Leland J. Kennedy Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

next to us was a duplex house and a man by the name of Halton, he was the secretary-treasurer
of the glassblowers' nationwide organization and I talked to him. He was their
secretary-treasurer. Of course his are all gone, they never had any bo~+s, they had two girls
and those girls died as young women.
But I'm sure they had - of course that's where the circus used to unload. That's down
by Sports and Sporgue. That's down on lower Broadway. I go to a filling station down
there three or four times a month. The glassworks are still there and those railroad tracks
are still there. And Sports and Sporgue are a shopping center now but of course there were
a lot of taverns there you know, in those days the glassblowers made bottles and they put
beer in bottles you know.
Q: Yes. (laughter) Well. Yes sir.
A: And they'd frolic and drink but you know that's a good - I don't know how they learned
that trade. I guess, oh hell, they had to learn it because you couldn't . . .
Q: What did your dad do at the Terminal Railroad?
A: Well he was a brakeman. He broke his leg on there and that's why he couldn't fulfill
his job. Ferguson was a big name in Alton. I guess it still is in Alton's past history. He,
I suppose, was a large stockholder in the old Illinois Glass and he was in the Terminal. If
there's any of his family left, I don't know that. And he got my dad a job at the
glassworks. And my dad had enough gumption I guess, and know-how about industry, to
get a job as a foreman. And he was a foreman on the automatics and - not too long though
because of an illness.
Well my dad had a chance to go to England. And I was talking to this Bob Levis about
that in the last couple of years. Morford who was a glassblower who made the connection
in England to take a number of old glassblowers or old automatic people and the machine
people, the automatic machines, over to England. And they did go.
My mother wouldn't go. I wasn't very old then. I was still in grade school. My mother
wouldn't go. I had a younger brother and an older sister. My sister's been dead about three
years. She just wouldn't go. And that could have angered the Levis people because it
seemed like those fellows who were interviewed to go and didn't go, it seemed like almost
to a man, and over a period of three, five or ten years, lost out down at the
glassworks. That's when you didn't have any grievances or seniority or anything like that.
But getting back to what Levis - he said they - I asked him about that. We were talking
about it and I don't know how that came up but he said, "The Illinois" - that plant's still
over there, that was one that became one of the Owens-Illinois' holdings. They bought some
foreign factories. The Moffatt family, they aligned with the Levis and Moffatt line to get
control of it. I haven't seen any of the Wall Street Journal or any of the business
papers. That's what he told me. It hasn't been too long since he told me that because we
were down at the glassworks for - they had the General Assembly down and some dignitaries
and the mayor of the town. And he was there and that's where I talked to him.
Q: You mentioned the Washington Street place where you lived. What are your earliest
memories of that particular home?
A: Well we had a hill there on the side of Averill Avenue where we used to coast on that
and we had a big - a lot of these glassworkers stayed on on the automatics and there was
a number of them there and they'd always have the, oh, maybe a big summer picnic and
there was woods down there and they'd clear it off and they had swings and they'd have
turtle soup. I remember that. And, oh, I remember the streetcars and the ice storm that
happened in 1924 when all of the lines - one thing I can recall definitely - and if you