LAST CALL: THE PASSING OF THE PAWTUCKETVILLE SOCIAL CLUB

Henri Marchand

The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people’s more serious involvement in other spheres…the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends.  They are the heart of a community's social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.  

—Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

The Pawtucketville Social Club (PSC), founded in 1897 by Franco-Americans, was incorporated in 1914. It served as a neighborhood “third place” for 125 years and five generations. Its members fought in six wars and elected twenty-five U.S. presidents and seventy-one Lowell mayors.

The Club was sustained by a long line of familial members—sons and grandsons and great-grandsons, daughters and brothers, sisters and cousins.  Brothers in blood and brothers in arms, veterans of wars from the Spanish-American War to Vietnam that joined in generational waves.  They were neighborhood friends and fellow church members, owners and patrons of small neighborhood businesses, and political aspirants.

But on Sunday, January 29, 2023, after 125 years, the PSC held a final party.  Last call, for those in attendance and for this neighborhood landmark, came around 9 p.m.

I

Although my grandfather, father, uncles, and cousins were members of the PSC, I did not continue the unbroken familial membership that others had but joined the Club just about eight months before it closed.  As I couldn’t time-travel, I spent hours poring over nearly a hundred years of Club minutes and several late afternoons talking with the last of the regulars and researching its long past and recent history as I attempted to get a sense of what the Club might have been like and of the “third place” it became for the Franco community and the Pawtucketville neighborhood over the years.

The Club began on November 20, 1897 as a civic organization to assist recent and new French-Canadian immigrants with assimilating into their new community.  Its purpose was “the social, recreation and intellectual advancement of its members.”¹ It quickly developed as an advocacy group for public improvements to the area and, increasingly, a supporter of political causes and candidates.  Beginning with the repeal of Prohibition, it also became a neighborhood watering hole.  While Oldenburg’s definition of third places focuses mainly on public spaces that are neither home nor work, the PSC, although private and limited for most of its history to men of French descent, in many ways provided the elements of a “good home” and “the heart of a community’s social vitality (and) grassroots of democracy.”  Entry was low-cost (dues in 1924 were .40 per month; in 2023 they were $40 per year).  Active involvement was encouraged, conversation lively, with the Club’s atmosphere for the most part friendly and playful.

As was experienced by similar institutions, declines in Club memberships along with increased operating costs and changes in social habits and traditions over the past couple of generations have all contributed to the PSC’s closure.  Another factor was the secondary out-migration of Franco residents who moved on to the neighboring suburbs of Dracut, Tyngsboro, and beyond, seeking quieter places away from the increasingly automobile and student-congested area hard by the nearby college, UMass Lowell (UML).  UML began as a school supporting Lowell’s textile industry through the 1940s.  It evolved to serve the emerging post-World War II tech industries and later merged with Lowell State Teachers’ College to form ULowell.  It is now part of the UMass system.  Beginning in the late 1960s, nearby owner-occupied housing—six-unit tenements, three-deckers, two families, and ample turn-of-the-century single families, many built by Franco-American contractors—declined as long-time residents retired or passed, and the homes were increasingly purchased by absentee investors.  The neighborhood became less attractive to the boomer generation who seemed to hear the call by blues rock band Canned Heat in their song “Going Up the Country” even if “country” meant neighboring suburbs.

Overall, the PSC’s arc mirrored national and local trends in the decline of civic, social, and fraternal organizations.  Listings of organizations, Clubs, and societies in the 1920 Lowell City Directory includes twenty pages with about seventeen listings per page.

In his book, Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam studied the trends of civic and social organizational involvement.  Nationally, he notes, membership in communal groups rose steadily from 1900 to 1930, dipped through the Depression, then began to rise again beginning in 1940 before flattening out in the late 1950s.  “The two decades following 1945 witnessed one of the most vital periods of community involvement in American history,” he wrote.  “By the late 1950s, however, this burst of community involvement began to tail off, even though absolute membership continued to rise for a while.  By the late 1960s and early 1970s membership growth began to fall further behind population growth.  By century’s close the massive postwar boom in membership rates in these organizations had been eliminated.”

Locally, new organizations serving new groups have been established; however, the overall number of organizations has mirrored Putnam’s findings as newer generations seem less inclined to join formal organizations.  In its latter years, the PSC’s “rough and tumble” image was another limiting factor to its ability to attract potential members.

Without the zeal and founding mission of its early years and with no new blood to carry the organization into a sixth generation, it ultimately became financially infeasible for the PSC to continue and what members remained made the decision to close.  Unable or unwilling to change their business model, the Club’s fate was sealed in late 2022, and members voted to dissolve it and put the building up for sale.

II

For most of my life I lived within a block of the Club or walked past it on my way to grammar school, the nearby corner market, the barber shop, the pharmacy and to work at a restaurant across the street.  I played wiffle ball and tag football with friends in the parking lot across the street and basketball two doors down in Bourgeois Park (originally created as a volleyball court in the early 1960s and used by PSC league members).  All the while I interacted with Club members along the street.  But the only time I entered the Club was when it was a neighborhood polling place or for a neighborhood association meeting.  As a kid, when my dad was a member, I attended Club Christmas parties at the closely associated but also now closed, Ste Jeanne d’Arc Church Hall.

I was given the PSC’s minutes from 1920 to 1978, a treasure trove of not only the Club’s month-to-month history but of the lives of its founding community and its members and the changing neighborhood geography and dynamics over twelve decades.  Records from 1897 to 1920 were not found.  However early information was gleaned from Richard Santerre’s history of the PSC, which mined early issues of L’Etoile, a local Franco-American newspaper.

The leather-bound, musty minutes tell of a Club active from the 1920s with weekly meetings and growing membership rolls.  Members learned parliamentary process and gained experience in public speaking, with lots of social interaction, compromise, and mutual support as well as negotiations of member conflicts.

