Hartford historic ties Larger paychecks and an Aroostook connection draw many to Connecticut

loading...

Part 5 of a 6-part series

You might remember the former Kim Willey as your waitress at the Pizza Hut near the Bangor Mall, or as a news reporter for Q106.5-FM a few years ago.

You might have seen her working in the Husson College library or at a series of other low-paying jobs she held while living in eastern Maine.

Then, like thousands of other northern and eastern Mainers, Willey left the state in the late 1990s in search of opportunity. She found it in the Hartford, Conn., area, where she landed a job with a major defense contractor and got married.

Between 1995 and 2000, the Hartford area was the fifth most popular destination – the third counting only out-of-state places – for people leaving the eight counties in northeastern Maine. During that period, some 465 people went to Hartford, according to Internal Revenue Service county-to-county tracking data the NEWS examined.

The Hartford area, however, was the only popular destination from which northern Maine actually realized a net gain of migrants. More than 700 people migrated from Hartford to the eight counties during the five-year period, a reflection probably of the area’s historic ties to central Connecticut.

The movement to central Connecticut is nothing new. Since World War II, the industrial cities there have beckoned Mainers – including thousands of Franco-Americans from the St. John River Valley in northern Aroostook County – seeking a more prosperous way of life. Many of them never returned to Maine except to visit relatives or to retire on their comfortable pensions.

The migrants also included non-Franco fishermen and farmers and laid off millworkers from more southerly areas of the state. Even today they form a network that helps younger relatives make the transition to a more prosperous life.

Capehart to Morgan Hills Estates

“I had lived all my life in Bangor,” said Kim Veneroni – her new married name – shortly after emerging from Pratt & Whitney’s sprawling manufacturing plant in East Hartford on a February afternoon. The company is a leading maker of engines for military, commercial and other aircraft, as well as space propulsion and power systems. Veneroni is an account analyst, a position that pays about $40,000 a year.

Her workday had ended and the petite blonde was headed home to West Springfield, Mass., a 35-minute drive.

Veneroni, who turns 31 this month, began her career with the company as a temporary worker. She eventually was offered a full-time position, and currently is making the transition from account analyst to financial planning analyst, another step up the corporate ladder.

The life she leads now seems a far cry from the one she left behind, she said.

Veneroni grew up in a single-parent household, one of four children of divorced parents, in Old Capehart, a low-income neighborhood consisting of rent-subsidized public housing in Bangor.

“I wanted better,” she said. “I knew I wanted to be successful.

“I graduated [in 1989], I think, 13th from the bottom of my class at Bangor High,” Veneroni said, as she darted around her kitchen in West Springfield preparing a dinner of pot roast.

Education was her key

The summer after high school, Veneroni headed to Florida with a boyfriend. Though she stayed less than six months, it was there that her eyes were opened to some of life’s material possibilities. She quickly grasped that education was the key.

“That’s what got me motivated,” she said of meeting people with “nice cars, nice clothes and nice jewelry. When you’re a kid, those things matter. If you want them, you do whatever it takes to get you there.”

Upon returning to Bangor, she enrolled in the New England School of Communications, where she studied broadcasting and earned an associate degree, was named the school’s broadcaster of the year and was inducted into Alpha Beta Kappa Honor Society for high academic achievements and citizenship.

After a yearlong stint in radio, she went back to school “because I knew that an associate’s degree wouldn’t get me anywhere.” Working three jobs, she put herself through Husson College and earned a bachelor’s in business administration. Then she left Maine again.

Like many young Mainers who have moved away, she joined a family member who already had put down roots in the Hartford area – her brother, Chris Willey, a controller at Pratt & Whitney. He left Bangor in 1990 after he earned undergraduate degrees in finance and management information systems from the University of Maine.

“I met Gino [Veneroni, also a controller at Pratt & Whitney] at work,” she said, her face lighting up as her husband of a year and a half arrived home well after 7 p.m.

