User:BenKlesc

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This user lives in the United States of America.

This user resides in
New England

This user lives in the U.S. Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

This user is interested in their local history.

This user is interested in the
History of New England.

MCCThis user attends or attended Middlesex Community College.

This user is a participant in WikiProject Massachusetts.

Benjamin William Kleschinsky (5 October 1996) is a longtime Polish/Italian Catholic resident of Chelmsford, Massachusetts. My family first set foot into the United States during the 1870's and immigrated to East Boston on my mother's side, and Bayonne, New Jersey on my father's side. My mother's family eventually moved to Revere and my father to Andover during the 1950's. My family first had roots in Chelmsford going back to the late 1930's when they rented a summer cottage by Heart Pond. My grandparents officially moved to Chelmsford in the mid 1960's where my mother was eventually born. I was born and grew up for the first years of my life in Lowell, and then moved to Dracut in 2000, and finally my family moved back to Chelmsford in 2002.

My passion for history as a child started growing up so close to the towns of Lexington and Concord. I recall going on tours along the Old North Bridge to stand where the Minutemen first marched. I also recall taking field trips in elementary school to visit the Old Garrison House in my home town to learn how to make soap and church butter like the first settlers of our town would have, as well as the House Of Seven Gables in Salem. It was at that moment I began to become obsessed with historic architecture and my surroundings. I wanted to know why everything existed where it did.

My second passion turned into politics and law, and that really spawned during my years in high school when I was asked to volunteer for local politicians and museums. I learned how government organizations worked and that grew to an obsession with every election. The first election I participated in was the 2014 Massachusetts gubernatorial race. The 2016 Presidential election would be the most involved movement of my life when it came to American politics. I worked for the Senator Rand Paul campaign in 2015 and met his entire family twice. I volunteered for Senator Bernie Sanders campaign and got to meet him for a quick conversation in Rhode Island. I was privileged to meet the former Republican Governor of Massachusetts Bill Weld and Gary Johnson in Boston. In 2016 I traveled by train to Philadelphia to attend the 2016 Democratic Convention, where I marched in the streets for hours and met Jill Stein. The following year I took another train to Washington DC to attend Donald Trump's inauguration. All of this so I could document and witness as much American history as possible regardless of any political affiliation.

So I took my love of history and politics and morphed those into a passion in my writing, and that it economic history. I became so frustrated and confused with the lack of answers when bringing up the economics of my local area. I became very fascinated with finding out the history of local businesses, companies, workers, and industrial base. I came across a surprising lack of useful information on the internet and that is when I decided to write my own books. Being so close to history in New England, I spent the years after I graduated high school visiting historical societies to locate original documents and photographs that were never digitized, and interviewing local politicians on their opinion about our current economy. The is when I came to find that the New England economy has drastically changed in the last 50 years. For most of America's history, New England was the industrial center of the entire country. Most industrial manufacturing from textiles, shipbuilding, rubber, paper, plastic, and automotive have mostly vanished. I'm in the middle of writing three books on Massachusetts industrial history.

As we shifted towards a new service economy this was the new reality. I have collected old photographs, old newspaper transcripts, and interviews I've conducted to provide a new wealth of knowledge to business and economic history of the surrounding area of Massachusetts. Now this was very much related to my professional career I moved towards out of the frustration and suffering I experienced and saw other people go through. In 2015 I received my diploma from Nashoba Valley Technical High School where I studied software development, and then went onto Nashua Community College in 2017 to get an Associates Degree in their Collision Repair Program. For three years I worked at various collision repair shops around New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and I quickly became frustrated to find out how much of the process is becoming automated and how much wages have stagnated in this trade over the last three decades. For one because automotive is the only trade without a labor union.

In 2020 after getting laid off from the workplace during the nationwide COVID19 pandemic, I made the decision to take my passion for the industrial sector and go back to school for engineering. In 2021 I am attending Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts to obtain enough credits to transfer to University Of Massachusetts Lowell in their nuclear engineering program. I am completely obsessed and passionate about our nuclear energy sector, and have written extensively on the history of our eight retired nuclear power plants in New England. The American nuclear sector is also a huge part of history which dates back to the Manhattan Project and mid century American economy, and the nuclear sector is also very much political and controversial. I look forward to sharing on Wikipedia my knowledge on that topic. Being a hobbyist historian, I am also involved in restoring historic artifacts and technology from the past. I have an electronics shop in my basement where I am involved with restoring tape machines and audio equipment. I also work with collectors in the New England area on archiving analog audio tape and other analog medium, such as the art of medium and large format photography and working with 8mm and 16mm film. I am also an active member of the Amateur Telescope Makers Of Boston located at MIT's Haystack Observatory.

Photography Gallery coming soon...