Dr. Edmund Olchowski, of Greenfield, MA

(1919-2000)

interviewed by Bill Knorr 4-12-1994

Edited by Jeanne Sojka, 07/25/2025

BK: I’m sitting with Dr. Olchowski in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and we’re beginning our interview. 

EO: I was born in 1919, October 21st, in the town of Montague, and my parents both came from Europe. [Mary Karp in 1905 and Frank Olchowski in 1906.] My mother came from Austrian Poland, and my father came from the Russian-dominated area of Poland and Lithuania in that area, and the reason why they left Poland was because it was divided, they had no country there for 118 years, divided by Germany, Austria, and Russia.

They were venturesome people because they left at a very early age. My father used to mention the fact that he was living in the country, and at the age of, I believe, 12, they said, make up your mind what you’re going to do with the rest of your life, and they would send the youngster to the city. And my father said he sat there by the hour crying.

At first he was going to be a tailor, trained for the tailor’s profession, but he became ill. I believe he had pneumonia. He had to return home to recover his health, and then he decided on being a baker, and the remarkable thing about his education or background, he never really had any formal education, but I believe he could speak and understand seven languages by his association where he worked, and eventually, as I say, he came over to the United States.

And about the, oh, 1907, 1908, I don’t know exactly when that date was, but they came about that same time to this country. There was a depression in the United States, and the people or the ruling people felt that if they could send these immigrants back, there’d be less of a problem for survival for everybody, and they actually gave them the offer of a free passage back home. And my father did not want to go back to Poland, so he worked his way up the valley to Turners Falls.

He worked there for a while, and then he, when he was offered to go back to Poland, there was no work here in the area, he went, he headed for New York City, and he bought a ticket, a one-way passage to South Africa, because of a diamond rush or something there, he felt, why not go there and see whether I can make a living there. He had the ticket in his pocket, he’d walk in the streets, and he saw a sign on a window, Baker Wanted, and he went in, and he was hired as a baker, and then he turned in his ticket, and never went to South Africa. 

BK: Did he work as a baker when he first came and worked his way up the valley, was that the first job? 

EO: That’s right, he was trained in Europe as a baker, and just a young man, he must have been about 18, 19 years old, and how he happened to come into this area, I don’t know, it just word of mouth, there were all these people were just sent to different areas, and he never actually had any reason to be coming up this way unless he just heard that there was work up along the Connecticut Valley.

The area where I lived was the, the familiar name to everybody was The Patch, [G Street], the south end of Turners Falls, and it was populated originally by the French and the Irish, and then the Polish came in, and they were the dominant group, and every home had their backyards and shed and chicken coops and all that, and I always remarked that the honesty of the people, they never, never took anything from anybody else, there was always a respect for the other guy’s property. So, my father worked for a fellow by the name of [George] Kopec, that had a bakery on the end of G Street, on the southern end of G Street, and that burned down, perhaps that was when he lost his job, he had an old bakery there. So they relocated, in the center of the south end, this Kopec built a bakery again, and had a store in the front of it, and a bakery in the rear, and the living quarters were on the second floor of the house.

Kopec left for Hamtramck, Michigan, and sold the business to my father [September 1917], and that’s how he established himself as the baker and owner of the bakery there. During the early years before my time, they built the canal, which was from the Turners Falls Dam, a water park for these mills, and the construction crews were Italians, they came in as a group, and they built a village in the southern end of the south end, and they had their own stores and bakery and all, and one story of interest was, when they let the water into the canal, it was just a pitch, dirt gully, and when the water came in, it just washed the sides and they fell in, so they had to stop the water from entering the canal, drain it off, and they had to riprap by putting rocks, one on top of the other on either side to reinforce the sides of the bank. In the meanwhile, these workers left, and as a youngster growing up along the, whether you went swimming or playing, I see all these metal beds, beds, cots, and I often wonder where did these things come from, they’re all thrown into the gullies, and they had anywhere to get rid of, and actually they were the beds from these Italian workers that left.

So, when they had to come back to repair the canal, they didn’t want to set up a permanent establishment because it was just a matter of a few months and they’d be out again. So, they approached my father and asked him if he would bake over and above his quota of bread that he had for his customers for these workers, and which my father was enterprising, in another extra dollar, he went ahead and consented. So, one story related to that was one of the workers owed my father money for bread, and he didn’t have the money to pay, and he came to my father and said, “look, I’ve got this Victrola with records and you can have that in payment,” and my father accepted it.

