***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-The Early Days 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

A while back I went on to the class website established for the 50^th Anniversary reunion of my North Adamsville High School Class of 1964 (that’s in Massachusetts) to check out a new addition to the list of those who have joined the site. Now the way this site, like lots of such sites, works is that each classmate who logs in gets a profile page to tell his or her story of what has happened of interest over that previous 50 years, stuff at least that you wanted classmates to know about.  After looking at the information provided by that new addition, a guy I did not know but who I had seen around the school (you would have seen almost everybody in the four years you were there with one thing or another even though the class had baby-boomer times over 500 students), I clicked on another feature of the site a “Message Forum” page which is supposed to be used for general comments and stuff like that. On that page I noticed some comments from Danny Valentine, a guy whom I did know, a guy who I actually knew prior to high school from down in the old Adamsville projects and who I had gone to elementary school with. I responded to his message asking about other members of the class who had also gone to that school with a comment and that started an exchange. I have posted my comments below with some information placed in brackets to give content to the exchange.      

********

[Danny had taken a trip down memory lane and had actually gone down to the old Adamsville projects and taken photographs of the place, including the Snug Harbor Elementary School we both attended. Those photos triggered an exchange about how tough it was growing up until age thirteen in the projects for me (and for my brothers). Danny whose family had only stayed in the projects a few years before moving to North Adamsville had not been washed over by the experience like I had and so spoke of more pleasant memories. That was a cue for me to express some of my own kid pleasant memories. ]  

Danny- Thanks for the note and I definitely appreciated the photos. The old school looked pretty much the same as in the days when we attended and raised holy hell whenever we could. I noticed the old Thomas Crane Library was not down in the basement anymore. Someone had told me previously that it had been moved up the street to its own building. All I know is that at a critical point in the sixth grade that hallowed library saved me from becoming a junior gangster once I found out it was better to read and get smart than doing crime (and doing time like a lot of the guys we knew then wound up doing as you well know). The picture of that old Carter’s Variety Store brought a tear to my eye since many times I went down to that place for penny candy, soda, and other sweets when I had a few cents of my own or when I grabbed some change from my mother’s pocketbook. Jesus, it is hard to believe that today it is still the only close source for provisions in the whole project with over four hundred families living there.  

The old housing project looked the same, like it existed in a time warp with the four- unit complexes looking exactly like I remembered them except the color of the houses had changed and the roads looked like they had not been repaved since about 1950. The view of the old beach where we swam in the summer and where when I was eight I almost drown and was saved just in time by the swimming instructor now overgrown and returned to nature brought a tear to my eye. No tears though for the photo of the channel where all the tankers came in providing materials for the Proctor & Gamble plant across the way. I will never forget that sickeningly sweet soap smell we would get in summer when the wind was up. Tears again though for missing the now torn down ship-building superstructure that provided work for my hard-pressed father when he had work and provided work for many fathers in the old days.   Thanks again.     

Your projects experiences seemed to have been more positive than mine but I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea about that. Certainly not all those childhood “projects” experiences were unrelentingly awful. A lot of that sense of things, that wanting habits/feeling of being an outsider/being poor came more from reflection later. When everybody was poor, or close to it, as a kid you really aren’t that aware of it. So sure there were fun bike rides around the projects and up to the Blue Hills, treasure hunts down the beach, trips over to that abandoned farm which was scary, skating on that make-shift pond in front of the rental office, and the like.

One of my two favorite memories was when I and my two brothers, you knew them, Paul and Kevin, would hit every house in the neighborhood twice on Halloween. We had it down to a science, never a wasted step. The way we did it was to have one of us “scout” for apartments with lights on signifying they were providing candy and the other two would go for the “kill” with the scout then going to that unit. Then one of the other would scout the next place. That saved time so that by eight or so when the lights would be turned off signifying either the supply of candy at that unit was gone or that the people in the unit were done for the night we had big sacks full. Enough for a while although I think our mother used to throw some out after a while when we tired of the stuff.  The other memory came from right after Christmas when we would scour the neighborhoods for trees to be used for the New Year’s Eve bonfire. A lot of families like ours would take down the tree the day after Christmas so we spent the whole Christmas vacation on the look-out as soon as we saw a tree on the sidewalk. I think, and maybe you remember, that a prize went to the kid who provided the most trees. In any case that work collecting the trees was worth it when New Year’s Eve came and the tree bonfire went up. I know a bunch of other stuff was thrown on the pile too like old chairs and dried wood from the beach.  

[Danny had mentioned an amusement park, Paragon Park, that everybody went to that was about twenty miles away on the water in Nantasket. Our family would go there on those occasions when we had a car, an iffy thing at best in those days. Or we would take the Eastern Mass bus (or rather two buses, one to Adamsville Center and from there another to Nantasket) but that would make for a very long day.] 

Danny-a couple of years ago when I was feeling a little nostalgic for the old days I went back down to Natasket to see what was left, if anything. The beach was still great and expansive especially heading toward Boston Harbor and the lighthouse that marked the channel. All that was left of the park though was the merry-go-round and a couple of arcades. I miss not playing Skee which is how I met my first “girlfriend” at age twelve or thirteen. The same is true for the Surf Ballroom, now long gone, for the dances where later on when we were out of high school we went to meet girls who wanted to dance and…but that is a different story for some other time.   

[Danny mentioned that he used to hitchhike places in order to get around. Pretty easy to do in those days when you probably knew who was picking you up when you did it in North Adamsville.]  

I too used to hitch-hike everywhere in the old days, including a few times across country in the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Now young people have to look it up on Wikipedia to find out what it is. I remember a few years ago just outside of Carlsbad, California I spied a young couple hitching and was so surprised that I went from the fourth lane over to pick them up and took them to LA. But such a method of travel is too dangerous these days (maybe then too).

[Danny finished up one exchange asking me if I “skid-hopped” in the old days. That was what we used to do in winter when there was snow on the ground, usually just after a big storm which left snow on the streets even after plowing. You would get on the back fender of a car (now almost impossible to do with melded fenders to the auto body), crouch down and let the car move you along. Sometimes you would get an irate driver that is for sure.]   

Danny-I think “skid-hopping” these days is on the order of hitch-hiking, record players, corner boys, transistor radios-“say, what?” We always skid-hopped the old Eastern Mass buses going up Palmer Street because  the bus driver could not see us in back.