Fluctuating Birth Rate, 1880-2013

A column published earlier this year explored counting the dead in Maynard, or more specifically, counting the dead who were buried in Maynard's cemeteries. This column addresses those born here. Birth and death information in the chart was taken from Town of Maynard Annual Reports, 1880-2012, available at the Maynard Public Library. The population line, scale shown on the right side of the figure, comes from U.S. Census data.

At first glance, deaths look to be fairly constant at 50-100 per year, but in light of the fact that the population was increasing from 2,200 to 10,100 what the chart really shows is far, far fewer deaths per thousand over time. Not a surprise - cleaner water, safer food, modern medicine and a huge decline in tobacco use has dropped the death rate in the U.S. to under 8/1,000/year. Maynard's death rate now falls below the national average, suggesting either that the current population skews younger and/or healthier than the national average Or that older people are moving away to die elsewhere.

A sharp spike in deaths in 1918 was due to the influenza pandemic. Town records show that 35 deaths in the last quarter of 1918 alone were caused by the flu.

Much like deaths, births per thousand population have also decreased dramatically over time. One hundred years ago the national birth rate was on the order of 30/1,000/year, declining to the present day 14/1,000/year. As in many cultures, the desire to have many children decreased as the likelihood of infant and childhood death decreased, while at the same time the cost of raising a child to independent adulthood increased.

Births show three large, sustained peaks. The first two coincide with increases in population. By 1902 the moribund woolen mill (bankrupt in 1898) had been bought by the American Woolen Company, reopened, and started on a major expansion program. Young workers were being hired—mostly immigrant Finns, Poles, Italians and Russians - and the birthrate exploded accordingly. No surprise—there was an uptick in marriages which overlapped the first birth peak. From 1895-1902 the marriages average was 42/year, while from 1903-1917 the average was 100/year.

The second peak in births represents the post-WWII baby boom, and also the transition of Maynard from a factory town to a bedroom suburb for employees of new businesses on Route 128. New houses were being built, especially on the northwest side of town, and population was showing another growth spurt.

One mystery is why the birth rate dropped so dramatically after the 1960 peak. Looking back, this is the period when birth control pills became widely accepted, when birth control sales to unmarried women became legal (1972) and when abortion became legal (1973). Demographics also played a role. Locally, population growth had stalled, new housing had stalled, and what was left was a mature, post-child-birth population aging in place.

The third uptick in births, starting in 1983, is also a mystery. This birth boom was taking place against an unchanging total population and an absence of new home construction. There is a possibility that retired mill workers were either dying or moving away and being replaced by younger employees of Digital Equipment Corporation, as the 1980s were a fast-growth period for Digital.

Statewide, the current birth rate is about eleven births per thousand population per year. Maynard is averaging above that. One possible answer: Maynard's home-owning costs are 30 to 50 percent less than in the neighboring towns of Acton, Concord, Sudbury and Stow, so Maynard may be more attractive to young couples who are becoming first time home owners. Subjectively, this is borne out by all the strollers being pushed about the downtown sidewalks on good-weather weekends. 

Fire Station Horn as History

One hundred years ago, the Town of Maynard Annual Report mentioned in passing that the fire department was responsible for conducting a daily 12:10 PM test blast of the fire department's steam whistle, located at the woolen mill. That's historic, but the full history of 12:10 is older.

Down the years, the means of sounding an alarm for the Maynard fire department went through several evolutions. Originally, a battery-powered system triggered a striker to hit the school bell at the Nason Street School (current site of the Library). The year 1903 added a steam whistle at the woolen mill. Both systems operated until the school burned to the ground in 1916. Makes you wonder if the school bell was ringing to signal its own demise?  

Two compressed air horns date to 1950

The late 1930s saw installation of a diaphone horn at the fire station on Nason Street, but until the mill closed in 1950 the steam whistle was still used in addition to the horn. Later, the fire station bought a pair of compressed air powered horns for the Nason Street station, transferred to the roof of the current fire house in 1955. Yes, the horns are that old.

Why 12:10? The great majority of towns with a fire horn system conduct daily test blasts. According to "A History of the Maynard Fire Department, 1890-1970" an unpublished manuscript written by Henry T. Hanson, Maynard's 12:10 dates back to the 1890s. W.W. Oliver, a jeweler with a store in the Odd Fellows Hall (next to the Nason Street fire house) was paid $12 per year to conduct the daily test.

