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-With Little Anthony And The Imperials Tears On My Pillow In Mind

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[Of course a writer, even a half-baked ex-editor like myself, and remember the old saying that those who can’t write, teach-or edit and so that is my writing resume, editor, writes about personal emotions, his, hers, some third party disguised or true, writes about places seen and described, and sounds, heard or belled. Less expressed, and maybe that was just my prejudice as an editor were pieces written which dealt with smells, the smells of something-fair or foul. But more than that smells associated with certain people like the elderly lady here who only gets her minute in the sun via those smells she produced in her homemade bakery. That is the nail that Seth Garth hung his hat on when he made one of his rare adult trips back to the old Acre neighborhood where he, we, came of age back in the day. Frankly, at first I balked at publishing the piece, showing that prejudice mentioned above but also fearing that to let the sun shine on the role of youthful smells ran counter to what we were trying to do with this series, a series dedicated mainly to sights and sounds.               

I let the piece go at the time figuring that it was harmless enough. But in a recent re-read to figure out how to introduce a piece that was not directly related to corner boy life or rock and roll I realized that smells, Ida’s bakery smells, were part of the fabric of those growing up experiences not all of them beautiful smells either. While I would today still be a little hesitant to let Seth run wild with such a piece if he, or somebody else added something about the smell of such a situation as part of a larger perspective I would not squawk.

After all how could you avoid smell when you were describing the first time Scribe, or any one of us, had our first tastes of whiskey which was a rite of passage in our neighborhood-and not when one reached the legal twenty-one age requirement. Scribe’s story was that he grabbed his first bottle of liquor when he went to Doc’s Drugstore up on Newbury Avenue in order to get his grandmother’s prescriptions filled and had Doc, a little sharpie by the way, throw in a pint of whiskey in with the order. In those days, maybe now too for all I know, druggists carried liquor for “medicinal” purposes and on occasion Scribe’s grandmother would order a bottle for herself so Doc threw the bottle in without question even though Scribe was maybe fourteen or fifteen.

The smell parts came from the nasty breathe that Scribe (and his confederate in the caper Frankie Riley) had as the aftermath of this occasion when the two went down to Adamsville Beach and sat on the seawall drinking swigs and slivering the taste. Worse, worse by far was the smell from Scribe when he vomited the contents of his stomach after the pint was finish and even Frankie wanted to get away from him-and in those days Frankie and Scribe were fast friends. My own whiskey experience at sixteen was not far off from that except in our extended family the tradition was that an uncle would take a male child well under that twenty-one requirement to the Dublin Pub and buy him his first whiskey. Although not the last that first ones smell lasted in my mouth for days it seemed.

I won’t dwell too much on this smell business but on the more positive side how could you explain the budding romance that Sam Lowell had in junior high school with Marla O’Hara without mentioning that fragrance she emitted from the perfume, maybe grabbed from her mother’s bureau top or maybe it was bath soap or something that lured him in like a little puppy dog. A year before, a year before puberty okay, Sam could hardly stand being around her, taunted her, made her cry I think and then the next year that smell which was the siren call, a siren call that would carry through three ex-wives and a number of love affairs. Maybe he was endlessly trying to recreate that first bloom of youth.

My own experience was less exalted when I was pursing Theresa Wallace who also had the bath soap scent but who dropped me like a hot potato when I showed up with a ton of Wildroot tonic on my hair, a ton of Listerine (or some mouthwash) on my breathe and Right Guard (or some such deodorant) on my underarms. She wondered what the hell the smells were when we had our first (and last) dance. Yeah, sometimes things don’t work out and describing those smells is the only way to convey what was what. 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 corner of 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-outs 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 old time 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 sour-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 we were obliged to not eat red meat on that sacred day, so 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 then 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.