Craig Wallen

Description

Transcription

00:07 - 00:10
Gregory Jundanian (GJ): Well, thanks for sit down with us.
00:09 - 00:09
Craig Wallen (CW): Sure.
00:09 - 00:13
GJ: This is for the Armenians of Whitinsville website.
00:13 - 00:13
CW: Yup.
00:13 - 00:25
GJ: And perhaps we just start by simply stating your name and the date today and where we are, and then we'll take it from there. Maybe talk about your family history.
00:26 - 01:22
CW: Well, okay. My name is Craig Steven Wallen. My baptism name at the church is Karekin, which I typically don’t use. I was born in Whitinsville. We grew up in Whitinsville. My first three years, however, I lived with my grandparents on Church Street. And for that reason, I grew up, those first three years, only understanding and knowing Armenian. And the reason was that my mother had health issues and was in and out of the hospital. My father was in school for electrical engineering, so there was nobody else around. So, I lived with my grandparents on. And for that reason, basically my grandmother became the most important person in my life. Yeah.
01:24 - 01:28
GJ: Can you tell me a little bit about your grandma? Where she was from? What her life was like?
01:30 – 03:52
CW: Sure. They were from Pazmashen. Her father came to Whitinsville in 1900. He was a carpenter. And I remember my grandmother telling me about the preparation for him to come here. His mother sewed gold coins into his clothing before he left. When he got to Whitinsville, he didn't speak English, and I'm really not exactly sure what he did at the outset. We never heard any stories about that. The only story we heard was that because he was a carpenter, somehow, I guess he took those gold coins, and he bought two properties on East Street and by hand, he built two buildings.
02:32 - 03:52
CW: He built a building for them to live in when they got here in 1907. The rest of the family and right next door, he put a larger building up. It was a Turkish bath. It was a hammam. And he operated that hammam until about 1918, so almost 20 years. And my grandmother always said the reason he built the hammam was because he noticed that Americans didn't bathe. They weren't they weren't clean people. And he charged 10 cents a bath to use the bath house. And 15 if you used his towels. And because the Whitin Machine Works was here, and that part of town was kind of loaded with Armenians. Yeah, they would leave Whitin Machine Works, they would be filthy. So, he had a pretty good business going on. Apparently one point he rented a barn and started showing movies and he was showing movies for 5 cents a ticket to see the movies. I don't know where exactly that was or how long he did that, but he did that for a while.
03:53 - 03:54
GJ: This is your mother's father.
03:55 - 04:30
CW: My great grandfather. Sarkis, Sarkis Malkasian. Yeah. Then in 1907, my grandmother and her mother came to the States. That was a long journey. Like three weeks going through Turkey on an ox cart and then the boats to Istanbul and then Marseille. My grandfather and his brother, the Mouradians, were both orphans. They were orphaned in 1894, 95.
04:30 - 04:31
GJ: Why?
04:31 - 05:44
CW: The massacres by Abdul Hamid. And my grandfather ended up at Euphrates College. That's where he learned English. By the time they left, it was, I think, 1906. I don't know how my grandfather got here. I don't know how an orphan can actually get to the United States after being an orphan for all your life, they didn't have any money. Maybe because Euphrates College was a Protestant missionary institution, maybe there was money? We do know that my grandfather's brother, Tateos came to the States through Batumi. How or why? We don't know. But they both got here. My grandfather also had an aunt and uncle who were already here. So that was that side of the family.
05:45 - 05:50
GJ:So they probably, I just recently found out how my grandfather, who was also an orphan—
05:50 - 05:50
CW: Oh
05:50 - 05:56
GJ: --and they were sponsored by people from the village of Arabkir, who happen to live in Waltham.
05:57 - 05:58
CW: Okay, might’ve been.
05:58 - 05:59
GJ: It might have been like that also.
05:59 - 06:03
CW: Might’ve been but we don't have any detail on how my grandfather got here.
06:05 - 06:09
GJ: So before that, do you know anything about the history beyond your—
06:09 - 06:09
CW: Great grandfather?
06:09 - 06:10
GJ: Yes.
06:10 - 06:48
