The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of Childhood- Ida's Bakery

By Allan Jackson

[Hell, it has been many years since I have used this by-line name having for most of that time used the moniker Peter Paul Markin who taught me, taught a lot of us who grew up with him in the Acre section of North Adamsville back in the late 1950s early 1960s, before he went off the rails, before he wound up with a couple of slugs in him down in Sonora, Mexico way after a big try busted drug deal. Today though I am proud to write under my own name especially since it was a struggle to get such recognition and since this Roots is the Toots project was one of a half dozen that I am proud to have been associated with in my long career.

Without going into to details which my old friend Jack Callahan has probably filled you in on already after I authorized him to speak on my behalf when I was in so-called exile to bat away the silly rumors that have accumulated around my exit, my purge from my position here I do feel that I am entitled to express my concern over the fact that is series was initially re-issued without my knowledge. That is what enraged me and led me to contact Sam Lowell and try to get this situation rectified. And by stages it has been as current site manager Greg Green whose work I admired when he held the same position over at American Film Gazette has graciously consented to let me run the rest of this series under my own name and make comment as I see fit about each piece. As my initial offering I don’t want to spend much time on this slice of live piece below about the old neighborhood, the old Acre section of North Adamsville where a number of us associated with this publication came of age and which drove much of the action of the series but on its place in my personal pantheon.            

I mentioned above that this is one of about one half dozen series that I have been associated with over the years that are hallmarks of my career. This is maybe not number one on the list, probably the series that I did long ago for the East Bay Other and The Eye two publications now long gone as have most alternative newspapers spawned in that time. That series concerned the fates of a bunch of fellow returning Vietnam War veterans who could not adjust to what we called “the real world” and wound up creating alterative “communities” down in the riverbeds and along the railroad tracks in Southern California. Guys who would certainly qualify as members of the “brothers under the bridge” which Bruce Springsteen made a song about some years later. That one was personal as well as journalistic and I think the guys who spoke their stories out appreciated what they were able to do to heal a little.

In the pantheon though this series ranks number two and without getting into a nostalgia trip which supposedly got me into more hot water than necessary early last year it is a rather remarkable “slice of life” run of sketches which covered everything from puberty to public nudity and then some wrapped around serious devotion to rock and roll music which saved our lives in that hard scrabble time. Plenty has been written and portrayed on screen about the middle class aspirations of the 1950s “golden age” in America which around our way was a myth, didn’t pan out. In that sense this was a unique experience. In another sense this also represented something like a “youth nation” culture which for a little while at least transcended classes until the middle and upper class youth went back to whatever they were going to do before they stopped for a minute. We on the other hand mainly wound up in Vietnam or fucked up in some other way. That part has come out too.

On the question of my role in the production of this series I either wrote the bulk of the sketches, assigned a few and edited every single piece with a very hard red pencil to turn them a certain way and while there was some collective efforts this one reeked of my sweat for a few years. Like I say I am proud to have my name on this one. To put paid to this sketch below I can still smell those bakery smells mentioned just like I did when I returned to the old neighborhood to soak in the milieu. Heck still can smell the smells from when I was a kid looking for a vagrant oatmeal peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Allan Jackson]           

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There are many smells, sounds, tastes, sights and touches stirred up on the memory’s eye trail in search of the old days in North Adamsville. Today though I am in thrall to smells. The why of this thralldom is simply put. I had, a short while ago, passed a neighborhood bakery here on the St. Brendan Street that reeked of the smell of sour-dough bread being baked on the premises. The bakery itself, designated as such by a plainly painted sign-Mrs. Kenney’s Bakery- was a simple extension of someone’s house, living quarters above, and that brought me back to the hunger streets of the old home town and Ida’s holy-of-holies bakery over on Sagamore Street.

Of course one could not dismiss, dismiss at one’s peril, that invigorating smell of the salt air blowing in from North Adamsville Bay when the wind was up. A wind that spoke of high-seas adventures, of escape, of jail break-out from landlocked spiritual destitutes, of, well, on some days just having been blown in from somewhere else for those who sought that great eastern other shoreline. Or how could one forget the still nostril-filling pungent fragrant almost sickening smell emanating from the Proctor &Gamble soap factory across the channel down in the old Adamsville Housing Authority project that defined many a muggy childhood summer night air instead of sweet dreams and puffy clouds. Or that never to be forgotten slightly oily, sulfuric smell at low- tide down at North Adamsville Beach, the time of the clam diggers and their accomplices trying to eke a living or a feeding out of that slimy mass. Or evade the fetid smell of marsh weeds steaming up from the disfavored Squaw Rock end of the beach, the adult haunts. (Disfavored, disfavored when it counted in the high teenage dudgeon be-bop 1960s night, post-school dance or drive-in movie love slugfest, for those who took their “submarine races” dead of night viewing seriously. And I do not, or will not spell the significance of that teen lingo race expression even for those who did their teenage “parking” in the throes of the wild high plains Kansas night. You can figure that out yourselves.)