As late as the mid-1960s, membership, as outlined in the newly accepted (August 19, 1966) Constitution, was restricted to “any male person, twenty-one years of age or over and considered Franco-American.  One of the parents must be of Franco-American extraction.”  Applicants were required to be endorsed by two members and had to pay $4 in dues, refundable if the applicant was rejected.  The purpose of the Club was for “the social recreation and intellectual advancement of its members.”² The first non-Franco member was John Flaherty, admitted in 1975.  Women were allowed to join shortly thereafter although available minutes do not list any women applicants, and the final entry is on May 16, 1978.  That meeting was canceled due to lack of a quorum.

III

I meet Jim Rutledge, a member since 1978, at the Club on a cool and cloudy day in early January, 2023 at 5:30 p.m.  I use my pass card for the first time to unlock the front door.  The interior is dark and my eyes need a moment to adjust.  The bar is along the right.  The middle of the room has three tables in a line from front to back.  Each has four chairs.  The floor is black and white tiles.  Beyond the bar area is a larger open space with “PSC” in contrasting floor tiles in the center.

Rutledge is at the bar with Bill Callahan.  Brad Bowden is bartending.  Otherwise, the Club is empty.  Bowden bartends as needed, retreating to his recliner at the end of the bar between requests.  He has a long ZZ Top beard and shoulder-length hair and wears a baseball cap and jeans with a length of clothesline serving as a belt.  Lean and quiet, he reminds me of Forrest Gump during his running years.

The bar top is marble, the back bar lit coolly with fluorescent lights.  There’s a thinning inventory of standard, half-empty liquor bottles.  Three wide-screen TVs broadcast a specialty car auction program.

Across the bar is a pool room with a 1957 Brunswick pool table reputed to be the one that Beat writer and one-time neighborhood resident Jack Kerouac played on.  His father, Leo, applied for membership on April 7, 1932 while the family lived at 16 Phoebe Avenue.³  Three years later Leo is listed as residing nearby at 35 Sarah Avenue.  At one point Kerouac lived across the street in the corner block at Gardner Avenue, about the time he wrote the opening pages of Dr. Sax:

In the dream of the wrinkly tar corner I saw it, hauntingly, Riverside Street as it ran across Moody and into the fabulously rich darknesses of Sarah Avenue and Rosemont the Mysterious…

Kerouac made the intersection of Moody and Riverside, a block away from the Club, into a compass of sorts, the entrance to Pawtucketville and the point from which his imagination traveled up Moody Street to “the Dracut border wild woods.”

The PSC became one of Kerouac’s Lowell haunts, and his fans have made it a stop on their pilgrimages to Lowell and annual celebrations of his life and work.

The Club’s walls are dark pine.  Interior windows between the bar and pool room allow bar patrons a view of who’s playing at “Jack’s table.”  A Bud Light fixture illuminates the pool table.  Off this room is a “Designated Smoking Room” with another pool table and bar.

The smell of stale cigarette smoke permeates the room, maybe from the smoking room or from lingering residue in the paneling and ceilings after years of unrestricted smoking.  The bar is “cash only.”

Oldenburg suggests that informal neighborhood gathering places like barbershops are “remarkably similar to a good home…the heart of a community’s social vitality,” and “the grassroots of democracy.”  He sadly concludes that they are “a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.”

“This has been more than a Club, it’s a society,” says Rutledge.  With his son Ty, he owns Professional Barbers of Lowell (formerly Dufresne’s Barber Shop), a three-chair shop a few doors down from the Club and the last of the street’s original businesses.  “You could call anyone, anytime if you needed something,” he says. “It was all Pawtucketville people.  Roland [Dufresne] brought me here the first night I worked for him.”

Roland Dufresne was a second-generation barber and regular Club member who hired Rutledge in 1978 and recruited him, as he did others, as a Club member.  Although retired, Rutledge still comes to the shop on Fridays to take care of his long-time regulars and to keep up on Club and community news.  Over the years Rutledge became involved with Club governance and recently resigned as Treasurer but continued to carry on Dufresne’s unofficial membership recruitment duties.  Rutledge’s last customer of the day is usually invited to join him for a drink at the Club.  Third places, writes Oldenburg, are:

Dominated by their regulars but not necessarily in a numerical sense.  It is the regulars, whatever their numbers on any given occasion, who feel at home in a place and set the tone of conviviality.  It is the regulars whose mood and manner provide the infectious and contagious style of interaction and whose acceptance of new faces is crucial.  Every regular was once a newcomer and the acceptance of newcomers is essential to the sustained vitality of the third place.⁴

Callahan graduated from the nearby Lowell Technological Institute in 1965 with a degree in electrical engineering.  He signed up for the Coast Guard, he says, after getting his draft letter right after graduation.  He’s gregarious and enthusiastic as he speaks about the Club.  Of LTI he says “They hated me there.”  To which Jim retorts with a laugh, “We hate you here!”  Callahan laughs.

Callahan became a member in 2006/07.  He lost use of an eye as a child and wears an eye patch.  His nickname is Patch.

All week, he says, “I [would] look forward to the weekends at the Club.”  His voice is at once melancholic and excited as he exclaims, “I have three nights left!”

Callahan says that he will miss “the folks, the camaraderie.  It was a place you could go and know you were among friends.  But you had to be able to laugh at yourself.”  Callahan laughs easily and often.

“Did they like me every minute of the day?  No! I talk too much,” he says with a chuckle.  “It was a very friendly, safe place.  Oh, someone may pick on you but it was in jest.  I immediately felt I belonged.”

Rutledge agrees.  “The sense of belonging, even if you didn’t come in all the time, you knew they would accept you when you did.”

“I used to come down and dance with the wives,” says Callahan.  He notes proudly that, “I was a good dancer!”, as he sips his beer. “It wasn’t a pickup joint.  You were safe here.” His face lights up as he describes looking forward to long-ago weekends.  “I had the Club.”

After a while I realize that no one at the bar has a phone in hand; what ensues is face-to-face debates and recollections of good times and expressions of regret at the passing of their special place, remembrances of old friends and times and ever lively bullshitting sessions.  The mood, as Oldenburg notes of third places, is “playful.”  He goes on to state that “Those who would keep the conversation serious for more than a minute are almost certainly doomed to failure.  The unmistakable mark of acceptance into the company of third place regulars is not that of being taken seriously, but that of being included in the play forms of their association.”⁵

In the 1960s and 1970s the Club had 500 members according to Rutledge.  Richard Santerre, in his 1972 history of the Club, claims it had close to 1,000 members that year.  At the Club’s seventy-fifth anniversary there were members representing at least three generations as well as Joseph Payette, the last surviving 1914 charter signatory.

