***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night -Coming Of Age In Atlantic- First Taste Of Liquor

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Peter Paul Markin has been helping to organize his North Adamsville High School 50^th Class Reunion. (I am also observing my 50^th year since high school graduation but I am not helping to organize anything, that’s Peter Paul’s gig). As part of that organizing effort his Class of 1964 has created a private website where classmates can join up, share photos (after serious work via the ubiquitous photo shop probably), crank out reams of home-made video and recite unto infinity the various virtues, accomplishments, and heroic deeds of their scads of grandchildren (a grandparent’s prerogative, I agree).

They can also via a Message Forum go round and round about their exploits, memories, and tall tales from the old days. One such exchange concerning the first time effects of liquor got Peter Paul thinking about his own first bouts with demon rum, johnny whiskey, et al which he mentioned to me one night, one foggy night, when we were sitting at the bar of Jimmy Jack’s over in Centerville. Here’s how he remembered things-         

 

 

Recently members of the hockey team and others have mentioned road trips with their respective teams which involved bouts of alcoholic consumption. Perhaps not the first time that those classmates imbibed alcohol but certainly dramatic images. In our generation, and maybe all generations, the first bout with alcohol is something of a rite of passage. That talk about high school drinking while hardly new got me to thinking about my own first experience with alcohol, in my case hard liquor.

The first class poll on the class website involved the question of where we went to elementary school with a list of six choices, including the ubiquitous “other.” That “other” list included, once people started to designate their schools, the now closed (and made into condos the fate of many such schools) North Adamsville Elementary School on Newbury Street across from old Doc Andrews’ Drugstore at the corner of Young Street. A drugstore I knew well since my maternal grandparents, Anna and Daniel Riley, lived on Young Street and my grandmother patronized Doc’s for her various medicines.

Doc Andrews’ business like a lot of neighborhood businesses in those days depended on good-will with the families in the area in order for the business to thrive. One of the things that Doc Andrews did was to let known customers in the area run up a tab until payday, or whenever they could pay. That was the case with my grandmother, dependent on my grandfather’s monthly governmental pension check. Since she was physically disabled and could have with only great difficulty gone herself and my grandfather was in a nursing home she often sent me to the drugstore when I went over to visit her.

In those days, and now for all I know, druggists stocked small sizes of liquor, whisky, scotch, gin, whatever, for medicinal purposes. Since my grandfather was a tee-totaller that was the only way she could “sneak” liquor in the house when she needed a little something for the head. As young as I was at the time, fourteen or fifteen, certainly underage, all I had to do was say the liquor was for Anna Riley and Doc would add it to the other purchases. No questions asked.

That seemingly innocent method was how I got my first bottle of liquor-a pint of Seagram’s 7 whiskey-from Doc’s Drugstore in high school. One day when she sent me up for her medicines without adding in a liquor purchase I just added the bottle for my own purposes. I brought my grandmother her medicines and then went home. That night I told a friend of mine from the neighborhood what I had (although not how I got it) and we went down to sit on the seawall on Wollaston Beach near the yacht clubs thinking were the kings of the hill. Between us we drank the whole pint rather quickly. Needless to say I got drunk (I am not sure about my friend). Worse I got sick as a dog. Maybe in the end that was the real point, although that reaction did not stop me later from developing a serious taste for whiskey.