.
16:51 - 18:47
KM: So he writes this and some of the translations I got and what he had written, didn't say he met my grandma, he said he found her. And because of my DNA research, I've made connections to some people who have the same last name Harabedian, Hairabedian, from Bursa. And one woman wrote back to me and said that my story was interesting, but she didn't have that much connection to Bursa, even though they had some family there, her connection was with Keghi and Erzurum. I said well that’s where my grandmother's from. Could it be that my grandfather's family also had connection with my grandmother's family, and they knew each other? That's why he found her. he was looking for her when he got there. And he found someone else there, who was, became the priest in Rhode Island at the Armenian church who was Gasparian. And Gasparian’s son, many people in New England would know him, Russell Gasparian, became, he worked in the jewelry business in Rhode Island. Of course, Providence was famous for costume jewelry. And he also started an Armenian radio program: the Armenian Radio Hour. And it came on every Sunday on 1600 AM for us up in Worcester and Whitinsville area. And we would listen to it every Sunday. He'd give a little news and he'd play a lot of music and he became quite well known. And I believe his collection, I think a family member is still running the program and his collection of recordings have gone to the Smithsonian Institute. So, Russell was honored for that.
18:48 - 19:39
KM: So, apparently my grandfather knew the priest from Bursa.  And there's a famous story in the family that my grandfather, whose name was Garabed, Harabedian, Hairabedian, became godfather to a young child in the church in Bursa. But my grandfather was a child himself, and the story goes that he couldn't reach, he couldn't reach the baptismal front, the fountain where the baby was baptized, so they brought a chair out for him to stand on so he could get up. And people who knew him, other relatives that eventually came to Rhode Island often told that story about him.
19:40 - 20:55
KM: Anyway, he left all that behind, never saw his family again. Met my grandmother, who was Zaroohi Boghosian from Keghi, and the French helped them to get to Beirut, and they were married in 1920. They get on the packet boat, which I discovered the name of through Mark Arslan's Armenian Immigration Project, he helped me with that. And I discovered the packet boat, and I've got a postcard of it, was the boat that took people from Beirut to France. Stayed in the Mediterranean, so they went to Marseilles and in Marseilles they stayed for a while until paperwork had cleared. That was their honeymoon. Of course mother-in-law was with them. I don't think the sister was with them. She had left a year earlier and then came to Worcester. And from Marseilles, they left Marseilles in 1921 and probably beginning of August, and they wound up in Providence, August 11, 1921. And that's written on a little vaccination card that they had along with some other documentation.
20:56 - 23:01
KM: Might be a good point to mention that I'm a photographer and photojournalism is what I like the most and telling stories and keeping kind of journals. Oh, it turns out my grandfather was doing the same thing. He wanted to remember his story and tell his story, and wherever he went, he kept some sort of souvenir. They didn't arrive with much, but he had photographs taken when they were in Beirut. In his French uniform. And photos of the sisters together, and he would buy postcards along the way. He had the postcards--in those days, people had postcard cameras and they would shoot the postcards with the camera and he would collect them along the way. He's got the British soldiers, he's with a good friend of his, and they were both wearing kind of, at that point, it was early in his time there after he had deserted, they were wearing mixed uniforms. A jacket from one place, pants from another, a patch, I think he had a French arm patch on. And so he saved those photos along the way and put them in an album. And so what he's done is document his immigration from the moment he sort of left the Ottoman Empire all the way through our births, through his latter days. So in Marseilles, he brought photographs of all the places that they had stayed in postcard form. When he got to the US, he bought more. At one point they traveled to California to be with his sister-in-law for a while and he went to 31 states apparently in 1952 with me in the backseat with my mom. And I was three months old and he collected postcards from all of those places. And so he put together this wonderful narrative of their lives, of an immigrant's life coming to the new world.
23:02 - 24:58
KM: So when they landed in Providence, someone was waiting for them on the dock. And I believe that was my grandmother's sister and her husband, who was, she was originally married to Zohrab Amerigian. When she got to the US, to Worcester in 1920, she had a young boy with her and Varkis Amerigian. So we assume that is her first husband's son. And actually, he was here before the genocide. We have, through thanks to the Armenian Immigration Project, I discovered his travel documents, the ship he came on, where he lived. And he lived in in Maine for a while. He moved to Michigan and lived in the Detroit area. And I believe that grandma’s sister even lived with him there for a while before coming back to Worcester. So they met the sister and her husband who was Avedis Garabedian from Worcester, who owned a bakery on Eastern Avenue, which was the area that all the Armenian immigrants were coming to.  So they met grandma and dede in Providence. They moved to Worcester. They stayed there for a while. And my grandfather, who was the chef, had his restaurant in Smyrna, cooked for the French in Aintab and got a job cooking for, my mom called them Armenian bachelors: men who didn't have their families with them living in a rooming house. He got a job. They would give him money to buy groceries and pay them, and he'd do all the cooking for them. So when they'd come back from work in the Worcester, Worcester wire mill or the other factories that were nearby that the Armenian men went to, they'd have a good homecooked meal.
24:59 - 25:41
KM: They stayed there for a while. Actually, the address they had was, I believe, 67, no, 62 Eastern Avenue in Worcester. I went and I looked for it once, Guess what? It was right next to the Laurel Street Church, which was the first Armenian church in America. So, they didn't stay there. Nearly every immigrant that came into Worcester, that was one of the addresses that they all used because they'd say, “Where are you going in Worcester?”, the authorities. They’d say 62 Eastern Avenue, that's our address. So, I've gone back and tried to track these places down.
25:42 - 27:01
KM: Avedis, the sister’s husband, had a bakery there. He was known as a baker. And it was there for some time. Later on, during some Armenian-American turmoil, there was a split in the churches, and he was being harassed. They were being harassed, so they moved away to Haverhill and eventually to Fresno, California. So part of my family went off to Fresno, but grandma and dede, dede got work in Whitinsville. They heard Whitinsville was a good place to go, it was very village-like; it certainly is. And they lived at several different addresses and ultimately settled on 40 D Street in a place called New Village. And what a place for Armenians who mostly were coming from villages to come to a new village. And that was its name. And the streets were easy to remember. They were the letters of the alphabet. So this was factory housing. And in about 1940, the census shows them living there. 1930, 1920, it has different addresses. East Street and I think Church Street, which are popular places for Armenians to live at the time.
25:42 - 28:05
KM: Grandpa got a job in the White Machine Works, which was an old mill. And, you know, coming from a great place like Smyrna and Bursa, to a well-to-do family, cosmopolitan areas, into a little town of Whitinsville. Whitinsville is called a village of the town of Northbridge in Massachusetts. I mean, how small could you go. But the work was there and he pushed a broom for 30 years, he did some painting in a machine room, whatever was needed. And he retired in 1954. So that's basically the story. Grandma was a homemaker. She had a mark on, on her face, hematosis or something it was called. It was a bubbly red mark, like some people call it a birthmark. So she became kind of homebound. She was sort of ashamed to go out in public with that.
28:06 - 28:13
GJ: You know, I had heard that in the old country, those marks were a gift, like God kissed you.
