ok welcome everybody i see a lot of members i see a lot of looks like friendly people from watertown how many want to talk people now the very friendly group thank you for coming today i think this is going to be a very interesting program i did not grow up in the belmont areas of the hood river company is something i can be schooled about i've heard about it and very much interested in seeing this fine fine video this will be our last monthly meeting on sunday because i was season ends in may and we will have zero in you'll meeting in this room but i'll be on a wednesday night may  in the end you'll meeting this year will include there are thirty three dollars topics we have the election of our offices and board directors we have our i probably the th anniversary of the david johnson preservation awards to various individuals or properties and then we have at least six house plaques historic post plaques that will be awarded that evening so put it down in your calendar in belmont just a couple weeks ago we celebrated not no news in the newspaper about this but we turned one hundred and gentleman on emerson street just around the corner this is his bicycle registration number he was number two he was he was like he was like eavis we are dying to here george raise your hand george george said he proudly is has number seventy eight in his garage someplace but he really does take a distant nd to charlie's  registration fee i don't know but very very nice little thank you all for coming i really appreciate it and i hope you enjoyed today's presentation i'm sure you will st i want to thank phil for always helping he sends out the flyers to the membership john both are helping with the publicity paula debbie and allison for today again taking care of our refreshment and all of you for coming out also jeremy for the belmont media center for being here as well so a quick introduction and then on with our program so multitalented his early years in dorchester he graduated from the university of massachusetts in boston with a music degree he cleans carpets and upholstery by day and is a freelance videographer in his spare time if there is one word to describe roger it is passionate especially when it comes to history and his heritage in his youth roger heard many tales of his grandmother's days as a factory worker at the hood rubber company in watertown inspired by these stories and those  countless other workers of the factory many of whom were of descent he spent six years to make this film which is part business history and part personal chronicle the film debuted in two thousand and nine has been shown numerous times various venues in and around the area roger has numerous other films to his credit many related to his armenian heritage he received the a t n t broadband regional award for best documentary film for his  journey along the middlesex canal and in two thousand and nine he received the community spirit award from the town of watertown for the film we are about to see roger is currently working on a film about the quad reservoir and now it is my thank you i don't want to speak to him but i want to mention that at the end of this film it will be a line of credits with beautiful music at the end of that i have some outtakes from the film and i could not quite fit into the chronology of the film but these are all important statements that people india and at that time i like to recognize people who participated in the film in the relatives who would be here and i'd be interested in people who worked at the who had rubber if they wanted to tell a little story i'd like to hear from everyone here i don't want to talk too much so i'm going to push the button now  and the th century invasions by the celtic turks and the subsequent expansion of the ottoman turkish empire claimed most of historic armenia the st christian nation the armenians became a subjugated people in their ancestral homeland of berlin imposed demands for reform on the ottoman empire and armenians and other persecuted minorities were allowed the freedom to leave the country at this time groups of armenians began to arrive in america they were mostly young single men or husbands who had left their families sometimes for years at a time to earn a living with the hope of returning to provide for a better life an eight thousand six hundred and seventy one i mean you name g came to the united states as the servant of an american missionary went to west lived in worcester and the story is that he was working for something like a dollar a week he then learned from a friend that he could make that amount of money in a day in the woods to wire mills so he left that employment and it was through garro through what we call chain migration that relatives and friends of his would start coming their massachusetts became the st armenian settlement in america the early immigrants there worked at wire mills such as the washburn and mo and manufacturing company in the eight hundred and eighty dollars s armenians began arriving in fresno california in most cases immigrants would come to the united states and work in the eastern seaboard anywhere from portland maine through boston was to providence all the way down to baltimore and what they would do is after a number of years usually working in the factories they would save up enough money to go to california and what comes out of the immigrant press is the the work in the factories was so debilitating exhausting and under very very dangerous conditions that you get the feeling of great weariness and poor health consumption and so many of these immigrants went to california for the climate now the st who went as far as we know with the serapion brothers in eight hundred and eighty one armenians initially pursued agriculture as farm workers growing raisins then leasing and eventually purchasing land and owning companies which provided the packing and distribution of fruits and vegetables when the women came there were some problems of adjustment because the men had learned something about american ways whereas the women were still all country dns and there were many cases during the massacres when the husbands were had been killed in the old country women would bring