CW: The only thing we know is from a book that my grandmother's uncle, Abdal Bogosian, wrote about Pazmashen, where he talks about how the village, Pazmashen, was established by ancestors who came from Ani. Okay, I guess in the 12th, the 13th century they migrated. And somehow they got the land and they established, this was about seven families, established the village of Pazmashen. They originally came from Ani. That’s all we know.
06:49 - 06:56
GJ: If you were to ask one of these relatives something, what would you, is there anything you've always wanted to ask?06:57 - 08:11
CW: Well, in the interview I did with my grandmother in 1973, one of the questions I asked her was, what was life like there? Trying to get to that because I wanted to know how did they live? We’re really disconnected from all of that. I mean, we grew up here, and other than what we experienced by being in our grandparent’s house, we don't really know now. Now I think they, they brought a lot of their traditions and habits along with them. So, believe it or not, you and I are the closest connection to Anatolian Armenians of anyone because we're the last people who had contact with those people. We heard them talking. I mean, that interview with my grandmother was basically to capture her PazmashenTsI dialect more than anything else because, as you know, nobody speaks that way anymore. You don't hear that. You don't hear those words pronounced that way. They had a very distinct way of speaking, and I wanted to capture that.
08:11 - 08:15
GJ: I remember we were going through that interview and you were always saying, “Grandma, speak in Armenian.”
08:15 - 08:25
CW: Yes, at the beginning. At the beginning, yeah, she thought I was going to be done in English. I mean, she became very fluent in English because she arrived here when she was nine years old.
08:26 - 08:35
GJ: So, she comes from, or maybe it's your grandfather's side, [inaudible] a pretty large family. I remember you telling me about a great uncle who was an artist in Boston.
08:36 - 09:16
CW: That, that was, Giragos Der Garabedian. So Giragos married one of my grandmother's cousins, Abdal’s daughter. He married Abdal's daughter. Giragos lived in my grandparent’s house on Church Street for a while. And as a thank you, he decorated the walls of the two living rooms in the house with Italian style plaster frescoes. You took pictures of those.
09:16 - 09:18
GJ: I know, I just remembered that I owe you those pictures.
09:18 - 09:21
CW: Yeah, you took pictures of those. They're still in the house, believe it or not. Yeah.
09:21 - 09:22
GJ: Yeah
09:22 - 09:40
CW: And originally, apparently, according to my grandmother, I remember her saying they were done with colored plaster, but at some point she had them all painted over. So they were monochromatic, but they were in frames, as you know. They're pretty complicated. And they were done, she said they were done with a sponge.
09:41 - 09:42
GJ: Wow.
09:42 – 10:08
CW: Somehow, somehow, he knew. He also had a studio on Newbury Street in Boston, and a couple of times I drove my grandmother into Boston to spend time with Giragos. And then the other relative in Boston was Kaspar Pilibosian, who had a rug shop on Route 16 in Wellesley. For many, many, many years. So, he was related to my grandmother, I mean my grandfather, not my grandmother.
10:09 - 10:13
GJ: Is that, just to digress, I know you're very interested in rugs.
10:13
CW: Yeah.
10:13 - 10:24
GJ: You work with Oriental rugs. Is that how you first kind of became educated in it? How’d that all happen?
10:24 - 10:34
CW: Maybe. There used to be a rug guy in Worcester and Pleasant Street Mihran Tufenkjian and I used to go and visit.
10:34 - 10:36
GJ: When you were at Holy Cross?
10:36 - 13:51
CW: Yeah, I used to go visit and hang out with him, and he would show me how he washed the rugs and he explained rugs to me. And then when I finished at Holy Cross, I moved into, I moved to Cambridge. And I got a job as a waiter in a restaurant in the North End. But that was at night. During the day, I went and worked for an old, old rug guy on Boylston Street. His name was  Hmayag Karamanian and it was Karamanian Brothers Rugs and he was on the second floor on Boylston Street. He had a big showroom. So, he was in his eighties. So, I would go there every day and help him show rugs to customers and move the rugs around.
11:24 - 12:30
