Posted on 03/11/2009 7:38:16 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Angelo Alderuccio, a 94-year-old retired public works employee from New Britain, might not strike everyone as an American hero. But in a country desperately seeking economic salvation, his tales of surviving the Great Depression are anecdotes for our times.
During the 1930s, Alderuccio spent what he now considers "the best years of my life" in the Cobalt section of East Hampton, at the Civilian Conservation Corps' Camp Jenkins. He worked with 250 other men building trails in the Meshomasic State Forest, weatherproofing posts and rails for state roads and building a fire tower overlooking the central Connecticut woods.
Like 3.5 million other young Americans who served in the CCC during the Depression, Alderuccio was required to send $25 of his $30 monthly salary back to his family, a policy that yielded more than $650 million nationwide to impoverished families over the life of the program.
"My parents back in New Britain had eight other children, so the Depression was really hard on us," Alderuccio said. "But that $25 my mother got every month was a big deal back then and she was able to buy my family's first washing machine. That's all my family talked about for years whenever we got together for reunions. Hey, Angelo! You joined the CCC and bought Mamma a washer!"
Alderuccio's gift to his mother, however, pales beside the legacy that he and more than 25,000 "CCC boys" bequeathed to Connecticut. More than 75 years after the CCC was created as the first plank of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, as both the new Obama administration and Gov. M. Jodi Rell consider reviving the program to meet our own hard times, the accomplishments of FDR's "Tree Army" seem staggering.
"People forget today that we are talking about the creation of the entire national and state park system," said Nicole Chalfant, the museum curator for state parks, which includes the Connecticut CCC Museum in Stafford Springs. The museum, housed in the old officers' barracks of Camp Conner, owns the second-largest collection of CCC archives and memorabilia in the country.
"The Connecticut that we know — celebrated for its natural and recreational amenities — simply wouldn't exist had it not been for the CCC," she said.
Indeed, during the life of the program, from 1933 to 1942, virtually every state forest had its own CCC camp — 21 in all. At the time, most of the state land was undeveloped, with few facilities for the public and no access from public roads.
By the time the camps closed at the onset of World War II in 1942, Connecticut CCC crews had created — among dozens of other state parks and roads — the entrances and traffic rotaries at Hammonasset Beach in Madison, the ski trails at Mohawk Mountain in Cornwall, the picnic area and the stream-side trail that climbs beside Kent Falls, and the popular Schreeder Pond swimming complex at Chatfield Hollow State Park in Killingworth.
The Connecticut CCC also built hundreds of miles of hiking trails, reforested thousands of acres in the scenic northwest corner and built the Department of Environmental Protection sawmill still in use at Meshomasic State Forest in Portland.
In many parts of the state, the vast acreage of white Pacific pines that the CCC planted in the 1930s is visually distinct from the surrounding forests, a scenic legacy of the program. It is impossible to travel 25 miles in any direction in Connecticut without seeing these replanted forests and other monuments of the CCC era — the access roads, swimming ponds and picnic areas that converted raw state forests into public parks.
A Modern CCC
Rell has proposed that the state spend $7.5 million creating a Connecticut Conservation Corps that would hire the unemployed to do everything from refurbishing hiking trails to weatherizing homes. Reviving the CCC program would invoke one of the most enduring, if forgotten, accomplishments of the New Deal, which showed that environmental progress and economic recovery can work hand in hand.
Few recall it today, but by the 1930s, America was both an economically and environmentally devastated land. In New England, a century of sheep-grazing and harvesting trees to make charcoal for the iron industry had stripped hundreds of mountainsides bare. Through vast stretches of the South and Midwest, over-farming and draining wetlands had contributed to dust bowls and soil erosion. Mining and lumber companies had clear-cut millions of acres in the Rockies.
Roosevelt was personally invested in conservation and forestry, especially after he was stricken with polio in 1921 and sought outlets for his enormous energy and public spirit. As he expanded his family's holdings at Hyde Park, N.Y., Roosevelt supervised the planting of more than 30,000 trees and experimented widely with introducing foreign and hybrid species. As president of the Boy Scouts of New York in the 1920s, Roosevelt founded upstate summer camps to teach forestry to scouts. As governor of New York after 1929, he established programs for unemployed men to work in the Catskill and Adirondack preserves, ideas he immediately converted to federal programs after being elected president in 1932.
