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Holyoke Mass.

The 1919 Christmas Eve Massacre and the Mobster Who Got Away With Murder

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 1919 a tidal wave of patients began showing up at the hospitals in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut. They suffered from delusions and blindness, and in some cases they had already died. Joseph Kania of Chicopee Falls, Mass., was one victim of the Christmas Eve massacre.

On Christmas Eve, Kania finished a shift at the tire plant and, on his way home, stopped into the American House for a drink. In World War I, wartime restrictions on alcohol had stopped the sale of anything but extremely weak booze. Nationally, Prohibition loomed. Word spread through town that a batch of good whiskey imported from France had arrived in the Connecticut River Valley.

The Christmas Eve Massacre

Brooklyn Eagle headlines decried the lack of punishment for mobster John Romanelli, perpetrator of the Christmas Eve massacre.

Kania, a husband and father of two, was among dozens of people lured into local taverns for a snort – perhaps their last before Prohibition. But what they thought was fancy French whiskey was actually wood alcohol shipped to the state by a gang of New York mobsters from the Italian section of Brooklyn.

John Romanelli, the “king” or “mayor” of Brooklyn’s Little Italy, was an undertaker. He had connections throughout the community. Police suspected that he might be the man to go to if a gang killed an enemy and wanted the body disposed of without too much fuss. He would, in 1928, conduct the spectacular funeral for his nephew Michael Abbatemarco, a gangster and bootlegger gunned down in a mob war.

John Romanelli

Romanelli generally managed to keep a low profile. The one occasion when he drew attention to himself came in 1915, when he and his gang attacked a rival undertaker. They fought over who would bury an eight-year-old boy who drowned in a canal accident.

In the 1915 brawl, which police broke up, Romanelli suffered a bullet wound. He received a fine for illegally carrying a weapon. His rival undertaker wound up dead.

Step forward to 1919 and Romanelli wanted a piece of the bootleg liquor business about to explode. As an undertaker he had access to wood alcohol, an ingredient in embalming fluid. He knew of a shipment in a New York warehouse, headed to Europe.

Wood alcohol (methanol) is a chemical cousin to grain alcohol, with an important distinction. People drink grain alcohol in spirits. Wood alcohol is poisonous.

Christmas Eve Massacre

Romanelli and a group of accomplices sneaked into the warehouse on December 20 and hauled away two barrels of wood alcohol. Working in a garage with the help of a local druggist, they drained the barrels into whiskey casks. They refilled the original barrels with water and replaced them at the warehouse for shipment. Then the men added color to the wood alcohol, to make the clear liquid look like whiskey, and poured it off into bottles with fake labels.

The bottles were then shipped to Hartford and made their way up the Connecticut River Valley. It didn’t take long before the trouble started. Men who drank the phony whiskey were turning up dead in their beds.

Dying patients crowded into the Connecticut River Valley’s hospital emergency rooms. They vomited, went blind and suffered delusions, paralysis and agonizing pain. Some arrived already dead.

In Connecticut, 13 died in Hartford, two in Meriden and two in Thompsonville. The death toll was higher in Massachusetts. At least 45 died in Chicopee, 10 in Holyoke, three in Hadley and one in Greenfield.

Others, who drank less of the stuff, survived but were sickened. The word spread rapidly about where the liquor had come from and who distributed it.

When police caught up with one of Romanelli’s accomplices, he begged them to arrest him. “I’m glad you got me,” he said. “For God’s sake don’t send me to Connecticut. I am an innocent man…it would mean certain death.”

Red-Handed

Police arrested Romanelli in New York, caught red handed with some of the stolen alcohol. Prosecutors charged him with grand larceny. Police waited for a New York case of poisoning to surface so he could be charged with murder, but it never emerged. All the known victims of the Christmas Eve massacre lived in Connecticut or Massachusetts.

It’s not clear how many people died from the phony whiskey. Some accounts said 97, while others said well over a hundred. Many more suffered injuries, but survived. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, prosecutors brought charges of murder. The states, though, had weak extradition laws at the time, and Romanelli cooled his heals in a New York jail.