After dating a year, the two became engaged and Kim again returned to school, this time enrolling in an accelerated master’s program in business administration at Western New England College in Springfield.

“Nowadays, a bachelor’s degree is nothing,” she said.

Pratt & Whitney covered her tuition, just as it had her brother’s when he earned an MBA. She finished in 18 months, compared with the two or more years it typically takes.

That was in March 2001. She and Gino, 38, married on a mountaintop in Holyoke, Mass., six months later.

Last June, the couple moved into a new $450,000 four-bedroom home with a ground-floor apartment for Antoinette Veneroni, Gino’s 82-year-old mother, on Appaloosa Lane in Morgan Hills Estates, an upscale subdivision in West Springfield.

Working overtime

With Kim working full-time and Gino working 12-hour days, the couple has little free time. Though they share an employer, the difference in work schedules means they must travel in separate vehicles. Dinner, often prepared by Antoinette, isn’t served until 9 p.m. most weekdays.

“That’s what you have to do if you want to get ahead,” said Gino, a native of West Springfield.

Their weekends consist largely of catching up on housework and errands. They occasionally get to sleep in.

Kim said she misses the friendliness of the folks back in Maine. She and her husband go back to visit three or four times a year, she said after dinner.

“I’d like to get back more often, but the ride seems to get longer every time,” she said. “The bottom line is, I’d love to get back to Maine, I really would. But I’d have to convince Gino.”

The couple’s combined income exceeds $120,000. A move to Maine likely would mean pay cuts of several thousand each, assuming they could even find jobs in their field.

According to the 2000 Census, the median income for a Penobscot County household is $34,274. In Hartford County, it is $50,756.

French connection

Maine’s French connection with central Connecticut isn’t what it used to be, according to Guy Dubay, a historian and retired educator from Madawaska.

What had been a trickle of people leaving the St. John Valley for work became a flood around World War II. For the French-speaking residents of the valley, Connecticut was a hot spot because of wartime employment and other jobs available in its mills and factories.

Connecticut also appealed to young women, Dubay noted. Limited to being “maids, washerwomen, nuns or teachers” back home, they could be financially independent in their early 20s, if they left Maine.

St. Francis native Theresa Ouellette, who moved to Connecticut in 1954, agreed.

“There were a lot more jobs for women here,” said Ouellette, who found clerical work at a law firm and insurance company.

Her friend, Van Buren native Lorette Nadeau, made the move in 1942. She landed a job at a Colt firearm plant.

Yet another reason many left was that wartime government support for Aroostook County’s potato farmers began to wind down in the early 1950s, which made farm life a little harder, Dubay said.

The migration continued after the war, as returning veterans used the skills they learned in the military to get jobs that fetched good salaries in Connecticut.

Farmers’ sons and daughters

“These were farmers’ sons and daughters. They were used to hard work and they weren’t locked into the union mentality,” Dubay said. Their work ethic made them attractive to Connecticut employers. Korean War veteran Dick Chasse, his wife, Anne, and his sister and brother-in-law, Loretta and Lucien Clavette, were part of the migration back then.

Now retired, all four moved to Hartford from the St. John River Valley in the 1940s and 1950s. Both couples now live in East Hartford, in middle-class homes about three miles apart.

“There weren’t a lot of jobs up home,” said Dick Chasse during a recent interview at his home on Chipper Drive. So in 1948, at the age of 15, he headed for Hartford.

“I picked potatoes to make the money to come down here,” he said. “Gas cost 17 cents a gallon then. We’d get a group of five guys together and hire a taxi. It cost us $20.”

Before he left, he earned $15 a week at a grocery store. His first job in Hartford – picking up and distributing sterile instruments at a hospital – paid nearly $30 a week. “And they gave us breakfast and lunch,” he said.

Social clubs

Older people such as Ouellette and Nadeau enjoy going to the French social clubs in the area to meet their friends. They are a remnant of the days when the language was more important than it is today.