Oliver would walk to the train station to set his pocket watch to "Washington time," then walk back to Nason Street. As the walk was about five minutes, the daily test was set to ten minutes after the hour. He had this responsibility because there were no full time fire station employees back in the day.

A differently told story is that because the mill's lunch whistle blew at noon, the town's whistle was offset by ten minutes. Regardless of origin, the 12:10 tradition continued long after any need for either a daily time check or subservience to the mill. It's a tradition, one captured by the fact that the Seal of the Town of Maynard shows the clock at 12:10 on town documents, vehicles and street signs.

All this is prelude to the observation that the fire horn no longer sounds at 12:10. The decision was made by the fire department. According to former fire chief Stephen Kulik, the horn was still operative up through his retirement in June 2011. Anthony Stowers, the current fire chief, stated that the practice had stopped before he came aboard in February 2012. The timing puts the onus on the temporary, non-resident fire chief who filled in between Kulik and Stowers. Apparently, the town's government was not involved.

Truth to tell, the fire horn system is in poor repair and perhaps heading toward obsolescence. According to Kulik, "The horn stopped working now and then, and it was hard to get parts. Every time we triggered the fire signal we had our fingers crossed."

Stowers acknowledged the horn still works but has a tendency to stick. He said, "we have made the decision to restrict the use to actual emergencies in the effort to keep it functional for as long as possible." 

The historic purpose of fire station horns was to alert volunteer firefighters. In an increasing large number of locations this function has been replaced by cell phones and pagers. Same for reaching the salaried firefighters who are off duty. Across the country, many newspapers have run articles on debates about whether to continue, discontinue, or even resurrect the tradition of a working fire horn system. And separately, continue or discontinue a daily test blast.

Some towns are also getting rid of their outdoor
fire alarm call boxes, as most people reach
for a phone to call 9-1-1 rather than think
to run to the nearest alarm box.

Given that Maynard is on the cusp of abandoning its fire horn system, can the 12:10 daily blast be resurrected solely as part of town history?  One means of doing this would be to install a new system on Clock Tower Place property, perhaps near the intersection of Walnut and Main Streets. As a bonus, fire department staff would no longer be subjected to a daily tooth-rattling blast from their own rooftop. A new system of horns and control box from Sentry Sirens would cost between $3,000 and $12,000 depending on whether the town wants a sound heard only in the downtown area or a blast loud enough to wake the dead in Sudbury, Stow and Acton.

Can sounds be history? Three-quarters of a century ago, life in Maynard was punctuated by a chorus of steam whistles on trains, the mill, and the fire alarm. School snow days were broadcast by five blasts at 7:15 AM. None of that is coming back. But in this writer's opinion, Maynard deserves its 12:10.

Fifty of David Mark’s 2012-2014 columns were published in book "Hidden History of Maynard" available at The Paper Store, on-line, and as an e-book.

Maynard, MA: Churches, Closed

Maynard was once host to a dozen church congregations but four have since dissolved or relocated. Nationally, a decline in mainline Protestant churches (Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Congregational, Episcopal) has been going on for decades. Estimates are that over the past fifty years these faiths have lost more than one-third of their membership. Surviving churches often find themselves with an aging congregation and less than excellent financial health, compounded by problems associated with maintaining an aged building.

Against these trends, there is evidence that the decline in total number of places of worship and worshipers has reached a plateau or even reversed this trend over the last decade. However, most of the growth is in new churches rather than increased membership in existing churches, with many of the new congregations identifying themselves as non-denominational and biblically conservative. Those interested in learning more about worship trends should e-visit the Hartford Institute for Religious Research [http://hirr.hartsem.edu/].

Closed churches in Maynard:

Click on photos to enlarge

United Methodist Church (1895-2014): There is often a gestation period between initial interest and steeple - in this instance 30 years. Services began in 1867, but were held in various meeting halls until the congregation completed the existing building in 1895. May 11, 2014 was the last Sunday services at UMC, ending 119 years in the building and 147 years as a congregation. Members are joining other churches. The local Alcoholics Anonymous groups, which had used the church for their meetings, relocated within town. The future of the building has not yet been determined. The Maynard Historical Society has remarkably little information on this church's history, so the hope is that information can be passed on rather than discarded.

