|
The
Derby Club
By Eugene F. Michalenko
The following article is reprinted from the Adams Historical
Society Newsletter April 1999 and posted to this website with permission of
the author.
Eighty portraits
of men hang on the south wall of “The Grille” at 77 Summer Street in Adams,
Massachusetts. The people who know the collection of photographs call it
“The Derby Club.” The photos are faded and water has damaged a portion of
their mounting. Worst things could have happened to the it while hanging on
a bar room wall since the early 1930s.
I became seriously
interested in it when I saw it missing. I asked Danny Paciorek, present
owner of The Grille, what happened to it. It had fallen off the wall and the
glass broke. He was keeping it in the former dentist office of Dr. Van Epen
connected to the bar. I offered to repair it. While doing so, I copied and
recorded as much of it as possible. That was in 1989.
Approximately 70
years ago, an unknown photographer took 80 portraits of men wearing the same
hat. Someone mounted those photos on a red board and identified them with a
first initial and a last name. This is a rare communication from the past;
photos are not usually labeled. For the Adams Historical Society, a
collection of 80 identified faces are worth more than a thousand unknown
ones. This collection is even more valuable and rare because it reveals and
preserves a segment of the Adams population that didn’t keep records—men who
frequented a speakeasy during Prohibition.
Searching for their identities
A face and a name
is just the tip of an individual’s iceberg. Most people have jobs, get
married, have a family, die and leave behind a record in the town clerk’s
office. Through these public records I’ve been able to trace the lives of 73
members of The Derby Club.
I prepared the
list of names that label the photos and gave it to the Adams Town Clerk’s
office requesting the death date of any male who was of adult age in the
late 1920s. Sydney DelDebbio and Barbara Bennett in the clerk’s office
researched the names and returned the list with the death dates for
three-quarters of the men. With these dates Brad Despres, a historical
society volunteer, found the obituaries printed in The Transcript, the local
newspaper and photocopied them from the microfilm reader in the Adams Free
Library.
Talks
with living members
When I started
this project, there were several members of the Derby Club still alive. I
interviewed three of them and heard three different stories.
Walter Kleiner
talked with me in 1989 and said that the photos were taken at 70 Summer St.,
a location two doors south of White Eagle Printing Co. Some readers will
remember this address as part of Jacob Wineberg’s Summer Street location of
Adams Super Market, presently occupied as storage for Standard Furniture.
Mr. Kleiner repeated a story I heard from John H. Wilk, former Adams
postmaster and third generation owner of The Grille. The
restaurant/speakeasy had a photo booth in the corner and customers were
invited to have their photos taken wearing the derby. Mr. Kleiner said the
place was owned by two men, Henry (Gagne) Gardner and Tony Surowiec. Gardner
ran the restaurant in the front and Surowiec served drinks in the back.
The second club
member I interviewed was Dr. Joseph Wilk. In a telephone conversation, I
told him about his photograph and where it hung. He blustered over the
phone, “No photograph of me is hanging in any bar room.” I invited him to
look at it. When he did, he was puzzled. He had no recollection of the photo
being taken and no knowledge of its existence.
In autumn, 1997, I
had hoped to interview Tony “Skupi” Kuza but while I procrastinated he left
Adams to winter with family in the South. I planned to contact him on his
return but due to bad health, he decided to stay in the South. He returned
to Adams in May, 1998 to close up his house and unexpectedly died here. At
that time, I mistakenly thought that he was the last living member of the
Derby Club.
The
discovery of “H. Kalisz”
The third
interviewee was Henry Kalisz. Until I met him in the summer of 1998, the “H.
Kalisz” listed above the photo in the Derby Club had been a mystery. There
were three Henry Kaliszes in Adams at one time. I found two of them in death
records at the town clerk’s office and didn’t know that a third one existed
because he was still alive. Of the other two, one had lived on Conrad Street
but was too young. The other one was Judge Henry Kaliss, (an Americanized
version of the Polish name Kalisz). His age fit, but his face didn’t match
the photograph.
I learned of the
living Henry Kalisz from his neighbor, James Loughman. To the best of my
knowledge the entire Derby Club had been dead but here was one more chance
to interview one of its members.
Mr.