28:13 - 28:13
KM: Yes.
28:14 - 28:13
GJ: And they were a mark of beauty.
28:17 - 28:35
KM: Yes. They said her friends, her complexion was clear for some time, but her friends said they noticed that her skin was starting to darken and eventually it became kind of bubbly and purplish. And they said “that that's the hand of God on your face. Don't think it's something bad, it's something good. You've been touched.”
28:35 - 28:47
GJ: So they were in the United States. Your grandfather was working at the mill. Your mother eventually met somebody who I think lived in Worcester, right?
28:47 - 28:48
KM: Right.
28:48 - 28:51
GJ: So can you tell a little bit about that side of the family also?
28:51 - 29:06
KM: Sure, I can go into it. But briefly, just before I do, everybody worked at the White Machine Works. Even for, mom's first job was as, she worked at a mill in Rockdale. You pronounce it Rochdale?
29:07 - 29:07
GJ: Yup.
29:07 - 30:53
KM: Everybody else pronounces it “Roach-Dale.” And she worked in that mill with these bobbins spinning material. She said she always had trouble hearing. She said for a week after that, she couldn't hear well. She had to leave the job. So they damaged her hearing that early on. But she went to Northbridge High School. And in those days, the women were getting married. It was World War Two. And the marriage was arranged. And someone named Askanoosh introduced her to my dad, who came from what can only be called a prominent Armenian family in Worcester. And they seemed to get along and they got married in 1948. And the marriage was in Watertown actually because there was no Armenian church in Whitinsville. And Dad was a Catholic. There was no Catholic Armenian church in Worcester. So the Catholic Church was in Watertown. And actually, the Armenians used St. Mary's Catholic Church on Mount Auburn Street there. So that's where they were married. So mom converted from Apostolic to Catholic. Later on, she went back. She put us in the Apostolic Church because Catholic Church in Worcester had few Armenians, and she felt some prejudice there because she was the only Armenian. They didn't know what an Armenian was. I could tell you stories about kids in school and us, but we’ll save that for some other time. They thought we were very oriental, let's put it that way.
30:54 - 32:44
KM:So yeah, so she married into the Martin family. The Martin family came from Kharpert. During the first massacres -- should I say the first massacres? From what I've been reading lately, there’s been massacres for a thousand years. So, 1895, 1896, Hamidan massacres, named for Abdul Hamid, the Sultan who wanted to punish Armenians for being Armenian. And they lost a lot of family members. Grandfather was killed. His name was Kazar Der Kazarian -- Khazar Der Khazarian. And so his wife, Sarah Melkon was her name, Melkon Der Kazarian, married a guy named Mardiros Demirjian. Mardiros left for the US and this killing happened before the general massacres. So, he left for the US, he arrives here in 1911, works as a shoemaker in Worcester, and eventually, especially after the 1895-96 massacres, the documentation shows Sarah Der Kazarian leaving on a boat from Marseilles in December of 1897 with three sons: Harootiun, Karekin and Jacob.  Two were her sons from the first marriage, one from the second. Arriving in New York, January 11, 1898. They make their way to Worcester and they connect with Mardiros and they start their life in a new world.
32:44 - 32:46
GJ: Which one of those is your dad?
32:47 - 32:47
KM: Again?
32:47 - 32:48
GJ: Which one of those three was your dad?
32:48 - 32:47
KM: Oh, wasn't my dad. It was my dad's dad, my grandfather. My dad's father was Harootiun.  Harootiun become Harry.  Karekin became Henry.  And Jacob became Jacob, Jake.
33:07 - 33:08
GJ: So your dad was born here. 
33:08 - 32:47
KM: No—yeah my dad was born here. Yes, yes. Sorry.
33:13 - 32:47
KM: So the boys knew English when they got here. They went to some of the best schools in Kharpert. I'm not sure about Jake. I haven't tracked much down about Jake. I think he eventually moved to Newton, Mass. But they knew English. Sarah didn't. She spoke only Armenian, maybe some French. And, so…
33:45 - 33:50
GJ: So that wasn’t unusual that the boys would go to school in the old country..
33:50 - 33:51
KM: Right.
33:51 - 33:53
GJ: …and be educated. And the girls might not have been.
33:54 - 33:56
KM: Might not have been unless you were from a wealthy family.
33:57 - 34:08
GJ: Right. And so a lot of the schools there were run by American missionary Congregationalists for the most part, I think, but maybe other…
34:09 - 34:11
KM: I think Euphrates College was there, Yeprad.
34:12 - 34:14
GJ: So they probably went to school like that is my guess.
34:14 - 35:52
KM: There were a lot of religious schools, Catholic schools, too. So I'm guessing they might have gone to Catholic school. And this was, I say, Kharpert in general. As far as more specific location, I think they were in Mezire, which old Kharpert is on a hill with a fort on top and people got started moving down to a lower city, which is where commerce took place and most of the people lived. So they lived in Mezire and also lived in, other parts of the family, were in a place called Keserig. And my, and I know about that because I've got some documentation that my uncle, grand uncle, that Karekin – Henry -- kept. And he said when his father was killed, he was sent to his grandfather in Keserig, and the grandfather took him to church one day and pointed at the dome of the church and said it had been damaged by an earthquake and they had rebuilt it and he said my grandfather had rebuilt it with his father, that they had rebuilt the dome. And he pointed to the inside of the dome in gold letters was the family name was having done the rebuilding. I think the church had another earthquake later on. But for someone to be doing that, you have to have, I mean, you donated the money, so your business must have been pretty good.
35:53 - 38:08
KM: So that's where they came from. But they had connections in Istanbul and in Istanbul when they stop there, I don't know which occasion. It might have been as they were immigrating, they stayed with relatives or friends in Istanbul. And my grandfather, who I didn't know, he died in 1932, my grandmother died in 1945--I was born in ‘52, so I never knew them. So this is all an interesting journey for me to find out about them, but they, let's see, when he was in Istanbul, he met his sweetheart. And the same thing happened to his younger brother, Henry. And they promised each other, young man and young woman, that when he was properly established in a new country, he would come back for her and they would be married. And they kept that promise. So that as she grew a little older, he saved his money. Let's see, they arrived in Worcester in 1898. In 1903, he was ready to get married. So, he and his mom, this is Harootiun, Harry, and his mom went back to find his bride. But in those days, first of all, the laws in Turkey, as I learned also from Mark Arslan and another lecturer who gave a lecture at Tufts University once with the NAASR organization said Armenians weren't allowed to leave the Ottoman Empire. You could get out by bribing people and sneaking out, which is basically what they did. But once you were out, you couldn't get back in either. Until 1908 when there was a constitution created which gave Armenians equal rights--for a time. But it was 1903, so he couldn't go back to Istanbul. So, the family, the Kevorkian family, whether they moved or just moved temporarily, went to Egypt and they met in Egypt and the wedding was in Egypt.