St. George's June 2014, quite overgrown

St. George's Episcopal Church (1895-2006): Episcopal services began in 1894. The cornerstone of the church was placed on August 10, 1895; the church consecrated as the Parish of St. George in 1897. The church had an active men's group, the Order of Sir Galahad, a women's group, the Guild of St. Hilda, also a youth summer camp program at Fort Pond. Membership declined after the Church of the Good Shepherd opened in Acton in 1962. After the Maynard church closed, the parking lot and rectory were sold separately. A remodeling project, intended to turn the ex-church into housing, is in limbo, leaving behind a deteriorating building with an uncertain future. August 2014: something going on - the brush and weeds around the building have been cleared.

Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church (1908-1967): The woolen mill attracted many immigrants from Finland. August 1894 saw an outdoor service and picnic on the banks of the mill pond - an event proposed by a traveling Bible salesman. The event served as a catalyst to start a Lutheran church. In 1902 the nascent congregation incorporated and bought land on Glendale Street. Construction started in 1907. The church was dedicated on June 6, 1908. The congregation stayed active, although over years the members and their children and grandchildren assimilated (services switched from Finnish to English). In 1967 the congregation decided to construct a new church in north Sudbury. The Church of the Nazarene took up residence for a while, them moved out around 1995. The building is currently a private residence.

St. Casimir Roman Catholic Church (1928-1999): By 1910, more than 600 immigrants from Poland live in Maynard. Even though the Mass was in Latin, these immigrants wanted to hear sermons and other aspects in their own language. The St Casimir Parish - services in Polish - was established in 1912, meeting at St. Bridget's. Fourteen years passed before the congregation bought the powerhouse building of the defunct Concord, Maynard and Hudson Railway [electric trolley], and two more years before the converted building was blessed as their own church.

Formerly St. Casimir Roman
Catholic Church (1928-1999)

In time, death of first-generation immigrants, assimilation of their descendants and dearth of new immigrants tolled on all of Greater Boston's Polish parishes. In 1995, Cardinal Bernard Law announced that 10 of 14 would stop celebrating Mass in Polish. Four years later the Beacon-Villager ran an article about the pending closure of St. Casimir. A locally circulated petition could not reverse the decision. The parish was merged back into St. Bridget Parish, although the St. Casimir building remained a consecrated space, used by the Polish community for baptisms, weddings and funerals. In 2003 the building was sold to St. Mary's Indian Orthodox Church of Boston.

CODA: Churches still open in Maynard (in color if hyperlink to website)

• First Bible Baptist Church
• Holy Annunciation Orthodox Church, services started 1915; church built 1916
• Mission Evangelical Congregational Church, services started 1903; church built 1913
• New Hope Fellowship Church of the Nazarene
• St. Bridget Roman Catholic Church, services started 1866; church built 1884
• St. Mary's Indian Orthodox Church services started at this site 2003
• St. Stephen's Knanaya Church
• Union Congregational Church, services started 1852; church built 1853

And once there was a synagogue in Maynard. In the early 1900s, the Maynard Hebrew Society invited a rabbi to conduct Sabbath services in rented meeting halls. September 1921, the congregation established Rodoff Shalom Synagogue in a house on Acton Street (next to where Avis car rentals is now). The congregation was active to 1980, when it merged with the newly formed Congregation Beth Elohim in Acton. In a temple newsletter, Adam Jacoby remembered, “In 1980 we built a new building and marched the Torah from Maynard to Acton under a chuppa with shofars blowing. I was one of the shofrot during the walk.”

 

Fine Arts Theatre, Maynard - History

100 years of movie theater history in Maynard, MA. For a few years, 1949-1952, there were three theaters in Maynard: Colonial, Peoples and Fine Arts. Colonial had lowest ticket price. Peoples was largest, and only one with a balcony. Fine Arts had only one screen until 1969.

First showing of a motion picture in Maynard was at the Riverside CO-OP (now site of Knights of Columbus building) in 1902. There is also mention of a 1909 exhibition of Sherman's moving pictures at same place. Newspapers of that era mentioned S.E. Sherman as a have-projector-will-travel impresario. By 1914 there were occasional showing of features, shorts and newsreels at Colonial Hall. These were silent films in black and white, oft accompanied by live music, typically a solo pianist. Intermissions featured performances by local singers. 

