***A Note On The Profile Of The Manager Of The Blog-Tales From Old North Quincy

Click below to link to the Tales From Old North Quincy blog

http://talesfromoldnorthquincy.blogspot.com/

Peter Paul Markin, Class Of 1964, North Adamsville High School comment (ex-classmates can figure out that despite the light dust-up change of names and places mentioned this is about the old town):

Here are the background facts of my life that are important to understanding the “why” of the creation of this blog and the reason that I can speak with some authority about the old pre- 1964 North Adamsville, at least to tell some tales about it (the town proper named Adamsville, after one, or maybe both, of the two United States Presidents who hailed from there, and set some kind of austere tone never quite vanquished). My maternal grandparents, Anna (nee O’Brien) and Daniel Riley lived on Young Street over across from the Welcome Young Field of blessed childhood memories of steamy summers under shaded elm trees and big time Fourth of July celebrations, almost all of their married lives, and various members of this branch of the Riley family have lived in North Quincy up until very recently. My grandfather was actually born in that house on Young Street and my grandmother elsewhere in Quincy so the roots, the roots after those first arrivals from the old country in Southie, are deep. As far as I have been able to trace back one or the other families goes back the Irish “famine ship” times in the late 1840s, although that information in pre-"green card" times is sketchy at best.

Needless to say my late mother, Delores, NAHS Class of 1943, and her siblings were born in Adamsville (and mainly stayed) as well. My mother, during World War II, fell in love with and married a Marine, the late Prescott Markin, who had been based at the Hingham Depot (now a shopping mall strip on the road to Nantasket Beach, also of blessed childhood memories, and who hailed from coal country down in Hazard, Kentucky. They had four boys, Prescott, Junior, the late Kevin, the late Frederick, and me, all born close together right after the war, classic post-war baby-boomers, all coming of age in the 1960s, all formed by that experience, not always for the better.

We four boys all went through the Adamsville school system, although I will just give my own public school resume here. I went to the Adamsville South Elementary School down in the Adamsville housing project, a place that we wound up at after some time on Young Street. I started from the first grade there and then is where I came of age, graduating in 1958. After a brief period at the Adamsville South Junior High (now Middle School) we moved back to North Adamsville over to Maple Street near the old Duggan Brothers Garage. I went to, and graduated from, the North Adamsville Junior High (ditto now Middle School) in 1960. I spent all four years of high school at North, graduating in 1964.

That last date is important to the sense of purposes of this blog as well. Events, places, and people described since that time mentioned in my various writings are a result of current reflections, hearsay, a few trips back, or some other form of indirect recollection because after that year I, effectively, no longer could be described as a North Adams-ite (a misbegotten son of Adam?). Oh, except, of course, that tiny little nagging problem of some forty plus years later finding that I am fiercely driven by some “inner demons”deep in my soul to feverishly write some tales of old North Adamsville, my old hometown, now too of blessed memory.