The Second Great Lynn Fire of Thanksgiving Week 1981

(For the yeflow factory of my father on Broad Street & the

uprooted)

On November 28, 1981 a tremendous fire devastated many blocks of factories in the center of Lynn, Massachusetts, the shoe making center of the United States at the beginning of this century. As a large industrial city it attracted many immigrants of many nationalities seeking work. It has a militant labor history and was, for a time, the home of one of the most militant anarchist journals of North America, the Italian language Cronaca Sovversiva, until it was suppressed by the federal government during the First World War.

!t was a Crossroads of pay envelopes & camaraderie at his bed-lasting machine beside his brother, I used to bring him his lunches, he was a breeder of friendships, then I worked there a year, a radio & a recorder, it was a beehive for the Unions of Hunger & a steady job in uncertainties-two broken tongue Generations on bread & onions up in fire & smoke burning alt ethnic ties writing on the sky & the air with ruins of fingers for a few days as the wrecker's ball got them & an Epoch amputated, the perennial & the fungi of pain & joy are overturned, emptiness is guiding-some relics are homeless as the red brick names & History has a chasm in the jaded blue noons

Vincent Ferrint

November 27-30, 1981