As it readies for its final days, its membership is down to ninety chartered members and a debate over the total of current members breaks out between Rutledge, Callahan, and Bowden.

After a spirited discussion, they finally agree that there are now 105 regular members.

My membership card number is 207 so I figure their debated number, given attrition, is close.  On a Friday at 5 p.m. in years past the Club would have been packed, but they note that just about twenty-four members now come in on a regular basis.

A decline in intergenerational membership seems to have begun with a “changing of the guard in the mid-80s,” says Rutledge. “All the old timers who didn’t get us moved to the Passe Temps Club.”  The Passe Temps Club, the last active Franco-American Club, was founded in 1902 and is located on Moody Street in the heart of what was Little Canada.

“Those goddamned bikers,” adds Callahan with a shrug and a chuckle summarizing the older members’ attitude.  Over the years other Franco Clubs closed—the Lafayette Club on Fletcher Street (incorporated on December 4, 1913), Club des Citoyens-Américains (CCA) on Market Street (founded in January, 1898), Centralville Social Club on Lakeview Avenue (founded in 1905), and the Corporation of the Members of the Catholic Association (CMAC) on Pawtucket Street (founded in 1878).  Talking about the closures and demolition of Little Canada in the mid-1960s, Callahan suggests that for these Clubs, “urban renewal was a disaster” as members were scattered from their immediate neighborhood roots.

           Dick Lavallee, eighty, joins us, and Rutledge challenges him to a game of eight ball, and we move into the pool room.  Lavallee also came to the Club as a guest of Roland Dufresne and joined in the 1990s.  As the pair play, they banter and bust chops while Callahan and I watch from the sidelines.

“I just like to piss him off,” says Rutledge laughing after he leaves Lavallee with a tough shot.  There are a lot of missed shots along with a few that are either lucky or well played.

“What the fuck!” cries Rutledge after he misses a shot.  To no one in particular he asks with a laugh, “Are we sucking today?!”

A couple of shots later he’s all smiles as he nails a long, opposite pocket shot to sink his final ball.  Now both Lavallee and Rutledge are going for the eight ball and the win.

Between shots Rutledge chalks his cue stick and talks about the Club’s musical events, noting that it hosted many bands through the 80s and 90s.  “The Flaherty Brothers Band was the house band,” he says, adding that, “all the local blues bands” played the Club.

Rutledge booked the bands and served as house DJ.  He recalls all the charitable and social parties in addition to band nights over the years—fundraisers for homeless veterans, Toys for Tots, House of Hope.  In the 1950s and 1960s Christmas parties for Club members’ children were held at the SJA Parish Hall.  Later, when the church connection frayed, these were held at the Club.  At some point that tradition also faded as another tradition, motorcycle runs, grew.  Though the biker vibe remains, the poker runs, during which bikers played running games of cards between participating bars, have also passed.  The runs began and ended at the PSC.  Participants received a card at each stop and best poker hand won.  Rutledge notes that those who won, “would usually donate [their] winnings…to the charity the run was for.”

Rutledge recalls that when the Club was sponsoring motorcycle rides in the 1980s, “a lot of Hells Angels started to come in.  They used to go on bike runs with us,” he says.  But the presence of rival motorcycle Club members who were also regular PSC members created a problem.  “We talked to them [the Angels] and told them that they couldn’t wear their colors,” says Rutledge.  “They seemed to understand.  [We] didn’t run into any trouble, and the Angels just stopped coming around.”

“When I came on, most members were Vietnam veterans,” says Rutledge after his last shot.

“I’m gonna miss this guy right here,” interjects Lavallee pointing to Jim, “going to miss the bike rides, the bands we had here.”  He adds proudly, “I was the oldest member who rode a motorcycle!”

IV

There were some incidents and times that Rutledge notes cryptically in passing but about which he says with a chuckle, “we can’t talk about.”  There were at one time, according to another source who wished to remain anonymous, monthly “stag parties” with an honoree “groom.”  Even if the current realization is that these were crazy times and beyond the pale, they are remembered with a mixture of ruefulness and a certain fondness for things done in younger years.  Perhaps not so much by the wives or girlfriends of the “grooms.” On more than one occasion over the years, angry wives would call the Club looking for their tardy husbands.  Jim recalls a time when he was asked to remind a member that his curfew was 8 p.m.  As time passed and he reminded the member for a third or fourth time, the member pulled out a gun and shot the clock, declaring, “It ain’t eight-o’clock anymore, is​?”

Issues between members and their wives were nothing new nor were incidents of trouble.  On January 24, 1923 the minutes record that “two members broke into the Club during the night and let other non-members in to play cards for money.”  When confronted, the two members admitted their guilt.  Another member broke the lock in the lobby.  When he came before the board, he claimed he didn’t remember because he “was drunk at the time.”  All three members faced a motion to expel them from the Club.  They survived with a vote of twenty-one for expulsion and thirty-three against.⁶

On September 14, 1959, a complaint was lodged against a member “for causing commotion.  [He] claimed his cane was stolen [but] PD found nothing.”  The member was suspended for thirty days.  His wife asked that the Club not allow him to drink as “he drinks too much and causes trouble at home.”⁷

V

The Club’s beginnings were far less colorful than its later years and reflective of Victorian era mores and the Club’s devout French-Canadian Catholic heritage.

French-Canadians, beginning in 1860, arrived in waves, responding to the promise of work and a better life in Lowell’s then-booming textile industry.  They initially settled into a dense neighborhood of tenements hard by the mills.  It quickly became known as Little Canada, an area bounded roughly by a wall of brick mills to the east, the Merrimack River to the north and west, and Merrimack Street and Salem Streets to the south.  When the Moody Street Bridge was completed in 1896, directly connecting Little Canada to Pawtucketville (annexed from the neighboring town of Dracut in 1874 and still relatively pastoral) some again pulled up stakes and began to move out of Little Canada, over the river and up Moody Street a little over a half-mile away.

