What Happened to Worcester?
A central Massachusetts city enabled the author’s ancestors to move into the good life of the middle class. That move is more complicated now.
By ADAM DAVIDSON
APRIL 27, 2016
The house existed, in my mind, as an idea, almost a dream, before I ever discovered the actual place: “Bumpa’s house,” the home of my father’s grandfather. It represented, in the telling of my father and other older relatives, the kind of place you’d get to live in if you worked hard. It was huge, on a hill, with a big yard, and every Christmas it was filled with toys: “Bicycles and skis and basketballs,” my dad, Jack, now 79, recalled. “And a croquet set.”
On Zillow these days, its value is estimated at just over $200,000, which happens to be almost exactly the median price for an existing house in the United States. This seems fitting. For my father’s family, the dreams fulfilled by this house had meant a climb from bare subsistence to the middle. This house was the middle; Worcester, where the house still stands, was the middle. The life that Bumpa and Narny built here was the middle. And that, to them and to their children and grandchildren, was a triumph, the goal of a good life.
Having studied the American economy for years, I’ve often reflected on how much my father’s family perfectly models the middle-class story — how closely the details of their lives illustrate the bigger economic forces around them. The way I read economic history, the middle class was a driving force in the American economy for about a century, starting in the second half of the 1800s. Its growth created a virtuous circle: The more people moved into the middle, the more money they made and spent, and the richer the country became, which made more room for more people to move into the middle too.
But in learning about my family’s economic history, I’ve also come to understand how deeply their story is embedded in the history of a place, of one particular city created by and for the middle class. When I mention Worcester to people from New England, they often give a knowing nod or laugh — this unlovely, down-on-its-luck city of dead industry and collapsing buildings. But Worcester was an engine for betterment until the middle of the 20th century, a magical place that transformed lost and impoverished lives.
A few weeks ago, I called my dad to relate what I had learned about his grandparents, George and Mildred Bestick. He told me he knew almost nothing about them before they got to Worcester, where they had settled by 1917. Bumpa and Narny existed as if they had no history. As a child, all my dad knew was that the Bestick name was Irish and that Narny, born Mildred Bailey, came from an old, proud New England family with Mayflower ancestry. They were respectable, clearly. Just look at the massive house and Bumpa’s three-piece suits and Narny’s quiet devotion to her Baptist church.
Only recently, I learned that this respectability was actually self-reinvention, built on top of origins in poverty and chaos. My great-grandparents’ economic journey was one that’s harder to make today, in part because there are fewer “middle” cities now. Even during the middle-class heyday of the 20th century, they couldn’t have done it without Worcester.
