From The Archives Of The Carter’s Variety Store Corner Boys- The Night They Burned Snug Harbor Elementary School Down-Almost  

By Sam Lowell

Of all the corner boys (read: juvenile delinquents in some quarters, sullen schoolboys in some, and misunderstood youth in others all three probably true in some senses) who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor while we were going to North Adamsville High in the early 1960s I am the only one still standing who started his corner boy career at Carter’s Variety Store across town in the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments (read: “the projects”). That experience started when I was a student at the Snug Harbor Elementary School located just outside the projects. The school had been built to meet the needs of the burgeoning school age population of both the young families who found themselves in need of cheap housing at the recently built projects and the influx of families who were filling in the extensive 1950s-style new ranch houses up the road. That should do for background for now.

I mentioned that I am the only Carter’s boy still standing but I was not the only one. There was one other one Peter Paul Markin who at Tonio’s was always known as the Scribe and I will use that here rather than that pretension-filled moniker his mother laid on him. Now much ink (and many tears, many tears still) has been spilled in this publication about his latter exploits and craziness of the Scribe when he was in high dudgeon at Tonio’s and a little later but little has been noted about the early days, the early corner boy days in elementary school when most of the Tonio’s boys were clueless about the value of desperately poor kids joining together, hanging out to do, well to do the best they could.             

I am not quite sure how the Carter corner boys started since it was already formed when I started hanging out along with the Scribe. Let’s leave it that this store was the only one in the whole projects area (and sadly still is) where residents without cars, including my family many times, or in need of some quick item could shop. That it has penny candy (yeah, I know inflation) and other sweets galore probably added to the allure. That and Mister Carter did not mind us hanging out as long as we didn’t block anything and didn’t do anything crazy (we never did-there).        

I met the Scribe the first day of school in fourth grade after my family had moved to the projects from another project in Riverdale west of Boston when my father’s company moved to the area and he needed the work. That was in Miss Sullivan’s class, an old biddy who trucked no nonsense and who made it her profession to keep us after school for detention-even that first day which was supposed to be easy stuff. The Scribe was looking at some book, forgotten now, and I commented that it looked interesting to start a conversation. That was all the Scribe needed as he wowed me with the contents. And didn’t wow Miss Sullivan who kept us after for the continuous talking. After that after school detention business we went to Carter’s to see what was up once he told me fourth and fifth grade guys hung out there and it was okay.

Later and elsewhere the Scribe, and to some extent me, would be the leaders of various corner boy combinations, would plan whatever needed to be planned, legal or illegal but then we were frankly naïve and really just foot soldiers. The deal was already set for leadership with Ronnie, George, Rodger, Lenny running the operations (all would later do various stretches of time in county and state prisons I think except Lenny who laid his head down in Vietnam during that war). We had no problem with that since we were in thrall to the whole aura of the thing.      

Now they say, maybe they said is better, that juvenile delinquents are born not made. Have some genetic kink missing which throws everything off. That was true of Ronnie I believe for he had a really devious and sadistic bent (his idea of initiation, for example, was to kick each new corner boy in the scrotum which almost killed the Scribe and I for we never saw it coming-what pain) Somehow Ronnie had gotten into a beef with his teacher and was going to be suspended or some such thing. He was livid about it. One Sunday night shortly after the beef he gathered us together to seek his revenge. He planned to burn the school down-with our help. Whether we thought about it or not we were in. So we started gathering wood from small forest behind the darkest part of the school where we would not be seen by traffic from the road and stacked it against a back pair of doors.

Ronnie had some gas, not much but enough to douse the wood and then took a match from a matchbook and lit the stuff. We ran like hell. Before long though we heard the fire engines come. A neighbor apparently had seen the fire and called. There really wasn’t much damage as we found out later since those doors were flame-resistant. Joke on us, right. My understanding was that the coppers, firemen and the headmaster too though it was some rummies from the forest trying to break in for whatever reason. That Monday night though while I was home with the Scribe watching television Ronnie went berserk and broke about twenty windows in the school. We were all called in on that one although nothing came of it since we all had alibis (and gave Ronnie one too). Yeah, that Ronnie was a piece of work.        
   
[I should point out for future reference that the Scribe and I hung out together until he moved crosstown to his grandmother’s house after his grandfather died in seventh grade. There he joined up with the corner boys who hung around Doc’s Drugstore which I also joined when my family bought a little shack of house in the Bottoms section of the Acre, the working poor section of North Adamsville at the beginning of ninth grade.]