CW: And there's a lot of dead time in the rug world. And we would sit and talk and he would actually educate me about rugs. He was very knowledgeable. He and his brother had this rug shop, I think since, I don't know, the 1920s and 30s. So, by that point they had been in business for a long time. He actually wanted me to buy his business at the end of that summer. He wanted, I think like $300,000, which I was penniless. That was impossible. That was never going to happen. So, but as part of the negotiation, my parents brought my grandmother into Boston. Sat down, my mother went through all his books and examined everything and then said to Mr. Karamanian, and said, “these are retail prices. How is Craig going to make any money? How is that going to happen?” So, it didn't happen, unfortunately, but that's how that started.
12:31 - 13:51
CW: The other the other real key interest in in rugs came really in Whitinsville. Even before that, when I got my first car. You might remember one of our teachers, Miss Balmer. Elizabeth Balmer. She came up to me and she said, “I noticed that you've got a car. Me and my sister are moving to a smaller house on Whitin Avenue. Maybe you can get one of your friends to help us empty the barn in the attic and take everything to the dump.” So, I said, “Sure.” She said, “I'll pay you each $25.” I was like, wow, that's pretty good. So, Jeffrey and I went and we emptied out the barn and the attic. We took things to the dump. And there were small rugs there. I didn't know what they were. I thought they were American Indian at the time because some of them had animals and they were all geometric. Now, I know, of course, that there were all Caucasian rugs. And I put them aside and I kept those because I had never seen anything like them. And that's really where that interest in rugs started from. Miss. Balmer.
13:53 - 13:59
GJ: And what is your business now? I know you’re in rugs but what do you—
13:59 - 13:59
CW: What?
13:59 - 14:02
GJ: I know you're in textiles and you do a lot of different things.
14:02 - 14:03
CW: Right. Yeah, yeah.
14:03 - 14:05
GJ: How do you describe what you do now?
14:06 - 14:41
CW: Well, rare antique rugs and textiles is the focus. I also sell other kinds of artwork and contemporary artwork, but the textiles fall into the ethnographic area, so I have ancient Coptic textiles. I have pre-Columbian textiles from Peru, things from the Ottoman Empire, from India. So, it's a mix. It's a mix. Yeah, it's never boring.
14:41 - 14:43
GJ: Yeah. Who would have thunk?
14:43 - 14:50
CW: Well, who would have thunk? Especially between, so I've had the shop for 20 years—
14:51 - 14:51
GJ: In Philadelphia.
14:51 - 15:00
CW: In Philadelphia for 20 years. But before that I worked in technology and in consulting. That's what I did for an awfully long time.
15:01 - 15:01
GJ: What a path!
00:15:03 – 00:16:21
CW: Well, but the thing is, yeah, the rug interests started a long time before, and it never disappeared because it's always been something new to discover, something new to learn. And I just find the whole technology behind textiles, especially in ancient times, to be really kind of fascinating. I mean, the amount of work that went into making these things in an era before machines, electricity, it all had to be done by hand. Everything was done by hand. And the process of just preparing the wool is, it's labor intensive. I mean, the wool has to be washed, carded, cleaned, spun, then dyed, and then the dyes were all made from roots, plants, even insects, it’s a huge production. Unfortunately, nobody nowadays really understands any of that. But with beautiful old rugs, it's just it's amazing.
16:22 - 16:25
GJ: So back to growing up in town.
16:25 - 16:25
CW: Yeah.
16:26 - 16:36
GJ: What are your earlier memories of growing up in town and maybe weave that into the community?
16:37 - 17:20
CW: Well, early memories involve walking to the Clark School. Spending time at my grandparent’s house with friends in the neighborhood. You know, we lived on Granite Street, Granite and East Street, across from Vanderbaan’s Market, which is where we got meat for kyeyma every Saturday. Behind Vanderbaan’s were the woods and down through the woods was the frog pond. And we all spent hours and hours and hours at the frog pond.
17:20 - 17:21
GJ: I remember.
17:21 - 17:50
