A change of gravity

"When Chassy called the Canterbury District Court "my court," he meant it," Lane told Merrion. "He acted like he owned the place and could do anything he liked. When people said he was arrogant, they were right.

Whether he did it on purpose, to piss people off, or he never realized how people took it; that I really never knew. I didn't really mind it, myself. He was a smart son of a bitch and he treated me all right. He helped me make money. Naturally I'd think he was a pretty okay-type of guy.

"And anyway, the fact of the matter was that when he said "This is my courthouse," he had it about right." Spring had grown up in Holyoke.

He had gone to Deerfield Academy and then to Harvard ('46) and Harvard Law School ('49) with Roy Carnes. Carnes in 1952 had won the first of the five terms he would serve in the state House of Representatives, representing the easterly part of Holyoke along with the towns of Canterbury, Hampton Pond, Hampton Falls and Cumberland. In 1960, Holyoke voters approved his all-but-hereditary succession to the state Senate seat held by his uncle, Arthur, forced by failing health to retire.

Virtually by acclamation, Arthur had won what became known as 'the Carnes senate seat' when the death of the incumbent opened it in 1946.

That had been less than a year after he was invalided home from World War II army service in Europe. He had lost his left arm during the drive for the Rhine. When he died in May of 1966, a fellow WW II veteran and friend of many years, Holyoke Transcript Telegram city editor and weekly columnist Reg Gault collected and published a full page of tributes to him, ending with his own: "Arthur was entitled to wear the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts. He seldom did.

"He figured in many eyewitness stories of combat heroism. I didn't hear them from him; I heard them from other soldiers, who had fought alongside him. Arthur was born in this city in 1913. He went away to school, and then he spent those war years in Europe. He took his legislative work seriously, as he took everything except himself, and so until his health forced his retirement, he kept an apartment in Boston, where he spent much of his time. "Far too much of it," he would tell you, voicing just about the only complaint I ever heard him utter, "too far from my home, from my friends, and much too far from Grey Hills," the club he'd been instrumental in creating on the abandoned estate of Jesse Grey, and the golf game he'd astonishingly somehow learned to play again with one arm "not quite as well, though," he would say after his war wound.

"His home, then, always was here. Wherever his life and work and service to his country took him, he never really left. His heart and spirit remained in Holyoke and this valley along the Connecticut River, with the people that he knew and served so very well. He never forgot where he came from.

"He always knew who he was. He never lost sight of the job he had to do. He was a devoted son, husband and father, an honest and far-sighted public servant, the kind of candidate who gives meaning to the term "public service," a hero and the best friend a man could have.

Raise a glass today to Arthur Carnes Ave atque vale."

The Carneses, Arthur in the Senate and Roy in the House, had first combined in 1954 to carve the Canterbury District Court jurisdiction out of the Holyoke, Chicopee, Palmer and Northampton Districts. There was merit to the rationale they publicized. The continuing escalation of the Cold War made it likely the civilian population around the US Air Force Strategic Air Command base at Westover Field would increase, as more and more Air Force dependents moved in. The Fisk Tire Company was working two shifts to meet the booming demand for real rubber tires to replace the synthetics rationed in wartime. The new Monsanto plant in Springfield was attracting young workers and their growing families.

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst was expanding. And, as Larry Lane said, there didn't seem to be any reason to think business would be tailing off at the Tampax factory in Palmer.

"Like it or not," Arthur said in the Senate, 'more people means more work for our court system, just as surely as it means more work for our school systems and our hospitals, more demands upon our water systems and our highways. Either we expand our facilities and agencies or we overcrowd and overload them to the point at which they simply cannot get their jobs done, and break down. If we expect and want the prosperity of our cities and towns to continue, with the population growth that good times economically attract, we have to be prepared to pay the price in necessary services. We need another court."