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Note: ly when he was around ten, and his difficult, emotionally unstable mother forced him to drop out of highschool to support her. He got a college degree in engineering via correspondence courses. Described as firm, patient, persistent, laid back and a bit mushy, "a rascal", and he may not overly in love with telling the truth. He and my aunt apparently did considerable laughing at my grandmother's high strung ways behind her back. He worked as an engineer and manager at Sandy Hill Paper Company in Glens Falls. In early years of his marriage he worked for about four years in Quebec, Canada, in management at paper mills.
Photos of my grandfather as a young man show a spirited, fun loving and optimistic young man, probably something of a scamp, who greatly enjoyed the company of his daughters when they were small. Photos of him as a boy and a formal photo in his military uniform show a less than happy and stiff person. However, photos of him in laid back moments with his own troop, while he was in the military, show him in his undershirt, relaxed, and having a good time.
My mother says he used to take her to watch ball games in the park. My mother loved him dearly, and was hysterical when he had his heart attack adn then died, but I'm not sure she always liked him. My mother was an intense, passionate and rigid woman who took after her mother, I take after my mother in some of these ways, and I have personality conflicts with people like Grandfather.
He read widely history, poetry, classics, currrent writing, mysteries, and military history. He kept a long multivolume set on something like the Napoleonic wars on the headboard of his bed in the spare room behind the livingroom where he apparently slept at times. When my cousin visited as a boy and also slept there, he liked to read them.
He had adult onset diabetes, and died in middle age of a heart attack. I always understood that he died unexpectedly young in middle age, but actually he died at age 70, and had far outlived all of his recent male ancestors. His father died in his mid 50's of heart disease. My grandfather took good care of himself and his diabetes, and had the diabetes under control for many years.
The entire family were bitter at his “early” “premature” death, and blamed it on his diabetes. The family historical materials contained a vehement note hand copied from something about the dangers of neglecting diabetes, as well as its genetic nature. Nevertheless one gets the idea that the actual family mythology was that diabetes is a monster that necessarily kills you, so there’s no point in worrying about it. My mother got diabetes, denied that she had it, denied that my brother has diabetes as well, and failed to properly care for it, and died at age 72 of unrecognized diabetic kidney damage, which is not easy to accomplish. She did also have a urostomy, and mild backup of fluid into her kidneys may have helped cause the uremia that killed her, but her kidneys had the granular appearance that diabetes causes, and not the mixture of granular crystals and holes on the surface that chronic backup of the urostomy causes. Kidney damage is the most common fatal complication of diabetes, but easy to spot by routine tests, and regular physical exams failed to catch it, which is consistent with my mother’s habit of picking old foagy not very competent doctors and trusting them absolutely. The autopsy also found that her circulatory system was healthy, and two recent lines of her ancestry are inclined to live to be over 100. This was my definition of death by stupidity.
His World War I draft card, from Ancestry.com, dated 1917 or 1918, describes him as of medium height and stout, and living in Quebec, employed already as a foreman in a paper mill in Grand Mere, Quebec. He registered in Northampton. The card is only partially legible, but the answer to one question was “mother”.
My grandfather had a troubled childhood. His mother had a serious mood disorder for which she was hospitalized in her sixties. His father left them when he was about ten, took up with a theater crowd, wrote bawdy light opera, remarried without telling anyone and as nearly as I can tell without ever formally divorcing his first wife, and moved to New York City, where he lived near Greenwich Village. His mother was prone to extreme rages over very little, that impressed and terrified my aunt, who witnessed them as a child, and who found my mother’s physically violent and sometimes psychotic looking rages entirely normal.
My grandfather’s mother moved to Northampton to start a new life or avoid her ex-husband or whatever, and claimed to be a widow. They lived as nearly as I can tell from the census, by taking in boarders. Her husband seems to have concealed his whereabouts from her. When my grandfather was sixteen, she forced him to drop out and go to work to support her. However, his highschool teachers helped him continue to study. Finally my grandfather, atleast 23 years old, and having been unable to separate from his mother by taking a job as a paper mill foreman in Quebec, and having already registered with the draft in 1917 or 1918, I’m told actually not long before the war ended, though long enough to serve a winter with his unit, enlisted in the military, and then went home and told his mother, who threw one of her most “impressive” rages ever. After the war, he returned to the same paper mill in Quebec.