He complained bitterly that the police destroyed his undertaking business. They framed him for the Christmas Eve massacre, he insisted. But no one bought his act. He received a sentence of three to seven years in Sing Sing prison for larceny.

Sing Sing prison in 1913

Two Years

But what of all the dead men left in the wake of his crimes? He could never be brought to justice from New York. The court did convict Carmine Lizenziata, the Romanelli associate who actually drove the liquor over the state line. He received a sentence for 18 years in prison. But he fled the country for Italy.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, claimed they couldn’t touch Romanelli for the murders. The mob kingpin left prison after serving just two years for the Christmas Eve massacre. The prosecutor then described the conundrum. Extradition, he said, was only used for people who committed a crime and then fled the state.

“A man may stand within the confines of one state and fire a cannon into another, killing a thousand persons, without laying himself liable to extradition to the state in which the deaths actually occurred,” the prosecutor explained.

“This is exactly what happened in the Romanelli case, except that the Brooklyn killers used alcohol instead of a cannon.”

This story about the Christmas Eve massacre was updated in 2022.

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How the Polish Immigrants Came to New England

Before Polish immigrants arrived in New England they had already made it to the Jamestown colony in Virginia as craftsmen.

John Evanowski, Polish immigrant, at the Fafnir Bearing Co. in New Britain. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Over the centuries Polish immigrants came to New England in waves, the first from 1870 to 1914, the second after World War II and the third following Polish independence in 1989. By 1900, 9.3 percent of Polish immigrants in the United States lived in New England. That number increased to 10.9 percent in 1930. Only the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic states attracted more Polish immigrants.

Today, Massachusetts and Connecticut rank 10^th and 11^th in total population of people with Polish ancestry. Connecticut has the third densest population of Polish-Americans in the country, with 8.85 percent, behind Wisconsin and Michigan.

Poles have been soldiers and journalists, farmers and factory workers, priests and rabbis, entrepreneurs and entertainers. Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski were heroes of the American Revolution. Igor Sikorsky, who had Russian and Polish parentage, built a helicopter factory in Connecticut. Martha Stewart, nee Kostyra, built a business empire.

Some of New England’s most prominent politicians have Polish ancestry: Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, the late U.S. Secretary of State Ed Muskie and U.S. senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Red Sox icon Carl Yasztremski grew up on a potato farm and spoke fluent Polish, while the New England Patriots’ former stars Stephen Gostowksi and Rob Gronkowski claim Polish ancestors. Paul Newman was part Polish; so is Steven Tyler, Aerosmith vocalist.

The 1st Wave of Polish Immigrants

Philip Sowa. Photo couresty Library of Congress.

Philip Sowa. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Most Polish-Americans are descended from the first wave of immigrants, when an estimated 1.5 million fled poverty and starvation in Germany, Russia and Galicia. People called them the za chlebem, or ‘for bread’ immigrants, because most had neither money nor land. A large number were Jewish, escaping persecution.

They came to New England to work in the factories, primarily textile mills. They came in family groups and settled in neighborhoods with large Slavic populations. In Lawrence, Mass., for example, Polish immigrants arrived en masse at the turn of the 20^th century.

Around 1912, Michael and Jadwiga Narkiewicz emigrated from Wilno, Poland, and settled in Westminster, Vt., where they ran a dairy farm. Then the paper mills came to Bellows Falls, and the Narkiewiczs followed.

Polish-American Club, Bellows Falls, Vt.

In 1903, 600 Polish immigrants lived in Lawrence, Mass. That number more than tripled in seven years, to 2,100. They mostly worked in woolen and worsted goods manufacturing. Two years later, Polish women working at the Everett Mill shut down their looms and started the Bread and Roses strike.

The Mills

When strikes in New Bedford’s cotton mills in 1894 and 1898 caused many workers to leave, Polish workers replaced them, though not as strike breakers. By 1910 several thousand Poles worked in the New Bedford mills — and they were still arriving.