38:09 - 39:26
KM: And we have some few photographs of that and some documentation of that. And Harry tells the story later on, how on the way out, he toured Europe, okay? He said he had to make enough money, but they couldn't have come from nothing. I don't think they were agriculturalists. They toured Europe with his mother on the way to Egypt. They went to Paris. They went to Germany. They went to Italy. And they went to Venice, to San Lazaro Island, which was the head of the Catholic order. As Catholics, they went there. Then they made their way, I believe, to Greece and from Greece, you could cross the Mediterranean to Egypt for the wedding in 1903. Big affair. And then they did a return trip. With a new wife. And came back to Worcester and started their family. In 1908, she, her name was, well, they called her Mary. Later on, she was Mary Martin. There were name changes. But she was Mary Kevorkian. I believe her name was Maritza. They called her Mari. But in the United States, it became Mary.
39:27 - 41:14
KM: So her brothers came over in 1908. Two brothers. So that was the Kevorkians in America, married to the Martins of America. Martin name, I think you had asked me that once before, was Der Kazarian. But because she remarried, Sarah became not Sarah Demirjian. And the boys took on the name Demirjian for a while, but then they changed it. And this is where it gets confusing. I don't know why they changed it, but they changed it to Mardirosian. Okay. Mardiros, was their stepfather. They used his first name and combined it with a ian, I-A-N, to become Mardirosian, and we find in the World War I draft registration that Harry Mardirosian and Henry Mardirosian have signed up for what was called the older men's draft because they were getting on in age. But still you had the sign up until, I don't know, 50’s or 60’s, depending on your age. And so, there's a documentation.  In it that says these two men named Mardirosian, and Harry writes next to his signature, also known as Harry Martin, Oriental Rugs. Because he transited from the shoe business with his father-in-law to repairing Oriental rugs and he started importing Oriental rugs at this young age. So, he became Harry Martin and everyone else was Martin. The letters I found coming from the Mekhitarists,  the Catholics in San Lazaro to him, always had his, their Der Kazarian name. Sometimes they would put Martin or they put Martin under Kazarian, so that's he was known.
41:15 - 41:59
KM: So they were doing pretty well financially. His younger brother went into insurance. He got a law degree. He studied at Clark University. I believe he got a correspondence degree from Northeastern. He did as his law studies that way.  And then later on he became a barber [laughs]. Go figure. They did everything. And an accountant. He would do taxes for the Armenians, he would stay up until 3 o’clock in the morning doing taxes. And he wrote about it once. He said, “This is the only way you'll get ahead in America, through hard work. Stay up till 3 o’clock every morning.” So, you know, they struggled, but they did pretty well.
41:59 - 44:17
KM: And that's where my father came from. My father had three brothers and four sisters, all with Armenian names. And dad was next to last born. He was born in 1918, just at the end of World War I or during World War I. So, his father was fond of giving them Armenian names or special names. And, so with my dad, he went with generals. So my dad, who we knew as Tony Martin, Anthony Martin, we discovered, was actually Antranig. The Armenians always called him on Antranig Pershing, who was Pershing, General Blackjack Pershing was the American general who chased Pancho Villa around Mexico, and who also led American forces in World War One. So, he was Anthony Pershing Martin. He didn't like the name, Pershing. Sounded too feminine to him. I don't know if he knew who Pershing was because they grew up as Americans, you know. So he changed it to Paul. So he became Anthony Paul Martin. Anthony P. was his signature. And yeah, that was my dad. His brother was Alishan. Uncle Al was Alishan. And real, you know, immigration story here. And Alishan, of course, was a famous Armenian Catholic priest. And Khazar was the older brother, after his father who was killed, Khazar Der Khazarian. And they called him Arthur. And then there was Hovhannes Katchaznouni Martin. Katchaznouni was the first prime minister of the Independent Republic because Dad was 1920, so Katchaznouni must have been--dad was 1918, he must have been 1920 when the Republic was still there, so he named him after him. And first name was Hovhannes. Hovhannes Katchaznouni Der Kazarian, but Martin. And so that was all of them.
44:17 - 44:39
KM: The ladies all had the names of Armenian or British Queens. Ashkhen, Sandukht, Victoria, and Elizabeth. And they translated into the simpler American names: Ash, Sandy, Betty, and Vicky.
44:40 - 44:41
GJ: So you have a lot of relatives here.
44:41 - 45:30
KM: There were a lot of relatives. So the Martins became kind of a clan. There were a lot of them and they had a lot of kids. And they occupied the area on, for Worcester, Worcester, see these people from Worcester who often didn't know they were Armenian because of the name change, and the name change because of business. Part of the family says because of business, they changed the name to make it easier to pronounce. But there are other sort of things. Henry went into Istanbul to find his bride in 1906, and so somehow the Turkish consul in Boston found out about it. He felt he was being followed. So I think the name change might have been helpful. In fact, when he wound up in Istanbul, he was Henry Martin with an American passport and dressed like an American. So that lasted for a while, not too long though.
45:31 - 45:45
GJ: So what, you know, your mom grew up here, in Whitinsville, I should say. What were her recollections of Whitinsville? And did she have siblings also? I can't remember.
45:46 - 47:12
KM: Yes. Yes. Well, let me just connect it here. They, so, the Martins lived near Park Avenue and Pleasant Street and they could walk to work. It's not like us today where we get in a car and we drive for 2 hours to get wherever we're going. It was a nice set up for them and they were they were getting established. Anyway, Askanoosh introduces Tony and Sue, my mom was Shushanig, Shushanig Harabedian. Shushanig means Lillian, but they called her Sue, Susie. But her middle name was L., for Lillian. That’s how she did it. She met Tony and things seem to work out. I'm sure they were pushed together. And because I don't know, I think Tony coming from the bigger city was maybe more desirable than a guy from Whitinsville, I don't know. But anyway, Sue, Susie lived on D Street after 1940 with her brother George. Kirkor, they called him. George was the older. There was also another child, a girl who was stillborn apparently. And that was the first child. So they lost her and they lived, they were on D Street from my memories, I remember going to D Street.
47:13 - 47:12
KM: You were asking about other aspects of Whitinsville.
47:17 - 47:22
GJ: Well, they, you remember going to D Street What were your impressions as a child?
47:22 - 47:48
KM: Oh, as a child. Let's see. There's one picture of me standing in front of a television in the D Street apartment, which was the factory-owned apartment. The rent was, I found a rental slip, I believe, 8 dollars a month. And you didn't have to do anything. If the light bulb went out, you called the factory, and someone came and changed it. Kind of creepy, but you know.
47:48 - 47:50
GJ: They mowed the lawns.
47:50 - 48:51
KM: They mowed the lawns. They did everything. Any repairs. But there's a picture of me in 1956 standing in front of a television looking at it. I tell my students, “You're looking at a guy who grew up with TV, with the first TV’s,” I mean they were out in like, ‘48 or something, ‘47, and I’ve been watching TV ever since. So I’m a TV guy. But I remember going there as a young boy still, you know, like two year old, three year old. But I remember being in that apartment and I remember when I had to go to sleep at night, you’d go out to the front porch, which was screened-in. There was a door on the left and you’d go up the stairs, so, apparently it was like a two-level apartment or something. And I remember sleeping there. And not much else from those years.
