***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of…..Roots  

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

For those who have been following this series about the old days in my old home town of North Adamsville, particularly the high school day as the 50^th anniversary of my graduation creeps up, will notice that recently I have been doing sketches based on my reaction to various e-mails sent to me by fellow classmates via the class website. Also classmates have placed messages on the Message Forum page when they have something they want to share generally like health issues, new family arrivals or trips down memory lane on any number of subjects from old time athletic prowess to reflections on growing up in the old home town. Thus I have been forced to take on the tough tasks of sending kisses to raging grandmothers, talking up old flames with guys I used to hang around the corners with, remembering those long ago searches for the heart of Saturday night, getting wistful about elementary school daydreams, taking up the cudgels for be-bop lost boys and the like. These responses are no accident as I have of late been avidly perusing the personal profiles of various members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964 website as fellow classmates have come on to the site and lost their shyness about telling their life stories (or have increased their computer technology capacities, not an unimportant consideration for the generation of ’68, a generation on the cusp of the computer revolution and so not necessarily as computer savvy as the average eight-year old today).

Some stuff is interesting to a point, you know, including those endless tales about the doings and not doings of the grandchildren, odd hobbies and other ventures taken up in retirement and so on although not worthy of me making a little off-hand commentary on. Some other stuff is either too sensitive or too risqué to publish on a family-friendly site. Some stuff, some stuff about the old days and what did, or did not, happened to, or between, fellow classmates, you know the boy-girl thing (other now acceptable relationships were below the radar then) has naturally perked my interest.

Other stuff defies simple classification as is the case here in dealing with growing up poor in America in the 1950s (our coming of age time) and the 1960s (our, those of us who migrated that way, political coming of age time). On a generic class website it is easy to tout successes, awards, rewards, and those ubiquitous grandchildren since the whole point is to cut up old torches. Dealing with the underbelly of what life was like in hard-shell North Adamsville, a strictly working-class area with a smattering of lower middle class professionals dependent on an every diminishing shipbuilding industry that even then was heading off-shore, is another matter. Perhaps not even good form, although the vast majority of the five hundred plus students who graduated in my class came from working-class and poor homes. So be it. Here I want to talk about the poor from first-hand knowledge not because I particularly want to talk about it, having beaten the issue to death about six different ways in other contents but because a fellow classmate, Brother Ronald, whom I respect greatly for his career path has sent me a series of private e-mails about his own growing up poor, a story that actually outdoes my growing up poor story. So maybe the real point is there are always worse circumstances around. No, that is not right, the point is to fight like hell to change those circumstances and create a more just society. But that is for the future right now let’s look at Brother Ronald’s growing up plight.

That “brother” designation by the way is not some off-hand political honorific, although I suppose given the circumstances it could be that too, but because Brother Ronald is a brother. A brother in the Xaiverian Brothers, a Catholic cleric organization (not priests, but just below in the church hierarchy) which reaches out to the poor, the needy, and those in prison. The way I know this is because Brother Ronald has come on to the site describing the work he has been doing for the past fifty years. Now as such things go Brother Ronald is a modest man and would not have touted his work on his own. What he responded to was a request by a classmate who had done a tribute to Brother Ronald and asked him to fill the rest of us in. That tribute by the way was done by a classmate not of Brother Ronald’s faith but by one who recognized that he was on the right side of the angels in his life’s work.

One of the main considerations beyond his fervent religious beliefs gathered in his youth for Brother Ronald’s career choice had been that he grew up poor in the Acre section of North Adamsville, a tough neighborhood right on the edge of where the poor,  the desperados, and the midnight shifters hang out. From the outside of the several blocks of two and three family houses and block-long apartment buildings the place looks like a lot of the rest of the town but as Brother Ronald filled me in I saw a very different side and now concede the point that his place was much tougher to grow up in that mine. See I always considered my house on “the wrong side of the tracks” (which it was) but you can go lower if you look.

Here is the way Brother Ronald placed things in context. Many years ago, in the 1970s somebody wanted to do a film adaptation of George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyne, about the cutthroat doing of the underworld a la Whitey Bulger and that ilk, and was looking for a location to film the seedy neighborhood where Eddie did his underworld business. The Acre to the protests of some of the residents (maybe muted protests but protests nevertheless) who did not see their neighborhood that way, or did not want it portrayed that way was selected and that location was used in the film. As far as I can tell my neighborhood, Five Points, never drew any consideration as a site. Here though is the beauty of what Brother Ronald was about which I will quote from an e-mail:

“All I know was that it was a tough dollar growing up poor when a lot of our classmates were a step above I think (although a recent trip back made me think that was a relative thing). I carry that knowledge and what it did to my psyche with me (as you do) but I have unlike others not forgotten my roots and on the questions of war and peace, social and economic justice I know I have stood on the right side of the angels. Later- Ronald”

Enough said