Sunday, August 31, 2003
A Shining Country Club on a Hill
Country Club Crowd - by Roaldus Richmond. August 20, 1940.
The clubhouse was set high in the hills. On all sides forested uplands rolled away, and on far horizons the mountains were banked against the sky. Here and there farmstead clearings broke the woods. The city itself was hidden, sweltering far below in its busy bowl, overridden with traffic, overburdened with sound and heat and the strife of everyday living. In the hills a clean breeze stirred the leaves and the sun tinged the green turf with gold. The golf course was picturesque, stretching over a varied and interesting terrain.
[...]
There were the young married set and the middle-aged married set. They lived in elaborate homes on the terraces of Trow Hill. They wore expensive clothes and drove expensive automobiles. They traveled together eternally, and nobody outside the circle mattered or even existed. There was nothing beyond the rounds they made -- weekend parties, cocktails in the Cellar Grill, Italian dinners at the Venetian, trips to New York and Montreal, skiing in the winter and golfing in the summer. In one way or another their money had come from granite. There were granite manufacturers, quarry and shed owners, who had inherited all that their fathers, rough strong men with steel-sharp minds and steel-sinewed hands, had sweated and died for. There were lawyers, doctors, dentists, bankers, businessmen, who had been educated with the money wrought from monumental stone. The beautiful cemeteries of Barre were filled with the men, prematurely dead, who had drilled and chiseled and carved the granite, that these people might live in ease and luxury. The country club was a far cry from the clamor of the grim sheds on the river flats. And if these people did not scorn the stonecutters, it was simply because they ignored them altogether.
Downstairs in the dim coolness of the locker room a poker game was in progress on a glass-ringed table. Men with soft hands and flabby faces nonchalantly lost or won the amount that a stonecutter might earn in a full-time week. A week in the ear-shattering chaos of the shads, standing on a wet dirt floor, bending patiently over a block, guiding into intricate patterns a pneumatic tool that shuddered with a hundred-pounds pressure. Upstairs the swing music went on, but the young couples slouched and sprawled about, glasses in languid brown hands. On the porch the session continued and most of the women were showing their drinks. Laughter and voices were shriller and louder, jokes were coarser... They mentioned John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath , and the fat woman said she found it unspeakably filthy and vile. A man proclaimed it nothing but propoganda. Another man announced feebly that he thought it a damn fine book. The subject was dropped.
[...] below, author quotes a young woman present at the clubhouse. [...]
"They're wondering now who you are, where you come from, what college you went to, how much money you have, what you do for a living. They won't be satisfied until they find out. I didn't realize until lately how sick and tired I'm getting of them, of all this. It's so damned small and smug, so narrow and mean. And they're so completely satisfied with it. Yes, it's quite true that this money they fling around all came from granite, directly or indirectly. Everything that they have they owe to the granite. And you should see their nostrils twitch when some stonecutters come into the Venetian after work and take a table next to theirs."
[...]
The session at the other end of the porch was getting louder and bawdier all the time. Shouts of laughter drowned the clink of ice in glasses. A sweet breeze from the woodlands passed unnoticed across flushed cheeks. A strong reek of perfume lingered like nausea in the head. The clouds above the western mountains were pink and lavender in the lowering sun.
And down in the valley beside the river the terrific din of the granite sheds was stilled; the silence of closing time hung heavy on the dust-laden air. Out of the long gloomy sheds straggled the workers, dust-covered, grime-smeared, with weary eyes and faces, cramped hands, aching backs, and damp stiff legs. The riot of noise still throbbed in their skulls, the vibration of high-pressure tools still trembled through their arms and bodies. But as they walked away the voices started, accents from Italy, Scotland, Spain, Ireland, and Sweden. And rich laughter rang in the slant of afternoon sunlight. The laughter of strong men coming from a hard day's work. The laughter of the unconquered and the unconquerable. It was true. They were as oblivious of the country club crowd as the club was of them. The girl stared out over green treetops and smooth golden fields to the distant ramparts of the mountains, blue, gray and purple against the transient colors of the western sky. "Well anyway," she said. "it's a beautiful country -- Vermont. That's one thing we have -- always."
Written in 1940, the story excerpts above are part of the Library of Congress collection, American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940. For entire account see: Country Club Crowd/Men Against Granite
more on the subject from the American Memory Project:
For a greater perspective on the stonecutters of Vermont via AMP, see: "Take Granite Out of Barre,..." scroll halfway down the page.
The clubhouse was set high in the hills. On all sides forested uplands rolled away, and on far horizons the mountains were banked against the sky. Here and there farmstead clearings broke the woods. The city itself was hidden, sweltering far below in its busy bowl, overridden with traffic, overburdened with sound and heat and the strife of everyday living. In the hills a clean breeze stirred the leaves and the sun tinged the green turf with gold. The golf course was picturesque, stretching over a varied and interesting terrain.
