Forbes magazine writer David K. Randall paid Waterbury a flying visit recently and pronounced it a "pile of junk" in the April 7 issue of the magazine. He noticed exactly one beautiful thing about the Brass City--the Union Station Clocktower--and found fault with everything else.
Randall spent his time in the city with Connecticut's former governor John G. Rowland, a Waterbury native who served 10 months in jail for fraud but who has been appointed by Waterbury Mayor Michael Jarjura to work with the city's chamber of commerce and the Waterbury Development Corp.to encourage businesses to come to the city. Clearly, the reporter was himself unimpressed with Rowland, whom he presented as more interested in taking care of himself than the city.
Pointing out the obvious requires little journalistic talent. Rowland is not a credit to Waterbury. If he couldn't whisk this reporter around the Green and point out the marvels there--the churches, the museum, the Y, the history, the Green itself where many good things happen, the John G. Rowland government building, for goodness sake--he might not be worthy of that $95,000-year job.
Randall made the obvious other points that there is poverty in this city, there are brown fields--lands poisoned by the very captains of industry who made their fortune here and whose buildings and monuments stand today--and boarded up factories, there are struggling schools.
If he went into one of these schools, the kids would have told him, as one told me the other day, that they're "ghetto." In Waterbury, this means they don't have a lot of money, they're old, and they're full of a mixture of races and languages. There isn't a school in Waterbury that couldn't make use of $95,000.
If the reporter made the effort of googling the name of this city, he would have found: a Western Connecticut State University branch, a University of Connecticut branch, Post University, Naugatuck Valley Community College, the yeshiva, an Islamic grammar school, arts magnet schools, the Mattatuck Museum, one shrine, downtown's technology zone, the Palace Theatre, Seven Angels Theatre, St. John's Church and the 40 social service agencies that use its resources, the Timexpo Museum, the Green itself, the Riverside Cemetery (on the National Register of Historic Places), and so much more.
If he had any sense of the place, he would have understood that Waterbury is as much a small town that takes care of the folks it likes--and liking can be as irrational as buying a corrupt politician and his guest a free meal,as happened to Rowland and Randall--as it is a dynamic city struggling to recover from its history.
I accepted the judgment on Rowland and Jarjura as an accurate assessment of a weird political decision. I accepted the inventory of what's wrong with Waterbury. I did not accept the assessment that the city is a "pile of junk." People live there. That kind of talk creates a ghetto mentality. You stop growth and hurt infrastructure in the form of vulnerable human beings and the many good folks working hard to do right by Waterbury. You don't hurt Rowland. He's living all right. He knows how to take care of himself, as we all well know.
There are many smallish bodies of water near our home, and many of them are homes of beavers. Often when I walk at dusk, a beaver will slap his tail on the water and swim off, bringing me out of my reverie and happily aware that our landscape is full of life.
Our gold-and-grey guinea pig Delmo is very ill. He had been hopping on three legs earlier this week, so I took him in for an exam. The vet tells me he might be suffering from cancer, kidney failure, a severe Vitamin C deficiency, or a bone infection. Whatever the problem, something is causing his bones to disintegrate inside his quiet and gentle little body. He is on antibiotics in case the cause is infection and on Vitamin C in case the lack of it is the problem. There's nothing we can do about cancer or kidney failure.