So, when I was growing up, whenever we played that Victrola, they were all Italian songs, and we couldn’t understand why they couldn’t have Polish or English or any other song, they were all Italian, until we got old enough to find out why we happened to have that Victrola. So, the Polish population was very close, and they built themselves around the church, priests had a great influence over everybody, and, of course, the language is Polish, and very few spoke enough English to converse with others, but there was a woman by the name of Putala, and I don’t know her first name, but she was the midwife. She delivered about every child in the South End, in addition to the Dr. Sharon, a French doctor in town, but this Mrs. Putala did all the delivery work for the Polish people, because they could understand each other in the language.

BK: Here we go. 

EO: I do want to recall or mention this story about my father and the young fellows’ attempt to leave Poland under Russian domination. They were also subject to serving two years in the Russian army, and the word came back to all the Poles where they just had to act as servants to the Russian soldiers, and they just detested the idea of being degraded so.

So, what they did was to bribe the guards at the border, and my father had just one pair of shoes, and they bribed the guards at the border to get across, and he even took his shoes off to preserve them going through the woods to get to the border. The mistake was that the border patrol had just changed duty, and the bribed ones were gone off duty, and the new ones came on. So, when my father and a few others were trying to cross, they were not allowed by the soldiers.

They were ordered to halt, and when they didn’t halt, then the soldiers started firing at them. My father said he ran through those woods barefooted with those shoes and just escaped then, but when things got better again, and he had a few dollars, he bribed a bunch there at the border, and that’s how he happened to leave the country, because they had to serve two years in the Russian army. But to get back to the influence of the Polish church, everyone growing up in the area was conscious of the church.

That was the leadership, the priest and the leadership. The Polish established a parish in an old Lutheran church. They bought the church. [Unitarian Church on L Street in Turners Falls, now the Montague Elks.]

It was either the membership just went off or whatever, but they were able to buy that, and in 1928, the church burned down, and St. Mary’s, the Irish church, allowed the Poles to have services in their basement until they built a new church. The problem was, the church was built just at the time of the Depression, and it was very, very difficult for everybody to maintain their contributions to the church. There was a lot of ill feeling there, because some people with large families just couldn’t afford giving towards a new church.

So, there was that resentment, but in due time, it all was resolved, and the beautiful Our Lady of Częstochowa Church in Turners Falls is known throughout the area for its beautiful structure, and the altars, a hand-carved altar by a fellow by the name of Kasper Schab, and when the Roman Catholic Church gave mandates to eliminate these elaborate altars, this parish just stood their ground and would not give up this altar, because it was a masterpiece, and it still is in use today, and the bishop and whoever, the authorities accepted that resolution of the problem. 

The youngsters, all of the boys, all wanted to be altar boys. There was so many there that they had to divide them as far as masses go, because there’s just too many altar boys to be at mass, and the occasions were, the church celebrations were always, say in the summer, would be a playground outing, and I’m recalling the days when I was such a youngster, the competition would be, say, carry an egg on a tablespoon and run, and the one that finished with the egg still on a spoon would be the winner that came in first, second, and third, and there were girls that were participants in that.

Then there was another contest, I recall, was they’d have these hot dogs hanging with a string, immersed, drenched with mustard, right above the youngsters’ heads, and the one that ate the first hot dog was the winner. So that was quite a comedy in itself, seeing the mustard all over the kids’ faces. 

BK: Did they bring some of the festivals and some of the things to do that were from Poland, or do you think that these were thought up by the people in the congregation here? 

EO: I believe it was just maybe thought up here.  It was just competition. Then they’d have baseball games, and it would be an outing, and everybody would attend. I believe a lot has to do with transportation.

People didn’t have that transportation chase all over the countryside. They all entertained themselves within a certain area, and that’s how they stayed as a congregation. But they’d have bazaars and money-making ventures for the church itself.

I do recall vaguely, through my father’s information, before the canal was built, they had a fire bell there, and they had hoses stored in the south end in one of the buildings. If there was a fire, somebody would run to that bell and ring it, and then all the volunteers would come out to help. So, that bell is in the church steeple of Our Lady of Czestochowa today.