Within seven days of his inauguration in 1933, Roosevelt proposed the CCC as a means of establishing useful, healthful work for the unemployed, and by July that year there were already 250,000 men working in camps from Virginia to the Canadian border.
Public works experts still consider the CCC one of the most remarkable mobilizations in history — preparing the United States for its rapid entry into World War II. Nationwide the CCC created more than 800 public parks and such enduring amenities as the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and the beginnings of the ski trail system at Aspen, Colo.
Governor's Father
Connecticut enrolled its first CCC member in April 1933 and had more than 15 camps established by the end of the year. In addition to establishing popular state parks like Hammonasset and Kent Falls, Connecticut's CCC camps were mobilized to help clean up after the devastating Connecticut River flood in 1936 and the Great Hurricane of '38. Today, firefighting crews still use the hundreds of miles of forest roads, and more than 1,000 water holes, built by the CCC.
Connecticut's program was considered especially successful because the creosoting plants, charcoal kilns and state sawmill it created produced a thriving commercial forest products business. The CCC camps sold lumber, railroad ties and charcoal to government agencies and private businesses in other states. In the days before electric refrigerators, many camps also harvested ice from ponds in the state forests, and then carried it to railheads nearby to be shipped to commercial accounts.
"Connecticut was one of the few states that actually paid the federal government back the money it cost to run the program — mostly from ice harvesting and forest products," said Chalfont, the state parks curator.
"But it's their legacy building dams, parks and forest roads that we need back today. All of those facilities were built 75 years ago, and we are now down in state employees, down in budget and everything else. It's time to bring the CCC back and rebuild these great amenities."
Rell said she was inspired to revive a Connecticut CCC, in part, by memories of her father, who escaped a hardscrabble upbringing on a North Carolina farm by joining the CCC in the 1930s.
"My father used to say that he went into the CCC a boy and came out a man," Rell said. "What I really want to do is create an opportunity for young people to work and support their families the way my father did, by spending their days performing good, honest labor that will benefit the state."
"If they don't know how to clear brush or use a chain saw, we'll teach them, imparting work values they can apply for the rest of their life."
Rell said she will work carefully with Connecticut's union leaders to reassure them that a revived CCC won't compete with private-sector jobs.
Marty Podskoch of Colchester, a retired teacher who became interested in the CCC after writing three books about Catskill and Adirondack fire towers, is compiling a history of the Connecticut program. He has met many veterans of the Connecticut CCC and spends several days a month wandering the sites of old CCC camps, photographing their concrete and stone foundations and documenting their work sites.
Podskoch is especially enthusiastic about Camp Filley in Haddam, where the foundations and road layouts are considered particularly well-preserved and will be protected until the state can install an interpretive park and trail system. State archaeologists are also applying for grants to survey the site of the old Macedonia Brook CCC camp in Kent.
On a recent tour of five abandoned CCC camps in central Connecticut, Podskoch stopped beside the attractive stone dam that formed Schreeder Pond at Chatfield Hollow State Park. CCC members at Camp Roosevelt there built the dam and pond, a long swimming beach, an Adirondack-style lodge and a shaded picnic area on the site between 1933 and 1937. The park is now one of the most popular DEP facilities in the state, with most parking spaces occupied every summer weekend.
"Just look at this place now," Podskoch said, sweeping his hand over the large swimming pond and grove of pine trees. "There was nothing here but a brook and wilderness when the CCC got here in 1933. Not a rock has moved on this dam since then and the pond is full of kids all summer."
"That's the legacy of the CCC, and there are not many other programs in America that achieved this much."
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For more information, contact Marty Podskoch at www.cccstories.com or call 860-267-2442.
“Albeit macht frei”.
IF THIS IS THEIR IDEA OF ECONOMIC RECOVERY we have regressed at least 50 years
Given the bad state of the home construction business, the economy in general and the low prices of commodities, the state could probably get good deals on experienced construction workers, equipment rentals and raw materials. Now would be a good time to build stuff. If the state wants good prices, it should negotiate aggressively with private firms, it being a buyers market and all.
“Albeit macht frei”.
Looks like the French ‘courvee’ may be on the “to-do” list of Obama and the Democraps.
Yeah the CCC sounds so great, but the problem they created in the Depression was to keep wages artificially high while prices were falling, squeezing businesses into bankruptcy.
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