The Red Sox, a 53 Buick Special and .....Fist City

[Myrtle]

It was late in the summer of ’55……..

That would put me a few months past the ripe old age of eight. Earlier that year my family had moved out of Orient Heights in East Boston. It was my birthplace, and the only home I had ever known.

It was one of those “Up & Out” moves; you know, one of the ones that signifies that your dad could afford to upgrade the status of his whole family because things were going well?

I loved living in Orient Heights. It was called ‘the Heights’ because its’ most prominent feature was a sharply rising hill that protruded almost right out of the Winthrop Bay inlet of Boston Harbor.

For any of you who ever flown into Boston, you can’t miss it, because it’s the highest point of land in and around Boston proper, and on top of it is a very large brick building upon which a large statue of the Madonna rests. The hill is shaped somewhat like a loaf of Italian scala bread, with the long side directly facing the inlet of the bay, across which is located Logan airport.

On the backside of the hill was Orient Ave. which sidled along near the Suffolk Downs race track.

On the harbor/airport side, almost at the top of the hill was Gladstone Street, which ran virtually the whole length along the side of the hill.

Along the harbor side of Gladstone Street was a group of 3 & 4 deckers buried into the side of the hill. The back porches of all of these had a sweeping, panoramic view of Boston, the airport and the Harbor. My family lived in one of these, and even better my fathers parents lived on the top floor of the one next door, and it had the best view of all of them. I spent many hours on that porch, watching the hustle and bustle of things both near and far, but most notably the comings and goings of all the planes at Logan.

To get off of Gladstone Street, there was a short, steep, curved street called Breed Street, which ran all the way vertically down the hill to Orient Heights Square proper. Breed Street connected Gladstone to Leyden Street, the next parallel street further down the side of the hill, but it did so in a reverse-Z manner and with a roller coaster-like drop, taking a wickedly sharp right-hand turn at the intersection of Leyden Street. From there, it went straight down towards the square at a good drop.

In the winter, it was one hell of a sled ride down Breed Street from the top where it intersected with Gladstone. There weren’t anywhere as near as many cars on the road back then as today, and the drivers seemed to be much more careful, so there was never anywhere as near as much concern for the safety of the kids who would slalom, kamikaze-style down the hill. With the right road conditions and snowfall, you could go almost all the way to Ford street, where it finally flattened out; a good quarter of a mile or so!

(For a graphic, Mapquest: 144 Gladstone St., East Boston, MA. The vertical drop from Gladstone to Ford is close to 200 feet.)

Halfway down Breed Street (between Leyden and Ashley) lived my mother’s parents.
Back then, I don’t seem to remember many folks whose last name didn’t end in a vowel. Translation: it was pretty much an Italian neighborhood. My folks grew up there; I had begun to grow up there, and everyone pretty well knew everyone else… in one way or another.

While we lived there, on virtually every Sunday we were at one or the other of my grandparents for dinner, which was always served around noon to one. Once we moved away, we still continued the tradition, perhaps not quite as often, but still with regularity.

It was on one of those Sunday visits that the following story unfolded……….

It was now the heat of mid-summer. On this particular Sunday, we were at my mother’s parents flat on Breed Street.

The Sunday morning ritual was pretty well the same in most families that I knew back then. Out of the rack, breakfast, get cleaned up and dressed up, and off to Sunday mass. Back from mass, get your stuff together, and off to either Grandma’s or Nona’s house to chow down.

On this particular day, I was dressed in my new, silk ‘smoking jacket’ replete with matching tie and dress shirt, which my mother seemed to be bursting with pride in my wearing. It was two-toned: dark brown with a light brown chest section, and it seemed to end at my knees. My reaction? About the same as Ralph in the Christmas story when he came down the stairs in the pink bunny suit…….uughh, I was not a happy camper!!!

Upstairs from Nona’s flat lived my mothers sister, Celia and her husband, my uncle Manuel. They’d usually join, along with their kids, so there was always a good sized crowd. The food was always beyond good……One of my great regrets was not having the foresight to get the recipes to all the magical special dishes they would put on the table that are now lost in a distant memory……. such is life.

Conversation around the table was a splattering of Italian and English, and after the meal itself was finished, out would come the wine and nuts and, inevitably, the arguments.