children and they would become the breadwinners and the heads of the family the largest concentration of women working took place in troy new york no one would think of croix to york but there was a large community there and it was called the assured manufacturing center of the united states and the reason for that was that they could work at home they would get and they would read these machine the sewing machines take them at home and they would do piece work and they preferred to do this they didn't want to go in the factories because these women came from sequestered secluded families in the old country with strict morals and swearing and and  rough language was not tolerated and then they get thrown into a factory and this would appall their husbands and their families from eight hundred and ninety four to eight hundred and ninety six massacres ordered by resulted in the deaths of some two hundred thousand armenians in autumn in turkey many refugees of these killings fled to the united states and about five thousand of them settled in massachusetts according to the massachusetts census of one thousand nine hundred and five the three largest communities and massachusetts for armenians were starting with boston and watertown but it's forty armenians found work at a new factory that had opened in watertown george henry hood of chelsea massachusetts was a robber good salesman and businessman during the latter half of the th century in and seventy seven dollars he founded the boston rubber company which along with eleven other corporations consolidated to become the united states rubber company in one thousand nine hundred and two george's sons frederick and arthur hood were convinced by a group of local businessmen that watertown would be an ideal location for their plant proximity to the port of boston and the railroad was essential such as the fitchburg railroads watertown branch which was already serving the united states arsenal there flowing through east watertown sahlins brook provided ample water supply and a large labor force existed in the surrounding communities on october the company attracted unskilled workers from various immigrant ethnic groups including the armenians and at the same time there is this huge migration of immigrants from the middle east and from southern europe and eastern european jews the italians the greeks the syrians and the armenians unskilled labor and the to work together the factory owners now want to produce mass goods that there are they're part of a huge international market and they want to produce them as quickly as possible and cheaply as possible so they now industrialized so that the machines can be tended by unskilled labor they don't need craftsmen to sew shoes they have machines to do that with this huge pool of unskilled laborers coming in systematically in city after city  town after town and in factory towns manufacturers were doing their best to get rid of their higher priced english speaking irish well established authors and and factory workers to get immigrants because they would come at a rd or a half the price of the threat of this incursion of foreigners compelled the american born good employees to demand the firing of these immigrant laborers however the company rejected this plea the armenians had proven to be good workers receiving low pay while toiling for long hours we think of wood rubber as an armenian factory it really wasn't i mean it's constituted probably five to seven percent of the workforce but had who would rubber not existed there would have been a huge community in chelsea or in providence or in portland or and camden new jersey there were i mean in communities there by the turn of the century the word spread even as far as the armenian provinces of the ottoman empire but there was work to be found at hood rubber the new ottoman constitution was implemented by the young turk regime in one thousand nine hundred and eight at this time another wave of armenian way to america and there is hope by the armenians that things have changed the new day throughout the i mean in world there are parades and celebration deep roots in armenia their families their culture and so forth so they always said at the top of their minds we have to return we are going to return and yet as they become more a culture to america as they get jobs as they have families as they own property and they see the deterioration of conditions in turkey they're settling and even against their best intentions there's no way that they're going to return so the  before the st world war and the terrible genocide the die is cast by nine hundred and sixteen there were approximately eight hundred armenians living in watertown according to apparently in tribute to the homeland of its armenian workers or to attract sales from their countrymen these two brothers started out and apparently they must have gotten along for a while but i think their temperaments  know but i do know that there was a great falling out between the two brothers adding tires to its product line the hood rubber company expanded production along with the watertown arsenal to accommodate military build up during world war one by the end of the war the factory was employing ten thousand workers homes were purchased and land was taken for additions to the plant the company had a research laboratory believed to be the st of its kind in the nation the boston elevated street railway even built a trolley loop at mount auburn street and bigelow av to accommodate workers commuting from harvard square in cambridge could rubber owned and operated the abraham lincoln house on arlington street where immigrant workers aspiring for citizenship learned english there was a clinic there providing minor surgery and dental care it was a progressive company and had learned from the infamous bread and roses strike of one thousand nine hundred and twelve in lawrence massachusetts that worker's rights needed to be acknowledged and as a result the few strikes that took place there were only partially effective during the early one thousand nine hundred and twenty s the peak of armenian immigration who'd employed about five hundred dollars armenian workers and by the end of the decade