It was a Friday evening in February and the joint was jumping. It was karaoke night at the French Social Circle at 373 Main St., across the street from Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford.

Half lounge, half game room, the clubhouse is a home away from home for Greater Hartford’s Franco-American population. There, they can speak French – or English with an accent – in comfort, have a few drinks, take turns at the karaoke machine or play cards.

Roger Dube, who grew up in a family of 10 in Grand Isle, is among the many former Maine residents who regularly drop in. A machinist by trade, he left Maine in 1971, a month after graduating from high school in Van Buren.

At the time, he said, Fraser Papers, the St. John Valley’s major employer, was in the midst of a bitter strike and his job prospects looked poor. Dube joined “four or five” brothers already in Connecticut.

“It worked out OK,” Dube said, shouting over the noise.

Dwindling numbers

In recent years, Guy Dubay, the historian, said, the number of northern Mainers moving to the Hartford area has dropped, largely due to the advent of birth control. Until then, families with 10 or 12 children were common. Today, the norm is two or three.

Migration still goes on, Dubay said, but not to the extent it used to. “I think things changed because the numbers changed, and by that I mean the numbers in the families.

“They’re still leaving, but a good bunch of them are going to Portland, Boston and other places,” Dubay said, adding, “I don’t think French is much of a factor anymore.”

Dale Soucy and his wife, Jane, are among the current generation of St. John Valley natives who continue to find their way to central Connecticut.

Like many others before them, the two were able to get established relatively quickly because of the Franco-American family network already in place. Jane had two sisters in Connecticut, and Dale had an uncle and some cousins.

When the couple moved in 1993 to the Hartford area, they stayed temporarily with Jane’s sister, Linda Cormier, who works for the Otis Elevator Co., before they bought a home in Bristol.

When Linda made the move earlier, she had stayed with an aunt and uncle, who since have come back to Maine.

Jane, a 1989 graduate of Madawaska High with an associate degree in business from Northern Maine Technical College, said she and Dale left northern Maine because there was little work there and they wanted a change of pace.

Dale, a graduate of Van Buren District Secondary School, found a job as an ironworker for United Steel of East Hartford, where he earns $40,000 to $50,000 a year.

Jane first landed a position with a small insurance agency, and then moved on to a family-owned computer store in Bristol where she handles office work. In addition, the store’s owner taught her how to repair computers.

The allure of the big city includes more stores for shopping, and “you don’t have everyone in your business,” said Jane

“We do miss everyone, though” she conceded. “It’s nice to go back.”

The couple visits the valley about twice a year, usually for Christmas and in the summertime. Travel has become more challenging now that she and Dale have two children, ages 21/2 and 3 months old.

Seeking a way home

Despite the prosperity many found in Connecticut, the transplants are a group that “always carries a piece of Maine with them. After working there for 30 or 40 years, they’ve bankrolled enough to come back up here and live like millionaires,” Dubay said with a chuckle.

The Chasses and Clavettes long to return to Maine and continue to scour the Internet for houses for sale. But both couples are leery of Maine’s harsher weather, the longer distances they’d have to drive to shop and visit doctors and higher income taxes.

“In Maine, if you’re retired and you have a pension, they tax your pension,” said Anne Chasse, who worked at the Underwood Typewriter Co. factory and then for Aetna Insurance.

“Your heart is always back there,” said Loretta Clavette, retired from the state motor vehicles department. “That’s why we’re in a dilemma. We don’t know what to do.”

By way of comparison, her income tax calculations for last year showed a total due of $524 – before the $500 deduction for which she was eligible. She would have paid about $1,900 in taxes on the same income in Maine, she said.

“I know a lot of people who said they’d move back in a minute if there was a Wal-Mart in Madawaska,” added Dick Chasse. “If grandpa had left us a farm, I probably would have never left.”

Tomorrow: Choosing the good life