48:52 - 50:00
And later on, after mom moved to Worcester, my grandparents, my grandpa retired. They thought they would move to California with grandma’s sister and live in Fresno because they had so many stories of Fresno. The husband had moved his bakery there, was doing very well. Their family was growing up, but before he left, during the war period, cousins from Fresno started coming to Whitinsville. Whether there was, you know, young men growing up giving their family a little too much trouble, it was felt that my grandfather, who had been in the Turkish army, was a good disciplinarian— “send them to send them to the cousins for a while.” So he came to Whitinsville. His name was John Garabedian, came to Whitinsville, where he met a young woman who was also a Garabedian. Same last names. That confused people for a long time. They moved back to California with their families, first to Connecticut, then to Haverhill, Mass. Then the whole family moved to California to join his mother and father.
50:00 - 51:42
KM: So grandma and grandpa wanted to go with them. They thought they would move to California and stay with them, but it didn't work out. And that was my first journey because when they went out, I had just been born and mom wanted to go along with them. So she put me in the back of Uncle George's Roadster. Buick Roadster. Left my dad at home working at the Pullman factory and we drove to California. And we stayed for a while and eventually came back and left grandma and grandpa there. And they were there for a couple of years, I think. And then they came back and they settled in Worcester instead of Whitinsville this time. But Whitinsville was central to their existence. “Whitinsville, Whitinsville, ertank derev havakenk --let’s go pick some grape leaves, let’s go get blueberries.” And, so, with Grandma, we always went back to her friends in Whitinsville. She'd meet the ladies and we'd go picking blueberries off of Route 146, or grape leaves for grandma to make dolma. And those trips occurred all the time. And even afterwards, when she was gone, mom used to take her there all the time. They'd visit friends, they'd go to the cemetery to see great grandmother who died in 1932. And always it was back to Whitinsville. Back to the church, go to the annual picnic, visit friends, tell stories, all of that, I know.
51:42 - 51:45
GJ: Do you remember any of her stories that she would tell you of Whitinsville?
51:46 - 52:37
KM: Sure, sure. When, when her grandmother, Arshalous, died they sent mom out of the house. And just outside because they would have the funeral in the house. And the neighbors from across the street took her in and because they knew what was going on and they knew that, they didn't think she should be there. So, they took her in for a while. And mom remembers that pretty clearly. She also remembers a hurricane around the same time. Other people remember this, when the big tree at the end of the street fell down. This is a popular memory from D Street. That huge tree crashed down during the hurricane.
52:40 - 53:24
KM: In the winters, the kids used to go down to Meadow Pond, which was at the end of the street to go ice skating. Mom went with the others. She fell through a hole in the ice and she was saved by, I believe it was Oscar Muradian, who was playing hockey with his friends, came over when she fell through and handed her his hockey stick and he slowly pulled her out from the water. And she was soaked and cold, and before going home, neighbors took her in again because the house was closer to the pond. The Shenians, who were good friends of theirs, took her into warm her up by the stove, so she dried out and then they brought her home. A lot of these little memories from the past.
53:25 - 54:44
KM: Another memory that, actually, the Shenians wrote about, Rose Alahverdian was a Shenian. And she's written a whole history of the neighborhood and of Whitinsville, and of all the characters who lived there and all the families. And she sent copies of part of that to my mom and I got a chance to read it. And she tells the story of my grandma, Zaroohi, going on one of the expeditions to the swamp to pick blueberries with the other women. And while picking blueberries, she got stuck in the mud. She you know, it's kind of marshy area and she was reaching for blueberries and her feet went down into the mud. She couldn’t move, she couldn't get out. And the women became hilarious that they called her Zarig. “Zarig was stuck in the mud.” And they all had to help her to pull her out, to get her out. And they finally got her out. And the story goes that they laughed all the way back to Whitinsville with their blueberries and they sat together and they couldn't stop laughing over this hilarious thing that happened. And I can just imagine my grandmother swearing in Turkish about this happening to her at the time. So that's a very strong memory.
54:44 - 56:13
KM: And another memory, in another book written by Mary Ovian, wrote a book called Seeds in the Wind, all about her family's experience being dispersed after the genocide as seeds in the wind, and reestablishing themselves in the New World. Wrote about grandma and dede. They did a popular dance. The neighborhood would come together and do Armenian dances. And Garabed and Zarig would do this rooster and chicken dance. I think it was called the Khoroz Dance; it was a khoroz song. And dede would act like the rooster flapping his wings and grandma would be the chicken running around as he chased her doing this dance and they would all sing. So they became popular for that. They were popular couple in town. Those are some of the memories and there were certainly others about school. Going to school for example, mom said, she said, “I know you hear it all the time from old people, but we really had to walk several miles to school. And during the winter there was no bus. But there were the piles of snow that the snow plows would put along the side of the road going into school. And we had to walk over those piles of snow like mountains of snow to get to school. Even during snowstorms.” So she remembers that. And I don't think that, I think they went to, is it called, West Elementary?
56:17 - 56:20
GJ: I don’t remember.
56:21 - 56:31
KM: I think there’s a Balmer School, and she mentioned Balmer School, but I think that was after their time. So she went to, I believe, West Elementary and then eventually to Northbridge High School.
56:31 - 56:39
GJ: I actually measured from where my dad lived on the edge of Rockdale to the high school where he walked. It was five miles each away.
56:39 - 56:43
KM: Yeah, that’s what she’d say. Five miles. Four or five miles.
56:43 - 56:50
GJ: It was unbelievable. When did you, as a child, learn about your history? And what was that like?
56:51 - 57:01
KM: Oh, let's see. I must have been 11, 12, 13 years old. Early on, I joined a choir through the AYF through the Holy Trinity Church in Worcester.
57:01 - 57:04
GJ: But when did you learn about your history from your parents and grandparents?
57:04 - 57:55
KM: Well, they started an oral history project and I started learning more then, I was a teenager then. Occasionally they would tell stories. Grandma would oftentimes sit out under the trees in the yard. They lived, at first we lived originally more towards Worcester Center in what was an Armenian neighborhood, I think actually a Kharpertsi neighborhood. Or as my dad used to say, “Harpetsi” neighborhood, you know, he couldn't pronounce the K-H, or people have told me that people from Kharpert couldn't pronounce that. They always said they were from Harput.   Well they would eat “heyma”. We know it as “kheyma” or “chee kufteh.”  So he had that funny accent.
57:55 - 58:36
KM: And grandma would sit under the--so we moved from there because there was too much traffic. I almost had an accident as a little kid with a car. And dad said that's it, he’s saving his money, and as soon as he's got enough, we're going to move. And he found a single-family home on an unimproved road in Worcester. More towards the west side or Main South area where it was a better neighborhood. Unimproved means it wasn't paved. There’s about 60 miles of that in Worcester. Turned out it was great for kids. Cars wouldn’t speed room, we were safe in the street. We could play baseball or football down there. It was a nice place to grow up and there, like this, a few little wood lots around, so it was kind of private.