In Pawtucketville they and their fellow Franco-Americans settled in along the Moody Street spine seeking better living conditions—homes with more green space, more quietude, private bathrooms.  A new “village” developed on the edge of approximately 144 acres.  Unlike the earlier Colonial-era village along Mammoth Road accessed by an earlier bridge a third of a mile to the southwest, this area was still sparsely developed with open fields, sand banks, and swamps north of Moody Street.  The roads were as yet unpaved and unlit, and travel to this area was still either by trolley or horse and buggy.  The “village” quickly grew with development along and close to Moody Street and lots already platted out north, north-east of Moody Street in anticipation of more development.  It had all the necessary services within a few blocks—a blacksmith, grocers, cobblers, a lumberyard, tradesmen.

Moody Street once stretched from City Hall in the heart of downtown Lowell past the Passe Temps Club through the heart of Little Canada (most of which was razed in the mid-1960s) over the bridge into Pawtucketville, past the Textile School and the PSC, and up to the Dracut line.  It was dead-ended at Pawtucket Street in 1972.  The section of Moody Street north of the river was renamed Textile Avenue in 1947 and then University Avenue in 1975 as the now UMass Lowell school evolved over the years.

In 1897, a year after the Moody Street Bridge opened, the PSC began providing naturalization and English classes to assist the new immigrants to assimilate and become US citizens.  Created to advance the growing Franco population, it sought to encourage both assimilation into the larger society and the preservation the residents’ cultural heritage—their Catholic religion, French language, and social activities.  The Club quickly advocated for improved city services and became politically active.  Early on, Club members formed a committee to lobby the city to make improvements to infrastructure—streets and sidewalks, street lighting, improved trolley and mail service, and public safety.  The first meetings took place in an empty grocery store owned by Leon Gelinas and later in a blacksmith shop run by A. E. Columbe on Moody Street.⁸  Columbe is listed as a “horseshoer, blacksmith and carriage manufacturer” in the 1887 City directory.

On November 16, 1897 the Club was officially made permanent and elected its first officers—President J. W. Alexander (men’s furnishings), Vice-President Vital Robert (contractor/house builder), Treasurer Napoleon Milot (carpenter), Assistant Treasurer Napoleon Grandchamp (clerk), Secretary C. R. Daoust (journalist), and Assistant Secretary Jesse Alexander (clerk).  It was incorporated on April 17, 1914.

Men from all walks of life within the Franco community became members.  They were grocery store owners, bakers, cobblers, clerks, electricians, carpenters, undertakers and a casket maker, bankers, lawyers, pharmacists, house painters and printers, barbers and tailors, insurance agents, hardware store owners, loom fixers and weavers, bookkeepers, doctors, tool makers, department store owners, clerks, and janitors.  Several PSC founders were early developers of the area.  Members were active in local and state politics with seven serving as mayor and a number of others elected to city and state offices and appointed to public positions.

Early on, the Club held oratorical debates and lectures (topics included civil service, Thomas Jefferson, early American history, labor issues, and “the pros and cons of ‘the emancipation of women’”)⁹ and encouraged members to apply for citizenship.

Members came initially from the immediately adjacent multi-family housing: from three-deckers and tenements across the street to two-families around the corner and from a few blocks away as the population grew and prospered and the once-empty fields off of Moody Street were platted and planted with houses.

They also came back over the river from the old neighborhood, Little Canada, where newcomers from Quebec continued to arrive.  Increasingly, members came from other Lowell neighborhoods and from farther away, from the towns north of Pawtucketville—Dracut and Pelham.

And they almost all came with (or were quickly given) nicknames—Babe, Tiger, Kid, Rocky, Punchy, Joggin Joe, Monk, Saint, Coffee, Blackie, Boof, Duchy, The Professor, Patch, Bib, and Skip among others.

Eventually the PSC purchased the Columbe building, and in 1925 the Club was expanded to accommodate a growing membership.  On June 9, 1928 a fire did significant damage, and the building was reconstructed and bowling alleys installed.¹⁰  A rotation of other businesses continued to occupy the street-side storefronts for a number of years—a tailor, bakery, shoe repair shop, and market.

      On and off, the students of Lowell Textile Institute/Lowell Technological Institute (LTI), University of Lowell (UL), and UMass Lowell (UML), were allowed entry as guests or by membership only to be revoked when town/gown conflicts arose.

Sociologist Oldenburg defines third places as “places where people spend time between home … and work … where we exchange ideas, have a good time and build relationships.”¹¹  For over a hundred years the PSC fit this description albeit limited to Franco-Americans for most of its history.  Similar clubs were formed by Lowell’s Irish, Greek, Portuguese, and Polish immigrant communities.  Today, Lowell is known as a Gateway City, as newcomers from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and other regions continue to arrive and to find a new home, celebrate their culture, and engage in the process of assimilation.

From its founding to about the early 1970s, the Club had a close affinity with Ste Jeanne d’Arc Church located a few blocks away.  An early Sunday morning French High Mass and Communion breakfast were still part of the officer installation ceremony.  It began with a parade to the church and continued with a march back to the Club, where members would then spend a good part of the day in celebration.  The Club continued to make donations to SJA-affiliated organizations as well as a variety of other charitable groups.  In 1933, with the repeal of Prohibition, the Club sought a beer license.  Before applying, however, they consulted with the parish pastor who blessed the effort so long as they promised not to admit women.¹²

Like neighboring businesses, the Club was a regular stop for neighborhood residents into the 1970s.  They were part of the fabric of the community with shared histories, interests, and familial ties.  For retired members the day often began with coffee at the nearby Textile Lunch or Campus Restaurant.  Then maybe a stop at Gagnon’s Hardware Store a block away to pick up some nails or Lambert’s Market across the street for groceries.  At each stop they might also pick up neighborhood news and gossip.  Next door they could purchase shoes at Langlais Shoe Store and have them fixed across the street at Langlais Shoe Repair.  Additional conversations could be had at the two barbershops, Dufresne’s and Norm’s Style Shop, or several variety stores, all within a block of the Club.  By late afternoon workers and retirees who were members would head to the Club for a beer or a game of pool or to read the local papers in the Reading Room, all the while wrapping up the day with more conversations on topics large and small. During election years, candidates, escorted by a supportive Club member, made the obligatory stop seeking Franco-American votes.