That was the original fire bell. As far as our self-entertainment, it was either movies or swimming along the river. Everybody had a swimming hole, and we seemed to enjoy all that entertainment by ourselves.

There was one place they called the Rock Dam. It was a natural area down below the Cabot Station now, on the [Connecticut] river. And we swam there many, many days, whenever it was comfortable to swim, we were there all the time. 

You talk about pollution in the river, nobody ever heard of infantile paralysis or anything, and yet we swam that river day in, day out. 

My grandmother, Agnes Karp, brought three girls over with her when she left Austrian Poland, and one was my mother and two sisters. And my grandmother worked in the Keith Paper Mill, in the rag room, and her job in that rag room was sorting cloth for paper making, to make sure there were no metal objects or no buttons on the cloth.

So, when I was very young, I never could understand where all these buttons came from around home, but there were bags and bags of buttons, which my grandmother brought from work, which they were going to throw away, and they had some use. So, the entire neighborhood would come to her for buttons whenever they needed buttons for their sewing clothes. That was the way of saving a dollar and sewing clothes for the youngsters as they were growing up.

So, her job was in the rag room at the Keith Mill. I used to go up, say the rain came during the day, I’d go up at the end of the school day to pick her up, bring an umbrella, carry her lunchbox home, you know. I was part of it all.

Many people worked in the, the cotton mill, they call it, and one family especially was a Piskor family, Piskor. And two sons were highly recognized and educated, and one was, is the professor or president emeritus of, well, Frank was the president of St. Lawrence University, and he was vice president of Syracuse University before he was appointed president of St. Lawrence. Bernard was an orthopedic surgeon in Rochester, New York.

In the area, when you analyze the group of Polish people and how they improved themselves in life, my father was a baker, I was a dentist, my sister went through college, and my brother was a dentist. So, the Piskor family were educated and their parents worked in the cotton mill. And then I have a cousin, Freddy Olchowski, that in corporate world, he’s made a name for himself.

And others were developed, the Montague Rod and Reel was in Montague City, and a fellow by the name of [Frank] Rudinski was a national fly casting champion. Just working at Rod and Reel and represented the company in all competitions. He was just an excellent fly caster, fishing.

So, many of them improved themselves on their own, actually, because there was no, there was a language barrier. They never had English for a background, it was Polish, and it was very difficult to learn English, but eventually they did, and then they worked themselves up to high positions in society. As I mentioned before, the number of people who worked in that cotton mill, it was labor, but many of them worked there, and then the men worked in the railroad yards down East Deerfield.

And from just the labor force there, and they were engineers on the trains themselves. So, that was a big money survival type of a job, was the railroad. 

But the 4th of July was a big occasion, and the reason why I say that was, there was a kind of a competition who would have the biggest bonfire 4th of July.

So, The Patch would always want to be number one in the county. Everybody’s barrel was wooden, rubbish barrel, in their backyards. Those were all taken for the bonfire.

They commandeered a truck or two, went down to East Deerfield Railroad Yards where the fellows worked. They all got these railroad ties, they used railroad ties, they’re all creosote soaps, you know. How much flame did you get out of that? And then just before the bonfire was lit, I have to say, Mr. Najda would always have his front stairs stolen and thrown onto the bonfire.

So, for about a week after the 4th of July celebration, the poor guy had to step on boxes and improvise any way he could get into his house till he got his front stairs to his house. But that was eventually banned. It was right down the lower end of Main Street.

That bonfire was banned because the heat would burn off the insulation off the electric wires along the highway. That was one reason. And I recall going as a youngster with my little four-wheel cart and a couple of pails or two to get the ashes from the bonfire because it was supposedly something to feed the chickens and let them peck at or whatever.

It was just something to do with their diet. So, I did go and get those ashes every year. But it was a wild occasion and everybody came from all around because The Patch had the biggest bonfires.

BK: Did your family have a garden where you lived in The Patch? 

EO: Along the canal, right, there was a fence. And on the other side of the fence was about a four-foot width of soil. And everybody along that canal had their tomato plants planted there along that.