From photos, it looks as though my grandfather did serve in Europe, but had a fairly good time of it. There are photos of him relaxing with this fellows, all in their undershirts. He may have had some sort of commission as an officer, or maybe he was a noncommissioned officer. Somehow he ended up in charge of a unit. My aunt said that having never learned to drive, he managed to drive a jeep to purchase stockings or socks or something for Christmas gifts for his men.
He worked in a paper mill in Quebec, as a manager, at the time when he married, and his wife lived with him there for several years. When he left he was a Superintendent in teh paper mills. They got caught in the middle of a labor dispute, and this was not an aspect of the job that he enjoyed. He decided to go into sales work and left for Chicago.
Publications about Sandy Hill paper company (now International Paper), in Glens Falls, state that Allen Lowe was hired between 1936 and 1937, as part of a major upgrade of the sales department. He had been superintendent of "the mill at Grand Mere, Quebec, when it had set a world record for speed in newsprint production". He was one of four men who "quickly brought in enough orders to make 1937, the second (and first full) year of our arrival here, a successful year in sales." It is also mentioned that at one point Allen Lowe was department head of Advertising, and at some point he was he was head of the Estimating department.
Other mentions: "That fall, Allen Lowe succeeded in obtaining for Sandy Hill the contract from the New York State Department of Forestry's Paper Making Division, an order for a complete commercial laboratory paper machine with both fourdrinier and cylinder board machine wet ends.
It could not have been done for the money appropriated, had not Allen found an almost new and unused 48" trim board machine at the former Stillwater, N.Y. board mill. Sandy Hill was able to rebuild it like new, adding a new Sandy Hill fourdrinier wet end and a new press section of our design. "
In apparently 1957, Allen Lowe was made Assisting Vice President in charge of Sales Promotion.
"As First Vice President, Wesley had combined a practical knowledge of papermaking with adequate machinery design. He had encouraged our engineers to perfect teh previously patented Fancher Roller Shoe drive for Packer screens. Together with Allen Lowe, he had designed the Rotoformer for the inventor, who did not know enough to understand that the principal by which the Rotoformer worked was supposed to be wrong. This statement was made to the inventeor by both of our top competitor machinery builders! As a result of the successful work of Wes and Allen, the inventor gave us the sole right to manufacture and sell the Rotoformer. "
p 383 - "Our forte had become the smaller specialty paper machines, with our pioneering in vacuum forming - thanks to Wes Joslyn and Allen Lowe followed by Martin Keller and Ed Matteson-- Sandy Hill having built 86 Rotoformers and 22 Deltaformers up to the anniversary date."
It mentions that the new president of the Board, Frank Juckett, had owned other companies, and was an inventor, with a wide background in the paper industry. Juckett had grown up in the Lake George area, apparently, and worked in Springfield, Massachusetts, for a railroad company. They still lived there around 1914/1917, when he worked at Strathmore Paper Mills in the Springfield area. Strathmore owned or helped at paper mills in Philadelphia, New York City, Cleveland, Detroit,. Kansas City, various places in Massachusetts and Vermont". I don't know if during some of the time when Grandfather was in Quebec and in Ohio he worked for paper mills that Juckett was previously involved with.
Book by Walter J. Juckett - his autobiography. "In Retrospect" 1981. He died in 1988.
They went to Oak Park, Illinois, for two years, which my grandmother hated, and then to Lakewood, Ohio, which my grandmother apparently loved.
My grandfather's obituary says that he began his career in the paper industry when he worked for the Laurentide Company in Grand Mere, Quebec, in 1911. During 14 years with that company he worked in all departments in capacities up to supervisor. Mail from him and to him in that time that my mother saved gives his address as Grand Mere (not Three Rivers).
After leaving Laurentide, according to his obit, he worked for the Fritz Publishing Company, publishers of Paper Industry Magazine, in Chicago, for the Penton Publishing Company and the W. S. Tyler Company in Cleveland.
He came to Glens Falls in 1930 as a partner in the Harris Importing and Exporting Company. He went to the Sandy Hill Iron and Brass Works in 1936. "At Sandy Hill he has been one of the prime figures in the research and development of the Rotoformer, a new type of paper forming machine".