Back then, showing movies was a dangerous business. Until around 1950 all film was made of cellulose nitrate, a highly flammable substance with a chemical composition akin to gunpowder. Film exposed to fire or a spark could burst into intense flames, releasing copious, toxic fumes in the process. Once ignited it could not be easily extinguished. There are fire safety movies showing cellulose nitrate film burning underwater! Luckily, Maynard never suffered a theater fire when an audience was present.

During the first half of the 20th century local businesses often
sponsored sports teams for publicity purposes. At Peoples
Theatre, Burton Coughlan (in suit) managed the team.
He was 34 at the time. 

The first location with regularly scheduled movie showings was the aforementioned Colonial Hall, second story of 65-69 Main Street, in business from 1916 onward. Bartholomew 'BJ' Coughlin was one of the owners. Older residents of Maynard remember that nine cents got you in and one penny bought candy. Riverside Theatre (then the second floor of what is now Gruber Bros. Furniture) started showing movies in 1922, run by Samuel Lerer. Riverside's run ended with a fire in 1934. Colonial was still in business as late as 1952.

The first building specifically designed to serve as a motion picture palace was Peoples Theatre. The building still stands at 14 Nason Street, converted to office space. Initially two groups of local businessmen were scrambling for downtown locations and funding. James A. Coughlan, Hector Hobers and James J. Ledgart organized the Peoples Theatre Company and sold shares for $25. The co-operative movement was very strong in Maynard at the time, so the idea of local people being able to buy into ownership and share the profits was well received. In fact, the decision to go for crowd-sourced funding was instrumental to choosing the theater's name. 

The second group (BJ Coughlin, the Naylor brothers, others) had land at the corner of Nason & Main, but not quite enough money. The two groups merged. Peoples Theatre opened on May 6, 1921 with seating for 700 people (250 in the balcony). A huge chandelier graced the lobby. Tickets were 25 cents. Circa 1951 the price of a ticket was up to 44 cents for adults, 16 cents for children. The theater closed its doors around 1959.

Peoples Theatre Office Building. Click on photo to enlarge.

Although the Coughlans, father James and son Burton, were both involved with Peoples, Burton decided to build his own theater on the family property at 17 and 19 Summer Street. James had started there with a horse stable in 1897, later adding an auto repair shop. Burton’s vision, the luxuriously appointed Fine Arts Theatre, with 400 seats, no balcony, opened on June 29, 1949 with a showing of The Red Shoes. An adjoining second theater, 300 seats, with its own ticket window, was added in 1969. One employee reminisced: "...the projectionist had to scamper across the roof to get to the [projection] booth for the smaller of the theaters." That theater was divided into two parts in 1989.

Fine Arts Theatre, Maynard MA, February 2012

Over decades, Fine Arts lost it lustre (and much of its heat, air conditioning, sound-system and waterproofiness), until by the beginnings of this century it was a threadbare carpets, duct-taped seats and sad bathrooms mess. The Shea family, operating as Deco Entertainment Services, leased the property in late 2002 and started a lengthy rehab process on the interior. Then, in 2013, Burton Coughlan's daughter sold the theater plus the building at 17 Summer Street (originally part of the stables, later Burton's art gallery) to the partnership of Steven Trumble and Melanie Perry.      

Opening night ticket, signed by Steve Trumble

Their extensive rehabilitation process, outside and inside, took far more money and time than initially expected, including twelve months with closed doors and dark screens. Trumble swears that during the remodeling process they excavated and renovated through layers upon layers of movie theater detritus, auto shop, and finally down to the wooden timbers and square-cut nails of the horse stable. So all the more sweet that 65 years after its premiere, the Fine Arts Theatre had its grand (re)opening November 5, 2014 with a showing of the movie Interstellar.

As of March 2015 two theaters are operative, albeit with film rather than digital projectors, and plans to complete renovation of the third room are on hold.

Fifty of David Mark’s 2012-2014 columns were published in book "Hidden History of Maynard" available at The Paper Store, on-line, and as an e-book.