We had to improvise a little ladder to get over the fence and get down the other side to gather up our tomatoes and peppers. But down below, beyond, on the southern end of the town, out of the section of the south end, some of the people had large garden plots. They all had some form of gardening there.

And that’s the way of life. 

BK: Your father was a baker. Did he specialize in Polish products at first? Or did he go into mainstream baking of just bread for the community? 

EO: Well, I have a couple of peels out in the back of my patio that my father used.  But I’d cut the long handles off. But this was an oven that was a hearth. And he could put in 800 loaves of bread in that oven.

The principle of it was he’d have the fire in the left-hand corner of the oven, which was accessible through the opening. He would set up a, build a fire there, a coke fire. After he had the oven all heated up, he would bank that fire.

And then, as he put in these, bread in about four at a time or more on these peels, it either was a narrow, long peel or a wide one. The wide one was to bring the bread, put the bread in. And the little one, the narrow ones were to rotate the bread because your heat was in the lower, the intense, the more intense heat was in the lower, in the left side of the oven where he had his fire.

So he had to rotate those 800 loaves of bread so they’d bake on all sides and from other areas. And that was a really laborious job. It was, especially say in August, there was no thoughts of air conditioning.

We lived in the upper level of that building. And bread rises. And when there’s a lot of heat, it rises very fast.

And you’d need help. My father would call us many times to come and help. And my mother and my brother and sister and I would go down and pitch in to help move things along.

The basic bread was the rye bread. And then the holiday seasons were the braided babkas, the raisin bread, because it was sort of a ceremonial bread anyway and people enjoyed them. It was all day-to-day.

My father eventually acquired a partner when he bought the business, a fellow by the name of Charles Noga. And that fellow knew how to drive later, but he started with Tommy the horse and the wagon, went house-to-house with the bread in Turners Falls, and went as far as Millers Falls in one day’s time. He’d go awful early in the morning and come late at night.

But as things progressed, they had automobiles or trucks, and then he could do his work in half the time by not waiting for the horse to pull the wagon. So he would deliver that bread, and he did the bookkeeping, and he was enough educational background to keep the books for the business. But there was the white bread and the white loaves and the Italian bread, but basically it was the rye bread that was the main course.

And then, of course, the pastry. You had the jelly balls and doughnuts and cinnamon rolls and horseshoe rolls and name it, and we used to make them. And on a nice warm summer evening when the bread was baking, people would just come flocking over because they knew the bread was ready to buy, and the people just came in to buy.

BK: Were there any other bakers in the particular neighborhood that you followed? 

EO: There was a Polish cooperative store that was a competitor to my father, and they never actually got somebody that could compete with, against him because of the continuous turnover of these bakers. But there was an oven there too. That was the important thing, to have a large oven and a hearth.

And there was excellent bread, excellent bread. There was none of these chemicals that people use today to move things along and temperature control. It was all by knowing exactly how to do it.

My father would start at four o’clock in the afternoon, and he’d be done two, three o’clock in the morning. The bread would be just fresh to be, start to deliver at six in the morning. 

BK: Did anyone from your family continue the business? 

EO: No, because we, we went off and I went into dentistry, my brother did.  My sister went off to college. Nobody had the interest to stay in. And there were others came after my father left, and they would stay a few years.

But then eventually, it was a lot of hard work, and people just gave up. It’s sad, but that’s, there was just a lot of work, and people gave up. So he had a, he had the opportunity, he told me once, to go into chain bakeries, like the Wonder Bread or something.

That was way back when that was just beginning, that type of enterprise. But he was intelligent enough to say no, because he, with his limited education, and he felt he was doing as much as he’d want to do in life, than expand into this chain type of bakeries. And he had the opportunity, and they, people wanted him to do it.

But he just felt he just didn’t have the background to go into that. 

BK: Do you know if he baked the host for the Polish churches or the local churches? 

EO: No, that he didn’t. But he, whenever there was a bazaar or a church supper, I think he donated the bread and the rolls and all that, for these suppers, these fundraisers.  Many years. 

BK: As you were growing up, did you start to notice the Polish population of The Patch changing, or at what time did you notice your neighborhood sort of change? 

EO: Well, it changed, but it wasn’t that rapid, because people owned their houses. The family just took, either they passed away, or else the family left the area.