Polish immigrants had large families, and the children often went to work in factories at a young age. Social reformer Lewis Hine photographed 14-year-old Philip Sowa at the Shoe Mill in Fall River, Mass., where he had applied to be a doffer. “Liked to go to school,” Hine noted in a caption to the 1916 photograph.

Another crusading photographer, unknown, photographed the overcrowded home of cotton mill workers in the Olneyville section of Providence. “Eight persons live in these three small rooms, three of them are boarders,” noted the photographer. “Inner bed-rooms are 9 x 8 feet, the largest room 12 x 12 feet. 23 Chaffee Street, Polish People. Property owned by the mill.”

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Thousands of Poles came to Massachusetts to work in mills in Springfield, Chicopee and Holyoke. Many saved their earnings from factory work and bought cheap, abandoned farms in the Connecticut River Valley. They moved into old colonial homes and transformed the land viewed as useless into thriving onion and tobacco farms.

A Cold Welcome

They weren’t always welcome. A novel published in 1913, called The Invaders, described how people of English ancestry reacted to the newcomers. So did a 1933 article in New England Magazine titled The Pole In The Land Of The Puritan:

In the smiling country along the Connecticut river and included within Massachusetts, there was three decades ago possibly the most distinctive survival of early New England Puritan life. The first Poles came in the early eighties; many of them were attracted by glowing reports of returning Jews, who told of a land of boundless freedom and countless dollars. Soon the descendents of the Pynchons and the Chapins were marvelling at the expressionless Slavic faces, which looked as if flattened against a board at birth; at stunted figures that bespoke grinding toil; at the masculine forms of the women, that told of field-work beside brother and husband and domestic animal. To-day the Polish tide, swelled by continuous immigration and prolific births, is steadily rising in this old Yankee community. The Massachusetts section of the valley is the home of twelve to fifteen thousand of these aliens.

Catholics and Jews

Many of the Polish farmers were Jewish and settled on abandoned farms in Connecticut with the help of Jewish relief societies. Many Jewish families who fled persecution in Poland dreamed of owning a small farm. They ended up, though, in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side.

Those who made it out of the tenements tended to settle on Connecticut farms near other Jewish farmers, in Colchester, Norwich, East Haddam and Newtown.

A Polish immigrant couple, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, on their tobacco farm near Windsor Locks, Conn.

Many other Polish immigrants belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1889, Fr. Franciszek Chalupka founded a Polish-American parish in Webster, Mass., the first in New England. The parishioners of St. Joseph Parish raised money to pay for his seminary tuition. He later founded St. Stanislaus Parish in Chicopee.

Poles and other immigrant groups suffered high unemployment after the 1893 financial panic. Father Chalupka visited wealthy people door-to-door asking for money to buy food and coal. He is remembered today for saving the Polish immigrants of Chicopee.

The 2nd Wave

World War II created the second wave of Polish immigrants who escaped ethnic cleansing by Germany and Russia. Many Poles died in German concentration camps or Russian massacres. The Soviet government also deported millions of Poles to Siberia and other remote regions of the empire.

Between World War II and 1968, 140,000 Poles came to the United States. Poles escaping repression in Europe came from diverse backgrounds and social classes. Most, however, left their home for political rather than economic reasons. A good percentage belonged to the middle- and upper-middle-classes in Poland.

The bulk of the second wave of Polish immigrants arrived between 1948 and 1952. Some were former soldiers, some were relatives of Poles already living here and some arrived under the Displaced Persons Act.

When they arrived in the United States, they tended to seek white-collar and professional jobs.

Today there are 78 Polish-American parishes in New England, mostly in the Springfield-Hartford-Worcester area, but also in Boston, Fall River, and Manchester, N.H. Three dozen Roman Catholic churches in New England offer Mass in Polish.

New Britain’s Little Poland

Many of New England’s Polish neighborhoods have disappeared as Poles assimilated quickly. Not so New Britain’s Little Poland, a thriving ethnic community in central Connecticut. The neighborhood retained its Polish character since it started in 1890. The third wave of immigrants came to New Britain after Polish independence in 1989.