Sicilians can argue about anything and everything, and more often than not, there would be multiple brouhaha’s going on simultaneously.

We kids would sit there, our heads going back and forth, much like fans at a tennis match watching the flight of the ball, listening and watching as the protagonists in the various arguments, with faces growing progressively more crimson and raised voices, would harangue each other laced generously with the spiciest of profanities in the native tongue.

Of course, we would never dare to utter a word…..back then, children were seen, not heard.

After a while, out of exhaustion and too much wine, the theater of the hilarious would wind down, and we would have to find something else with which to entertain ourselves.

For me, on this day, this was a no-brainer. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees on this Sunday afternoon, and my dad had just bought a new car, and it had a radio in it!

It was a shiny, black 53 Buick Special. Straight-8, Dynflow tranny with lots of get-up-and-go. It was his baby, and he kept it clean as a whistle.

Did I mention that it had a radio? Yuppers, but remember, this was way before the transistor was a gleam in any electronics engineer’s eyes, so it was tubed. You turned it on, and waited for it to ‘warm up’, and after a minute or so, sound would eventually emanate from the speaker. And….you didn’t even have to put the key in the ignition for it to work.

With much trepidation, I asked my dad for permission to go sit in the car and listen to the game. I really didn’t expect him to let me, but much to my surprise permission was quickly granted.

The Special was parked out on Breed Street, a few spots uphill from Nona’s house, close to the corner of Breed and Leyden Street. In the car my brother and I piled, turned on the radio, and after the requisite warm-up time, there we were….in Red Sox heaven.

The details of the game itself escape me after all these years…….the events that were soon to follow are permanently etched in my mind.

So there Peewee (my brothers nick-name) and I are……stuffed full of good food…….windows down on a nice summers afternoon listening to the Sox battle the Yankees……life is good.

…………tick……………..tick……………..What the hell was that noise?

Tick………………tick…………….Both of us are trying to figure out where this tapping noise was coming from.

It didn’t take long, as we also became aware of some talking and laughing as we were trying to solve the mystery.

Not far away, almost up on the corner of Leyden Street, was a group of four of five kids from Leyden Street. What were they laughing at?

Once we saw one of them pick up a pebble and toss it as the Special……..tick…… we knew.

Geezez Keerist!!! My old man is gonna go crazy if he finds out.

Out of the car we roll, but not into the house, but up to the corner we go. Hey, what the hell, they’re throwing rocks at my old mans pride and joy……no self-respecting son is gonna let those bastards get away with that!

I might have only been eight, but I was raised one street up and no way would I let any sob get away with that stuff.

These kids were 2 or 3 years older than I, and it didn’t take me very long to realize that perhaps I had bitten off more than I could chew. As I started to get into it with them, and the pushing and shoving started (the normal prelude to fist city) I suddenly realized that I was still wearing my mothers pride and joy two-toned, brand spanking new smoking jacket.

Oh [censored]!!! If anything happens to this jacket, she’s gonna kill me. And then shortly follows the second realization; if I don’t fight back, my old man will also kill me.

I don’t think that I had as of yet at the ripe old age of eight had ever heard the term “between a rock and a hard place”, but at that exact moment, I sure could describe how it felt.

Well, they pushed me around quite a bit, and I just had to hold back, bite my tongue and not fight back. In the meantime, my brother all 3 feet something and 5 years old, is in the background yipping at their heels like a miniature pit bull.

Tears of frustration welled up in my eyes. Once the Leyden street boys saw that, there was no holding them back. I now became a helpless bean-bag toy for them.

I can’t remember how long it all lasted or how exactly I got away from them, but I finally did. Once free, the real fear welled up in me……I had to go back into the house and tell my old man what had just happened.

I screwed up whatever courage I had left and up to the dinner table, with the whole family still gathered around it, I went.

My mother knew immediately that something was wrong, and asked me what had happened. As I started to blurt out, best as I could the story, my brother took over and detailed my denouement.

I fully expected my father to knock me into next week once he heard it, but somehow or another that didn’t happen. They both seem to have understood what had happened, and the dilemma that I had faced.