[...]
There were the young married set and the middle-aged married set. They lived in elaborate homes on the terraces of Trow Hill. They wore expensive clothes and drove expensive automobiles. They traveled together eternally, and nobody outside the circle mattered or even existed. There was nothing beyond the rounds they made -- weekend parties, cocktails in the Cellar Grill, Italian dinners at the Venetian, trips to New York and Montreal, skiing in the winter and golfing in the summer. In one way or another their money had come from granite. There were granite manufacturers, quarry and shed owners, who had inherited all that their fathers, rough strong men with steel-sharp minds and steel-sinewed hands, had sweated and died for. There were lawyers, doctors, dentists, bankers, businessmen, who had been educated with the money wrought from monumental stone. The beautiful cemeteries of Barre were filled with the men, prematurely dead, who had drilled and chiseled and carved the granite, that these people might live in ease and luxury. The country club was a far cry from the clamor of the grim sheds on the river flats. And if these people did not scorn the stonecutters, it was simply because they ignored them altogether.
Downstairs in the dim coolness of the locker room a poker game was in progress on a glass-ringed table. Men with soft hands and flabby faces nonchalantly lost or won the amount that a stonecutter might earn in a full-time week. A week in the ear-shattering chaos of the shads, standing on a wet dirt floor, bending patiently over a block, guiding into intricate patterns a pneumatic tool that shuddered with a hundred-pounds pressure. Upstairs the swing music went on, but the young couples slouched and sprawled about, glasses in languid brown hands. On the porch the session continued and most of the women were showing their drinks. Laughter and voices were shriller and louder, jokes were coarser... They mentioned John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath , and the fat woman said she found it unspeakably filthy and vile. A man proclaimed it nothing but propoganda. Another man announced feebly that he thought it a damn fine book. The subject was dropped.
[...] below, author quotes a young woman present at the clubhouse. [...]
"They're wondering now who you are, where you come from, what college you went to, how much money you have, what you do for a living. They won't be satisfied until they find out. I didn't realize until lately how sick and tired I'm getting of them, of all this. It's so damned small and smug, so narrow and mean. And they're so completely satisfied with it. Yes, it's quite true that this money they fling around all came from granite, directly or indirectly. Everything that they have they owe to the granite. And you should see their nostrils twitch when some stonecutters come into the Venetian after work and take a table next to theirs."
[...]
The session at the other end of the porch was getting louder and bawdier all the time. Shouts of laughter drowned the clink of ice in glasses. A sweet breeze from the woodlands passed unnoticed across flushed cheeks. A strong reek of perfume lingered like nausea in the head. The clouds above the western mountains were pink and lavender in the lowering sun.
And down in the valley beside the river the terrific din of the granite sheds was stilled; the silence of closing time hung heavy on the dust-laden air. Out of the long gloomy sheds straggled the workers, dust-covered, grime-smeared, with weary eyes and faces, cramped hands, aching backs, and damp stiff legs. The riot of noise still throbbed in their skulls, the vibration of high-pressure tools still trembled through their arms and bodies. But as they walked away the voices started, accents from Italy, Scotland, Spain, Ireland, and Sweden. And rich laughter rang in the slant of afternoon sunlight. The laughter of strong men coming from a hard day's work. The laughter of the unconquered and the unconquerable. It was true. They were as oblivious of the country club crowd as the club was of them. The girl stared out over green treetops and smooth golden fields to the distant ramparts of the mountains, blue, gray and purple against the transient colors of the western sky. "Well anyway," she said. "it's a beautiful country -- Vermont. That's one thing we have -- always."
Written in 1940, the story excerpts above are part of the Library of Congress collection, American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940. For entire account see: Country Club Crowd/Men Against Granite
more on the subject from the American Memory Project:
One of the workers' chief concerns was stonecutters' tuberculosis, a deadly condition caused by inhaling airborne granite particles. Labor unions organized to insist employers install dust-removing equipment. One Vermont granite worker explained, the workers were "pretty well resigned to their fate. These stonecutters expect that one day sooner or later they will get [stonecutters' tuberculosis]." Interviewed in an era when when workers' rights were very narrowly construed, he recounted:
The big worry of some of [the quarrymen] is that they'll die before they have made good provision for their families. That's the real reason behind the strikes. They feel that since they're 'marked' men with perhaps less time to provide for their families than the average man, that they are entitled to higher wages. Besides there are certain periods in the year - we call them slack time and dead time - when there is little work to be done. Sometimes only a few men work during these slow weeks; sometimes, none at all." Granite Worker:
For a greater perspective on the stonecutters of Vermont via AMP, see: "Take Granite Out of Barre,..." scroll halfway down the page.
