It’s quite possible that you’ve never heard of the windmill on Cuttyhunk that was once the largest windmill in the world, but it’s likely that you’ve heard the names of two of the several young environmentalists, engineers, and idealists who built it back in the late 1970s.
John Rockwell of Marion and former Marion resident and Tabor graduate Roger Race were both there in Cuttyhunk some 40 years ago, and their labor along with the efforts of four other men provided an alternate energy source to the island in the midst of the nation’s energy crisis. And what they did could be considered not only revolutionary, but downright subversive in a society once completely dependent on foreign-owned fossil fuels.
Documentary maker David Vassar captured the entire project in the film Generation on the Wind, preserving the history of how the island of Cuttyhunk was once home to the world’s biggest windmill built only with limited implements and the basic methods available at the time, used by men who were ahead of their time.
Rockwell was living on the island in 1977, and he was acquainted with Allen Spaulding, who was in the throes of a plan to build a windmill big enough to power the entire island that at the time relied solely on generators fueled by diesel, something that was much more expensive on Cuttyhunk than on the mainland.
“In the movie, I talked about how I went out one day to say hello to him and see what he was doing,” said Rockwell from a boat off the coast of New Jersey on May 1. Rockwell liked the sound of Spaulding’s project and he offered to “shimmy up the pole,” said Rockwell, “And for, I think, fifty cents. I didn’t actually think he’d hire me; he was just impressed that I would do that. I didn’t tell him after that my knees were shaking when I got down.”
The project became a steady paycheck for Rockwell, who had no background in high steel work, “Which was basically what we did,” he said. “I knew about rigging,” and a lot of what the crew did was simply that – hoisting and being hoisted 120 feet in the air to build the massive windmill. There wasn’t any large-scale equipment on the island at the time.
Construction began in the fall of 1977 and was completed in mid-May the following year. “That winter was the blizzard of ’78, and we were shipped some parts and they got lost,” Rockwell remembered. And when it was finally time to attach the windmill’s nose with its three 40-foot long blades attached, Rockwell was up there suspended at the top of the tower, guiding the nose dangling from a crane onto its mounting point to be tightened and secured into place.
“It was sort of scary in retrospect,” said Rockwell. “It wasn’t really that scary when I was doing it.”
Rockwell pointed out a part in the film when he was ready to receive the blades from the crane moving them toward him, suspended, and there was an audible ‘groaning’ sound. Someone asked him, “What’s that?” Rockwell told him it was nothing, “But it was actually the main shackle holding the blades up in the air,” he said. “It was bending open! And when it clunked into place, it ‘plunked’ because the main shackle opened right up – in the right place, thank goodness.”
“After that, I realized I could do no wrong,” said Rockwell.
It was an interesting time, Rockwell said, and the interesting project included a group of equally interesting people. A “motorcycle nut” who was a mathematical genius created the custom-made computer program that controlled the speed of the blades’ rotation every tenth of a second, “Which was very impressive back then.”
“One guy was a Boston Celtics fan, and he quit because we didn’t get good TV reception on the island and he couldn’t watch the games,” Rockwell said. “One guy, whenever he went up in the air (to work on the windmill) he always dropped something, which is the only way you can get hurt, by being underneath and having somebody drop something on your head. If you fell, you had a thousand things you could grab onto … We called him Mister Drop.”
‘Mr. Drop’ had a family, though, and wanted to make more money. He left the windmill project to go work on a nuclear power plant in Virginia, “Which we all thought was pretty funny,” said Rockwell. “It was an interesting time.”
Rockwell was friends with Race, who was recovering in Marion from a serious motorcycle crash. “He was sort of feeling sorry for himself because it was hard for him to get a around…” Rockwell talked Race into joining him on Cuttyhunk, and Race joined the project and even stayed on for another six or so months after the windmill’s construction was complete and the 200 kilowatt wind-powered generator was powering the entire island, which it continued to do for eight more years.
Race remembers Rockwell calling him up and encouraging him to come up to the island. “I said, ‘What the heck, I’ll recover out there.’”
The windmill was a great idea, said Race, really cutting edge to try to build one of such a size and capacity to produce power. And just a few miles away on neighboring Block Island, NASA was at the same time building its own large-scale wind turbine, “And it was ten times as much money,” recalled Rockwell.
“NASA was coming over to see us; we were going over to see NASA…” said Race. “Building the world’s first commercially viable 200 kilowatt generator…. It really was a lot of fun.”
“We were all at the top every day, hoisted up,” said Race. “Yes, there were some near misses,” Race continued, like when he was on top of the tower and in the distance he could see a sudden, strong winter storm approaching. “I called down to John, I think, ‘Get me out of here!’ In about ten minutes … when we got to the ground it blew like hell…”
“But it was all fine at the end of the day, nobody got hurt,” Race said. “It was wonderful to be out in the elements and experience that.”
“I thought it was really cold,” is what Rockwell said was on his mind pretty much most of the time he was up building the windmill. “We were cold, it was wintertime, and we were working outside and we were really cold, and that’s what we were thinking about mostly. We were all in our twenties … and we weren’t thinking too much about profound earth-shaking things.”
But the boss, Allen Spaulding, was. Rockwell said Spaulding thought of the windmill as a work of “monumental art.”
“I took that to heart,” said Rockwell, “and I always thought if I ever built anything, I’d want it to be a piece of monumental art like his windmill was.”
Looking back at the experience, Rockwell said the lesson he learned was a simple, yet empowering one – “You can do just about anything, if you think about it.” Building an 80-foot tower of steel with no gigantic cranes using old-fashioned construction techniques – “And when we had a problem we just sat down in a circle and we figured ‘em out. And the windmill produced a lot more power than we thought it would.”
As an engineer who does a lot of traveling, Race said everywhere he goes – France, Scotland, Canada – “I see [wind turbines] everywhere else and I think, wow, we were just so far ahead of our time.”
Generation on the Wind was recently digitally re-mastered and re-released in a theater in Texas on April 22, and in San Francisco the following day, just in time for Earth Day 2018, 40 years later. And, if all goes as planned, Netflix will acquire the rights to the film, making it available soon to an even wider audience.
The documentary was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature, won the “best documentary” blue ribbon at the American Film Festival, and won “best documentary” at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
A short ten-minute abridgment of the documentary can be viewed by visiting http://tinyurl.com/vimeo-wind.
By Jean Perry