52 Ancestors Week 35: Off to Work

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 35:

The theme for Week 35 is “Off to Work.” Who had an unusual occupation? Do you have memories of a parent going off to work every morning? What about someone whose occupation today would be obsolete, like telephone operators?

I'll have that Starbolts comic on your desk by five.

    Jobs that don't exist any more, huh? Well, we don't see many fix-it shops like the one my great-grandfather Alfred Hamel owned around here these days. I think those went out of style along with the Maytag repairman. Thankfully, those jobs sort of evolved into different specialty shops like a computer repair shop. Side note: It was actually pretty fun going to my local computer repair shop. I mean it was named after the villainous leader of the Decepticons, Megatron. How could you not like that shop? I miss Megatron Computers.

    All kidding and Transformers references aside, there is another person in my family tree who had a job that really, really doesn't exist in today's world. My grandmother Olympia Carrabs worked as a wire winder at Western Electric.

I think hers was black and gold.

 When I was a kid, my grandmother had a phone similar to the telephone in the picture in her living room.  It was pretty neat and she let me play with it all the time. It wasn't like it was connected to anything. She also wasn't an antique phone collector. Unlike my other grandmother, she didn't really collect anything. My great-aunt Nickie on the other hand....

When I was older where she got the phone from and what the story was behind it. My grandmother, if you recall, was always up for a story. If you pointed something in her house out, she will tell you all about it. Even if it was just  a knick-knack from like Pier 1 Imports.

    She told me that the phone was a memento of a very interesting time in her life. A time when she put her housework duties aside and went to work while my father was in grammar school. I'm not going to say she was a trailblazer or anything as plenty of  other women were entering the workforce during that time. What's interesting is that she first entered the workforce in while she was in her forties.

    While it was true that my grandma Ollie was a housewife for a number of years, she joined the workforce in the  early 1960s and became a wire winder. A wire winder was someone who operates machinery to wind wire, such as copper, onto bobbins, coils, or armatures for electrical components like transformers, motors, and generators. In Ollie's case, she worked on transistors for telephones.

    I can only imagine how rough that job was because back in the early 1960s, telephones didn't have
apps where you could play a game or look at the weather. Phones back then were very different. They were even different from the touchtone phones I remember from when I was a kid in the '80s and '90s! They greatly resembled the phone in her living room.

    While wire winding still technically exists as a profession, telephones haven't used transistors and tubes in a very, very long time. 

    The story of how Ollie landed the job was really quite simple. In the post World War II era, many women were going to work after the men returned home from overseas. 

    In Haverhill, Western Electric took over an old shoe factory then eventually, a large manufacturing plant opened in North Andover, Massachusetts in 1956. It became a significant employer as over 12,000 people worked at the plant at its peak. The Merrimack Valley was already known as a major player in textile production thanks in parts to the mills that dotted the valley since the early 20th century. The plant itself served as an attempt to move on from textiles to advanced technology.

    Western Electric focused on telecommunications, innovation developed products like the aforementioned transistors and fiber optics. Everything ran smoothly until 1984 when Bell Systems was dismantled. The plant itself continued working under the AT&T banner and later Lucent Technologies. The plant became an industrial park by 2021 when Bell Systems eventually removed all of their manufacturing capabilities out.

    Ollie worked at Western Electric for a number of years before finally retiring in her sixties and she always said she had a pleasant experience working there. She took great pride in her work and that was no doubt passed down by her father who was a janitor at Pentucket Bank. 

    Any line of work would be a good job for her as far as she was concerned. In her own way she helped to make peoples' lives better by working on telephones. By the time she passed away in 2002, telephones were a lot different as we were seeing more mobile phones in the hands of consumers. 

    In the end, grandma Ollie was more than just a housewife as I said earlier. She worked hard and helped while her husband Marco did his own thing.  Around the time she was working at Western Electric, he and his sister-in-law's husband Arnold Villanucci had that motel in Salisbury. To say that both of my Italian grandparents were busy in the 1960s is a bit of an understatement.

   Anyway, it was very cool that Ollie took part in a growing field that helped to bolster the economy here in the Merrimack Valley. Again, I wouldn't say she was a trailblazer by any means. She still had a great job and she took a lot of pride in her work. In the end, that's what it's all about. If you're good at something, you should show pride in it even if it's something small because you never know what kind of an impact you might have on someone's life.

See ya next time!