58:37 - 59:41
KM: So we lived there. When grandma and grandpa came back from California, they lived where we had on Piedmont Street in Worcester for some time. After we moved, the house next door came up for sale. And a lawyer approached my mom, instead of putting up a for sale sign, and said, “the elderly gentleman who lived here has passed away and,” I'm forgetting his name at the moment but, “we're selling his house. Would you be interested or anyone you know?” Immediately mom called my uncle George who had moved to Worcester also. “There’s a house, maybe we could buy it for mom and dad.” And they did. So, grandma and dede moved in next door to us on Beaverbrook Parkway, and it was wonderful. When we came home from school instead of going into the house, because mom started working after a while, she hadn't come home yet, we’d go to their house, have a sandwich or something to eat or some pilaf, and then we'd go home.
59:41 - 01:01:30
KM: And that's when I started hearing the stories. Grandma in the summertime, like this, used to love sitting under those trees and a breeze would come up the driveway. She had a nice wicker chair she sat on. And she’d just sit, smoking a cigarette, thinking about who knows what. Today, I know what. She was going through her memories and the terrible things that happened to them and the good life she had with her family in the old days. And she'd say to me in Armenian, how should I say, I'm trying to translate, “eench gele --it won’t be anything”,  ‘why don’t you go in the house – yes bagh choor muh goozem, bagh choor muh per eenzee -- bring me a cold water, a really cold water”. And I said, “of course, grandma!”. So, I’d go in, I’d get a cold water, I'd bring it out to her, she’d drink it. She said, “ahh, when we were young, all we wanted was cold water.” She was talking about, not being young at home, she was talking about being out in the desert in the mountains where they wouldn't even let you go near a stream with, the guards would not let you do those things. They just wanted you to die. They wanted you to go away. And she said all we wanted was water. We didn't even want food. And as she was telling me this, I was sitting on the lawn and she said, “You know what we ate?” I said, “What did you eat?” She said “That”, I said, “What do you mean?” She pointed at the grass. She called it chayer or khod.  Chayer I think is Turkish for grass. And khod is wheat, Armenian. She said, “We ate that.” I said, “Grandma, you can't eat this. Only cows eat this.” She said, “Oh, we ate it.”
01:01:32 - 01:02:38
KM: Now I think back well, she, maybe she did eat it. And having gone to Armenia once and seeing foragers out there picking herbs and things, they knew their plants, but they weren't, if it was just grass they would’ve eaten that too. I've since discovered. But I said, “Why? How? What kind of life was that to have? Why did that happen?” And that's when I started asking more and finding out more. She didn't tell me the worst of it. I found out later from my mom of some of the terrible things that happened. But that's when my conscience was awakening. And the first thing I thought, even as a young kid, was, that's wrong. That's not right. I have to do something to help. Maybe I can help. And that stayed with me throughout my life and whatever I've done, at some point, I’ve put a little time into helping, and once I joined the AYF and those organizations, I realized this is a better way, there's other people who want to help too, so maybe we can do something with this. So I never forgot that.
01:02:39 – 01:02:55
KM: And of course, grandpa told me, mostly about, well, when he told me about seeing Armenians in the train car, I started putting that together too. Why was he there in the first place, you know, why did they come here? And I started figuring it out at a pretty young age.
01:02:56 – 01:03:04
GJ: What about, you're starting to get to this, but what about you as a person that’s distinctly Armenian? Like, if you were born Irish…
01:03:05 – 01:03:05
KM: Oh, distinctly Armenian?
01:03:06 – 01:03:31
GJ: Yeah, if you were born Irish, you wouldn't have these, you know, or if you were born French, but you're born Armenian. What is it about being born Armenian?
01:03:14 – 01:04:45
KM: Right, this is the identity story. You know, I've been working on that myself all this time. And photography school, I started a project. I was going to photograph Armenian community, and I'm still doing it. And I'm doing it because it's a search for identity. Now, it's a very popular expression to toss around these days. Everyone, especially lately, and people who are getting into college now and going to Armenian studies, we didn't have Armenian studies, we didn't even have an Armenian school in Worcester so we could learn. My mom didn't have an Armenian school. One of the ARF members from Worcester used to go to Whitinsville—here’s a Whitinsville story, sorry to get off track for a minute. Karekin Boyajian, Unger Karekin Boyajian used to go to Whitinsville once a week and he’d teach students for 5 cents each Armenian lessons. How to read, how to write, how to speak. And my mom, Shushanig Harabedian, could fluently write Armenian, she could read, and she became the one that did everything for her family. She translated all the documents. She told them about all these things, bank accounts, everything, that was her job. And brother George helped out too. He would take them shopping every week and always come down when he was needed to get things done. So they wound up helping their parents a lot as immigrants.
01:03:46 – 01:04:54
KM: So with me, I thought I could help in that way. You got to bring me back on track, Greg. Where was I?
01:04:54 – 01:04:58
GJ: Well, we're just talking about…
01:04:58 – 01:05:00
KM: Oh! When did I start forming identity?
01:05:00 – 01:05:10
GJ: Well, what do you think about yourself that’s distinctly, because of your ancestors, because of how you were raised, who you are, why you’re Armenian?
01:05:10 – 01:06:27
KM: Well, because of how I was raised, I was different. I spoke Armenian until I was five. And then kindergarten started. And I started forgetting everything I had learned except for, well, we call it Kitchen Armenian. You know, I knew the foods and how to ask for things and such. So that's when I started realizing I was different and my parents and grandparents enforced that. That you are different. You are not like the others. And there are many reasons for that that you'll find out as you grow up. And then the kids in school helped me to realize I was different. To the kids in school, let's see, how many Armenian kids did we have in our elementary school? We had five, six, maybe seven. There were a few more Jewish kids than us and a few Greeks and a smattering of Italians, and the rest were Irish or French, Franco Americans. And some English Americans, Yankee Americans. Public school.
01:06:29 - 01:07:34
KM: But we certainly were in a minority, and we knew each other by the last names. But with my name change, always confused people, it still does. I like to play around with them for a while. Let them figure out if I'm Armenian or not. And so those kids helped us. “What are you? “I'm Armenian.” “You're not Armenian.” “What's an Armenian?” And I said, “Well, what's an Italian? What's an Irish? We're Armenians.” “No, we think you're Chinese.” Okay. “No, we're not Chinese.” Well, one of the Armenian girls who lived a couple streets from us had Asian eyes, almond eyes. And she was Chinese too. She said she was Armenian. And I said I was Armenian, well we were both Chinese, and the other Armenians looked Chinese too.
01:07:34 - 01:08:42
KM: So on the way home from school, we had to hear, “Oh, we have Chinese.” There were no Asians in the school. It was us. Okay. And children can be cruel, as everyone knows. And so because we were such a minority, you know, suddenly, you know, “mom, why are they calling me Chinese?” You know? And so then we get it from our parents, “You go back and you tell you’re Armenian.” And so we’d go back and say, “Look, we're Armenian, we're not Chinese, we're not Asian.” And, although technically speaking, we were Asian, geographically-speaking. And she said, “you tell them you're Armenian and you tell them you're a Christian.” So coming back home in a patrol line, it would start up again. I’d say, “Listen, we're Armenians, we're Christians.” “Oh, yeah? What church do you go to?” I said, “What do you mean, what church do we go to?” “Well, what church do you go?” “Well, we go to the Armenian church.” And then they’d go home and tell their parents they go to the Armenian church. And the parents would say, “Yeah, but what? What is that?”
