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12.14.2003
The Mill Town
BY TOM MOONEY
Journal Staff Writer
WEST WARWICK -- You can live your entire life in the smallest state in the country and never pass through its geographical center. You would have no reason.
West Warwick is miles from the ocean, but from the low buildings and closed storefronts of Main Street, it feels like a tiny island -- a place that's not easy to get in or out of, where the interstate long ago detoured around. Ambitions languish here.
On a map, West Warwick resembles a tree stump with a deep wedge notched out of the eastern side. Its 8 square miles formed the framework of Tom Medeiros's life.
When the story of how they found Tom Medeiros after the fire reached the sticky floor of the soap factory and the smoky circles of the Portuguese social clubs, people understood it as truth.
Tom was always there for others.
After his brother-in-law suffered a fatal heart attack inside the Holy Ghost club and his niece and nephew both married, Tom moved in with his sister to keep her company.
And until the fire at The Station, he drove each day to the West View Nursing Home to visit his ailing mother, sometimes returning on his break to feed her.
His generosity bordered on the extraordinary: four years after breaking up with his old girlfriend, Tom continued cutting her parents' lawn.
This was the Tom Medeiros people knew in this mill town where lives pass close and often intersect. His life is the story of West Warwick. His death is one measure of The Station fire tragedy.
HE WAS 40 and nearly 6 feet tall with the same dark, close-set eyes and pronounced jaw that stare up from his 1981 West Warwick High School senior yearbook. The resemblance between then and midlife, however, stops there. Back then Tom had worn his love for rock music on his head: a trademark mane of curly blond hair that cascaded to his shoulders.
He fostered his love of music as he grew older, taking in concerts when he could, but found a new passion, too, which he celebrated with his ever-present Patriots' cap, always turned backwards so the brim hid the curls, now dark, of his short mullet.
Tom had so many relatives crowded into the corners of this town of 30,000 that the simple act of gassing up on busy Providence Street could convene a family reunion.
Tom Medeiros was also an anachronism. He lived out of time and place: an immigrant who still toiled down by the Pawtuxet River, in a factory.
For more than a century, the force of water had brought West Warwick greatness. Fruit of the Loom fabrics were manufactured here. The dreams of tens of thousands of immigrants like Tom Medeiros were woven on the clattering looms along the river. For most, those days drifted away long ago.
Many of the mills resemble sulking leviathans now, gutted and crumbling. Town leaders have hoped they would be transformed into Rip Van Winkles of the Industrial Revolution. But they have never woken.
"We don't have the mall. We don't have the ocean," local Rep. Timothy A. Williamson told the General Assembly two years ago in pleading for a special sales-tax-free zone for West Warwick. "We don't have anything to attract anyone to this town."
The Pawtuxet River still runs, but along its banks inertia prevails.
THIS WAS to be a redefining year for West Warwick, a year when the steady decline would reverse and the desperation that had seeped in with financial calamities and business closings would ease. In the 1990s, West Warwick became the sixth Rhode Island community to have more than 15 percent of its children living in poverty. According to the 2000 Census, 43 percent of its households made less than $35,000 a year.
Prior to the new year, there was optimism over the casino proposed for the business park. Town leaders were courting developers to rebuild downtown and spoke of how the momentum had shifted.
Even the stationery of the town's Economic Development Commission bore a new motto: "On the Verge of Greatness."
Then, late on a cold night in February, an aging rock band with a fading legacy took the stage inside a former restaurant, at 211 Cowesett Ave., renamed The Station.
Among the over-capacity crowd of some 430 revelers were Tom Medeiros, a fan of the band Great White, and his girlfriend of more than two years, Lori Durante, a West Warwick mother of two adolescent boys. She loved Tom dearly, but not the club scene or heavy metal.
The band opened its act with a blast of pyrotechnics. The highly flammable packing foam on the club's walls, installed as soundproofing, ignited.
Within minutes, Tom and Lori were dead, along with scores of others in the nation's fourth-deadliest nightclub fire.
In the hours and then days that followed, the list of confirmed dead grew: 39, 63, 78 . . . 99. The 100th victim died in a Massachusetts hospital May 4 -- 73 days after the fire. More than 200 others were injured.