CW: Right? Falling in, all of it. One of the big things, I think it was in ninth grade where we had to do this wildflower project, where we had to collect as many wildflowers and basil leaves of that plant and identify them and press, dry press them, and put them in a booklet. I still have that booklet, believe it or not.
17:50 - 17:51
GJ: Lady slippers.
17:52 - 18:54
CW: Lady slippers. Yeah. Yeah. I think I had like almost 50 flowers. Most of them are weeds. We think of them as weeds, but they're really not weeds. So that was interesting. I mean, we all did science fair projects. Um, I did science fair a project on sound transmission, and my grandmother had an old crank up record player and it the Northbridge High Gymnasium, I don't know if you remember this, but as part of my display, I played “Come On-a My House” probably a thousand times and drove people at the science fair crazy because it reverberated to the whole gymnasium. I think I won honorable mention for that, which was kind of fun. You know, we all did do all the things like Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, that kind of thing.
18:55 - 18:57
GJ: Were you involved with the Armenian community growing up?
18:58 - 20:04
CW: Well, one of the earliest involvements was going to Armenian school. So, my grandfather on the weekends would sit me down and teach me the Armenian alphabet, so I would have lessons with him. He was very adamant that everybody had to learn Armenian. And apparently, according to my mother, no English was allowed to be spoken in the house, which is why I didn't know English until I left my grandparent’s house. So, he sat me down to teach me the alphabet. But then I'm not sure how old we were when Digin Haiganouch started teaching Armenian classes in the church basement. So that was my first formal Armenian school experience. And then the different Der Hayrs did Armenian school on, I guess I don't know if it was Friday and Saturday or Thursday and Friday, you know, but it was two days, right?
20:06 - 20:10
[Off Screen][inaudible] like two days.
20:10 - 20:26
CW: It was two days, right? It was two days after school we went. Anyways. So there was that. We belonged to AYF. And AYF all consuming for a long, long time.
20:26 - 20:26
GJ: How so?
20:27 - 20:50
CW: Well, we had meetings. It was very formalized. We had AYF Juniors, AYF Seniors. We had to keep minutes of the meetings. I ended up being president of the AYF for a couple of years, I guess. Someone I think still has minutes to those meetings. I think Laura might still have those written down somewhere.
20:50 - 20:56
GJ: What kind of stuff was discussed? Who knows now, right?
20:57 - 20:57
CW: You know…
20:57 - 20:58
GJ: Parties
20:58 - 21:23
CW: We were all, well we did house parties and dances at the club. And an AYF central executive would have little, I guess, suggestions and what we were supposed to do. And they had requirements of what we needed to report back to them. I don’t remember a lot of it to be honest with you.
21:24 - 21:26
GJ: What was it like walking into the club?
21:26 - 21:27
CW: Well…
21:27 - 21:28
GJ: What was the name of the club, first of all?
21:28 - 21:31
CW: It was the Gomideh, the Agoomp…
21:32 - 21:34
GJ: Right. The ARF Rosdom Agoomp or something? (Rosdom was misspelled on the Coca Cola sign as Rosoom
21:34 - 23:04
CW: So sometimes on the way home from school, I would stop there to see my grandfather. But remember, my grandfather died when I was 11. So, it was before that. And you walked in and it looked just like any coffeehouse in Turkey does now. I mean, there's all guys sitting around marble top tables, pictures of the fedayees on the walls. There was a case with chocolates and chewing gum and that probably had been there for 50 years. Avetis Malkasian would make coffee for the guys. They were playing cards, or Tavlou. And my grandfather was there smoking his cigarettes. So, I'd go in and he'd pat me on the head and buy me a candy bar.  You know, the club had a big history in the past. From what I remember from my grandmother, my uncle, my mother, was how the club was the site of where my grandfather was going to be basically arrested by the feds because my grandfather had been smuggling people in from Canada for quite a while.
23:04 - 23:59
