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

 

One of the seriously played song on the juke-box at Salducci's Pizza Parlor by Joe Finn.  

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 is simple to classify as is the case here in dealing with the search for long-lost friends, or maybe not so much a search as connecting with long-lost friends once they have traversed  the intricacies of joining the site and logging in. Once such occurrence, connecting with Joe Finn, can serve to make the point. Joe and I were fast friends back in high since where we had many of the same classes together, and more importantly, hung out together holding forth at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor. That holding forth was not merely accidental but came through the good offices (nice term, right) of Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie Riley, the leader of the Salducci’s corner boys and my friend since junior high school. Joe came later, came in high school since he had attended Adamsville Central, one of the other feeder junior-high school for North. So we were solid through high school but as such things work out we all our separate ways, all drifted wherever the winds would take us (except Frankie and me episodically over the years but that is not a story that concerns us here).

Now this business of connecting, of finding out locations for many of the five hundred plus graduates from our baby-boomer-etched class is worthy of mention here because for our generation, the generation of ’68 as I like to call it since we were washed up in the big wave that came crashing through in that decade, is kind of on the cusp of the computer technology revolution.  Some people seem adept, others who have had perfectly good careers without much technological entanglement less or not so. Joe fell into that latter category so the task as I understood from what he and someone on the reunion committee who was finally able to reach him had been somewhat daunting.

Joe had stayed in the Greater Boston area so that was a help but when somebody on the committee noticed that he was on an Internet-North Adamsville High- related site he thought the task of recruiting Joe to the site would be easy. But see here is where that generational divide comes in. One of Joe’s daughters had signed him up for the site since he was clueless about how to get on that site. So the way that he was reached by the committee was through a postcard mailing based on his last known address informing classmates about the reunion and joining the site. Once again one of Joe’s daughters (not the same one as previously cited) signed him up for the North Adamsville reunion site and so the way, mostly, Joe and I communicate on the Internet is when his daughter gets around to checking his personal profile page and notices that I have left a private e-mail for him. Knowing his situation I have posted my e-mails to him in the form of questions for him to answer. Below is part of the first exchange we had once he joined the site.              

“Joe -Thanks for note- I noticed a while back that  you are on our class website yet. It is user-friendly. People are starting to join as we spread the news. If you are in contact with any NQ64ers let them know. Are you retired yet? Sorry to hear about your medical problems. I just wrote to Jack  Zane who had sent me an e-mail which ended with “getting old sucks”- I said you will get no argument from me there, brother. Thanks for offer of help and since you live in Millsville as the committee gets things firmed up and needs help they will call on you. BTW some very nice pictures of you and yours where was that last one taken, Venice? They should go on your personal profile on NA64 to show that you have done well in life. Later Frank Jackman - Sorry about the football mix-up I was working from memory (ouch!) [I had remembered him as a guard on the football team and he was actually a tackle, a bruising one, on the senior year championship team.”