      The PSC had regular and recurring annual activities—a routine of traditions and social, civic, and philanthropic initiatives.  Like the seasons, each year had unique and expected activities with temporary committees formed and dissolved with regularity.  The Club’s Activities Committee organized a wide range of sporting, social, and community events including movie nights, summer outings, fishing trips, and tournaments, Whist, bowling and cribbage tournaments, ping pong, volleyball, and pool leagues along with summer trips to Fenway Park (with a requisite beer keg on board the bus).  The Club also held blood drives, and when a member passed away, a committee was formed to officially represent the Club at his funeral.

Formal activities were augmented with impromptu, day-do-day social connections and interactions, games of cards and pool, bar chats and bowling in the downstairs lanes; there were monthly dances and movie nights.  What Oldenburg suggests is a key to third places’ attraction: “the urge to return, recreate, and recapture the experience.”

The Club created and recreated this experience over the years with a rich civic, social, political, and community life, played out along the straight line of its geographical link—Moody Street/Textile and University Avenues—from Pawtucketville to Little Canada and the mills.

VI

As the years and generations passed, the PSC continued to preserve its Franco-American cultural identity but also evolved to include more social events.  But, by the mid-1970s, after seventy-five years, the fifth generation, the “boomers” brought swift and dramatic change to the traditional culture of the Club.  Gone were the fedoras and topcoats worn by members and the bow ties and white shirts worn by the bartenders.  In came tee shirts and jeans and leather vests, long hair and beards, and rock-and-roll, and Harleys.  Motorcycle runs replaced Turkey Nights and Whist Parties as fundraisers for the Club’s causes.  Whereas previous members walked over from around the corner, the “outlaws” increasingly roared in from elsewhere on their Harleys.

The WWII and Korean War generations were aging and passing and being replaced by a generation that saw no need for bowties or Robert’s Rules.  Still, a few old-timers continued to call PSC home, and as the boomer cohort aged and mellowed themselves, the Club continued to change.  Rutledge recalls the last motorcycle run being held “sometime in 2021.”

Oldenburg writes that “the location of third places” is important.  “When informal gathering places are far removed from one’s residence, their appeal fades.”  He notes, writing of English pubs, that “Because so many pubs are situated among the homes of those who use them, people are there frequently, both because they are accessible and because their patrons are guaranteed the company of friendly and familiar faces.”

For most of its history PSC members simply walked, or took the trolley or bus, to the Club and back home.  Over time many moved away from the blocks around the Club where their families and early Club members settled.  First they migrated to the suburbs of Dracut and Tyngsboro then to the towns over the border in New Hampshire.  The frequency of their visits declined as they lost the energy they once had to drive back to the neighborhood, find parking, and party as late as they had in their youth.  Time took its toll in other ways as some members ended up in prison, and some died from years of youthful excesses, or inevitable age-related health issues.

By the start of the 21st century, new memberships began to dry up.  The post-boomer generations were not joining as others had.  New interests and new social interaction options caught their attention.  Bar hours reflected the decline in members’ ability or interest to stay late.  Closing time went from 1 a.m. to 8 p.m.

As reflected in the Club’s monthly meeting minutes, changes in attendance and past traditions appear to have begun in the mid to late 1970s.  There’s a notable change in the tone, structure, and details of recorded minutes.  At the same time there is a fading of older members making motions and holding office.  This decline overlaps with an increase in “boomer” applicants.  Indeed, another rise in applications coincides with the post-Vietnam War era as did earlier post-war increases.

The minutes cease to be recorded in bound books and no other monthly records have been found.  Leading up to the last recorded entry on May 16, 1978, several meetings had been cancelled and monthly committee reports end.

Many of the old guard, uneasy with the changes, looked back to their roots in Little Canada for that “third place” that reflected their experiences and interests.  They joined the Passe Temps Club, maybe the CCA, or the CSC over in Centralville.  Anniversary celebrations went from a bow-tied and gowned banquet with the Big Band sounds of the Charles Pelley Orchestra at the Speare House (seventy-fifth) to a jeans and t-shirt Club gathering with the Club’s house band, the Flaherty Brothers Band, a long-haired rock and roll band with a bare-chested lead singer (ninetieth).

Fundraising for charity continued, but by the 1980s it was motorcycle rides/poker runs for vets’ causes rather than the Whist parties for church and school.  While the pool and card tables remained, poker machines and juke boxes were introduced

VII

As the Club’s final days grow near, I meet with Jim Rutledge on Friday, January 13, 2023 for a full tour of the building.  We begin in the basement, which, like a long-lived family home, holds a collection of furniture, castoffs, and relics.

The basement has several rooms for utilities, office space, and storage.  There is an old walk-in cooler and various motorcycle parts.  A dismantled pool table leans against a wall.  Long gone are the three bowling lanes where my Uncle George had his first job as a pin boy.  I try to imagine the sights and sounds of cracking balls and pins and the crackling conversations flavored with residual hints of Franco accents as players teased and cursed in French and English, and my Uncle dodged flying pins between resets.

In the back corner is an office with a desk, file and storage cabinets, and miscellaneous items accumulated over the years.  In a gray metal cabinet we make an exciting discovery—the Club’s old records—leather notebooks filled with detailed meeting minutes, years of financial information, and Club history.  The earliest is from 1920 and is written in French.

As we leave the basement we pass boxes of old holiday decorations, and Jim notes that the members’ kids’ Christmas parties continued into the early ’90s.  “Joggin Joe was Santa Claus,” he says, describing a challenged member who would slow jog as he walked along the street, often “leaping” with one leg over hydrants.

