Those Were The Days
There was a frontpage story by Billy Baker in the Globe last Sunday about Ski Bradford in Haverhill. Bradford reminds me of Mt. Tom. A small ski area with a couple of lifts, snowmaking, and night skiing. They call Bradford the biggest babysitter on the North Shore, which is what Mt. Tom was to Holyoke in its heyday too. I wonder how many kids learned to ski at Mt. Tom.
Daniel O’Connell’s Sons, the construction company founded by my great-great grandfather, originally bought the Mt. Tom property to use as a rock quarry. It had hundreds of acres of the best trap rock in America. Back then if you had access to trap rock you could win major highway construction projects. My dad was the vice president of O’Connell’s and he ordered the purchase of a big rock crusher from Canada. But they never crushed any rock. Dr. Bob O’Malley, who was an avid skier, talked my cousin Dan O’Connell into ditching the quarry idea and putting the mountain to a better public use as a ski area. So they built that instead. My old man sold the crusher and he and cousin Dan told Jimmy Landers, the Holyoke forestry chief, that there wasn’t going to be a quarry.
Mt. Tom operated as a ski area from 1962 to 1998. I worked there year-round in the seventies. Generations of people have great memories of the place. Unfortunately, things happened, the family lost control of the mountain, and the new owners used their political influence to bamboozle the land court in Boston into believing the quarry designation was grandfathered in, even though they never crushed a single stone on the premises. At the time, the one guy left who could tell the true story was my father, but he was intentionally excluded from the hearing. Had he been allowed to speak, I believe Mt. Tom might still be around today.
Anyway, after reading the Ski Bradford story, I started thinking about the last-ditch effort we put up to save Mt. Tom years ago, when we developed a grassroots campaign with the theme “Mt. Tom. I Don’t Dig It.” Those stickers and lawn signs were everywhere and that effort generated enough commotion to stop the dynamiting of Mt Tom. But it was too late. Those crooked bastards had already quarried twelve acres. It was all about greed. Hey, you can destroy a mountain, but you’ll never destroy the memories.
Keep your dukes up.
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