01:08:43 - 01:09:29
KM: And they’d come back to us and say, “What do you mean you go to the Armenian church? We go to the Catholic Church, he goes to the Protestant church. Where do you go to?” I said, “the Armenian church.” So, we didn't know what apostolic was or arakelagan or we didn't know what loosavorchagan, Gregorian church. Oh, we didn’t know it was Orthodox. The Greek kids at least knew they went to the Orthodox Church, so we figured it out. So that helped us with our identity. And we spoke differently. When we got home with grandparents, so did our friends. So did the church. Although we couldn't really understand what they were saying at church and so that helped. So I started realizing I was different at that time.
01:09:32 – 01:10:45
KM: Then when the organizations came out, you know, the, for us, well, when my mother was christened, she was christened, she was christened in the Armenian church in Worcester, because there was only one Armenian church. There was no Catholic Church at the time. There was no split in the churches at the time between Etchmiadzin and Antelias.  So it was all the one church. So she was christened there.  I have her baptismal documents and strangely, I told you about the Martin family being Catholic. Well, one of the brothers became arakelagan and so uncle Henry, grand uncle Henry was on the board of directors of the Armenian church in Worcester in 1906, 1907. I don't know for how long. Joined the AGBU I think later on. So for us to have left the Catholic Church where Mom felt the same thing we were feeling in the, in the school. You know, we wound up going into the Antelias church.
01:10:45 – 01:10:49
GJ: How has your worldview been shaped, though, from being Armenian?
01:10:49 – 01:10:50
KM: Hey, I'm different.
01:10:50 – 01:05:51
GJ: How?
01:10:51 – 01:11:56
KM: I'm different. All right, my dad said it best. He said “we're the little guys.” This is his American thinking. “We're the little guys. We're the underdogs. They killed us. They tried to destroy us, but we survived. And we're doing okay in this country. And we're different.” And I don't have to get into details about his attitude towards others, but he certainly considered them different than himself, maybe a little less cultured than himself and that was what they used on us to say, “you're different, you were better.” I've since learned better, we're no better than anyone else. But we certainly are different. And that helped with my identity. And it was later, once I joined organizations with more people like me that we started forming our own group identity and some group think.
01:10:58 – 01:12:29
KM: And I stayed with those organizations. Eventually getting into positions. I was president of the AYF, Armenian Youth Federation Juniors. Then we graduate to the seniors. And they do things. social stuff together. Sunday school after church or meetings. And, you know, here I am, 11, 12-year-old having a meeting. I don't think my friends were having meetings. We had a chairman and a secretary and all. It was very organized, very cool stuff for young kids.
01:12:29 – 01:12:30
GJ: What kind of stuff would you do?
01:12:31 – 01:12:35
KM: Well, what do we do? We had meetings, we organized dances.
01:12:35 – 01:12:39
GJ: What were the Armenian dances like when you were a teenager?
01:12:39 – 01:13:28
KM: When I was a teenager, well, teenager, I was a, I went to summer camp, thanks to the AYF. They gave scholarships for camp and they drew names from a hat. And Kenny Martin got one of them. The AYF would pay for a week if my parents paid for a week. So that's how I started at camp and I loved it. And after that, I asked to stay longer. My parents, sure, they made it three weeks and probably were happy to have me there. And my sisters went to camp and that's how we met our friends. And, of course, later I learned the camp was organized by General Nejdeh to keep Armenian youth together. He organized AYF for that reason, and it succeeded pretty well.
01:13:29 – 01:14:05
KM: We learned how to organize things and do things. Bake sales and that sort of thing. And it wasn't later, until it got political, once I started joining the senior organization. And I enjoyed that stuff, you know, being president of the organization and I went on to be the president of this and president of that through my life because of that experience. I became president of the seniors. And I brought that into high school with me. And I became president of the Spanish club. And I was on the tennis team.
01:14:05 – 01:14:09
GJ: What were the political aspects of it?
01:14:09 – 01:15:03
KM: The political aspect? Well, what can I say? There was a genocide. These terrible things happened, and there needs to be a reckoning. And it came about land and about Armenian cause. And most people did not move into that. They were more interested with the things that teenagers were interested in, partying and dating. And doing a lot of things that became part of the counterculture in the sixties, you know, not really demonstrating, but doing a lot of socializing. And then there were others within the group that had more of an interest in the Armenian history. And freshman in school, I studied ancient history, and I was really interested in history and social studies.
01:15:04 – 01:15:09
GJ: Well, at that time, there was no Armenia outside of the Soviet Union.
01:15:09 – 01:15:10
KM: Right. Right.
01:15:10 – 01:15:16
GJ: So a big push, if I remember correctly, was a free Armenia outside of the Soviet border.
01:15:16 – 01:15:20
KM: Sure, sure. You're getting to the juicy stuff. That's where you want to go, right? [laughs]
01:15:21 – 01:15:23
GJ: Well, I just…
01:15:23 – 01:17:12
KM: Yes, it was Hye Tad: Armenian Cause. And they went around identifying, I don't want to denigrate my peers in any way, they all went on, most of them have gone on to great successes in business and life in American society, but they kind of identified kids who were, I'll use the word, the expression, the kids who were more interested in Armenian things to be sort of identified as people who could get stuff done. And so, in each town, whether Springfield or Boston, New York, Worcester, Providence, they identified certain kids who might go on within the organizations to do things or had developed a more Armenian identity to want to help. So they kind of nurtured that.  And then of course, there were other organizations along the way, the ARF, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which was part founder of the AYF, had a chapter in Worcester. And I got interested in that. And they had a club there and a cultural center, and I used to go there, and I joined that eventually and I became one of the younger “ungers” or comrades there. And the old guys loved me because they told me, “You're a good listener. And when we say something, you listen to us, and you remember it. Everybody doesn't do that.” And so, they gave me a nickname. I was Kennedy Martin. They thought I was that kind of person and they loved it. And whenever I walked in, they said “Kennedy's here.”
01:17:12 – 01:15:23
GJ: That’s funny.
01:17:12 – 01:18:28
KM: Yeah. And so I belonged to that for a while and went to conventions. And AYF would go to conventions with the national and you’d discuss things, you’d have educational programs, athletic programs, other things of interest. So it’s structure, it gave me some structure that I noticed my friends who didn't join didn't have. And a lot of them had issues with the general society. They got in trouble. But for me, who would certainly have gotten in trouble, the organization kept me busy. The summer camp kept me busy. Summer was a dangerous time, much more dangerous now than it was then. But to just hang around in the summer was asking for some trouble. If you had a job, and I did early, first in a toy store then a grocery store. I could have worked there during the summers, but I worked at the camp later, I became a counselor. And there were educational programs at the camp as well. You met people from all over the country and later from all over the world as immigration started. And so, I made friends from a lot of places, and that helped to form my Armenian identity.
