Welcome to beautiful Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells speak just to the Cabots,
And the Cabots speak only to God.
But not so much these days. Descendants of the Lowells and the Cabots are still meandering around the terrain, but Boston is a much younger place in Anno Domini 2015. There are fifty-six, count ‘em—56, colleges and universities in the Boston area, although we’re not entirely sure the Hellenic College and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology should count. Still, a lot. It’s a young town, with 22% of the population at age 19 or under. Even if you’re young, educated and confident, however, Boston can be a hard place to figure out. Many of the tiny streets are one-way and it sometimes seems impossible to get from here to there. Unlike many cities, New York for example, where most of the streets and avenues are numbered, none of the streets in Boston are. And why bother, since most of them travel neither north-south or east-west, rather ambling across the landscape in a maddeningly convoluted path, defying navigation. Blame the city’s lack of urban planning. When the English got off the boats in the 1600s, each of them decided where he or she wanted to live and it was up to someone else to insert the roads. Only in 1857 did the state of Massachusetts fill in the marshland which eventually became known as the Back Bay and implement a grid of parallel streets.
Why worry about driving, however, when you have the wonderful Boston subway system, the MBTA. It used to be called the MTA, but then Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Hawes went and wrote a song about a man named Charlie, who got trapped on the dang thing. The ditty, first called “The MTA Song,” then “Charlie On The MTA,” was originally recorded as a mayoral campaign song for Progressive Party Candidate Walter O’Brien but became so popular the lyrics were adjusted and a new version was released by the Kingston Trio in 1959. It was a smash hit, celebrating—or decrying—the subway’s new “exit fares.” If you, like Charley, couldn’t pay them, you were not allowed to leave the train; thus, the sad tale of Charley, whose wife tossed him a sandwich each day as the train came rumbling through. Nobody ever mentions why she didn’t hand him a quarter.
In New York, the Subway system is easy to figure out. Mostly, it goes uptown, toward the higher-numbered streets, or downtown, toward the lower. In Boston….well, just make sure you get your map. They do have “inbound” and “outbound” trains, which helps a bit, but right after you figure that part out, it’s time to change trains again. When we were kids, if we got lost on the subway, we always headed for the giant Park Street Station under the Boston Common. You could get anywhere from Park Street and practically all the MTA lines cross there. It’s still a good ace in the hole.
In Boston, though, it’s easy to walk. The town is not gigantic and a person in reasonable condition can traipse from the Aquarium on the waterfront over to Faneuil Hall, through the Common (past the gold-domed State Capitol building) and Public Gardens and on to the high-rent shopping extravaganza that is Newbury Street, perhaps stopping for a ride on the Swan Boats or an iced coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, which originated in Quincy, just outside Beantown. It’s not an exaggeration to say there is one on every corner, and sometimes two, often right across the street from one another. None of them are empty, Bostonians never having suffered from a reputation as healthy eaters (see “ice cream stands—Bedford Farms” and “fried clams—Woodman’s”). The two most prominent universities, Harvard and MIT, are both across the river in Cambridge but subway-accessible. Fenway Park is in the Back Bay area just off Kenmore Square and is the oldest Major League baseball park still in use. The ballpark tours (about 1 1/2 hours) offer opportunities to play inside the scoreboard or sit atop the famous left-field wall, both of which might be safer than actually attending a Red Sox game, the 2015 season being what it is. We went anyway.
Ducks await tourists near the Prudential Center, Boston
Ducks passing in the night. Vehicle in the foreground emerges from the Charles River, ours waits to enter.
View of the Museum of Science from the Duck.
Partial view of Hub skyline from the Duck.
Bill visits the Boston Holocaust memorial.
Plaque at the Holocaust Memorial.
Discussing important business, getting subway instructions from ex-mayor John Curley.
Ducks Unlimited
Siobhan and I landed at Logan Airport in East Boston in the early afternoon of July 26th, a Sunday, and immediately reported to our new digs at the Hilton, right on the airport property. We had earlier ordered up a normal sized room but I upgraded it to a vast corner number in compensation for the claustrophobic nights at The Sanctuary. It came with a nice view of the Boston skyline and shuttle service to the nearby subway stop, which we promptly utilized to get to the Prudential Center, a jumping off spot for the famous Boston Duck Tours. The Ducks are World War II amphibious landing vehicles which take you through the streets of Boston and eventually into the Charles River for a ninety-minute overview of the city, during which time you will occasionally be required to quack at unsuspecting passersby or be thought a bad sport.
The drivers, for whom a high wackiness quotient is a job requirement, will guide you around town offering a plethora of colorful historical information and corny asides, at which everyone will laugh hysterically. Our driver, a late twenties sweetie who called herself “Amelia Airhead,” actually came up with a good one, while pointing out a bar on one side of the street and a cemetery on the other: “This is the only place in the country,” she said, correctly, “where you can actually DRINK a cold Sam Adams while looking across the street at the grave of another one.” HA!