But there are still homes there with families that were there for 75 years or more, when they first came over. So someone in that family is residing there, some connection to it. Many of the old people have passed away, in my time.

BK: In your area, was there a division amongst the Polish immigrants, between those who were Roman Catholic and those who were Polish National Catholic? Was there some sort of separation between those groups, or did they work together? 

EO: Well, the Polish National wanted to set up in Turners Falls, but the Roman Catholic did too. And the Polish National left, and they never got organized. There was never that feeling, because there was no competition as far as churches go.

So the closest was down in South Deerfield, of course you didn’t have transportation those initial years. So, I wasn’t aware of anything like that. 

BK: Okay.

EO: There’s a question about the memories of first day of school. 

Of course, we all spoke Polish at home, so it was very difficult to adjust when we went to school. So I, after the first day of school, I came home and we’re sitting around having our supper meal, and they asked how I liked school.

And I said, “oh, the teacher talks a lot, and I can’t say anything. I think one day is enough for me.” I didn’t think I’d go to school anymore.

That is a big turnaround. 

BK: Okay. 

EO: The athletics in Turners Falls were very, very well attended, all the events, and all the youngsters growing up had a desire to play on a team.

And in our area, in the south end of The Patch, some of the best football players in the history of Turners Falls High School came from that area. And I attributed that, number one, to we had to walk to school. And in order to get to school, we had to walk up a hill, a goodly distance to get to the upper level to where the schools were located.

And our legs were in darn good shape from doing that, walking to school every day. We had no bus rides. We had to walk.

Well, in my memory, there were some excellent football players coming out of the south end. One fellow by the name of Krynzel [Adam] played at Fordham University, but he didn’t stay there four years. But Fordham was the best football team in the country in my young days.

He played there for his freshman year. And then there was a Chet Skrypek. He went to St. Anselm College.

And he was an excellent football player. Then there were the Novak boys [Anthony and Joseph] that were excellent. The Najdas [Felix “Mike” and Edward Naida.]

You can name a number and number of these people that played football. 

Of course, I’ve got to include myself as a player, but not that outstanding. But I did play, and I had some great memories of doing that.

And the reason, one of the reasons why they enjoyed these team trips was that they had to get a ride somewhere. We thought going to Gardner and to Springfield was the biggest thing of the year, was just to go play football in some city. Today, you get in your car and drive down there in a few minutes, and nobody thinks that anymore.

But in those days, transportation by bus was something to desire. I am married and have three sons. My wife comes from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Wanda. [Kosior]

And my three sons are, I should say they were educated to the point where Greg went to Dartmouth College and law school, Boston College Law. And my son Charles, who was in partnership with him, went to Syracuse University Law School. So, and Stanley, my youngest, lives in Alaska.  He’s been there for 17 years, and he went to the University of Massachusetts. So, Charlie went to Harvard before he went to law school at Syracuse. So, they all had an excellent education for their own, for their own, I should say, background for their future lives.

BK: Because that’s… 

EO: After I retired from dentistry, I had many things to do. I’ve done photography, nature photography, for many years. But there was a void because of a loss of contact with people.

I had a lot of things to do by myself or around home. But the lack of associating with people bothered me to a certain point. So, then I felt I could contribute to the Town of Greenfield by running for political office.

I was elected as selectman for two, three year terms. And I was, during that time, I was chairman of the board for two years. And no one, to my knowledge, has told me differently that I was the first Polish, Polish selectman in the history of Greenfield, Polish background.

And that, been many years that the town had been in existence. So, I felt that that was an accomplishment on the part of the Polish background. 

BK: What year were you elected? 

EO: I was elected about nine years ago, I would say.

BK: In mid-1980s. 

EO: Mid-1980s. And I was selectman for six years, and I’ve been out for three years.

So, it was nine years ago that I was a selectman in Greenfield. I met many dedicated people in politics. And then I met a lot of people that I have absolutely no use for, because there was an element there that would do anything to destroy you or whatever you’re trying to do.

But the majority were very dedicated people in politics. And trying to do something good for somebody. 

BK: Do you remember any of your childhood friends from where you grew up ever went into politics? In other parts of the valley? 

EO:  No, I don’t.

I can’t think of anybody. I have no recollection of that part. 

BK: Thank you.