Polish-Americans from nearby towns in Connecticut bolster Little Poland’s population of 30,000. They can spend a day doing business completely in Polish, shopping, buying an airline ticket, getting a home loan, taking dance or driving lessons and ordering dinner. On weekends, thousands attend Mass at Sacred Heart Church.

On the last Sunday in April, Little Poland is thronged with visitors to the Little Poland Festival on Broad Street. It features crafts vendors from around New England, food and a live stage with folk dancing and live bands.

This story about Polish immigrants was updated in 2023.

Image: Polish and American flag By Elevatorrailfan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41217488.

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Louis Sockalexis, The Indian Athlete With the Tragic Flaw

Louis Sockalexis broke a different color barrier in baseball 50 years before Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

He was a red man. And unlike Jackie Robinson, he couldn’t handle the taunts and insults, the war whoops in the stands and the racial jeers.

Sockalexis had a sensational start to his Major League Baseball playing career, dubbed a ‘wonder’ and ‘the most talked about’ young player on his team.

But he would only play 97 games in the Major Leagues, spend time in jail and die young.

After his playing days ended, he was arrested for vagrancy in Holyoke, Mass. Unshaven, with toes protruding from his shoes, he explained his downfall:

They liked me on the baseball field, and I liked firewater.

Louis Sockalexis

On Oct. 24, 1871, Louis Francis Sockalexis was born a member of the Penobscot tribe in Old Town, Maine, where both money and jobs were scarce. He was the son of Francis Sockalexis, a logger who became governor, or chief, of the Penobscot tribe, and Frances Sockbeson Sockalexis. He grew to six feet tall and excelled at sports.

Sockalexis at Holy Cross

In the summer of 1894, Louis Sockalexis played outfield for a baseball team sponsored by the Poland Spring Resort. One of his teammates was Mike ‘Doc’ Powers, a summer visitor to Maine and captain of the baseball team at the College of the Holy Cross. He persuaded Louis, a Catholic, to enroll in the Jesuit school.

He tried out for Holy Cross’s baseball coach, Jesse Burkett, a future Hall of Famer who played for the Cleveland Spiders. Burkett offered the 24-year-old Sockalexis a full scholarship. He rewarded Burkett with outstanding play for two seasons, batting over .400. He once stole six bases in a game against Brown and is credited with setting a world’s record for the longest baseball throw – 138 yards.

Burkett moved to Notre Dame, and Louis Sockalexis followed him. In the spring of 1897, Burkett helped him get a contract with the Cleveland Spiders.

He made a splash.

Deerfoot of the Diamond

“I unhesitatingly pronounce him a wonder,” former New York Giants Manager John Ward told the Sporting Life.

His Indian heritage and outstanding play was catnip for sportswriters. They called him the ‘Deerfoot of the Diamond’ and ‘Chief of Sockem.’

When he hit a game-winning home run for the Spiders’ first victory of the season, a newspaper headline read, ‘Indians Hang One Little Scalp on Their Belts.’

The team went on a tear, led by Sockalexis’ hitting heroics. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported ‘a visibly larger percentage of women than usual’ came to the ballpark when he played. Fans also came to jeer at him with war whoops and war dances.

He cheerfully shrugged off their taunts — he claimed.

Wild Bird

Off the field, Sockalexis liked to drink and carouse at night. A teammate called him a ‘wild bird.’ In early July, a foot injury hampered his play. How he got it is unclear. According to some accounts, he jumped or fell from the second-story window of a brothel. According to others, he injured his foot while running the base paths.

His drinking caught up with him, his play clearly suffered and his boosters in the sporting press turned on him. Suddenly Louis Sockalexis fit all the stereotypes of the drunken Indian. When he made a fielding error, he was called ‘a wooden Indian.’ In late July, the Plain Dealer reported, management couldn’t control him anymore.

Sockalexis’ demeanor changed; he grew angry and sullen. He spent the end of the 1897 season on the bench.

And then he spent most of the 1898 season on the bench.