Next day, we took Siobhan to the Museum of Science, the highlight of which is always the scary Lightning Show, which often causes women with small children to flee the room and generates zapping nightmares for days afterward. Hey, they warn you and point out the exits before the show starts, what more do you want? Siobhan loves these places and I barely got her out of there in time to get ready for the ball game.
It had not rained on us so far this trip, but the dark clouds gathering outside Fenway were ominous. A couple of drops fell and the scorecard barkers began offering ponchos with their product for a mere dollar, an offer I couldn’t refuse. That done, it never rained another drop. Security at the gates was a little over the top, but then again the Boston Marathon bombings were not so long ago. We made our way inside to the third base line box seats the scalper had raved about for a relative pittance of a hundred each. They were as promised. A nice young lady came by and took our picture, returning later to offer it to us for a mere $26. The way I look at it, any time I get a chance to buy a resemblance of myself in which I don’t look (a) ancient, or (b) pissed off, is an opportunity not to be turned down. You can see the result at the top of this column.
The invading Chicago White Sox immediately blasted two triples, bringing a rain of boos down on the unpopular Red Sox pitcher, Joe Kelly. Sometimes, it’s not enough to be Irish. The Chisox got four runs in the first, disappointing everybody. Boston came back with two of their own, however, and soon achieved a 5-4 lead. The game went back and forth from there, the White Sox getting two runs late to win, 9-7. Despite the early boos, the crowd was in a mellow mood and appreciated the contentious game. Boston fans are knowledgeable and have muted expectations for this bunch. The Red Sox won the World Series two years ago, everybody celebrated, and now we are paying our dues, awaiting the next triumph. Fenway crowds are generally an ebullient group, happy to be spending a night at the park, whatever the outcome. We sighed at the impending loss, decided not to commit suicide and grabbed a cab back to the Hilton. Thomas Wolfe famously said, “You can’t go home again,” but tomorrow we would do just that. And discover he was mostly right.
We’re Off To The Coxville Zoo!
I have never been a big fan of rental car companies. Oh, I like the concept alright, just not the execution. When we were kids, we never heard of rental cars, although there has been some modest version of the critter lurking around since 1904. National Car Rental came along in 1947, Enterprise in 1957, then Thrifty and Budget a year later. John Hertz had been at it in a modest way since 1923. To us, the notion of plunking down a couple hundred dollars and driving off in a car worth thousands was laughable. “What if you just don’t come back?” we wondered. Do they send someone after you? I mean, you could drive to Korea. The whole concept was fascinating.
About the same time rental cars came into wider use, credit cards appeared. If we thought driving off in a nice new car for a relative pittance was a scandal, THIS was ridiculous. Diner’s Club was going to send you a card which allowed you to get almost anything FOR FREE! Oh, sure, you were supposed to pay for it later, but what if you didn’t? Sorry guys, ran out of money. Could they call the cops? This would never work. These people must be crazy. Anyway, the two entities went hand in hand. Before long, you couldn’t rent a car without a credit card. When this happened to me the first time, I was flabbergasted. You won’t take CASH? Why that….that’s….UNAMERICAN!
I guess it’s just a matter of where you rent a car. They’re nice enough in, say, Kalispell, Montana or Lexington, Kentucky….smaller cities where they value their limited number of customers. It’s the large airport counters that are worst, staffed with aggressive salesmen who insist you are a fool to refuse their offers of gas, insurance, EZ Passes and the like. Oh, and you might want to consider upgrading from a four to a six cylinder engine if you’re thinking of taking on those mountains—didn’t we tell you when you made your reservations?
I have made it a firm policy to never buy anything from these people. When they begin speaking, there is an automatic switch in my brain which goes off, making it impossible to consider anything they say as possibly accurate. In the case of the Alamo man in Boston, I turned down a $20 EZ Pass which would have saved me a lot of aggravation on the toll-ridden Maine Turnpike, which has about 700 little booths in the first hundred miles north of the state border. Live and learn. First, however, it was on to wonderful Lawrence, in my youth a textile town of 80,000, now the redoubt of Hispanic drug gangs and worse. But I don’t scare easy.
Bill’s house at 51-53 Garfield Street in Lawrence, Mass. from ages 4 to 17. The wall is new. He swears the porch was bigger. One of his bedrooms was behind the upstairs window over the porch.
An interesting spy roams the neighborhood.
Bill, Jack Gordon (hidden) and Barbara Gordon talk business with a local merchant. Jack’s house is in the background.
Sitting on Jack’s steps, as in many days of yore. Nobody brought the radio.
The view down Garfield from Bill’s porch.
All work on the gas line stops as foreman solicits Bill’s advice on a move to Florida. Should it be Venice (definitely NOT!) or West Palm (perhaps) or Tampa? We’d recommend the latter, but careful with the neighborhood.