CW: So, there were Armenians from the Middle East who arrived and didn't have any passports, they didn't have any papers. How were they going to get into the United States? Somehow there was a network of people and my grandfather was part of that. They would bring people in through Canada. I don't know how they did it, but at some point, somebody reported my grandfather to the federal government and people showed up at my grandparent’s house, like government people, my grandmother called them the “G-men” and with papers to arrest my grandfather because he was doing something illegal. There were immigration quotas at that point, right? People weren't supposed to be coming in.
23:59 - 25:34
CW: So I think this was the late 1920s, early 1930s. And the only way he was going to be exonerated was by getting some kind of paperwork from someone in Canada. Now, my grandfather had some relatives in Hamilton, Canada, and that's where they would come through all these refugees. Well, I think it was 1932, 33. My grandmother--now, my grandfather was not allowed to leave the house--and when this happened, apparently most of the Armenians in Whitinsville, shunned my grandfather. They didn't want to have anything to do with him or the family because of this investigation. So, my grandmother hopped on a train, a series of trains, went to Hamilton. I don't know who she met with. She came back with paperwork. Okay, at some point, the feds called a community meeting the Armenians in Whitinsville at the club, and this guy came up from Washington and everybody was in the club. And then the government guys were on the stage. My grandfather was on the stage and the community was there.
25:35 - 26:56
And at some point, I don't know what was said or how it was said, I wasn't there. But according to my mother, my grandmother publicly produced this paperwork and the paperwork got my grandfather off the hook. But then somebody in the crowd demanded to know from the federal agents who reported Eli Moradian, because most of the people there had been brought to the United States by my grandfather and the federal agent pointed out Mr. Garabedian in the crowd, and my mother said there was a near riot in the club. They were going to go to kill Mr. Garabedian. And so, from that moment on, and at least in our family, the Garabedian name was mud. Mr. Garabedian had a store on Church Street that, as you know, he sold Boy Scout uniforms. We were not allowed to go there for shoes, for socks, for anything. And that was the reason why.
26:56 
GJ: Wow.
26:56 - 28:04
CW:Yeah, that was a reason. So, the club was a big deal. And as you know, when we were kids, there was no Armenian church in Whitinsville. And we all went to the Congregational Church. But then my grandfather petitioned E. Kent Swift at the Whitin Machine Works to get the land donated, which was swamp land. And then the process started to build the church. And so, the church opened, I guess, in 1956?  57, yeah. So, it took a while, but they finally got a church. Strangely, my grandfather was a die-hard Dashnak, never went into the church once it was built until the day he died and he at his funeral there. Never went into the church. He was not religious. My mother was not religious. My father, who wasn’t Armenian, wasn't religious. My uncles were not religious. My grandmother was. So, she liked going to the church.
28:04 - 28:05
GJ: She did it for her.
28:05 – 00:28:09
CW: Yeah, she did it. But really nobody else did.
28:09 - 28:11
GJ: So, your dad was not Armenian.
28:11 - 28:12
CW: Right.
28:12 - 28:15
GJ: And in that generation, that was probably a big deal.
28:15 - 28:17
CW: Oh, I think it was a very big deal, yeah.
28:18 - 28:20
GJ: Yeah. Can you talk about that a little?
28:20 - 29:15
CW: I don't, they, so he was introduced to my mother by Rusty Malkasian. Because my father was in the Navy with Rusty. And they were good friends and Rusty introduced my father to my mother and somehow it worked.And they lived across the street.
CW: And they lived across the street from us. Yeah. They ended up living across the street from us. So that's how that happened. The rest is history.  I mean, my father's family was originally from Lithuania. I finally found out the village where they were from, and when they moved here, they lived in Lawrence, and then they moved to Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
29:16 - 29:20
GJ: Where did your dad's family originally come over, do you know?
29:21 - 29:29
CW: His father came to escape conscription into the Russian army.
29:29 - 29:30
GJ: World War One?
29:30 - 29:36
CW:Before, yeah, before World War One. He didn't want to be drafted by, because it was part of the Russian Empire.