The Club “was good people,” he says fondly.  “Rough and tumble place but good guys.”  But he admits that, “If you walked past here in the eighties, you probably wouldn’t come in, but if you did it was a good place.”  That would have been me, I think with a silent chuckle as I recall leather-clad members and “rough and tumble” Club stories passed along and around the neighborhood.

When he joined in 1978, Jim says, “The bartenders still had bowties and they were just starting to let women in.  Used to be all men, all French speaking.”  He’s not sure exactly when the all-male rule was changed.

As we finish our beers, Jim speculates that the decline in member visits in recent years was perhaps also due in part to friction between members, a rude bartender, as well as aging and dying members, and members moving further away from the heart of the neighborhood.  And he believes that changes in social habits, particularly among younger people who seem to not be into joining Clubs, has had an impact.

As we pass the bar on our way out, Jim pauses.  “I come in here and I remember all the people who passed away,” he says ruefully.  “I can still see them sitting at the bar.”

VIII

Two weeks later I return to the Club.  Its days are down to single numbers when I stop in on Friday, January 26 at 3 p.m. for another beer and to again absorb the residual ambiance and social interaction of “happy hour.”  Brad is off today, and Billy Gillic is bartending.

Billy, gregarious and animated, holds court as he serves up drinks along with non-stop banter filled with F-bombs and loud laughter.  He’s in his element.  There are four of us at the bar.

Tom Heinz, nicknamed “The Professor,” is a UMass Lowell groundskeeper.  He has a buzzed head and a long beard.  He sits to my left, two seats over.  Next to him is Phil.  A woman is at the far corner.

I order a Sam’s Octoberfest (It’s taken a while but I’ve overcome my self-consciousness of having a Sam’s vs. the house preference, Bud Light.)  I listen as everyone jabbers back and forth on a variety of subjects—Tufts/LGH, Billy’s upcoming surgery, his doctor using an iPhone to show him his x-rays, the Lottery and how there’s little trust in ticket scanners in convenience stores, Tom’s work at UML and his disdain for college students and “higher-ups.”  Tom is quiet as he sips his beer but then offers that he “hates working inside, worked outside all my life, except for a short time.”

Brad and his son arrive and sit to my right.  Soon two women and two men follow.  With Last Call looming, it’s the busiest the bar has been in a while.  About 4:45 p.m. Jim arrives with his son Cole.  We talk a bit then move to the “Kerouac” pool room.  We play two games, and we each win one game via a last shot scratch.  As we play, more members arrive, and the volume of chatter and laughter coming from the bar goes way up.  Three members retire to the “Smoking Room” adjacent to the pool room and sit at that bar talking and watching TV.

IX

Saturday, January 28, originally scheduled as the Club’s final day, is a sunny, cool day and a good one for Club members.  They have been given an extension to Sunday for last call.  I find a spot in the city parking lot across the street, and as this is much a memory trip, I recall that the lot was once a playground.  My earliest memory of that space is swinging on chair swings while my mother went into Lambert’s Market.  Years later the park was paved over, and I played whiffleball, tag football, and punchball between the cars with friends who all lived nearby, but none of whom joined the Club despite having family members who were Club members.

It’s 3:15 p.m., and the PSC’s facade center lies in the long shadow of the tenement building across the street.  The wings catch the late winter sun, the bricks glowing like embers.  It’s a pleasant image I have seen many times.

Brad is back behind the bar and serves me a beer.  The right side of the bar back has fewer bottles.  Brad wears a gray and black flannel jacket over a black Harley Davidson long-sleeved tee and a baseball cap.  He lets me know that Skip, the Treasurer, is downstairs cleaning out the office.  Jim has told Skip of my interest, and Skip okayed the transfer of any historic materials to me for research and to then donate them to the Mogan Cultural Center/UML Center for Lowell History.  I head to the basement.

Raymond “Skip” Beaudry is eighty-one years old and a 1960 graduate of St. Joseph’s High School.  He served in the Air Force from 1960 to 1965 and graduated from Lowell Technological Institute (LTI) in 1975.  He’s been a PSC member for fifty-nine years.

“I was home on leave a year before leaving the service.  Just turned twenty-one.  My father brought me in.  ‘You’re joining the Club,’ he said.  ‘I don’t join Clubs,’ I said.  ‘You’re going to pick me up when I get cocked!’ was his reply.”  So Skip joined.  He will be the Club’s last Treasurer and has a lot of work to do to wrap up the Club’s business. 

We talk as he sorts through files and Club paraphernalia stored in the basement.  Skip says that the real estate closing is scheduled for Monday.  He has a crew coming in Wednesday to haul away whatever is left in the basement.  He’s the right person for this task.

After graduating from LTI, Skip worked for RCA and left after fifteen years.  “Wang started a federal division to go after government contracts,” he says.  “I handled all contracts and finance in Lowell.”  He was recruited to move to Wang’s DC headquarters.

“I’m not a bar guy so this was a safe place,” says Skip.  “For me, I grew up with a lot of the [members].”  He rummages through cabinets and drawers and hands me a seventy-fifth anniversary souvenir program from 1972.  “It was a safe place,” he repeats, adding, “Sure, it had a few issues, but they were taken care of.”

Since the eighties the Club has been known for its biker atmosphere and weekend bike runs for fun and for charity.  These were popular outings and on bike-run days gleaming, expensive Harleys and other motorcycles lined both sides of the street side by side for two or three blocks.  When they took off and returned, the roar could be heard several blocks north and south of University Avenue.  Further back in the basement is a room with discarded bike parts, a large model motorcycle, and a smaller model made from wires which Skip grabs before we head back upstairs.  About ten people have come in and are drinking, mostly beers or shots, conversing and catching up.  Many have not been regulars in a while but have come for the “last calls.”  Rock music plays loudly on the digital jukebox, “Brad’s music,” someone says to no one in particular.

Skip hands Brad the miniature motorcycle he found in the basement.  I order another beer, but as I pull out my wallet, Brad waves me off.  “All set,” he says kindly.

Brad has a much mellower personality than Billy, and despite the number of members mingling, it’s relatively quiet for a while.  I seem to have become familiar and accepted as no one takes note of my presence even as I scribble notes.

