One rainy Friday evening, I made my way to the home of Jessica “Jessy” Park, namesake of the Jessica H. Park Mailroom, where she and her brother, former Senior Lecturer in English Paul Park, invited me into her warmly lit living room. After shifting around the room for a bit, Jessy Park finally settled on a rocking chair — one that may soon be replaced after her retirement at the end of December.
“I don’t know — we might keep this rocking chair,” she said, running her hands down its arms.
Paul Park explained that employees of the College who retire can receive a rocking chair with a brass plaque engraved with their name attached to its back. The Park family has already collected three: one for Paul Park, who retired in spring 2022; one for his wife Deborah Brothers, who retired after 38 years as a theatre department costume designer in fall 2023; and one for the Park siblings’ mother, Clara Claiborne Park, who taught at the College as a senior lecturer in English from 1972 to 1994. While their father, David Park, also worked at the College as a professor of physics, he never received a chair — perhaps because he retired before the tradition was established.
The Park family’s long legacy of employment at the College is now coming to a close as Jessy Park prepares for the end of 43 years as a mail clerk in the mailroom that was named after her in 2007. According to Paul Park, former President of the College Morton Schapiro once said that when a member of the Park family was no longer working at the College, the institution itself would “dissolve into ectoplasm like the House of Usher.”
“So that might be a subject of concern, or even of relief, when January 1 comes around,” he said to me.
Unlike the rest of us, however, Jessy Park has reason to look forward to her retirement. “I will paint some more and [work] on pictures and cards, and I will walk some more, and I will cook some more,” she said of her post-retirement plans. An accomplished artist with autism whose paintings are featured in exhibits and private collections across the country, Jessy Park has sold hundreds of pieces, often commissions of certain buildings or other structures.
“Jessy, when she was first diagnosed [with autism], was considered extremely high functioning,” Paul Park said. “But not now. Williams is full of people who have been diagnosed as autistic, but they’re college students, or even college professors. The scale of it has really changed.”
“My mother was very proud of the fact that Jessy had a job, and then she started doing these paintings,” he continued. The mother of four children, including Paul and Jessy Park, Clara Claiborne Park wrote two memoirs (The Siege in 1967 and Exiting Nirvana in 2001) about Jessy Park’s experience with autism, which are now widely recognized “as an important and pioneering source of insight for autism advocates, mental health professionals and educators,” according to the College’s obituary for Clara Claiborne Park.
“She put a lot of pressure on Jessy,” Paul Park said. “[Jessy] talked to galleries, and she had shows, but we could see that Jessy didn’t really enjoy that very much… Her response to her own art is very different from your average artist, and it’s hard for her to talk about that, and it’s also hard for people to think about it.”
Jessy Park has continued to paint throughout her time at the College. Recently, she has been interested in painting elaborately decorated Christmas cards — one example of what the Park family calls “enthusiasms.”
Over the years, Jessy Park’s “enthusiasms” have ranged from casinos (inspired by gambling nights that Schapiro held in the Towne Fieldhouse) to astronomical phenomena like sky charts and asteroid explosions. “Digital fluorescent number chains and extra-legal station identification,” Jessy Park added to the list. Sickness is another enthusiasm — when the College’s COVID-19 dashboard was still being updated, she would check it every day to track the number of cases.
“She’s very precise with numbers,” Paul Park said. Numbers were a large part of our conversation — Jessy Park has a sharp memory for dates and the hours she worked at jobs over the course of the past several decades.
She first started working at the College on Aug. 18, 1980, the summer after she graduated from Mount Greylock Regional High School. Prior to her job at the College, she had also worked in the teachers’ mailroom and library at her high school, as well as at the Clark Art Institute.
After a three-month trial period, Jessy Park officially began working as a mail clerk at the College on Dec. 1, and since then, she has seen the evolution of the mailroom from its home in Baxter Hall to its temporary three-year stay in a trailer outside Chapin Hall after Baxter was demolished in 2004 to its current home in Paresky Center in 2007.
Given the 43 years she has spent in the College’s mailroom, it’s unsurprising that she has seen her share of strange deliveries. “I remember the package that … says ‘beep, beep, beep,’” she recalled. The building was evacuated out of caution that the package contained a bomb, though it turned out to be a harmless electronic device. One thing she never solved was the mystery of a package with a tuft of hair sticking out.
Jessy Park has left an indelible mark on the students, faculty, and staff who pass through the Jessica H. Park Mailroom every day. “The one thing I will always remember Jessy for is every [Christmas], she would give everyone her handmade [Christmas] card adorned with a replica of one of her famous paintings,” Mail Operations Coordinator Debby Kopala, who has known Jessy Park for over 21 years and worked with her for almost 17, wrote in an email to the Record.