Or the smell sound of the ocean floor (or dawn, if you got lucky) at twilight on those days when the usually tepid waves aimlessly splashed against the shoreline stones, broken clam shells, and other fauna and flora turned around and became a real roaring ocean, acting out Mother Nature’s high life and death drama, and in the process acted to calm a man’s (or a man-child’s) nerves in the frustrating struggle to understand a world not of one’s own making. 

Moreover, I know I do not have to stop very long to tell this retro crowd, the crowd that will read this piece, about the smell taste of that then just locally famous HoJo’s ice cream back in the days. Jimmied up and frosted to take one’s breath away. Or those char-broiled hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on your back-yard barbecue pit or, better, from one of the public pits down at the beach. But the smell that I am ghost-smelling today is closer to home as a result of a fellow classmate’s bringing this to my attention awhile back (although, strangely, if the truth be known I was already on the verge of “exploring" this very subject). Today, after passing that home front bakery, as if a portent, I bow down in humble submission to the smells from Ida’s Bakery.

You, if you are of a certain age, at or close to AARP-eligible age, and neighborhood, Irish (or some other ethnic-clinging enclave) filled with those who maybe did not just get off the boat but maybe their parents did, remember Ida’s, right? Even if you have never set foot one in old North Adamsville, or even know where the place is. If you lived within a hair’s breathe of any Irish neighborhood and if you grew up probably any time in the first half of the 20th century you “know” Ida’s. My Ida ran a bakery out of her living room, or maybe it was the downstairs and she lived upstairs, in the 1950s and early 1960s (beyond that period I do not know). An older grandmotherly woman when I knew her who had lost her husband, lost him to drink, or, as was rumored, persistently rumored although to a kid it was only so much adult air talk, to another woman. Probably it was the drink as was usual in our neighborhoods with the always full hang-out Dublin Grille just a couple of blocks up the street. She had, heroically in retrospect, raised a parcel of kids on the basis of her little bakery including some grandchildren that I played ball with over at Welcome Young field also just up the street, and also adjacent to my grandparents’ house on Kendrick Street.

Now I do not remember all the particulars about her beyond the grandmotherly appearance I have just described, except that she still carried that hint of a brogue that told you she was from the “old sod” but that did not mean a thing in that neighborhood because at any given time when the brogues got wagging you could have been in Limerick just as easily as North Adamsville. Also she always, veil of tears hiding maybe, had a smile for one and all coming through her door, and not just a commercial smile either. 

Nor do I know much about how she ran her operation, except that you could always tell when she was baking something in back because she had a door bell tinkle that alerted her to when someone came in and she would come out from behind a curtained entrance, shaking flour from her hands, maybe, or from her apron-ed dress ready to take your two- cent order-with a smile, and not a commercial smile either but I already told you that.

Nor, just now, do I remember all of what she made or how she made it but I do just now, rekindled by this morning’s sough-dough yeasty smell, remember the smells of fresh oatmeal bread that filtered up to the playing fields just up the street from her store on Fridays when she made that delicacy. Fridays meant oatmeal bread, and, as good practicing Catholics were obliged to not eat red meat on that sacred day, tuna fish. But, and perhaps this is where I started my climb to quarrelsome heathen-dom I balked at such a desecration. See, grandma would spring for a fresh loaf, a fresh right from the oven loaf, cut by a machine that automatically sliced the bread (the first time I had seen such a useful gadget). And I would get to have slathered peanut butter (Skippy, of course) and jelly (Welch’s grape, also of course) and a glass of milk. Ah, heaven.

And just now I memory smell those white-flour dough, deeply- browned Lenten hot-cross buns white frosting dashed that signified that hellish deprived high holy catholic Lent was over, almost. Beyond that I draw blanks. Know this those. All that sweet sainted goddess (or should be) Ida created from flour, eggs, yeast, milk and whatever other secret devil’s ingredient she used to create her other simple baked goods may be unnamed-able but they put my mother, my grandmother, your mother, your grandmother in the shade. And that is at least half the point. You went over to Ida’s to get high on those calorie-loaded goodies. And in those days with youth at your back, and some gnawing hunger that never quite got satisfied, back that was okay. Believe me it was okay. I swear I will never forget those glass-enclosed delights that stared out at me in my sugar hunger. I may not remember much about the woman, her life, where she was from, or any of that. This I do know- in this time of frenzied interest in all things culinary Ida's simple recipes and her kid-maddening bakery smells still hold a place of honor.