The stream of arrivals swells, and the chatter gets louder with happy greetings and hugs.  Like a reunion.  The crowd spreads to the tables.  More people filter in, a steady parade that includes couples and a relatively narrow range of ages   Some look familiar, like long-ago classmates or neighborhood kids I once knew.  The conversations and steady laughter remind me of a wake for someone who has lived a long happy life but with a sad anticipation of what’s to come tomorrow when the Club closes for good after 126 years.

By 4:25 p.m., working on my second beer, I begin to sense what it might have been like over the years during weekday “happy hour,” during its best days as members and long-time neighborhood friends and business people gathered and when hopeful candidates for public office stopped in to “meet and greet” during campaigns and what I’ve been told will be missed.  A friendly place to pass time.  A Cheers, albeit far edgier, comes to mind again.  Most here are now more subdued boomer members.  Certainly mellower than their heyday of the later ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.  Like Skip, I was never a “bar guy,” and, seeing the current atmosphere and camaraderie, I wonder if I would have fit in and remained a member had I joined just prior to the “Outlaw” years.

I lean on the bar, and in the dim light I read from the seventy-fifth anniversary booklet.  It was 1972, just before women were allowed to join, and Club secretary Norm Desrochers (my earlier barber) served as general chairman of the weeklong event.

Brad notes that more “regulars” should be in tomorrow for the last call.  Seems like the current crowd is primarily long-absent members and guests.

By 4:45 p.m. the bar area is full.  Skip invites me to chat with another long-time member sitting mid-bar, John Letendre, who grew up around the corner on Phoebe Avenue.

“When I joined in October of 1970 I had just come home from Vietnam,” says John.  “It was just men, and you had to have your mother or father be French.”  When asked when women were allowed to join, he says “probably the eighties” adding that “Jack Flaherty was the first non-French member.  He was friends with everybody in here.”

“This is where you got your French votes if you were running for office,” he adds.  Then he echoes what I’ve been hearing at each visit.  “I’m gonna miss the camaraderie of everyone in here.  This is like Cheers,” he says smiling.  “You know, everyone knows your name.”

Skip comes over and asks Brad when women were allowed to join the Club.  “I came here in ’77,” says Brad, “and they were here then.”

“It’s like coming into your own house.  I’ve been coming here for fifty-three fucking years,” pipes in John proudly.

Skip suggests I chat with an older member sitting to my right.  John Douglas, eighty-six, is here with his daughter Heather, fifty.  Heather has been a member longer than her father.  “I signed him up,” she says cheerfully, “Me and my dad always went barhopping!”

“My daughter was a bartender at different places,” says Douglas.  “When I bought the house on Dunfey Street the first thing I did was join.”

“I’d come in here and feel safe all by myself,” says Heather.

Douglas is scrolling through photos on his iPhone and shows me a photo of himself and his sister in a cart pulled by a goat.  “I’m sixty-five and two-hundred and fifty-two months,” he says with a wide grin.  As I try to do the math, Heather saves me and says, “He’s gonna be eighty-seven.  Just so you know.”

I gather the materials that Skip has given me and check with Brad about spending a few minutes chatting tomorrow.  He’ll be in he says but won’t be behind the bar.  “I took the day off.”

Scanning the room for Skip—away from the bar the room is dimly lit—and catch sight of him as he waves me over.  I thank him for his time, and he promises to let me know if he finds any other historic records.

Before I leave, Jim hands me two unopened boxes of never-used black, clip-on bow ties, touchstones to an earlier era of the Club when my father and uncles were members.

X

Sunday, January 29, 2023 is the last hurrah for the PSC and its faithful, final members.  I arrive at 3 p.m.  The Club is crowded—more crowded than it has been in a long time.  The bar back on the right wall is brightly lit, creating silhouetted profiles of those sitting along the bar, like a cityscape at sunset.  I shield my eyes from the glare for a minute trying to find Jim or Skip or Patch or Brad among the reunited old friends.

A big potluck spread weighs down a couple of tables in the back room.  Both pool rooms crackle with ricocheting balls and lots of animated banter echoing back and forth within and between the rooms.  I spot Jim holding court in the “Kerouac” pool room, playing a game with Dick, a cue stick in one hand and a beer in the other.  The jukebox is cranking out a blues tune.

Skip sits in Brad’s recliner at the end of the bar.  He directs me to Ron Beauchesne, seventy-five, seated at the corner stool.  I tell him I’m gathering information on the Club and its members for a story.  He quickly shares his family connection and history with the PSC.

“My father and stepfather and grandfather were members here,” Ron says.  “I was nineteen when I joined as a non-drinking member.”  I order a beer as he talks.

“I spent every Saturday here,” he adds with a chuckle, “I don’t know how my wife put up with me!”  He notes proudly that he rode on “pretty much all the [bike] runs.”

When asked what he’ll miss he echoes, without pause, the mantra I have been hearing over and over.  “The friends, the people.  Made a lot of good friends here,” he says, adding proudly as if to emphasize the nature of Club membership, “We didn’t have phones.”  To underscore the long friendships and neighborhood connections, he pulls out an envelope he brought with class photos from SJA School from the ’50s and ’60s.  “The people,” Ron repeats, spreading the prints.

“I’ve been here many years and I only saw one fight,” he adds with pride before noting that it was one he was involved in.  Someone bumped into his wife during a dance, and Ron punched him to the floor.  It was quickly dealt with as the offender was picked up and escorted out.  “He wasn’t a member,” he says dryly.

Sitting next to Ron is Bambi Knight, sixty, who has been a member for twenty-five years.  Like everyone else, when the Club closes, she says she will miss “The people!”

Her husband, Dale Ayotte, sixty-two, wanders over.  He’s been a member for about thirty-five years.  “[Came] down here on Saturday mornings from eight in the morning to eight at night.  We didn’t know when to go home!”  Dale says he’ll miss “the atmosphere, the bike runs they used to have.”  He pauses then adds as he scans the room, “What I’m gonna miss most is not walking in here and not seeing what I see now.”  The crowd has continued to grow, everyone recalling the good times.  Then, Dale shakes his head and says, “That’s what gets my ass, people who are here now but haven’t been in a while.”

