I’m proud to be able to boast I am a product of the mill town in which I grew up. The man I am now was made in Easthampton. Not unlike what was manufactured in the red brick-walled factories in which my mother and father toiled back in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mom worked for United Elastic, in the building located at the intersection of Union and Cottage streets. When I was a student at Maple Street Junior High, just down the road from Mom’s mill, I used to wave at her as she sat at the window near the machine at which she worked. And she waved back to me.

That intersection still looks pretty much the same as it did back then. But Cottage Street has undergone a remarkable resurgence, and is now what Main Street’s Shop Row was when I was a kid. And much work has been done to the shores of Nashawannuck Pond.

My father worked in a mill on Pleasant Street, as a shipping clerk at Hampden Specialty Products where metal folding chairs were made and shipped to locations all over the world.

I’ve written about an experience I had soon after my wife and I moved to North Carolina. The recollection of it clings to me, like a sweat soaked T-shirt after a long walk in July down Memory Lane. Donna and I were browsing in a shop selling second-hand goods. I spotted two chairs. Metal folding chairs like the kind made in dad’s mill. And wouldn’t you know it! The labels on the backs of the seats whispered, “Made at Hampden Specialty Products.”

My father’s image came to mind as I looked at the chairs. There he was sitting in one, nursing a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and reciting lines from a Rudyard Kipling poem titled “If.”

And there I was, kind of seeing my younger self sitting in the other chair. Listening to dad echoing Kipling’s last words of his favorite poem: “… then you will be a man, my son.”

Last month Donna and I attended our next door neighbors’ 60th wedding anniversary. Bev and Joe said their “I dos” in 1964. The last full year of my father’s employment at Hamden Specialty Products.

He’d been working there all my young life. I was 18 years old when his status changed from working stiff to an unemployed man looking for a job.

The anniversary party was held in the ballroom of our golf course community’s property owners association. We were among about 50 other guests there. As we walked into the room, I spotted Bev and Joe’s son, Russell Farmarco, his wife and two daughters. They live on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Russell is an award-winning sound engineer who was dialogue editor for the 2023 Best Picture of the Year “Oppenheimer.” He is currently working with the legendary film actor/director Clint Eastwood on what will possibly be the last movie Eastwood makes. He is 13 years older than Russ’ 80-year-old father.

When Russ told us of his working relationship with Clint, I thought of his much-publicized appearance at the 2012 Republican Convention. He gave a speech, and behind the podium was an empty chair. Eastwood, ever the actor, turned toward the seat and started engaging in with it, imagining then-President Barack Obama seated in it.

I didn’t ask Russ if he edited that Eastwood dialogue!

When Donna and I were shown to our table, I spotted eight chairs surrounding it. Six were made of wood. Two were metal folding chairs, on which my wife and I sat.

As a toast was made to Bev and Joe, we stood up and raised our wine glasses. As did the rest of the guests.

Except for one who yours truly spotted standing by a window. It was my father raising his glass of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The shipping clerk had found work after all. Getting delivered those chairs maybe made in Easthampton.

Terrence McCarthy, an Easthampton native, is a writer now living in North Carolina.