My Story: The Early Years

 

My first years were spent in Northboro, a rural town in eastern Massachusetts that was rapidly changing from a quiet country setting filled with apple and peach orchards, small vegetable farms and small dairy farms, to a suburban bedroom community that developed an insatiable demand for new housing to support the burgeoning high-tech industries falling within the Rt 128 ring road around Boston, and soon thereafter, the outer ring road of Rt 495. My family was part of this influx of newcomers, lured there by IBM, my father ‘s employer.

My earliest memories of Northboro made a deep and lasting impression on me: the freedom to roam with the cows out on the pastures of the farm immediately adjacent to our newly completed housing development, where once stood open farmland; to explore a largely abandoned 200-year old English style barn on an isolated corner of the farm; to stop on the road to wait for the cows to cross on their way to evening milking when my father drove us to the local swimming hole for a late afternoon summer dip; to enjoy freshly pressed apple cider right from the press in the autumn, and smell the sweet aroma of the pomace piled up outside the press house.

By the time I was 6 years old the cows began to disappear and soon construction began on a massive housing development that transformed the landscape forever. I remember feeling devastated and longing for things to be the way they used to be, conveniently unaware that my family was part of the problem driving this so-called “progress” that led to the rampant suburbanization of eastern Massachusetts. This sense of longing never left me, even to this day. About the time that I turned eight, my father was transferred to an office closer to Boston and we moved to Framingham to make his commute more bearable. Even then, the traffic heading into and out of Boston during rush hour was a nightmare.  Framingham, a much more suburban environment than Northboro, was where I spent the remainder of my childhood until college, but my heart was back in the Northboro that I remembered. A neighbor of ours, an elderly former professor at Framingham State College, would give my parents issues of Vermont Life Magazine after she had finished reading them, and I spent hours pouring over them. I couldn’t escape a deep sense that Vermont was where I was meant to be.

Dark things happened as I transitioned into the junior high/middle school years, things that my parents knew nothing about to their dying day, but by the time I entered high school they knew that something was very wrong and that I was in psychological freefall. During those turbulent years that included two suicide attempts, they never gave up on me, always encouraged me, and taught me the meaning of unconditional love and the ultimate source of such love. Their deep Christian spiritual convictions profoundly shaped my view of reality, which many years later, became the preeminent impetus to move into the realm of cheese history as an area of scholarship during the second half of my career, and to write the book Cheese and Culture. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but if you are interested in “the background behind” the background behind Cheese and Culture, you can check out an essay that I wrote titled “With All Your Mind”, published in 2017 as part of a sabbatical leave project that included an objective to use cheese history as a lens to help conservative evangelical Christians reconcile evolutionary science with their conservative Christian beliefs: https://godandnature.asa3.org/essay-with-all-your-mind-by-paul-s-kindsedt.html  But a word of warning: Strap on your seatbelt, this definitely ventures into the realm of “and beyond”.

When I turned 16 in the summer of 1973 it was time to begin working to save for college. My first official paid employment was at Santoro’s Sub Villa, a submarine sandwich shop that also added pizza to their menu during my high school years and later when I came back to work during breaks from college. Bob Santoro, the owner and immigrant from Italy, had built up a chain of six or seven restaurants and the Framingham site was his latest addition. He was a wonderful man who took an interest in me because he saw something in me at a time in my life when I desperately needed mentoring. He would drive down from his flagship restaurant in Saugus to train and mentor me and soon promoted me to night manager. It was during those early years at Santoro’s that I cut my teeth on pizza cheese, which would later dominate the first half of my research career as a university professor. Mozzarella cheese in those days didn’t always melt and perform in the pizza oven in the expected manner. Sometimes it dried out and charred at the surface, at other times it turned to soup, flowing off the slices when the pie was sectioned and transferred to the carboard box. As night manager, I was on the front line of customer service and had to deal with irate customers. It was stressful at times but the best training that I possibly could have received for what was to come a decade later as an Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont. I will always be grateful for the interest that Bob Santoro took in me and the opportunity that he gave me.