there would be three thousand five dollars armenians living in watertown almost ten percent of the town's population one of them lost an acre doria more commonly known as the artist marshall gorky worked at the factory for a few months until he was fired for practicing his art on the roof of the factory and drawing on the soles of shoes i was twelve years old when my parents took me  and twenty nine on the eve of the great depression b f goodrich acquired the hood robber company which became its hood robbery division the parent company went into decline for the st time in decades as the demand for robert diminished those fortunate enough to retain a job endured harsh working conditions typical of those in most factories of the north east some girls wrists are so sore that they work in constant pain all day their fingers are so worn from pulling at the rough course rubberized cloth that they bleed constantly many women arrive early get attended to by the company nurse and then they go to work and of course like i said this is what happened on the come one day i was putting us in all of ten issues on the command that's going around something fell right that need the wheel i think it was i went to pull it out was i wasn't fast enough or whatever it went right on my finger so everybody came i think i think didn't they stop the career when a man came and took my finger off it right away took me to the nurse and they tied it up and everything you know and then they said well to all come back to work but i didn't know any better there you stay home when you saw door let us in and we would go in and they would say you know we have a size of that size of that size and if that was your size then you would get the shoes sneakers then you would have to come in every wednesday and they would check them to see how they wore and so forth and family there was a family with as i said with five kids that lived on the st floor so one of the boys had gone up for a test and he saw that there was a size there that was my size and he came running from the hood rubber to it to get me we get the week this was depression years i never got there in time to get the free ones so i would come back disappointed got a new pair of sneakers every week because i worked so had running around and doing so much that i was the best test girl by mr barrett was one of the men at the high drama and used to drive to my house and have all these boxes of sneakers and say rose i got another pair for you to take the old one had she how wore out they had that look to see what part of the heel wore out what part of the toll wore out and me be and so active because my mother and that's why i never stopped i was still going to school i was sixteen years old and i had a chance to work at the who drove a company for the summer months we worked on the buffing machines we would r inners part of the so so that when the cement was applied it would stick to the canvas sneaker it was a very hard job but it was boring i enjoyed working there because a certain amount of camaraderie and we were all working for the war effort i  during world war two we're going to her drug we used to get books of coupons from the government and you can only get so many coupons per family well we were three girls away woodstock and we didn't have enough coupons  because she we stagger the thirty five o'clock we had our break and then we were till seven and then seven o'clock i just would go home because i used to do my homework in school so i couldn't do on work at night i didn't have time didn't have the energy and i worked with people standing right next to me especially during the why you know they needed work because because the boys well god and so these black woman was so good they were such good workers never did anyone say anything about them it was how times it was very hard times until roosevelt would get on the nose and give us a little hope he'd give us a little  usual people getting out of the street and going to work constantly and you know what they love their jobs felt it wasn't like they were dreading it but yeah they used to walk from the knob and down directly to the it would take you directly to the big entrance of the whole odd sight of men going to work and coming back from work carrying their black lunch pails you know these were these are black rectangular boxes with a round  with something on into it at the end of the conveyor well i was such a good work i was so fast that they made me a spare meaning i learned every job on the whole conveyor the told t every part of the snake of the rubber and if you hold it up if you don't feel good or your guitar i had everyone gets angry at you and they want to watch because you have a make so many pairs a night they call those tickets on the ticket if it's at five hundred dollars size eight you have to do five hundred dollars pairs of size eight that night to get good money there is a bunch of young college boys who never made a shoe in their life wearing white shirts and neatly pressed pants they time every job keeping their eyes on a stopwatch otherwhile you never get there you know i never took a break we never took breaks only went to the ladies room and then we came right back in fact i lost my high school ring in the bathroom and i was very fast and everybody would say to me now when they come any very wait you don't work so best some of the older ladies and girls and i said ok so i just took my time street mrs gould bank and mrs moravian were always laughing and they would always kid around with me and they would call me bobby that was my name  he needed them that give it to you they took good care of you i think they gave good benefits no no benefits no you just got a paycheck cannot benefits you just punched out and left and went  that was the end of that until you came the next day again punched a clock again we had a punch in because and no one get punched you by mistake like you know i'm not going to work today would you punch me and so i can get paid they never did do you know i was going to say this because i have no facts but health issues that may be related to the said to my knowledge no one was of a boy and the hood rubber company for this but i just have to