Women at Digital Equipment Corporation

October 10, 1957: A short item on the third page of The Maynard News mentioned that Kenneth H. Olsen and Harlan E. Anderson had formed a new electronics company named Digital Equipment Corporation. Both of them had been employees at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory before striking out on their own. Ken was 31, Harlan 28. They started with 8,680 square feet of space, rented for $3,600/year. 

For the first three years they were producing electronic test modules for engineering laboratories, meantime working on Phase II of their plan: Digital's first computer, to be named the PDP-1. By October 1961 the company had grown to 265 employees. In time, DEC made Maynard "The mini-computer capital of the world."

Olsen was a big believer in numbers. Employees were assigned consecutive numbers based on order of hire, later becoming their badge numbers. Ken was #1 Harlan was #2. The first two women hired were Alma E. Pontz, #5 and Gloria Porrazzo, #6.

Women were not rare at Digital. From perusing a list of the first 100 full-time employees, 36 were women. Years later, the main reasons Olsen gave for locating in Maynard were low rent and a local work force with lots of factory experience. Many of the women were walk-to-work Maynardites who had worked in the same buildings in the woolen mill era, 10 to 20 years back. The newly refurbished work area was clean, quiet and well lit, although hot during the summers, as no air conditioning installed until around 1970. Throughout the buildings, summer weather meant lanolin from the old wool-processing days dripping down the walls or from the ceilings above.    

Alma E. Pontz was the first woman hired. According to her 2013 obituary she had already put in 24 years in the wool business before being hired by Olsen as the first administrative assistant, and thus was more than a decade older than her bosses. She stayed with DEC until she retired 21 years later.

Gloria Porrazzo was the first woman hired to work in assembling Laboratory Modules and Systems Modules. These products allowed Digital to be profitable from its first year onward. According to Peter Koch, plant manager, Porrazzo stayed with the company for 25 years, rising to the level of production manager. The 50 to 60 women who worked for her in Assembly were informally known as "Gloria's Girls." They were responsible for inserting electronic components into circuit boards, welds and quality control. Ken Olsen was known to drop in for coffee and a chat with Gloria to keep abreast of any production problems.

In time, Digital was not averse to hiring women with technical expertise, but some of the customers had a hard time adapting. Barbara Stephenson, MIT graduate, employee #71, was hired the second year. As posted at www.computerhistory.org: "I was the first woman engineer at DEC. Customers would call for an applications engineer. They would say 'I want to speak with an engineer,' and I would reply 'I'm an engineer,' and they would say, 'No, I want to speak with a real engineer.' I developed this patter: 'Well, tell me about the application you have in mind. We have three lines of modules ranging from five to ten megacycles and …' The line would go dead for a moment and then I’d hear, 'Hey Joe, guess what, I’ve got a…woman…engineer on the phone!'"

Women were promoted from within. Maynard resident Angela Cossette was hired as an administrative assistant in 1963 in support for DEC User's Society. DECUS provided a pre-internet forum for computer users to exchange technical information and user-developed software. Cossette moved up to becoming the company's first woman manager, in time with as many as 100 people reporting to her. In her own words "...Digital became very aggressive about giving women the opportunity to grow in their careers and making it possible for them to move into key positions." [Quote from company newsletter Digital This Week.] Cossette retired in 1992.

Her comment reflected Digital's self-realization that it had a problem with its history of male dominated culture. A Core Groups program was started in 1977, evolving into the Valuing Differences philosophy in 1984. The stated goal was for the company and its employees to pay attention to differences of individuals and groups, to be comfortable with those differences, and to utilize those differences as assets to the company's productivity.

Modest monument to Ken Olsen, corner of Main and Walnut Streets.

Digital Equipment Company, for those too young to remember, grew to be the second-largest computer company in the United States, peaking in late 1989 or early 1990 with more than 120,000 employees and ambitions to overtake IBM. Instead, overly-fast growth combined with a series of missteps led to a precipitous decline that finally resulted in a sale to Compaq, which in turn was bought by Hewlett-Packard. All Digital left behind as a name-bearer was the Digital Federal Credit Union, better known as DCU. 


Interesting sources about Digital Equipment Corporation:

Jack Falvey   http://www.falvey.org/hot_neg_ch3.shtml

Reesa Abrams 1984. http://www.decconnection.org/ReesaAbrams-DIGITAL.pdf

Peter DiLisi 1998  http://www.org-synergies.com/docs/DEC98.pdf