Kalisz was 91 years old and had a clear memory of The Derby Club. He even
owned a duplicate of his portrait which had been made into a button. His
story differed from Walt Kleiner’s. He said the speakeasy was in the present
day location of Domino’s Pizza at 78 Summer Street which is two doors north
of White Eagle Printing Co. Food wasn’t served there; it was just a
Prohibition era speakeasy. Henry recalled the open disregard for the law.
People came and went through the front door like it was a normal business
establishment except on Sundays when everyone used the back door. He did not
remember the place ever being raided by the police. This was not due to
memory loss, but to the best of his knowledge, the bar operated with no
hindrance from the law enforcement agencies.
 He agreed with
Walt Kleiner, who said that the speakeasy was owned by Gardner and Surowiec,
and he added that Herold and Surowiec, the first two men at the top of The
Derby Club photo, operated it. Later, Herold bought the interest of Surowiec
who subsequently went into business with John S. Wilk, the second generation
owner of The Grille. This explains how The Derby Club moved across the
street and why the collection of portraits is still in existence today.
Mr. Kalisz,
however, offered a different version of the photographs’ origins. He
recalled an itinerant photographer who stayed in town for a period of time.
He thought that the photographer may have worked for drinks. That the photos
were taken by a human and not a machine has some validity when you look at
how the men pose, the lighting and the composition of the photographs which
seem to have more attention given them than what would randomly occur in a
photo booth.
In a conversation
with Leonard Wilk, brother to John H. Wilk, he offered the possibility that
the photographer was the same one who came through town occasionally and
photographed children on a pony.
As for memories of
individuals in the club, Mr. Kalisz said Bill Dynes and Harry Partridge,
both located in the top row, worked part-time in the place. Dynes was a
substitute bartender and Partridge (former fire chief) was the bookkeeper.
When
I asked him about “J. Sunday”, someone whose death record I could not find,
he laughed and said, “That’s Joe Niedziela.” Sunday is the translation of
his last name. When I retold this story to somebody at the bar in the Saints
Hall, they laughed too and said that Joe was appropriately called “Sunday”
because he set up a “before hours” bar in a hotel room at the old Greylock
Hotel on Sunday mornings when drinks couldn’t be legally served.
Derby
Club demographics
After reviewing
the obituaries of the club members, a picture emerges of an average male
resident of Adams since women aren’t included in this portrait gallery. It
is unfortunate that they are not. Is it possible that women didn’t frequent
the place; or worse, were they not welcome?
Of the 73 men
whose identity I have found, only 15 died outside of Adams. Of those 15,
eight died in Berkshire County and six lived most of their lives in Adams
but died elsewhere in retirement. Only one, Harry Ernst, moved away and
never came back. Presumably, the seven men whose identity I am not able to
verify could have left Adams or never lived here. Maybe one of them is the
photographer.
Two-thirds of the
men lived to retirement age. The largest number of them died in their
seventies. Three of them lived into their nineties, two died in their
thirties and two in their forties.
Two-thirds
of them
were born in Adams. Thirteen were born in Europe or Canada and seven were
born in the USA, but not in Adams.
Three-quarters of
the men married. Eleven men remained single. Of the married men, three times
as many had children as did not.
The nationalities
of the men reflects the population of the Summer Street neighborhood and of
Adams. The following ethnic groups are represented in the order of the
largest number to the smallest: Polish, German and French tie for second
place, Irish/Scot, English and Jewish.
The occupations of
the men is both surprising and expected. The largest group were
self-employed merchants or tradesmen. The second largest group were
employees of the Berkshire Mills and the third largest were employees of the
General Electric Co.
What’s the meaning?
Derby Club members were ordinary
men living under unusual circumstances. Most of them were respectable,
hard-working, family men who became “criminals”
when they violated the laws governing controlled substances. Is The Derby
Club a portrait of protestors who defied the Prohibition, or is it a
portrait of drinking buddies who were regulars at a local bar on Summer
Street? Whatever the importance, or lack of it, that can be attached to
these photos hanging on a bar room wall, they remain a unique and historical
remembrance of a bunch of guys who made a permanent record of themselves.
I’m happy to help preserve this memory of everyday people pursuing one of
the small pleasures in life.
|