WEST WARWICK was forged by fire.
Since their advent in the 18th century, mills have burned in spectacular fashion.
In 1992, when the Crompton Mills went up, nursery school children set their chairs outside in a neat row and watched with wonder as one of the state's greatest industrial achievements collapsed in a ball of flame. Many adults cried.
House fires have killed. In a 1995 fire, two days before Christmas, four members of the Larocque family, and a visiting friend, perished. It was the deadliest fire the town had ever known.
For more than a year in the mid-1990s, an arsonist terrorized the town, burning 20 downtown buildings.
Those who live here and have known fire's wrath seem at times tempered by hardship. But the despair wrought from The Station fire burned deep, to a place never before touched.
And the loss of Tommy, as much a product of West Warwick as Crompton Mills velvet, weaved its own specialty line of hurt.
WHEN THOMAS P. Medeiros was 4, his parents, Gilberto and Virginia Medeiros, brought him and his six older siblings to West Warwick from the village of Ribeira Quente in the Azores, an island archipelago off the coast of Portugal.
They followed a course charted more than a century earlier by thousands of other immigrants who had flooded into the Pawtuxet Valley at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
There, the north and south branches of the Pawtuxet River flowed around gentle hills on an eastward path toward Narragansett Bay. Where the branches narrowed and dropped and the brown-stained water quickened, the mills staked their claims.
Mill houses and stores rose up around them. They clustered into villages named Crompton, Natick and Riverpoint where the rivers merged, and Lippit, Arctic and Roger Williams, named for the state's founder. When fire destroyed the Roger Williams mill, in 1821, the residents renamed their village Phenix, after the mythological bird that rose from the ashes of fire, born again.
Phenix would live up to its name. For the next 80 years it suffered one fire after another.
New arrivals gravitated to villages where relatives and friends had settled before them. Villages took on ethnic identities: the Polish in Crompton, the Italians in Natick, the Irish and French in Arctic.
The Medeiros family settled among the Portuguese in Riverpoint, where Sunday Mass at St. Anthony's is still said in the language of the old country.
They lived in a two-story house with a flat roof at the bottom of Harris Avenue, a short walk from the library and one street away from Patrick Quinn's hilltop mansion.
Quinn, a flamboyant orator and lawyer, was the son of Irish immigrants who arrived to work in the cotton mills a century before the Medeiroses.
In 1913, Patrick Quinn led a successful campaign to have what was then the state's most industrialized and thriving region -- and a center of state political power -- split off from the rest of rural Warwick and incorporated into its own town.
Quinn became West Warwick's first Town Council president. In the grand tradition of nepotism that would define the West Warwick of the future, Quinn had his nephew and law partner appointed town solicitor. For several decades, he ruled West Warwick like a fiefdom.
Quinn's mansion was razed in 1982. After a fire.
QUINN HAD BEEN dead 11 years when the Medeiros family moved onto Harris Avenue. The year 1967 promised them a new start in a new land.
For the town, 1967 would eventually prove disastrous.
Throughout the 1940s and '50s, the village of Arctic, the town's center, enjoyed a reputation as the shopping destination for southern Rhode Island and Connecticut. People poured onto Main Street sidewalks each Thursday and Friday night. All roads led through Arctic and it was in Arctic where storefronts glowed.
That October the Midland Mall opened three miles away, in Warwick, the first shopping center of its kind in Rhode Island.
The face of retail changed, and left Arctic virtually abandoned.
By then, after more than a century as an industrial powerhouse, West Warwick had little open space left to entice the big malls.
Retail giants cast longing glances instead at all the open space of neighboring Warwick, a former farming and fishing community.
The birth of modern shopping centers coincided with construction of Interstate 95. What few customers the malls didn't steal from Arctic stores, the new highway would steer away.
IN JANUARY 1922, thousands of mill workers angered by a second pay cut in as many years took to the streets in West Warwick.
National Guardsmen manned a machine-gun nest on the roof of the Royal Mills in Riverpoint to ensure order. The strike lasted for months. A newspaper article called it the town's "darkest hour." Several of the town's nine mills never reopened. Over the next four decades most of West Warwick's textile companies gradually moved south where labor was cheaper and raw materials close.