Part 2

29:51 - 29:53
CW: So, you were talking about growing up in Whitinsville.
29:53 - 29:54
GJ: Right.
29:54 - 31:15
CW: I mean, so a lot of stuff happened, like I said, at the club with AYF. A lot of things happened on the church, once we got the church, going Armenian school, doing the different hantesses, events, we had to recite poems and sing songs, and do all of that. But then, you know, I always like to think that we grew up in a village, within a village, within a village because, you know, know the Armenian world of Whitinsville, even though it was in Whitinsville, which is a little New England town, and there's a mix of people, I think a lot of us had a very concentrated experience with our families and the people they knew. I mean, the other part of it is that, you know, when I think about growing up in Whitinsville, what I remember is that everybody was old. Everybody was old. My grandparents were old, all of their friends were old. People who came to their house were super old. I mean, now maybe they were what our age is now, but they seem to be really, really old.
31:15 - 32:57
CW: So, who am I talking about? Well, I'm talking about the Johnsons on Brook Street. They were at my grandparent’s house all the time. They always seemed to be very old. There was my grandfather's brother, Tateos and his wife, Azniv Mouradian on East Street. They were older than my grandfather, but they were old. Alice Sagherian’s mother, I remember, she was quite old. I remember Baron Mikael Der Kosrofian on Church Street. He had a huge garden and we used to go up there and he would explain his garden and how he fertilized the garden, which was a little distasteful in a way. But he had a beautiful garden on the outside. The Asadourian’s lived next door to him. Across from my grandparents were a whole row of Malkasian’s, the Gigarjian’s. Next door was Hagar and Zabel Malkasian. They were old. Everybody seemed to be old, other than, you know, kids our age when we were in school that we hung out with, it seemed like everybody was old. And then, you know, as my grandparents got older, it seemed like all weekends, we spent most of the time in the hospital visiting elderly people who were sick. I mean, I think, I knew other kids were out playing, but, you know, we would go to the hospital to visit elderly relatives who were sick and dying.
32:57 - 33:20
CW: I also remember other fun things. I talked about the frog pond. But we used to go fishing at Meadow Pond. We used to go ice fishing in the wintertime at Meadow Pond. We used to go skating on Meadow Pond. My father was a really good ice skater. And so, we had, you know, we had skates, we had to go learn how to skate. And fish. He taught me how to tie flies.
33:27 - 33:34
GJ: I feel, like we said earlier, about people being really old, I remember all these old people as if they were ghosts.
33:34 - 33:35
CW: Really?
33:26 - 33:43
GJ: You know, that they were in bodied. You could just feel the pain that they went through this. I've always felt that way, you know.
33:47 - 34:52
CW: After having gone to Turkey three times and going to different parts of Turkey, it's amazing to me when I have been here, how familiar and comfortable every place was. So, you’d go into back streets in Istanbul or some of the other villages outside and you see people and they look and act exactly like the people we grew up with because they are the people we grew up with. I mean, it's amazing to think that what we grew up with was really transplanted, like completely from Turkey to Whitinsville. There was an overlay of something American. But, you know, most of these old people we knew spoke English with a very heavy accent. Some of them almost didn't speak English at all. Just enough to get by, but some of them didn't at all.
34:53 - 35:04
GJ: When you’re saying old, I mean, I think part of everybody feeling like the feeling of people being old is almost also the feeling of them being from the old country.
35:05 - 35:06
CW: Yes, yes.
35:06 - 35:07
GJ: I think that’s what you’re saying.
35:07 - 35:12
CW: Well that, their habits, their the things they did, I mean—35:12 - 35:13
GJ: Were different.
35:13 - 35:34
CW: Well, they were different. And it's funny when you think about it, nowadays in the United States, people want to do things that are natural and organic and, you know, farm to table. Okay. Most of us had family, grandparents or someone who had a huge garden.
35:34 - 35:35
GJ: It was always organic.
35:36 - 36:19
CW: It was always organic. And everybody always made torshi. My grandmother made bastegh. My grandmother did all kinds of stuff with things from the garden.  She also made her own soap. She made jelly, she sewed, she knitted, she crocheted. So, they did everything themselves. And we don’t, we’re not really, other than having that experience, we don't really do that. You know, we go to the grocery store. They didn't really go to the grocery store.
36:19 - 36:22
GJ: Do you have any like, favorite dishes your grandmother made?
36:23 - 36:32