The 1899 Spiders, worst team ever in baseball. Sockalexis wasn’t good enough for them.

In 1899, most of the Spiders were sold to St. Louis, except Sockalexis. He stayed behind with the Spiders, who won only 20 games that year with a team made up of rejects, prospects and semipro players.

Early in the season, the Plain Dealer reported, ‘the big Indian seems to have come to his senses.’ But then his play quickly deteriorated. On May 13, he twice fell down drunk in the outfield.

The once promising star wasn’t even good enough to play for the worst team in baseball, and the Spiders released him.

Last Years of Sockalexis

Louis Sockalexis played minor league ball for a few months, then dropped out of the game. Over the next two years he was arrested and jailed for drunkenness, public disturbance and vagrancy. He returned to baseball in 1902, playing for a Lowell, Mass., team, and in 1903, playing for Bangor.

He returned to the reservation in Old Town, where he coached teams and piloted a ferryboat. In 1913, he joined a logging team. He died of a heart attack on Dec. 24, 1913, only 42 years old.

The Indians

The evolution of Chief Wahoo

Back then, baseball teams changed their names frequently. The leagues had merged, and Cleveland’s American League team was known as the Naps, after their best player, Nap Lajoie. But Lajoie had been traded, and the team needed a new name. In 1915, the team’s owner asked local sportswriters to come up with one.

They settled on the Indians. Perhaps they remembered that brief period of excitement when Louis Sockalexis made his major league debut nearly 20 years earlier. Perhaps they were thinking of Boston’s miracle Braves, who won the World Series the year before. At any rate, the Indians adopted the image of Chief Wahoo as their logo.

The grinning, dark red caricature has come under criticism recently, much like the name of the Washington Redskins. The team tried to deflect its critics by saying the team was named in honor of Louis Sockalexis.

Louis Sockalexis was voted into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame in 2000. And in 2021, the Indians changed their name to the Guardians.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Eva Tanguay, The Lady Gaga of Vaudeville

As America started to throw off its Victorian propriety and embrace the Roaring Twenties, the bold, sexy Eva Tanguay showed them the way from the vaudeville stage.

She called herself “the girl who made vaudeville famous,” and she was right. Her outrageous exploits on and off the stage made her a media star, and she was the first singer to tour nationally on her (or his) own.

Newspapers reported scenes of fan frenzy akin to Beatlemania. At her height, she achieved enormous celebrity in America, a model for female stars from Mae West and Sophie Tucker to Madonna and Lady Gaga.

Her celebrity was no accident, but a well-planned assault on stuffy Victorian convention. She provoked reaction, singing songs with titles like Go As Far As You Like and wearing bizarre costumes like a dress made out of pennies. The tabloids ate up stories about her love life, which included a romance with the African-American vaudeville star George Walker.

You couldn’t escape her from 1904 to the early 1920s. But then she disappeared into obscurity, living out her life in a Hollywood bungalow.

Eva Tanguay, Rising Star

Tanguay as a 20-year-old actress

She was born Aug. 1, 1878 in Marbleton, Quebec, to a doctor and his wife. The family moved to Holyoke, Mass., when she was six.

Her father died when she was young and she started performing at a Holyoke amateur show at eight. Two years later she toured professionally in a production of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

By 1901 she had made it to Broadway, appearing in a musical called My Lady. By 1905 she was performing solo in vaudeville. And by 1910, she earned $3,500 a week – more than $80,000 in today’s currency.

It was not so much her looks or her voice that drew record crowds, but her abandon on stage. She had a pudgy face and wild reddish hair. Sometimes she poured champagne over it on stage.

While dancing maniacally, she sang songs like It’s All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It, I Want Someone to Go Wild With Me, Go As Far As You Like, Kid and That’s Why They Call Me Tabasco. Her delivery was unconventional, as she used comic effects like squeaking, screeching, yawping, drawling and talking.

I Don’t Care

Eva Tanguay was known as the “Wild Girl” and the “I Don’t Care Girl” after her signature song, I Don’t Care, performed in 1909 for the Ziegfield Follies and recorded in 1922.

