I only had to say why I was calling.

Hearing the name Silvio Ottavio Conte, the subject of my Feb. 17 Hampshire Life story, sent people back 20 years — and got them talking.
I didn’t have the space in the magazine to share all of their stories, so here’s a postscript with additional recollections and perspectives from former Gov. Jane Swift, U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, Mary Wentworth of Amherst and Jonathan “Jay” Healy of Charlemont.

Healy was a Republican state representative in 1985 when people in his district united to oppose a plan by the U.S. Air Force to erect 70 communications towers on potato fields at the Ashfield-Hawley border.

On July 5 of that year, Conte, wearing a tie and light-colored fedora, climbed onto the back of a pickup to announce that the Air Force would have to look elsewhere.
“I have met with key persons who control the purse strings and convinced them that we should deny funding to this project,” he said that day to cheers, as people huddled near rugged lines of weather-beaten maples that would have been dwarfed by the towers.

“This project is dead.”

Healy recalls Conte wasn’t sure at first whether protesters were in the right. “He looked at both sides of the issue and listened to a lot of people. He wasn’t with us initially. But in the end, he said, ‘You’re right.’ ... He was open-minded about things that might be solutions to problems.”

In Healy’s view, no one then could have predicted how party lines today would obstruct that hunt for answers.

“It would be an experience like going to Mars,” Healy said, comparing the politics of 1985 with those of today. “The values he embodied were 180 degrees opposite what we see in this sad fight and perpetual war between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C. He was someone who tried to figure out where the middle ground was. It’s totally foreign to what we see in Congress and on Capitol Hill right now.”

Healy adds, “The party and the values he stood for are no longer seen in the Republican Party on any level and that’s really sad. ... He’d definitely be a Democrat.”

Healy, state director for rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture for three New England states, offers that view of the Republican Party having gone through his own political transformation. Healy dropped his Republican enrollment about a decade ago after concluding the party no longer lined up with both his fiscal conservatism and social progressivism. “The Republicans have just moved so far away from what they were.”
If Conte were still in Congress, Healy believes he would be a champion of a spirit of compromise and cross-party lawmaking.

“He would be a brawler and call out some of the hypocrisy and almost downright idiocy of people who are governing on a platform of blocking nearly everything. I think he would really be dismayed by what is happening. He was a maverick who called them as he saw them. I don’t know if those would be even tolerated in this day and age. He wouldn’t have changed his values and ways of working with people to find reasonable solutions for the greater good. He was a leader and not a follower and that was one of his great strengths.”

U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, the Springfield Democrat whose home city moves into the 1st Congressional District under redistricting, says older residents in western Massachusetts remember Conte well. But he believes it would be hard to get their grandchildren to grasp how Conte was able to remain viable, as the only Republican member of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation and how he ran several times under both the Republican and Democratic banners on November ballots.

The ability of the two major parties to line up like that would seem a puzzling artifact from a dusty time long ago, Neal suggests. “If you tried to explain that to a political science class, they’d think you were talking about the Magna Carta.”

Mary Wentworth of Amherst, who took on Conte several times at the polls, once came in behind the Republican in a September Democratic primary.
She recalls challenging him at one election forum about the fact that he had initially voted against Medicare in the 1960s. As someone trying to unseat a powerful incumbent Republican, Wentworth says she grew accustomed to hearing two things.

In Berkshire County, she said, some declined to sign nomination papers for her because a Conte staffer might see their names in the filings — and there could be consequences.

“In this part of the district, people thought, ‘Oh, Silvio is a Republican, but that’s as good as having a Democrat.’”
The challenge Wentworth faced: convincing them that it mattered, and that while Conte had a good record of scoring funds for Planned Parenthood, he was staunchly anti-choice.

In her view, his Republicanism allied him with forces that sought to benefit businesses and the wealthy. “He probably would not go to the lengths that Republicans have gone to in the present to maintain such a disparity, because he grew up pretty poor.”

Jane Swift, the former Massachusetts governor and a Republican, recalled her family connection with Conte. Their families knew each other in Pittsfield’s “The Hill” neighborhood and Conte had played high school football with her mother’s uncle.

In an interview from her family’s horse farm in Williamstown, Swift noted the breakdown in civility between political parties. Conte’s era simply allowed — or expected — more fellow feeling among those in Congress, Swift notes, and that feels like a long time ago in light of today’s media hothouse, in which news organizations chase stories 24/7 and often treat politicians as celebrities, she says, rather than as leaders.

“The immediacy of the news cycle rewards bad behavior — it’s hard to break through unless you do something really bad. He represented a different era,” she said of Conte.

The difference could be seen March 12, 1991, when leaders across the political spectrum, from Tip O’Neill to vice president Dan Quayle, attended Conte’s funeral, four days after his death. The funeral drew Sox great Carl Yastrzemski, who served as a pallbearer, as well as Gov. William Weld, House Speaker Thomas S. Foley leading a 50-member delegation from Congress, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (who said of him: “He really is one of the can-do members of the House”) and John Kerry, and House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel.

“Just the amount of respect that he garnered,” Swift said. “But also, so many people would tell you that he didn’t let his power — and it was immense — influence his character. He never forgot where he came from.”