CW: Oh, oh, my Lord. My grandmother was a phenomenal cook and she was always cooking.
36:33 - 36:35
GJ: What did her kitchen smell like to you, do you remember?
36:33 - 37:59
CW: Well, it's interesting you say that because when I walked into the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul, my reaction was, “this smells like my grandmother's kitchen.” And every place I went to in Turkey always smelled like my grandmother's kitchen. It's kind of odd to say, but that memory, that smell memory, always stuck around. I mean, so my grandmother's kitchen was, she walked in and opened the refrigerator, there was always a gigantic bowl of madzoon. There was a pitcher of tahn. There was usually something on the stove. There was, you know, eggplant with ground lamb, pilaf, kofta. She would make bread dough and take it across the street to Ronnie Malkasian’s grandfather's house, who had a wood stove, and she would break the bread in the wood stove. She wouldn't use her own gas stove. She'd go to the wood stove because it would taste better. And it did. It tasted better. You know, in the wintertime, she made t’tmajabour.  So we had t’tmajabour all the time.
37:59 - 38:00
GJ: What is that?
38:00 - 38:50
CW: It’s a madzoon-based soup with noodles and mint and onions. It's delicious. She’d make Khoshab from dried fruits, so we’d always have that in the wintertime. My grandmother was famous for her porov kuftehs. And it's funny when you're in, when we were, the first time I went to Turkey, my cousin and I were in Istanbul, we kind of asked around like, “Where's a great—is there a restaurant we go and get Harput kofta? And we were told that you have to find an Armenian grandmother from Harput to make it. Yeah, yeah. It's funny that they remember that in Turkey.
38:51 - 39:04
GJ: That’s an outrageous story. Do you have any amusing stories of growing up in Whitinsville?
39:05 - 40:53
CW: Well, yes. I mean, so my aunt and uncle, my Uncle Warren, lived in Hartford, Connecticut, so they would come up almost every other weekend, stay at my grandparents’ house, with my cousin Barbara and her brother Jamie, and we would hang out. We'd go into the woods. We picked blueberries. We’d filled quart bottles of blueberries and sell them from a card table in front of my grandmother's house for 25 cents a bottle.
I would lead little expeditions for my cousins through the woods, showing them this and that. I don't know if you know, but off of Highland Street, there are like these gigantic rock cliffs. And yeah, we would go and explore these cliffs looking for caves. I don't think we ever found a cave, but we did find a snake once, and I was showing my cousins how to properly pick up a snake. Well, I went and picked up the snake and I didn't grab it close enough to the head and the snake went and bit me on the thumb.
Alright, we threw the snake away. I told my cousins, “Whatever you do when we get back to the house, do not say anything about me being bit by a snake.” Go to my grandmother's house, we open the door, we walk in. The first thing my cousin Barbara says is “Craig got bit by a snake. Craig Bit by a snake.” So, I had to get rushed to the hospital for a tetanus shot. So, there was that.
41:06 - 42:03
CW: The other interesting little episode was when, I think it was the Thanksgiving weekend. And Craig, your father came down from Worcester, hooked up with me and my cousin Barbara and my grandmother's house, and we went across the street into the woods, up the hill to do an archeological dig. And we went out with shovels and rakes, and we dug down, I think, probably eight inches to a foot, it was going to be very precise. But we found arrowheads. I still have those arrowheads. My cousin Barbara found a spearpoint, and I think she even has that spearpoint from the woods across from my grandmother's house on Church Street, up on the hill where there now there's a housing development there.
42:03 - 42:04
GJ: Was it a grave?
42:04 - 42:04
CW: I don't know what it was.
42:03 - 42:07
GJ: That those things were to be buried in a place—
42:07 - 42:08
CW: I have no idea. Yeah, yeah.
42:11 - 42:12
GJ: Remember Sadie Pilabosian?
42:12 - 42:13
CW: Of course.
42:13 - 42:16
GJ: You and I were probably [inaudible] that class.
42:16 - 42:25
CW: She threw an eraser and chalk at me at one point, which is strange because she was related to my grandfather.
42:25 - 42:33
GJ: But she said to me, “You know, you're incredibly snide.” And I'm like, I have no what snide meant. I had to go and look it up.
42:33 - 42:36
CW: How would you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
42:37 - 42:42
GJ: And then Mrs., the music teacher, Balian.
42:42 - 42:44
CW: Oh, Barbara. Baljian.
42:44 - 42:47
GJ: Baljian. She gave us all A's. All the Armenians got A’s.
42:47 - 43:34
