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.
In 2015 I received a 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. My experience inspired me to begin writing history book on labor rights and industrial manufacturing of New England. 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 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 run an electronics basement studio where I am involved with restoring tape machines and audio equipment and projectors. 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.