But there was still work at the Original Bradford Soap Works.
In 1931, Bradford took over the former Valley Queen Mill and turned the stone edifice into the world's largest manufacturer of private-label soaps. Each year, Bradford turns out tens of millions of soap bars that line grocery store aisles and the shelves of Victoria's Secret boutiques.
At Bradford, the Medeiros family found opportunity.
Tom Medeiros's father, Gilberto, took a job there shortly after the family settled in Riverpoint. Tom's older brother John would follow, meeting his future wife on the factory floor. There were cousins, the Pimentels, who had arrived from the Azores before them. They, too, worked on the soap floors.
So many Medeiroses and their relations came through Bradford's door that by the time Tom Medeiros knocked in July 1984 all he needed to do was say his name.
"When a Medeiros walked through the door back then you hired them," says Joe Sosnosky, the company's executive vice president. He hired Tom Medeiros. "That's one family where if you could fill your place with, then that's what you'd do. They all have a great work ethic and rarely miss a day of work."
Tom was 22 and enjoyed a status and notoriety beyond his surname.
He had graduated three years earlier, recognized as the greatest runner in West Warwick High School history.
In a town with little to cheer about, the West Warwick Wizards boost the collective self-esteem. Virtually anyone off the street can speak of the legendary Frank "Monk" Maznicki, a local hero who went on to play for the Chicago Bears and returned to coach 17 football teams to championships. He even took the 1952 team to a national tournament at the Orange Bowl in California.
On the track, Tom brought West Warwick pride.
Many recall the tall, lean runner's golden hair flowing behind him, emulating David Lee Roth, the lead singer of the rock group Van Halen.
"He was amazing to watch," says Norm Bouthillier, who ran against Tom Medeiros at Bishop Hendricken High School. "He was head and shoulders above the rest for a long time."
Tom won the outdoor 3,000-meter state championship in 1980 and cross-country championships in 1980 and 1981. In his senior year, he set school records in the mile (4:30.6), the 1,500 meters (4:03.6), and the two-mile run (9:41.3).
In the 1981 Outdoor State Championships, Tom finished fourth overall, a ranking that failed to reflect his achievement, recalled Mike Crawley, who ran for Shea High School that day.
"It was pouring rain out in the morning," said Crawley, now a track coach at Lincoln. "Tom thought the meet was canceled, so he decided to run 10 miles for a workout."
When he returned, Tom learned the meet was still on.
He ran the 1,500-meter race, taking second.
Four of Tom's West Warwick records stand today.
THE WRITER Ann Hood graduated from West Warwick High School in 1974, seven years before Tom Medeiros. In an essay about her 15th-year reunion, Hood described West Warwick as a small town where people tend to stay.
"At one point that evening as I talked to a group of boys -- they were, of course, men, but somehow I still thought of their 17-year-old selves -- they each told me where they were living now. West Warwick. West Warwick. West Warwick. I looked to the fourth one. 'Do you still live in town, too?' 'No way,' he said, insulted. 'I got out a long time ago. I live in Warwick.' "
Tom Medeiros had stayed and found contentment in his hometown, despite its many misfortunes.
There had been the town's financial collapse of 1993, which resulted in a citizen revolt and one of the highest tax rates in the state today.
There was grim poverty coupled with little new business.
And there were scandalous examples of officials choosing self-interest over public service: the overweight firefighter who couldn't get his calf in his boot and demanded a disability pension (he lost); the School Committee member fined by the state Ethics Commission for pressuring a principal to hire his son as a teacher; a former mayor who pleaded no contest to obtaining money under false pretenses for paying himself $15,000 in sick time and vacation pay before leaving office; a fire battalion chief convicted of arson conspiracy for delaying the response to a fire at a friend's warehouse. . . .
In West Warwick everyone knows everyone.
The circumstances keep the state Ethics Commission busy. Town officials need advisory opinions on what might be nepotism or patronage, and what is simply life's reality in West Warwick -- such as the councilman who sought guidance on whether he could participate in contract negotiations with the police union, given that his son was a patrolman and his daughter also worked for the town.
Through it all -- the eras of bad luck and poor management, the mill fires and unsolved arsons -- West Warwick endured. And Tom thrived on the strength of family and friends.
