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Terry Files first oral history interview, recorded by Tony Macro on April 7, 2015. In this interview, Files discusses farming and husbandry in Wapping and working in tobacco as a youth. He also talks about the Second World War, including food rationing, watchtower, and anti-aircraft gun emplacements. Other topics include: travel by rail (from Manchester) and public bus; the Barnum & Bailey circus fire in Hartford; canning chickens and Sunday dinner, after boxing lessons, with 'Bat' Battalino; shopping in Manchester; musical entertainment in Hartford; dances and auctions at Hill's Grove; friends and companions on the Collins' school bus; activities at Ellsworth High School; life with the US Army in Idar-Oberstein in Germany, in the late 1950s; building Interstate 95 in southern Connecticut; and the Trade Union movement.
Orgnaizational or Biographical History
Terry Hull Files was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on 29 January, 1936, and raised in a farmhouse in the center of Wapping, South Windsor at the "Five Corners," on the site now occupied by the Santander Bank. Educated at Wapping Grammar School and Ellsworth High School, he took a number of jobs locally after graduation, eventually settling into a long career in heavy construction work, interrupted only by his national service in the US Army in Germany from 1958 to 1960, and in the Trade Union movement, in which he remains active. He had three children by his first wife - a daughter and two sons. He now lives in retirement with his second wife, Sandy, in a delightful house he built to his own specification, deep in the woods off Troy Road.