01:18:28 – 01:18:30
GJ: And you married a woman who's Armenian? 
01:18:30 – 01:18:30
KM: Yeah.
01:18:31 – 01:18:32
GJ: How did that come about?
01:18:32 – 01:19:50
KM: That came about later. Well, it came about because of immigration and because of international instability. I mean, people in the late seventies were coming from Lebanon. The “Beirutahyes”, we called them, came from Lebanon because of the Lebanese civil war and immigration started. Later on, in the eighties, it became Iran because of the Shah and the revolution in the late seventies. Actually, my wife, Verjik, did a straight immigration before all that. She and her family immigrated in 1975. They wanted greater opportunities and Verjik especially wanted to get out into the larger world, either in Europe or the U.S. They had an uncle here who had settled in, who had gotten advanced degrees in architecture and settled in Las Vegas. And so he became their sponsor and the family moved to the Boston area and into Watertown. And I met her later on.
01:19:50 - 01:21:22
KM:She wasn’t an organizational person like I was, but I wasn't a straight organizational person either. I, sometimes our organizations are kind of insular, like Armenian community is generally. The troubles we're having now in the world is because we don't have allies. We don't have friends out there because we’re kind of, I think, self-centered. And that certainly could have happened when forming identity. But I was always outward looking. I had friends from everywhere and with American Armenians at the time, they’re friends with other American-Armenians, not the Lebanese or the Iranian-Armenians. But I looked to them as a source of inspiration and knowledge, and I learned so much that I became friends. And in the Boston area, we even held a meeting where all of us decided that this community was kind of quiet and uninspiring. And maybe we would do some community building. And we did that, and we held cultural events. When it came time for Hye Tad, we organized political events and were quite successful in giving Watertown, Boston, Worcester area quite a shot in the arm because of the newcomers and the idea that we could organize our community better. So I was involved in all of that.
01:21:22 – 01:22:56
KM: And later on, about mid 1980s after I had met Verjik. We had dated for a few years and decided to get married and, you know, I was putting more time into Armenian things than I was into my career. I had, I went to college, went to Holy Cross and then afterwards to New England School of Photography for their two-year program. And they were talking about getting master's degrees through Northeastern University. It never worked out. That's why I went there, to get my master's, and it didn't work out with Northeastern. But later on, I started teaching. Universities considered that master's equivalency because I had done everything, you know, my master's thesis and everything and photography projects that had to be judged by the entire faculty. And so that's what I had done. But I wasn't pursuing it so much. I got a job with the telephone company and the school sent me out, the placement, to meet with the New England Telephone in a place called the Learning Center, where they trained executives and retrain them and I got a job in the lab. And then later I got taken by the marketing department to go all around to their facilities and photograph for them and make slideshows. So part of my major was Slides as Media and Editorial Photography. And so I did that for them for three years and then I wanted to freelance, so.
01:22:57 – 01:22:59
GJ: How’d you meet your wife?
01:23:00 – 01:23:00
KM: Huh?
01:23:00 – 01:23:00
GJ: How did you meet your wife?
01:23:00 – 01:24:40
KM: Well, as we were about to get married, I quit my job so I could set up a freelance. Setting up your own business is very difficult, so it's been a struggle. I met her on several occasions before meeting her. I was introduced on several occasions. I came to an organizational event, a cultural event, and I noticed there was someone different there that I hadn't seen before. And I asked someone who that was. “Oh, that's Verjik.” “Oh, really?” I said, Well, I've never seen her around. She's not a member of the organizations. And then we were introduced at a New Year's Eve event, and then later I met her sister, Jackie Abramian. And she was studying journalism at Suffolk University. And we were going, I was going to a demonstration in New York, an Armenian demonstration to photograph. Part of the follow up on my project. And I said, “Well, why don't you come along and write about it for the Armenian Weekly, and I'm going to submit my photos and we'll do a joint article.” So when I went to visit her to show the pictures, her sister was there going out with friends from work, she had gotten a really interesting job with a company. And we had met again and just nodded to each other. And that was it. But when I was visiting one day, they were, family was going to California to visit their brother and uncle and Verjik was staying back because she was working. So I called her and I said, “Hey, it's me.”
01:24:40 – 01:25:13
KM: So we agreed to go on a date and we found out we had a lot in common. The way our family acted to, shall we say, interesting families. And just by chance, we were both Catholic. I had been christened Catholic. And Verjik had gone to Catholic school in Iran. And we had a lot of similar interests, in art especially. And so we started dating and over time decided to get married.
01:25:13 – 01:25:15
GJ: And where did her family come from before going to Iran?
01:25:15 – 01:25:17
KM: Her family came from Tehran.
01:25:17 – 01:25:20
GJ: Oh, they had been in Tehran for generations.
01:25:21 – 01:26:28
KM: They were in Tehran, not for generations. Part of the family. Well, it's the Armenian story, isn't it? Her mother came from Kurdistan, western Iran, and their family was a very large family. Landowners, orchard owners. Her grandfather worked for the government and oversaw large areas of villages, that was his responsibility. And her father, Verjik’s father's father, they were in Russia after the genocide. They moved up towards Yerevan and then they went beyond to Rostov and oh, how can I forget the other name near Rostov? Krasnodar. They lived in Krasnodar.
01:26:28 – 01:26:30
GJ: And where did they come from in Turkey? Do you know?
01:26:31 – 01:26:35
KM: In Turkey, part of the family was from Van.
01:26:35 – 01:26:35
GJ: Oh, wow.
01:26:35 – 01:26:54
KM: Before they, yeah, when they left during the genocide, they left Van. So they had relatives on both sides of the family from the Van area. Either near the Iranian border with the Ottoman Empire and or from Van itself. Some of them fought in Van.
01:26:54 – 01:26:59
GJ: So, I have, this has been fantastic. Thanks, Ken. I have one last question for you.
01:26:59 – 01:26:59
KM: Yeah?
01:27:00 – 01:27:07
GJ: If you had a chance to ask an ancestor, who you didn't know, something about their lives, what would you ask them?
01:27:08 – 01:27:09
KM: Once again?
01:27:09 – 01:27:27
GJ: If you had a chance to ask an ancestor something, who you didn't know, could be your grandparents on your father's side or maybe even your grandparents, who you never, lived with you, or you didn’t ask, or people before that. What would you have asked? What would you want to ask them?
01:27:28 – 01:28:36
KM: Well, I'm into genealogy and trying to find out. I would want to know as much as I could. I would want to know about the family. Where did we come from? How far back do we go? I can't get back much beyond 1850. And just some rumors on the Martin side of a family named Melkon, who used to own tobacco fields in Turkey and Egypt. Very well-to-do who were killed in Adana on a business trip. So, I would want to know more about the people before them, more specifics. Where did we really come from? How far back do we go? And I say it because people who grew up in Iran, Armenians who grew up in Julfa, I mean, were brought there by the Shah and Shah Abbas in the 1600s. They have family trees that go back forever. They didn't go through the genocide. Our information stops. At least for me.