"He really liked it here, where his family was, and liked what he was doing," says his niece, Andrea Silva. "He always said that."
Tom wanted to buy a house, Silva says, somewhere close by.
"He told my Aunt Maria that even after he moved out of her house he would still come by and cut her grass. Tommy kept her yard so nice."
For Tom, family came first.
"He put us, all his nieces and nephews, on the top of the world," Silva says. "He always said he would protect us. That was just the way he was."
Lori Durante fell under Tommy's umbrella of love and protection.
"And that's why I know," Silva says, "he would have done anything to get Lori out of there."
Out of The Station fire.
LAST JULY 25th marked Tom Medeiros's 18th year with Bradford Soap.
Bradford operates around the clock and although Tom had seniority, he preferred the third shift, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.
The arrangement gave him his days free to sunbathe in summer -- Tom always had a deep tan -- take in the New England Patriots pre-season practices at Bryant College or help his aging father and mother, who had suffered a stroke six years ago.
Each night he would make the four-mile drive to work from his sister's house, just over the town line in Coventry, navigating his pickup through a valley of darkened mills. He arrived -- always on time -- in jeans and a T-shirt colored white, black or gray, the company's colors.
He seemed suited for the repetitive nature of factory work.
He had worked in the maintenance department, where his brother John was now a master foreman, and on the assembly lines, where his sisters Norbina and Jorgelina packaged the perfumed bars.
At least two of his 12 nieces and nephews also worked on the production floors. And then there were all the cousins and in-laws.
Late in the summer of 2002, about six months before The Station fire, Tom changed to second shift so he and Lori could spend more time together, friends say.
Both had emerged scarred from previous long relationships. They found each other at the West View Nursing Home where Lori, a medical technician, dispensed medicine to Mrs. Medeiros and helped with her care.
Tom shared with his father his intention of marrying Lori, who along with her boys were now regular guests at the big Medeiros family meal that his sister Maria Coelho hosted each Sunday, always making too much chourico.
When the Patriots played in the Super Bowl in February 2002, the Medeiros clan gathered at Jorgelina's house in their team shirts. Lori's boys playfully teased Tom that they were rooting for the Rams.
While his factory shift had changed, his job remained the same.
Tom worked the tacky floor of the soap room, feeding heavy sacks of additives into vats of steaming base soap. The emulsifying mixture of beef fat, coconut oil and palm oil resembled a vanilla frappe and filled the air with a subtle antiseptic smell. In summer, the temperature inside the soap room often surpassed 100 degrees.
Once the base soap dried to proper consistency, a pneumatic pipe above Tom's head loudly sucked the soap from 7-foot-tall kettles and sent it upstairs. Tom packaged the popcorn-like pellets into 1,800-pound bags.
Tom Medeiros set high standards for how much soap his shift would package, and he rarely missed a day of work.
February 20 was different.
He used some vacation time so he and Lori could have the day together before attending the Great White concert at The Station that night.
In recent years, the club had attracted many of the bands that played the '80s heavy metal of Tom's youth.
He had heard several concerts there, including Great White's last appearance in April 2000.
Paul Coelho, his 31-year-old nephew, went with him to many of those shows.
Before the Great White concert, Tom told his nephew that Lori was going. Tom said he didn't know why, since Lori didn't even like the music.
Coelho was about to offer to go in her place, but bit his tongue. It struck him that Lori just wanted to be with Tom.
"I told myself, let them spend some time together because their hours are all messed up and they don't get many chances to see each other."
HOURS AFTER the fire, Tom's relatives stood with hundreds of others gathered in the night's cold, hoping for word.
Firefighters had begun recovering the bodies of people they would later learn were their friends, or the relatives of neighbors and coworkers they knew.
Everyone in Rhode Island, it seemed, knew someone who had died.
Two days after the fire, Tom and Lori were still officially listed as missing. On the third day, officials added her name to the list of confirmed dead.
It would take another day until authorities added the name of Tom Medeiros to the list.
A family friend later explained why to Tom's relatives, his niece says.
In his final moments, Tom Medeiros had laid his body over Lori Durante's, as if to shield her from the flames.
TOMORROW: The Codes
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