They say I’m crazy, got no sense,
But I don’t care,
They may or may not mean offense,
But I don’t care,
You see I’m sort of independent,
Of a clever race descendent,
My star is on the ascendant,
That’s why I don’t care.

Tanguay changed costume as often as 10 times in one 30-minute performance – and what costumes! She designed them herself: a dress and headdress of feathers, a dress of dollar bills, a dress covered with coral, a Dance of the Seven Veils outfit so skimpy she said she could hold it in her fist. She once performed La Marseillaise in a revealing outfit made of French tricolor flags.

Her performances didn’t end on stage. She got very publicly engaged to cross-dressing performer Julian Eltinge. During their courtship she dressed as a man in formal attire, and he dressed as a woman. She didn’t marry him, but she did marry a dancer named Tom Ford and divorced him after four stormy years.

She had an affair with a vaudeville dancer named Roscoe Ails and was rumored to have had one with George Walker.

The backstage squabbles of Eva Tanguay made news, too. Police arrested her once for sticking a hatpin in a stagehand who got in her way. She had to pay a $50 for throwing another one down a flight of stairs.

Tanguay made sure the newspapers reported on her marriages, affairs, divorces, fights, feuds and arrests. She bought full-page ads at her own expense, on one occasion spending twice her salary on a publicity campaign.

Eva Tanguay, Faded Star

In 1927 at the age of 49, she married her 23-year-old piano accompanist as a publicity ploy. By then her star had begun to fade, and she didn’t get much publicity. The marriage was annulled after two weeks.

Eva Tanguay, photo courtesy New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre collection.

She was said to have lost $2 million in the stock market crash of 1929. But Eva Tanguay’s troubles resulted from her inability, or refusal, to adapt to the new media of radio and film. She retired from show business in the 1930s and lost her sight from cataracts. Her friend Sophie Tucker paid for the surgery to restore her vision. In 1934 she wrote to Henry Ford asking for a free car.

I live off a sort of an alley in a small house which is set in back of a big one, there is no view other than the backyards of other houses. … It is very sad to have had so much and be cut down to poverty, but my illness prevents me from doing any work… I’m no tramp, having lived the very best, my home consisted of gold glasses silver plates and everything that meant refinement, now I’m alone and cut off entirely from my world I so loved. If I had a car I could go out afternoons and might connect some way with managers, agents—and find something to do.

He declined.

For the rest of her life, she survived on her savings and the sale of her costumes from a storefront on Hollywood Boulevard. Shortly before her death she gave an interview to Life magazine, complaining that the public had forgotten her artistry.

Eva Tanguay died on Jan. 11, 1947.

The Henry Ford has more great photos of Eva Tanguay. Click here. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Great Northeastern Blackout of 1965

At dusk on Nov. 9, 1965, 11-year-old Jay Hounsell was walking down the road in Conway, N.H. He was on his way home for supper, swinging a stick. As he passed a telephone pole he whacked his stick against it. Instantly, the light on the pole went out. Jay looked around and saw lights go out all over town. Terrified by the blackout, Jay Hounsell ran all the way home.

His mother remembered, “His eyes were sticking right out. I wasn’t sure he hadn’t done something, but I told him it didn’t seem possible that a whack on a telephone pole could put out the whole gizmo.”

Areas affected by the Northeast Blackout of 1965.

Areas affected by the 1965 Northeastern Blackout.

‘The whole gizmo’ included eight Northeast states – New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania – and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Power stayed on in Maine and part of New Hampshire.

More than 30 million people over 80,000 square miles had no electricity for as long as 13 hours. It was the largest blackout ever.

Rush hour traffic snarled, and 800,000 people got stuck on subways in New York City. Many were trapped inside office buildings. Railroads halted and airplanes circled darkened airports before finding emergency runways. Some landed at the naval base at Quonset, which had switched to an emergency generator.

Nearly all of the television stations in the six hardest- hit blackout states lost power, and nearly two-thirds lost power for the duration of the blackout. The dearth of information caused some people to panic, thinking Communists or a UFO were responsible for the power outage.