CW: Yes, yeah, she was, you know, so she's a khnami of mine. When my Uncle Warren went to Hartford, he lived with Rose's family because they were Rustigan’s. And my grandfather’s brother, Tateos on East Street, his wife, Azniv, was a Rustigan and related to Barbara's mother. So again, there are these, when we were kids, we always said that everybody in Whitinsville was related to everybody else, kind of as a joke. But now we're finding out that it's actually true. It’s actually true. But they were all from a very small village in Turkey.
43:34 - 43:37
GJ: Of like 800 people or a thousand people.
43:37 - 44:20
CW: Even if it was 3,000 people, you know, I mean. Yeah. So I, I mean, I don't know about you, but I worked for a while at Phillip’s Market. In the wintertime we would shovel snow. We would go downtown to the different merchants, to Mencow’s, to Snyderman’s, to Leon Dickman and offer to shovel the snow off their sidewalk in the wintertime. I remember I would go with Kevork and we would do it and we would charge 5 dollars.
44:20 - 44:22
GJ: A lot of money back then.
44:22 45:03
CW: Mr. Mencow did not want to give us 5 dollars and he had the biggest sidewalk of everybody. But I think he offered us three and we took it. We cleaned of his sidewalk, and we did a good job. I don't know if you remember the Halloween contest where we had to compete to paint the different storefront windows. So, I think a couple of years in a row I ended up doing Cooper Cut Rate, remember the Cooper Cut Rate. That was the Epstein’s who had Cooper Cut Rate and I did their window.
45:03 - 45:07
GJ: I remember that.
45:07 - 45:10
CW: I don't know when they stopped that, but that was a really fun thing for Whitinsville.
45:10 - 45:11
GJ: That was kind of a fun thing.
45:11 - 45:17
CW: Every storefront had a Halloween themed painting in the window.
45:17 - 45:20
GJ: Wow, I had completely forgotten about that.
45:20 - 45:20
CW: Yeah.
45:21 - 45:42
GJ: Would you say that, you know, you really told some great stories about growing up here, would you say there are any values that you think are intrinsic to your heritage? In other words, if you were born in a different nationality, you might have different values, or are they the same values but maybe just slightly different?
45:43 - 47:35
CW: I don't know if they're universal values. I don't know if they're specific to Armenians or my family. You know, my grandmother's biggest thing was do unto others as others do unto you, she would always say that. And you know, I try to do that as much as possible, whether it's in daily life or in business. I mean, you want to treat other people properly. One of the stories my grandmother did not tell in her interview, but I remember her telling me was that when they finally got here, they got to New York, they got to Ellis Island. And she completely freaked out because when they landed, the porters were all black. And she told me that the only time you saw people that color back in the old country was when they had died and they hadn't buried them fast enough. They turned black. So, my grandmother thought these were dead people carrying people's luggage. And it was her father, my grandmother's father, who said, “No, they're people just like everybody else.” So, I remember explaining that to us that, you know, if you see black people remember they’re people just like everybody else, treat them just like everybody else. So that was, I think, an important lesson that came from her when she arrived here at nine years old. So, kind of important, you know, kind of important. And I ended up having a black roommate at Holy Cross.
47:35 - 47:38
GJ: Who was it? I don’t know if I know the name.
47:39 - 48:58
CW: His name was Charlie Guinn. If he was from Savannah, Georgia, believe it or not, which is where Clarence Thomas is from. There weren't that many black Catholics, I guess, in Savannah. Anyways, so I remember bringing him to Whitinsville with a couple of other schoolmates, and we went to the church and after church there was a dinner downstairs, or luncheon, and it was pretty rare that a black person ended up at our church in Whitinsville and someone came up to him and asked him if he was from Ethiopia.  Well, and then she said she said, “I know there are Armenians in Ethiopia. Are you Armenian?”  He was like, “No, I'm not. But it was an interesting little episode…an interesting little episode.” What else would you like to know about Whitinsville?
48:46 - 48:53
GJ: I was just trying to think. We’ve covered a lot of ground. Lisa, can you think of anything?

[off screen]

No, I think this is a good place to end.
Okay.
48:58 - 48:59
CW: Is that—
48:59 - 49:00
GJ: Thank you.
49:00 - 49:02
CW: Yeah. Yeah, sure, I mean—
49:02 - 49:03
GJ: It’s been very delightful.
49:03 - 49:07
CW: Yeah. Just a few reminiscences about growing up here.
49:07 - 49:11
GJ: Yeah. It was definitely a special place.
49:11- 49:15
CW: Like I said, a village within a village within a village. Yeah.
49:16 - 49:17
GJ: Well, thank you, Craig.
49:17 - 49:18
CW: Well, thank you.
49:18 - 49:20
GJ: Thanks for doing this.
49:20 - 49:21
CW: You’re welcome.

Creator

Contributor

Date

Coverage

Format

Publisher

Rights

Relation

Type

Duration

Transcriber

Subtitler

Videographer