Willimantic, Now & Then
I remember one time; we got a call from a guy at the Immaculata Retreat House, just south of town. They were replacing about 30 beds and had mattresses to give away. We loaded many of them onto Tony’s old truck. It was an impressive load: high and wide.
We drove down to Union Street and I jumped up on top of the load, shouting: “BEDS! FREE BEDS!” People would hang out the windows and yell to us if they wanted one. We would run the beds up to the apartments until they were gone, then go back for another load and cruise through Windham Heights.
At this time, Tony and I were doing some odd jobs together. I was also working part time, to earn what meager living I required in those easier times. Most of our time though, we were out collecting furniture from an ever-growing circle of people who knew that we would get that couch or dining room table to somebody who needed it.
By Mark Svetz
WILLIMANTIC –
september 2009
Return to
Tony Clark: 1933 – 2009:
Sing A Song of Friendship
The Earth shrugs her shoulders. Things change. A forest fire destroys old trees and seedlings appear in the ashes. I am holding on to these images as I think about the passing of a friend. I lost such a good friend when Tony Clark died in July.
I have come to think of friendship not as an abstraction, but more as a collection of concrete experiences. Experience is the foundation of trust, which is at the heart of friendship. I am thinking a lot about friendship these days.
I first met Tony some 30 years ago when I went to work at Willimantic Waste Paper Co. Tony was running the Flea Market for our friend,
“You drink beer?” Tony asked me.
“No,” I told him, with a straight face. “I don’t drink.” I was on the wagon, briefly at this time. Tony shrugged and lifted his glass. He knew something wasn’t quite right about this.
Over the next week, I fell off the wagon and I started bumping into Tony wherever I went. It was only a short time when all these lines crossed. We ended up at Nature’s Place again one night when Tony and his wife Kathleen were in a singing mood. I was in a drinking mood and I had never heard people sing like they did.
Tony and Kathleen had lived a live of high adventure before ending up in Willimantic in 1979, when our paths crossed. They took their five children on a world tour, expecting to settle in Australia. I heard stories of this time, but it is a tribute to them that they never lived in the past. Even this incredible past.
They lived in and around Perth, in Western Australia in 1965. They all settled in a refugee camp in Perth, where Tony found work in construction. Ultimately he found a place as a hand on a station.
The remoteness of life in the Australian boondocks was startling to them. Kathleen spoke of the “flying doctor” who showed up occasionally to tend to the sick.They returned to the United States in time for the birth of their youngest daughter Kate.
Somebody would let us know they had something to give away and we would work it into our schedule. Tony was great at juggling many things in his mind, taking care of them as the opportunity arose.
One time somebody gave us a stove. We picked it up in the course of our daily runs. We knew somebody who needed a stove, but they weren’t moving into the new place for a few days. We needed a place to put the stove for a while, because we had to help somebody else move and needed the truck.
We happened to be driving past Catina Caban’s house, and saw her big front porch. We stopped, and like Keystone Cops, we hustled the stove up to her porch and left it there. We knew we’d be back for it in a couple days. And we were.
Some time later I ran into Catina and she told me a story of how a stove appeared on her porch and then disappeared. She was a little curious, but she said she just figured Mark and Tony would take care of it.
I think I wanted to get moving and Tony wasn’t up for it. One thing lead to another and I went and got a shopping cart and helped Tony into it. I pushed him around downtown all morning. He was playing his kazoo and I was whistling. We went into all the shops, even the banks. I pushed Tony into the elevator at the Savings Institute and we went up to the offices, him playing the kazoo the whole way. People talked about that for years!
At some point in the mid-80s, I quit drinking and our work got more serious. We were never what you would call serious people, but we started directing our madcap knight errantry toward trying to fight some of the injustice we saw around us.
Tony was in Washington one time and talked to three men from Veterans For Peace. They were fasting in protest of something I can’t even remember any more, but Tony was moved. Something in the actions of these men touched him and he came home and started his own vigil. He kept it up, spending hours every day carrying his sign around town or standing on Main Street. He inspired many people.