"With a background of many years' experience in the paper industry in teh operation as well as the design and installation of paper machinery, his advice and counsel were regularly sought from a wide area of the paper industry, both in the United States, and abroad. He was a regular contributor to technical papers and a collaborator on numerous textbooks dealing with the paper making process. He was a member of TAPPI, the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry."
"During WWI he was a member of the 301st Engineers and served as an officer with the 50th Pioneer Infantry with the American Expeditionary Forces. He was immediate past president of the 301st Engineers' Association.
"Mr. Lowe was an active member of the Church of the Messiah. He was also a member of Glens Falls Post, 233, American Legion, and of Senate Lodge, 456, P, and A.M. "
It sounds as though in his work, my grandfather had a remarkable talent for using practical creativity to solve any problem, a naturally confident attitude about his ability to solve a problem, and natural sales ability, as my cousin Joe. It sounds like he could talk anyone into anything. As nearly as I can learn, my grandfather was mentally as stable as a rock, though less cheerful and optimistic when I knew him than as a young man, but this was bipolar temperament.
My cousin Joe, who was visibly having some kind of attack of mania at the time, told me that his first cousin, Murray Williams, went into business with our grandfather just before the Depression, and made off with the money, and this caused the family to lose a nice house on Ridge St. From what I have found, I cannot assess the truth of that statement. It definitely is not completely true. My cousin was going through a phase of acting clinically manic. My mother says it's a combination of a neurological disorder and medication, and I'm suspicious if the medication would cause a not bipolar person to act manic, as a number of medications predictably aggravate bipolar disorder. The most infamous of them is the steroid hormones. Some things he told me were true pieces of family history long hidden that were critically important to make known to me. Other things he said have been disproven, and some things sounded outright jumbled. For instance, he insisted repeatedly that my grandfather's grandfather was run out of Ireland for being a Mason, when he was never run out of Ireland, and while he did get into serious trouble, for which even his descendants never acknowledged his own responsibility, being a Mason had nothing whatever to do with it. His son apparently left Ireland as a teenager to go to relatives in Montreal. I questioned some things Joe said when he said them. He was talking on and on, and he could not be contradicted in anything.
See my notes on Murray Williams; he was a prominent, quite respected, businessman and journalist in Montreal, and died there in 1930. Since there is a photo of my grandfather with Murray Williams, the two of them were clearly in touch. Murray Williams had gone from writing exceedingly popular advice columns in the Montreal papers on stock market investment, to working in the stock market. Conceivably he and my grandfather had invested in something together, or he had something to do with my grandfather's job that brought him to Glens Falls, in which my grandfather was a partner, and that did apparently fail at the beginning of the Depression. My aunt writes in her autobiographical essays that things were good for their first year in Glens Falls - when they lived in hte nice house, on Ridge Street, and then "the depression caught up with" them. My cousin, who was born in 1949, spent his early childhood down the street from his grandparents’ house and visited them constantly, and could possibly have misunderstood something, or else been told the story before my grandfather learned that Murray Williams had died at the time when he was looking for him.
It is hard to know how long it took my grandfather to learn Murray Williams had died, and very conceivable that my grandfather was not very assertive in his efforts to learn what had happened to him. He must have eventually learned this, because it is in my mother's family papers that I found copies of his numerous obituaries. My grandfather also allegedly had no idea what happened to his father after they were in touch in 1923, and actually his father died six months after his last letter and his widow moved. Nevertheless something in the same papers suggests that he knew what had happened to his father. My grandmother allegedly looked hard for where his mother’s father had come from, and his efforts, which are well documented in the family papers, are nothing short of idiotic, if he actually wanted to find the information, and in this case there is nothing to indicate that my grandfather ever for instance checked the church his father attended, or else he asked only for specific information about his parents’ marriage, his mother and two sisters and got it, the main Protestant cemetery in that city, the city directories, the bmd indexes, or the city tax records, and he didn’t know of half the man’s children, let alone that he’d been born in Montreal to Irish Presbyterian parents and had a brother who was a witness at his wedding, and two sisters. At times it is hard to believe my grandfather was bright enough to teach himself advanced calculus and engineering, and he could be such a marshmellow, that one could wonder if he had a backbone, and his elder daughter is the same way. According to my aunt he got teh idea someone didn't want him to know his family history, and I guess that feeling that his cousins didn’t give him the necessary permission or whatever he ceased to look into it. According to his several obituaries, Murray Williams was President of the church where my grandfather would have looked for records. That would apparently be who didn't want my grandfather to know his family history, since otherwise why didn't Murray Williams just tell him his family history, starting with the fact that John Cauthers had married in that church. I suppose that history would include the fact that John Cauthers died of alcoholism.