The 1965 Northeastern Blackout

Jay Hounsell did not cause the Great 1965 Northeastern Blackout. Maintenance workers did. They set a protective relay too low on a power line to Ontario, which then tripped the relay. It then sent power to other lines, overloading them.

Some towns escaped the blackout because they had their own electric utilities. Holyoke, Taunton, Peabody and Braintree did in Massachusetts, and so did Hartford, Conn.

blackout-news

Fran Rensbarger had gone to the Boston Public Library after her college classes. She stood n Copley Square Station when the lights dimmed. Unlike New York, where the subways stopped, Boston’s T kept running underground. The T stalled at Kenmore Square, the last tunnel stop, and the passengers got out to walk the rest of the way.

Rensbarger, in an interview for the Blackout History Project, recalled their surprise at finding the lights out in Brookline and Boston.

Streetlights and traffic controls were dark, and people were directing traffic with flashlights. Even the Prudential Tower was dark.

Communist Plot?

West Springfield power plant, not much good on Nov. 9, 1965.

Fran Rensbarger lived in an apartment with a university professor and his family, helping out with the children. The neighbor downstairs learned on his car radio the blackout covered the entire Northeast and told them.

Willie, the mom, started throwing canned food, medical supplies and liquor (for sterilizing, she said) into boxes to escape to their summer home northeast of Boston. …Many people, including this family, feared the blackout was part of a communist plot. We were still in the height of the Cold War, and nothing seemed too absurd at the time. By the time we were ready to flee, the true source of the blackout was beginning to be suspected, then confirmed. We unpacked, and went to bed. The lights came on sometime after midnight.

Abbey Hamilton was 16 and working at W.T. Grant’s office in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston. She lived in the Dorchester section of town. Fifty years later she recalled,

WALKED home! (ahhh, to be 16…!) Fascinating, everything dark, scary but interesting, you know? My Mum waited with an enormous flashlight at the corner of our little street and Dorchester Ave shining the light into passers-by faces hunting for me, making sure I wouldn’t “miss” the turn! As if!

Baaad Repute

Hamilton, with very low vision, said there were fewer cars and people to bump into that night.

The T did send some busses to Mattapan Square supposedly to replace the trolleys to Ashmont but (the T was in baaaad repute just then…) I was afraid I’d wind up in Springfield or Woburn, or some place far, far away like that – grin – so the only default choice was walking.

It was a wondrous night for me – Mum was a very old-fashioned Yankee, obvious emotion was not generally allowed; but that night I received a big, warm hug. (for years I wondered if she had thought the Russians – or the Aliens – had “got” me! -grin – she was that scared.)

A Boston T in 1965.

A Spot of Trouble

Vermont’s Lt. Gov. John Daley was eating dinner by candlelight when the phone rang. Daley was in charge as Gov. Phil Hoff was in Europe. At the other end of the line was President Johnson, telling Daley to let him know if he needed any help.

Throughout New England, people generally stayed calm, with some exceptions. A few incidents of looting were reported in Springfield, Mass., and the inmates in the maximum security section of the Walpole State Prison rioted for three hours. They rampaged throughout the building, smashing windows and tearing up everything they could get their hands on. State troopers quelled the riot with tear gas, and the next day the inmates had to mop up the mess.

Massachusetts Gov. John Volpe called out the National Guard, but the guardsmen did little patrolling. In Providence, Mayor Joseph Doorley considering sealing off the city to incoming traffic. He decided against it, but wondered, “How the hell could something like this happen in this day and age?”

That question preyed on many minds. Clearly, a single act of sabotage could wipe out power to 30 million people. Though power was restored by morning, electricity consumers – that is, nearly everybody – suddenly felt more vulnerable. They began keeping flashlights, candles and matches in their homes.

With thanks to The Night the Lights Went Out by the staff of the New York Times. 1965 Northeastern Blackout by 08OceanBeach SD. Licensed under Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons. West Springfield Power PlantBy John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17379403. This story last updated in 2022.

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