We walked to Hartford for a Housing rally. We were with six or eight others, carrying signs and talking to people along the way. We spent the night in a homeless shelter in Manchester and got to Hartford the next day.
One time we filed a lawsuit against the town of Windham because they passed an anti-loitering ordinance we thought was wrong. Tony did a lot of research and I wrote the briefs, which we submitted to the courts, and we actually won a temporary injunction. The Connecticut Civil Liberties Union helped us argue for a permanent injunction, which we won.
We started a syringe exchange in Willimantic in 1990. We had heard about this way of helping people avoid the growing threat of HIV infection associated with injection drug use. Some people were talking about the need for this, and Tony and I just thought: “We can do that.”
At that time it was illegal to have syringes unless you had a doctor’s prescription for them. This led to a black market for syringes, not always clean, and many people had trouble getting them.
We went to New Haven one day and talked to some people from Act-up who had started an underground, illegal exchange. We found out some of the details and a guy there gave us a box of syringes. We came back to Willimantic, went to visit a friend whom we knew injected drugs. We traded some clean needles for her dirty ones, and the Willimantic Needle Exchange was born.
We did that 24-7 for over five years, making our rounds to various apartment houses where people would meet us and trade dirty needles for clean ones. I was arrested, and over the next few months, Tony got arrested four or five times, including once for possession of heroin because of the traces in the dirty needles.
We ended up being represented by lawyers from UCONN Law School, who worked out a deal with local prosecutors that if the needle exchange was made legal, they would drop all charges against us.
At this point, we went public with what had been an open secret in Willimantic: Mark and Tony and the needle exchange. We even went to Hartford to speak to a legislative committee at a hearing on the subject. They were debating the cost of needle exchange and Tony and I stood up and said we weren’t asking for money, “We’re doing it right now. We’re just asking you to stop arresting us!”
The rest, as they say, is history. For us, it was an intense time of incredible connections and community effort to make this thing happen. It was eventually made legal and funded by the state.
I remember, sitting in jail, waiting for the police to “process” me when I was arrested. I wondered what would happen to me, to us, to the exchange. This was something we had anticipated, but not really expected. I finally got out, and there was Tony, still carrying his bag of needles. When I asked him if we would keep doing it, his answer was so simple and right: “It’s what we do.”
And this brings me back to that great shrug of the Earth’s shoulders. Tony’s life has passed. A magical man is gone. Willimantic has been enriched. And as for me, well, I know our friendship was so worth the pain of losing him.
Mark Svetz and Sarah Winter own Clothworks, a shop on Church Street in Downtown Willimantic, where they make and sell clothing and bags. It is a little lonelier now, without Tony stopping by.
Another time, we were working on some job together and had agreed to meet at The Forum for breakfast. Tony never showed up. I went out looking for him. It happened to be a day of Sidewalk Sales downtown, so it was busy. Tony was sitting on a wall down on Main Street. I think he might have been hung over. He sure didn’t want to work. He had gotten a kazoo from Gale’s Music Store and he was playing it to his own amusement.
Jim DeVivo. I remember asking another friend about this guy who had an old VW bus for sale. I was looking for cheap, portable housing. My friend said, simply: “Mark, when the junk man is selling, don’t buy.”
It turned out Tony and I were on a path destined to intersect. I ran into him at Nature’s Place, a health food restaurant on Church Street.
Mark Svetz and Tony Clark at the Vic
It turns out I knew the words to a lot of the old British Isles folk songs they sang. As the night progressed, we drank and sang. And then we sang and drank some more.
From that moment on, Tony and I were constant companions. We started almost every day for the next 15 years, looking for each other, working together, playing together, drinking together and singing together. When I fell in with these two people, this legendary couple, my life was never to be the same.
Tony was so sure of who he was. I suspect that was part of what made his personality so magnetic: we love that certainty and we are so often drawn to it. I was drawn to it, and during many years of self-appointed knight errantry, Tony and I built a foundation of experience that brought trust and friendship.
We drove his beat-up trucks around town, loaded with furniture, helping people move. We took donations from people who had furniture to give away, and we found homes for it. It was a great adventure.
Mark and Tony at the Willimantic needle exchange