The family papers prove that my grandfather did do research on his mother’s father, but he did it rather illogically and it didn’t go very far. There was a letter from someone in Montreal stating that his grandfather had worked as an accountant for a certain firm for many years, and also a letter from someone in a small village called Hemmingford, Quebec, on the Canadian border, stating that his grandfather had had a summer home there at one point but there was no other sign of him. My mother told me repeatedly when I was a child that my grandfather had heard that his grandfather might have been from Hemmingford but couldn’t find any sign of him there. It apparently never occurred to him to look for the trail of his father in Montreal where he knew the man had lived, or maybe that was when he concluded that someone didn’t want him to look into it and dropped it.
This is what I found on the history of where they lived.
Crandall library found Allen and Helen Lowe in the city directories for Glens Falls for 1931 through 1939, and they moved to William Street in 1936. Before that they lived on Nunan Street.
My mother tells a brief story of moving in and out of the house on Ridge Street more than once, then renting and buying the house they ended up in on William Street.
I have that they lived in Lakewood and/or Cleveland between roughly 1927 and 1930.
Cleveland, Ohio Public Library found Allen A. Lowe, salesman, and wife Helen in city directories in 1928, 1929, and 1930, at 1604 Cohassett Ave.
When I stayed with my grandparents when my parents made trips out of town when I was around seven, I was impressed that my grandfather slept in his den with a bed in it downstairs and my grandmother in the master bedroom upstairs. I saw little of him during those stays; he left the house early and came home late. I am not sure how often he ate dinner with us in the formal dining room. He would come out of his room in the morning, pick up his hat, coat and briefcase from a stand in the corner of the livingroom, and walk out of the house, and my grandmother would ask him polite questions about his needs and welfare as though he were a guest. When my grandparents stayed at my house for holidays my grandfather was always quite jolly, but on those occasions when I stayed at his house he never cracked an expression.
When my grandparents would actually stay at our house for a few days at a time at Christmas and so forth, I found him cheerful and jolly toward my brother and me, and he and my brother, who was five or six when he died, got on quite well. He was the only family member who really encouraged my brother to act like a small boy. He seemed to genuinely like my brother, and gave him encouraging toys like a jack in the box. In photos with my grandfather is about the only time I can recall my brother smiling or have a photo of him smiling, as a small child.
I wonder if it was always something of a marriage of convenience even though he and my grandmother at one time greatly enjoyed each others' company, my cousin and my grandmother both told me that they had planned to spend retirement reading literature and poetry to each other, and my grandmother was griefstricken and bitter at “premature” death at age 70. They seem to have loved each other very much at times but it may not have started out that way. When my mother had just returned to Northampton, to her parents’ home, from her missionary work, my grandfather happened to visit, and discussed the topic of marriage with a former highschool teacher. He told the teacher there had been just one girl he had ever thought about marrying (who was three years older than he), and the teacher said she was at home and not yet married. He went to visit her, made a formal and very humble speech in which he addressed her as “Miss Lowe”, proposed marriage, and the way my grandmother told it, she immediately accepted. My cousin also suspected it was in good part a marriage of convenience. My cousin said that when she was at Smith College my grandmother would have known men like my grandfather but second generation and more adn wealthy, who became managers and engineers. The way he sees it, my grandfather put it like sort of, here is what I can give you, and my grandmother recognized my grandfather as the sort of promising young man she had learned at Smith College to want to marry. My grandfather was already employed as a manager in the paper industry. They both had bipolar temperaments, and she probably thought he was likely to succeed. They also shared troubled family backgrounds and mothers with serious mental illness.
But my cousin and I both got the idea that by our time, the marriage had become rather a matter of convenience, and while they may not have disliked each other, Grandfather and Grandmom virtually lived separate lives.
Note: My grandfather was an engineer, self educated. His father left the fami
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