say my uncle died of cancer my other uncle died of cancer we've had a lot of cancer in the family we all all of us grew up in him and lived near the hood robber but we also all live near lewis india today they'd probably have a heart attack it was a working place and made money for people but it also was an unhealthy situation for the for the town of watertown and it showed up years and years later as we know parents my mother had breast cancer my dad had breast cancer so i used to type on a they used to call it i had to graph head to graph typewriter it made a lot of copies and it was a special because it's on that side would build up on the inside of the hood well i was tall enough so that when the residue let go after a while it would hit me in the chest and all it would do was brush it off but my friend i was shorter than i and when to let go it would hit him right in the face i would have to get the here machine and stand back a while and then  he was cutting something maybe one of the cutting machine he put his hand on the end the clamp for the safety part of it didn't work it was broken or something felt his hand got that kind of there and they said he was  looming over us and the certain times of the day they would spew out small can and so i remember the good rubber chimney and said hood rubber on us at night there would blow everything you know it would come out of the away maybe sixty feet away from their god it was the railroad tracks with the trains in the diesel but that wind was very active in the us and we were always fascinated by the switches and the cars and all the different to wonder though you know black smoke spewing out the smells and all that you get used to us like that doesn't bother me burning reference doesn't bother me no small burning rubber was like waking up in the morning and smelling leaves of grass if the wind was right or maybe i should say if the wind of wrong you could get a combination of burning rubber smell of the stark yards in brighton and the burning fires of john in the sneakers called posture foundation p f flyers a pioneering development in the modern sneaker industry and we used to sometimes get other kinds of things they were really testing but p f flyers kid i never knew that was actually what it what it was obviously they were testing the wearability of of the speakers they made we thought it was just a handout you know we always were a movie if we didn't get new sleeve who thought we should get new sneakers every week and if we ever did get new sneakers they didn't actually tell you you could have this one that was they would give you whatever they wanted to give you and of course we all believe that if we had new sneakers we could dry run faster jump higher played baseball better i suppose the wearability of hood rubbers products was all based on the activities of wa we we used to try to get new ones every week so that when you went to school we had real white nice clean sneakers and when i went to my last service in  we turned it into magic it was a faraway beautiful woman singing a song to us we lived in a factory town a lot of activity we saw drugs fighting all the time  things like there was a lot of activity going on and in the middle of the night to be shift changes and if we were out at night before the lights came on we could see all that there was always a lot of traffic sort of traffic jams and it and they came out of the machine hot we would grab one off the ground and he would toss it back and forth totally got reasonably easy to handle and would play with what it was me had no idea what to do with it we had no idea but it was important to have one state at the window and watch people work and i remember just one guy used to i'm sure what he was doing was cutting all souls and they had a machine that had things of rubber flat panels  guy he was like a sort of a local hero to us we never saw him in the street only in that one place and he never knew that we were also fascinated by what he did because his window was always open one of the think we like to do was to crawl under the fence or plead the whole company was surrounded by what we call our chain link fence and of course every kid in the neighborhood knew where all the spots where you could probably don't eat so on a nice warm summer day would find our favorite crawl  all the company prospered in the post war years fewer and fewer armenians turned to work at the factory as they pursued their own professions through college education and the g i bill and the people who are working there interesting to me anyway in the s were mostly minorities and it was the same kind of work and the same kind of explanation of why the armenians came middle class americans well educated would not work in the factories in me made fifty's in the early sixty's i worked in the canteen for quite a brothers who was the food service provider for the who'd rather i also worked on the wagon the wagon was a food service wagon that was pulled around by one of the horde employees so that we could reach into the bowels of the building where the buildings where there were no ca eighteen years old graduated in june and my miles let's go out and get a job the b f goodrich is right there i was one of the young kid i was probably the neon just improving girl in the office own from my grandfather in the probably foundry as they would call it to my mother in the factory you know and then i was in the office that i was probably make in more money than my mother was after all those years there briefly if you know for a while and then that's when it was starting to shut down a lot of my amp bosses were going down to lumberton north carolina way back in one thousand nine hundred and sixty eight when they will say in laying out that it was going down south the company was moving down south and union meetings on one bigelow avenue the union would meet in i think it was the canadian club right on bigelow avenue right next to where b g sheet metal is today and they'd be going to meet with management and they'd be you know strategizing in the stuff like that and the whole town was watching at the time because they were such a large employer that they didn't want to move out of town and