It's 4:20 p.m. and the 49ers/Eagles game is on the three large screen TVs—two above the main bar and one above the smoker’s room bar.  I play a game of pool with Jim’s son Cole.  I somehow win and play a game against Dick.  I lose.

At 4:34 p.m. “San Francisco Nights” is playing on the jukebox recalling the sound track that played on another jukebox when, as a teenager, I worked across the street at the Campus Restaurant in the late ’60s, washing dishes and serving 10-cent coffees to students, professors, neighborhood residents, and Club members when PSC bartenders still wore white shirts and black bowties.  I wore neither a white shirt nor a bowtie as I worked behind the restaurant counter.

After my pool-game loss I take a seat along the wall and chat with Dick between shots as he plays the next challenger.  They rack up the balls for another game as he recalls more good times when he played keyboards in a band in the mid-60s.

Someone lights a joint, and the air is suddenly redolent as the pot smoke mixes with cigarette smoke escaping from the smoking pool room.

“My uncle, Joe Downes, was mayor of Lowell,” notes Lavallee, and I am reminded of the Club’s politically active history.

Dick looks around the room and into the bar area.  Whether from the beer, whisky, pot. or the good vibes, everyone is getting more animated and high-spirited as the final hours pass.  “Used to be like this all the time,” he says dolefully.  “I remember so many good times here.”  He returns to his seat after missing a shot.  “I don’t think I ever had a bad time.  Everyone is great.”

Patch is wandering between the main bar and the pool rooms in animated conversations and is laughing heartily.  Both pool tables have been taken with games all afternoon, the rooms full and loud and lively with greetings and good-natured insults.

Jim’s beer gets knocked off the shelf.  No one notices for a while, but when they do, it starts up a new round of good-natured accusations, denials, and loud laughter.  Jim tends to wander off between shots to chat with newcomers—the mayor of the PSC.

By 5:20 p.m. the crowd begins to thin, but Jim says the party will go on as long as folks hang out or the bartender, who has control over “last call,” decides to call it a night.  (Following up a few days later Jim says with a bit of uncertainty that the official last call was sometime between “eight to ten” o’clock.)

I debate over whether to stay a little longer but decide to leave.  As I walk out, I spot Patch and another member standing across the street and walk over to say goodbye.

“The sign is gone,” says Patch with an air of resignation, staring back at the Club facade.  I turn and see that the aluminum letters attached above the entry that spelled Pawtucketville Social Club have disappeared.  Another souvenir for a departing member.  What’s left to adorn the brick-face front after 126 years is the aluminum address numbers, 123, over the entry, the “For Sale” banner to the left, and the American and MIA flags fluttering above from a rooftop pole.

Patch says that PSC members will be welcome at other neighborhood Clubs, noting that the East End Club has already offered PSC charter members a year’s membership.  His tone is more subdued now.

“It won’t be the same,” Patch says glumly after a pause but then quickly turns hopeful.  “But we will have places to go.”  He hopes that the regulars will stay in touch and meet up after today’s last call.  And that the new owner of the PSC building keeps the bar and the pool tables when he renovates.  Patch is optimistic and holds out hope that they may someday return to find some familiarity and comfort in the new place.

Whatever replaces the PSC will likely be a simulacrum, far away from its origins in the frontier Franco village along Moody Street, from its bow-tied and fedora formal decades and from its “outlaw” years.  Its patrons will certainly be more digitally connected, beer prices higher.  But it probably won’t last for 125 years nor, I suspect, become a “third place” full of friends and as fondly remembered as “The Club.”  But for a new generation and a few old timers willing to return, in time it may become a close enough “great good place” to connect and to create new friendships and new memories.

Epilogue

       It has now been nearly three years since the PSC’s last call and not much has happened to the Club.  The brick façade still catches the afternoon sun, and the American and MIA flags still flutter above the roof.  The American flag is tattered and faded.  I pass by often but other than the new owner gutting the interior, there’s been no noticeable activity.  In On the Road, Jack Kerouac writes, “I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”  Another October has passed, and I imagine the ghosts of PSC members “going home” to gather and debate, to play cards and shoot pool and to party, with no more curfews and no more Last Calls, in their now silent Club.

Acknowledgements

UMass Lowell Center for Lowell History: thanks to Tony Sampas and Carisa L. Kolias for their help and direction with resources and Center research.

Pawtucketville Social Club: thanks to Jim Rutledge, PSC Member/officer, for his connections and wealth of information on the Club’s last few decades and to Raymond Beaudry, PSC Treasurer, for his providing Club minutes and memorabilia and for his assistance with introductions for interviews.

Thanks also to Richard Brouillard, who helped his father George, an active member in the 1950s and 1960s, with Club events, for his recollections and informative details, and to Paul Marion for his feedback and encouragement.

Special thanks to Monique Letendre for her translation of decades of minutes and other documents.

Notes 

[1] Constitution of the Social Club of Pawtucketville, August, 1966, 5.

[2] Ibid.

[3] "Register Volume 4 1932-1937," p. 16, Social Club of Pawtucketville Collection, Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts Lowell. 

[4] Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 34.

[5] Ibid, 37-38.

[6] "Register Volume 1 1920-1924," p. 292, Social Club of Pawtucketville Collection, Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts Lowell. 

[7] "Register Volume 8 1957-1964," pp.192-193, Social Club of Pawtucketville Collection, Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts Lowell. 

[8] Richard Santerre, “Le Club Social de Pawtucketville: 1897-1972,” in 75th Anniversary Program, November 12, 1972, ed. Social Club of Pawtucketville.

[9] Richard Santerre, Seventy-Five Years of Community Spirit: Le Club Social de Pawtucketville, 1897-1972, 75th Anniversary Program, November  5, 1972.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Stuart M. Butler and Carmen Diaz, “‘Third Places’ as Community Builders,” Brookings, Sept. 14, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/third-places-as-community-builders/.

[12] Richard Santerre, Seventy-Five Years of Community Spirit: Le Club Social de Pawtucketville, 1897-1972, 75th Anniversary Program, November  5, 1972.