“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood!”—Mr. Rogers
Siobhan and I showed up on Garfield street in South Lawrence around 9:20 a.m., over a half hour earlier than our appointed meeting time with old neighborhood friend Jack Gordon and his wife, Barbara. Sadly, my old house at 51-53 was up for sale and thus vacant, making a trip inside impossible. We took a mess of photos and I roamed around the property, noticing that the backyards of all the houses had fences now, making it awfully tough to throw the football around. Or it would have had there been anyone in the area interested in tossing pigskins. Truth be told, there wasn’t a kid in sight. Everybody but the itinerant workmen on the streets was 40 and up, a far cry from the days of our youth when young kids spilled out of every door, baseball bats in hand, jump-ropes at the ready, looking for action, happily advancing into the face of another exciting day. Say it ain’t so, Mortie!
In those days, the first order of business for the boys was to walk over to a friend’s house, look for the most likely window and “call” our pal….as in “JAACK-EEE!” or “EDDD-EEE!”….as loud as possible. If someone was named simply “Ralph” or “Paul” and was never actually referred to anything but Ralph or Paul, his calling name still had the appropriate addenda, as in “PAAAWWW-LEEE!” I mean, come on—“Paul” has no gravitas. It was against the unwritten neighborhood rules, of course, to simply go up and knock on someone’s door. What is this—the Ritz-Carlton? After a maximum of a half-dozen calls, the subject of our attention would rush from the house, sports equipment in hand, a smile on his face. Alternately, his frowning mother would appear to advise us that little Jimmy hadn’t finished his evening chores and would be ten more minutes, we could wait on the porch. Jackie Fournier’s mother (before her divorce and remarriage to Mr. Gordon) was a little different. While we were waiting for Jackie, she liked to ask us embarrassing questions, sometimes about girls. Usually, we looked at the ground and mumbled. Mrs. Fournier was feisty and a looker, not a normal quality for the typical neighborhood mother, although you couldn’t help but notice Dennis Tardiff’s mom had extremely large bazoombas. Anyway, this is how the day got started for the boys of Garfield Street. The girls, for some reason, never called their cronies. It was a source of lasting wonder to the male contingent how those girls ever got anybody out of the house.
Jack and Barbara Gordon arrived around 9:40 and we stomped around the old neighborhood, pointing out beloved landmarks, commenting on the evil dissipation of the tree colony and asking one another, “Honey, who shrunk the nabe?” Years ago, it seemed to take forever to gallumph from Falmouth Street, the southmost border, to Boxford, the northern delineator. More steps then, I guess. Jack steered us down to South Union Street, the area’s prime shopping venue, where we commiserated over the demise over Phil’s, an unrivalled comic-book emporium which floundered decades ago. The place would be high-rollin’ it these days with the new comix culture but Phil, at 124 years of age, might want to keep unreasonably short hours. Siobhan and Barbara, unfascinated by all these recollections, found a nice tree to stand under and ruminate over affairs of the day until our own conversation ran its course. This only happened a couple hours later due to travel time constraints and certainly not due to any lack of subject matter. We had barely scratched the surface of the Red Sox, a subject which runs deep. Walking and talking with Jack Gordon for two-plus hours makes it practically inconceivable that we do not live in houses next to one another and still go out to call each other every morning. It’s a tragedy. How did the world get so complicated?
At least, for us, the old place is still there, wrapped in a different package, maybe, but capable of generating moods and memories that no other place can. That’s the telephone pole Bill landed on when he fell out of the tree. Over there is where Jack set his radio every night so the both of us could listen to faraway Alan Freed and this exciting new rock ‘n’ roll. Here’s the building that used to house Louis Gervais’ variety store, which featured one of those cold-drink machines opened from the top and full of an endless variety of colorful choices. There was even ice floating around in there to enhance the experience. Leo also had the first gumball machine we ever saw. You could win a prize if you lucked into a gumball wrapped in shiny paper. There was no end of penny candy in the place, up to and including the tasty “nigger babies,” which were not even politically incorrect at the time. Leo’s was the stopping off spot after the finish of daily baseball games at the nearby B&M field. We had no Little League then. We made our own entertainment. The friends we knew in those long-ago times are scattered to the four winds now, those of them which survive, but we remember them well—peanut-sized Jimmy Lavery stealing passes away from much taller defenders….Jackie Mercier constantly proselytizing for careers in the Fire Department….Paul Brooks striking out or dropping fly balls in right field. The friends are gone but the neighborhood survives, leased by someone else now but still owned by us, still kindly thought of in our moments of reverie, still appreciated for the solid foundation it gave our lives. And when we hear people whining about misspent youth, unhappy childhoods, psychologically damaging early years, we shake our head in mystification. And then, of course, we remember. Oh—that’s right—they didn’t grow up on Garfield Street.
That’s all, folks….