01:28:36 - 01:30:06
KM: The more I research, and the more people I talk to, maybe I can push it back more. But in terms of documents and things, all I have is things from the period of immigration. And I have one photograph from Keghi from the Old World. Small photograph. My grandmother as a young woman, a young teenager, her sister a little bit older, her mother, and I believe an aunt. And a young boy wearing Russian style clothing with a wool cap, standing with them. That is not labeled anywhere. And my cousins immediately recognized my grandmother from her facial features. They're holding books. They were students dressed in Western clothing. I think, “How did that photo get there?” I think grandma kept it in her hand. I think she kept it in her pocket, and that's all she was able to take with her, because when she came here, she had nothing, only what my grandmother, my grandfather had collected after their marriage along the way, a Turkish coffee grinder and some other objects. And then photographs that he had taken, but nothing from before, just that one photograph.
01:30:06 - 01:30:41
KM: So on both sides. I would want to know, you know, where did we come from before that? What was it like. Grandma? What were the name of grandmother's brothers? We don't know their names, except one was Kegham. And that's what they call me, they say Armenian name is Kegham.  So when I went to Armenia, there wanted to know my name. I said, “Ken.” “Ken?” “Ken?” I said, “okay, Kegham.” “Ah, Kegham, okay,” so people were happy with that. I hope that answered the question.
01:30:41 – 01:30:41
GJ: It did.
01:30:41 – 01:30:42
KM: Yeah?
01:30:42 – 01:30:43
GJ: Thank you so much.
01:30:43 – 01:30:46
KM: Yeah? What else you want to know about Whitinsville?
01:30:46 – 01:30:49
GJ: We can, we can, well is there something you want to add?
01:30:49 – 01:30:50
KM: Yeah!
01:30:50 – 01:30:50
GJ: Okay, add it.
01:30:51 – 01:30:52
KM: Okay. The cemetery.
01:30:52 – 01:30:53
GJ: Okay.
01:30:53 – 01:32:26
KM: Pine Grove. My mom would get together with her best friend, Rose Ovian, who you've met. Rose Megerdichian Ovian. Have me drive them to Whitinsville so they could go to the cemetery, so they could see their family stones. And then, they would hold hands and walk around the cemetery, talking about everyone! “Oh, there's so-and-so. You know what they did when they were…” “There’s so and that was a really nice family, you know?” or “Oh, her mother died in tragic circumstances” or “they had a really great business.” They would do that. And of course, me, at least with my camera, I had something to do, I could photograph them doing that. But just like, they're going to go to every stone here and they're going to talk about everyone in Whitinsville. And I jokingly called them Radio Whitinsville. If you wanted to know what was going on in Whitinsville, even though they lived in Worcester most of their adult lives, you would just have to visit Sue and Rose and you'd find out everything. They were on that telephone when mom or Rose weren’t working outside, you know, in the work world, they both had jobs. They were on the phone. You know, we kids got to know everything that was going on in Whitinsville and in Worcester by just listening to mom on the phone. “Uh huh, Uh huh. Oh, really?” So that was Radio Whitinsville.
01:32:27 – 01:32:27
GJ: Radio Whitinsville.
01:32:27 – 01:33:52
KM: Yeah. Yeah. We knew everything by what they would do. And they loved it there. They wanted to go back all the time and we lost mom a year ago, on October 1, 2022 and you know, she just would always talk about it. She had dementia in her last years, and when she was in the house and I would go to visit, we had five people that live with her. I lived with her for a while. My son Craig lived with her for several years until she got too bad to take care of. She would say, “Oh, it's good that you've come.” She remembered my name. She didn't remember everybody, but she said, “I'm glad you came. Would you take me home now?” And I’d say, “Well mom, we are home.” “No, we’re not. Something wrong. You have to take me home. Take me to D Street.” I’d say, “Whitinsville?” She’d say, “Yeah.” I’d say, “Okay! Let’s go.” And I’d put her in the car. And I’d drive her to D Street and I’d drive her by the house. And she’d say, “Where is this?” I said, “You want to come home. This is 40 D Street.” She said, “It looks different. Where's mom and dad?” I said, I don't what to say. I said, “they’re on vacation. I think they went to California.” “Oh, really? They went to visit the cousins?” I'd say, “Yeah.” “Well, let me know when they come back. Bring me back here.”
01:33:54 - 01:34:40
KM: And then she’d say, “take me to take me to the cemetery.” I'd say, “okay.” We’d go there, she'd get out because my dad had died earlier in 1999 and she'd go to the stone and then I'd take her to her folks and then I take her to her grandmother. And then we get back in the car and she’d say, “What are we doing here?” And, you know, when someone's got dementia, you can't tell them that, “well you said so.” I’d say, “well, where are we?” I’d say, “we’re in the cemetery.” “Where?” “In Whitinsville.” “We’re in a cemetery?” I’d say, “Yeah.” She said, just like my mom, “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she’d make a fist and say, “let’s get the hell out of here.” So I’d say, “okay mom.” And I’d speed out and we’d go home. And she’d get settled down again until our next trip.
01:34:40 – 01:34:42
GJ: I remember when she…
01:34:42 – 01:34:43
KM: So it was all Whitinsville.
01:34:43 – 01:34:48
GJ: She told me once, “Whitinsville? There’s nothing there anymore.”
01:34:48 – 01:34:49
KM: She’d say that?
01:34:49 – 01:34:50
GJ: She said that to me once.
01:34:50 – 01:34:51
KM: Uh-huh.
01:34:52 – 01:34:53
GJ: Not true, but…
01:34:53 – 01:34:54
KM: Why would she say that?
01:34:54 – 01:34:57
GJ: I have no idea why she said it. She was, you know, she had dementia.
01:34:57 – 01:35:00
KM: Well, if you asked me about Worcester, I might say that now.
01:35:00 – 01:35:00
GJ: Yeah.
01:35:01 – 01:35:53
KM: There's nothing there anymore. I've seen the community really change and it's happening to a lot of our communities. The people who are there are dedicated. I went to a meeting the other night all about what's happened in Artsakh to inform the parishioners of what's happened, what needs to be done, how we can help. And I looked around and, you know, since my mom's generation, she's one of the last ones to go. There's a couple of more at our church. They're the ones who kept the church going. They paid their dues regularly, they joined the women's club, the ARS, even when the Armenian Renaissance group started for women, a lot of them joined that, but they supported the community and the community was strong, had a lot of money.
01:35:53 - 01:36:27
KM: It's changed. And that’s, the baby boomers letting them down? Is it assimilation having taken over? Sometimes people say intermarriage. But, you know, all the intermarriage I've seen is at the church, they stay at the church, the spouses stay with the Armenian spouse for the most part. But it's not the same. So, people talk about the strong diaspora and maybe in certain ways it is strong, but it's certainly changing.
01:36:28 – 01:36:31
GJ: Okay, well. Thank you, Ken.
01:36:31 – 01:36:31
KM: Sure.

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