in those negotiations went on for quite some time and everybody was sort of hanging on the edge of the their seat but we were asking the you know the and it kept raising that money for no money imported foreign goods forced b f goodrich to close its hood rubber division marking the end of a monument of sorts to the establishment of the armenian community of watertown the home broken h such an integral part of the town of watertown and its makeup dead when it left even though we had progressed from where was dependent on the year old rubble it was a blow to the community roger asked me for example one of the question he asked me is the impact of the hood rubber company on the neighborhood and i a little puzzled at a certain impact on the neighborhood i said to her company was the neighborhood company but i had no idea how important it was to the armenian community it was thrilled to be here and thrilled to be working and thrilled to have their families and the church and their community and their world really revolved around us want to tell them some members of my family some relatives some uncles never had licenses never had a car their whole world was right around us want to put rubber moves some shepherd be arsenal but cetera we can reflect on the good things that came out of it i mean there are a lot of bad things environmentally but as a culture we develop the i mean culture want to tone heavily because  they came to they came to east watertown and they've got good jobs i know my you know i know that she's on this film i do know that she worked very hard at the hoover while she was there and those primary breadwinner for a large amount of time i look at it this way that who in the world was going to give me a job i couldn't speak english i can read write at least will grow up a gamey a job that i lived on with my family they paid very well but i used to turn it all in i know it kept it i never complained never battery she worked her beer during the war years my mother took and still takes in her ninety nine years would be presumably a lot of pride in what she did when i graduated because i couldn't make needed to be in a spare you got to be there k someone's out so i didn't so i couldn't sing my my graduation that was a let down to this white collar worker a kind of humility that sort of bothered me that he couldn't stand up for his own but there was a sense in which the leadership of the the armenian community roger and as a kid what struck me was that st of all they were very closely knit and i mean that in a positive sense not in any way of negative and also that they were achievement oriented and although i wasn't conscious of it at the time it was real and it was there and it did have an effect on me i couldn't have fun after school because i had to go all i had to walk home from watertown had to cross that street and then change my clothes and go to work so i didn't have time to go to waste i had to move so i still a lot of planning that i can run today so i remember the st job i ever had was at the watertown arsenal washing floors in the cafeteria and a few of my friends were working at quite a brothers in the rubber and they said john this is a better deal you make more money you work less hours and you know i worked with a group of my friends there and that we all went to school together we all hung around together so it was more like fun than work the only difference was we were at work together rather than at the junior park together you know fact the monies  that during the summer months i think i can relate to sixty dollars for the three months i had because a little damage to my car that was learning how to drive a cause about sixty dollars worth of damage so whether i made the hood rubber went towards that repair so it was listen to me it was to have a job these are people who came from the all country that people went through the great depression to have a job with you know everything gave them gave them a reason to live  r ok i don't want to talk too long again i'd rather hear from you really i'm sure you can tell me i can learn more louis equal community in interviews and i want to say that i'm dedicating this every presentation i dedicate to to do a personal dedication to her today her memory i want to think the participants i used to be when i would show this you have a dozen people here who are in the film and most of them a lot of really important in some cases technical information about the factory so god rest your mom soul she was a wonderful way to get it's wonderful doing these projects get to know people so i just wanted to  still in florida or at this time very very helpfully wrote a great book called torn between julian's it was a lot about these i mean as they would come to this country they'd work they'd send the money back home they go back and they'd come back italians would do this other people do this just at some point you couldn't go back and just stop now john breaux nias family was an example where the family was separated from the genocide and he his father a mother started a new family here and the others were killed over here so but i didn't get too much into the genocide with this if you notice and there's a reason because this is a a story of resiliency the story of of rebuilding of lies in communities the churches my grandmother w watertown but i also want to mention that the boston college has a website it's called global boston dot com our daughter edu i think you know but global boston that website has a section on the i mean use settlement and in this story you know and anybody any questions or comments because yes  gary knows about the he wave of the industrial revolution the automation the the conveyor belts you know mass production please mention just briefly i don't want to push myself here but i do have coffees available fifteen dollars to fifteen dollars but i also want to let you know that if you go online it's online to test search google search destination watertown and it's online on on a you tube channel have for a couple of films and so just so you know you have the option if you want to purchase a hard copy fit television watching whatever but you can also watch it online just search destination