My old man got very quiet….not like him at all. He told me to take my jacket, shirt and tie off. I did. He then gently took me by the shoulder, and outside we went, followed by the rest of the family.

The boys were still up at the corner, and when they saw me and the old man and the crowd come out of the house, they began to move away.

One shout from the old man stopped them all dead in their tracks.

Up we walked to them. Dad asked me which one had thrown the rocks and roughed me up. I pointed out the main instigator. I don’t remember his name, but he was eleven or twelve and bigger than I was.

Dad then calmly told me…… “Go kick his ass”.

Those of you who may have read some of my other stories here are probably aware of some of the tales about my old man.

He was one tough son of a bitch. Five feet eleven inches and 190 pounds of coiled steel; tempered by his WWII combat experiences and his daily work as a stonemason and plasterer. Add to that, that he knew absolutely no fear. It wasn’t until many years after this that I finally understood why he knew no fear, but right at that moment, I also knew no fear.

He had taught me well how to take care of myself. I really didn’t care how much bigger or stronger that other kid was…….I was most certainly going to kick the living [censored] out of him.

And it started……bap, bap, bap….with stiff jabs that took him totally by surprise and bloodied his nose. It shortly became clear to me that this kid wasn’t really that tough, and I proceeded to start to unload with some 1-2 combos, and was literally beating the hell out of him.

All of this with his friends and a growing crowd milling around, watching and yelling encouragement to both of us.

Now…..this was not happening in a vacuum, as you must remember that we’re in the middle of a three-decker neighborhood, and the normally placid Sunday afternoon calm had been shattered by our mini-brawl on the corner.

People started popping out of their windows, and the yelling started……some in English….some in Italian.

My old man grew up in this neighborhood……He knew almost everyone there…… and they knew him.

When it became clear that I was beating the hell out of the pebble thrower, my father stepped in and pulled me off of him with a simple ‘that’s enough’.

At that point in time, some guy leaning out of one of the windows started giving my old man some serious crap in Italian (back then I understood it pretty well….no longer). It turns out that the guy was the father of the kid whose ass I had just kicked.

At that point in time, the old man began to get angry. I knew this because the veins on his neck and arms began to bulge, and I knew what would shortly follow should anyone cross his path.

He started walking toward the guy in the 2nd story window and started waving his arms with fists clenched as he shouted back at him. I seem to remember something like “I know who you are and you better shut the eff up and get back in your effin house or I’ll come after you right now and break every effin bone in your body.”

I can almost still remember the look on the guys face.

He just suddenly stopped talking and paused silently in the window for a moment. Then, like a shadow disappearing when the sun goes behind a cloud, he was gone; the window slammed shut right after he vanished.

I didn’t know what to expect next.

Was he coming out to meet my old man in the street?

Was my old man was going to go up to his door, drag him out into the street and beat him to a pulp?

Neither event would have surprised me at all.

Fortunately, neither happened. The crowd dispersed….the yelling and shouting died down.

After the fifteen or twenty seconds of non-events, the old man cooled down, turned around, put his hand on my shoulder and we quietly walked back to Nona’s.

In retrospect, the years after World War II were a time of great social transition in this country. My sense of it now is that the world had been overwhelmed by hate, violence and suffering, and like me on that day, it was between a rock and a hard place.

Society was beginning to reject violence as a way to solve disputes, but old habits die hard.

When the adrenalin flows, we lean one way. When the calm prevails, we know that the old ways are not the answer.

There are times today that I long for the simplicity of resolving issues as cleanly and clearly as it seems that we did on that day some fifty odd years ago.

I still live with each of my cheeks firmly stuck on the horns of this dilemma.

At what point is the fear that lives within each of us driven so deeply that we can no longer get in touch with it?

Is no longer being able to touch it courage, or is it an empty void that detracts from the value of each of our lives?

I mostly wish that I had enough wisdom to even begin to know which questions to ask………

[rothko]

myrtle . . . absolutely splendid.

[Dominic]

very nice story...

amazing how a thread title with "Fist City" in it would have meant something completely different if I had posted it.

[boscoe1]

a very good read

[katyseagull]

Yes a very enjoyable read. Thanks for sharing that part of your childhood with us Myrtle.