Joseph A. Conforti - Another City upon a Hill: A New England Memoir

PORTUGUESE IN THE AMERICAS SERIES

Portuguese-Americans and Contemporary Civic Culture in Massachusetts
Edited by Clyde W. Barrow

Through a Portagee Gate
Charles Reis Felix

In Pursuit of Their Dreams: A History of Azorean Immigration to the United States
Jerry R. Williams

Sixty Acres and a Barn
Alfred Lewis

Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934
Charles Reis Felix

Distant Music
Julian Silva

Representations of the Portuguese in American Literature
Reinaldo Silva

The Holyoke
Frank X. Gaspar

Two Portuguese-American Plays
Paulo A. Pereira and Patricia A. Thomas Edited by Patricia A. Thomas

Tony: A New England Boyhood
Charles Reis Felix

Community, Culture and the Makings of Identity: Portuguese-Americans Along the Eastern Seaboard
Edited by Kimberly DaCosta Holton and Andrea Klimt

The Undiscovered Island
Darrell Kastin

So Ends This Day: The Portuguese in American Whaling 1765-1927
Donald Warrin

Azorean Identity in Brazil and the United States: Arguments about History, Culture, and Transnational Connections
Joo Leal Translated by Wendy Graa

Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings
Julian Silva

The Marriage of the Portuguese (Expanded Edition)
Sam Pereira

Home Is an Island
Alfred Lewis

Land of Milk and Money
Anthony Barcellos

The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales
Darrell Kastin

Almost Gone
Brian Sousa

Land, As Far As the Eye Can See: Portuguese in the Old West
Donald Warrin and Geoffrey L. Gomes

ANOTHER CITY UPON A HILL

A New England Memoir

JOSEPH A. CONFORTI

Tagus Press UMass Dartmouth Dartmouth, Massachusetts

PORTUGUESE IN THE AMERICAS SERIES
Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth
www.portstudies.umassd.edu
2013 Joseph A. Conforti
All rights reserved.

For all inquiries, please contact:
Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth
Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture
285 Old Westport Road
North Dartmouth MA 027472300
Tel. 5089998255
Fax 5089999272
www.portstudies.umassd.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conforti, Joseph A.
Another city upon a hill: a New England memoir / Joseph A. Conforti.
pages cm.(Portuguese in the Americas series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-933227-56-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-933227-57-3 (ebook)
1. Conforti, Joseph A. 2. Portuguese AmericansMassachusettsFall River. 3. Italian AmericansMassachusettsFall River. 4. Fall River (Mass.)Social conditions. 5. Fall River (Mass.)History. 6. Fall River (Mass.)Biography. I. Title.
F74. F2C66 2013
974.485dc23 2013009669

For GEORGE SNEAKER MCDONALD, DON MONTLE, and the late MANNY LIMA, the best of Fall River, and for BILL STUECK, the best of friends

Contents

Acknowledgments

This memoir is a personal story, but also, as the title suggests, its a story about a New England place. My Fall River, Massachusetts, was distinctive in ways that I try to convey to the reader. I am grateful to Frank Gaspar, who read a draft of this memoir and pointed out that the personal narrative was too often in the background to the story about Fall River. My friend, the distinguished poet Wesley McNair, suggested something similar two years earlier. He gave it to me straight, as a good friend should. Had I listened to him, it would have saved me a lot of grief. But it proved a challenge to wean my writing away from what I was taught growing up: you dont speak about family and especially yourself in public. I also want to thank Tom Grady for reading two drafts of this memoir and offering critical evaluations that gave me a basis to revise and greatly improve my narrative. Phil Silvia Jr. read the first chapter to make sure I had my historical facts straight.

I thank Darrell Reinke, my former colleague at Rhode Island College who pulled up stakes and returned to his tiny Idaho hometown. More than thirty years ago, we explored surprising similarities in our widely divergent backgrounds. Across the continent and years we have tried to keep the conversation going.

Several years ago I needed a respite from academic writing. Howard Rosenfield, a psychiatrist (though not mine) and a fiction writer, encouraged me to explore writing a memoir. I am grateful for his persistence. My local academic friends, now all retired from the University of Southern Maine and other institutions, have offered encouragement over lunch during the time I worked on this memoir. Joe Grange, Jim Leamon, Dick Maiman (who helped with photographs), John Woolverton, and Oliver Woshinsky have served as an inspiration by their continuing pursuit of research and writing. Also Victoria Bonebakker, now retired from the Maine Humanities Council, has been a good friend, a wonderful collaborator, and a stimulating lunchtime conversationalist. With family roots in New Bedford, she has been very interested in the progress of this memoir.

At the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Frank Sousa has been a constant source of encouragement during the process of review and revision. Mario Pereira has quickly responded to my numerous questions about producing and publicizing the book. The university has a strong connection to my family. Many of my nieces and nephews are alumni. One of my brothers graduated from a predecessor institution, Durfee Tech, and so did a cousin who went on to become academic vice president of the university. It never occurred to me when I started writing that this family connection made the university the appropriate publisher of this memoir.

At the Fall River Historical Society, Michael Martins expressed a strong interest in my work. I am grateful for his help with photographs.

I especially want to thank my brothers John, Bill, and Doc and my sister Betts for answering my constant queries, reading a draft of early chapters about our growing up, correcting errors that crept into my memory, and suggesting areas where I needed a more balanced perspective. I trust my daughter Antonia, an only child, will gain a broader understanding of the background to her life from this memoir. I also hope she acquires some insight into what she has meant to her parents. Once again my wife Dorothy patiently supported me while I scraped this book off the brain, to paraphrase the great Herman Melville. Her love and her values have shaped my life in countless ways. I have dedicated previous books to her, a small token of my love. This book I dedicate to three Fall River men who took me under their wings, and to a highly accomplished diplomatic historian who also happens to be my most loyal friend since our undergraduate days at Springfield College.

Note: Perhaps it is my historians training, but I am skeptical of memoirs that reconstruct detailed dialogue thirty, forty, or fifty years after it has occurred. My memoir is not a dialogue-driven work. I have included exchanges that I overheard or I was party to and that I remember vividly and, I believe, accurately. I have slightly changed only two names to protect persons privacy.

ANOTHER CITY UPON A HILL

Prologue

Im not going! Im not going! Im not going! I screamed, as I fell to my knees and tears streamed down my cheeks. This outburst was not a stubborn childs tantrum. I was a forty-two-year-old college professor with a family and a mortgage. For three nights running I had awakened with a start at 3:00 a.m. I bolted out of bed, rushed down the stairs of our white Cape Cod house with green shutters in Cranston, Rhode Island, and began nervously pacing around an obstacle course of packed boxes. In a matter of minutes my wife once again stood face-to-face with me in the dark. And again we retreated to the family den in the back of the house so as not to awaken Antonia, our fifteen-year-old daughter, sleeping upstairs.