Down And Dirty In The Acre-North Adamsville Style-Circa 1960-When The Corner Boys Were Corner Boys For Real Back In The Day

By Bart Webber

No, by no stretch of the imagination as the ex-editor of this publication and now some kind of “of counsel” contributing editor Allan Jackson has speculated even if in some personal nightmarish dream am I sleeping with the fishes. (Contributing editor means that even hard-boiled current editor Greg Green will have a hard time reining Allan in since there is no word limit or apparently no slander or libel, depending on the source, that such special creatures can spew forth without correction, at least after reading that last piece of Allan’s which was nothing but a no-brain bunch of bullshit on a stick aimed at my head). My watery fate deemed appropriate by Mr. Jackson courtesy of the fact, if it is a fact this late in life, that after almost sixty years I have “spilled the beans,” hell snitched, finked, dropped a dime I think we used to call it on an episode where he almost drowned as a kid and I was sworn to secrecy as the sole witness to the event. At the time I believe, and I think he will agree as well, it was about keeping that knowledge from his mother who would probably have grounded him from the beaches and the ocean at least through high school.      

I won’t, no, I refuse to, bore the reader with a recap of the events which led up to Allan’s silly experiment which led him to be rescued before he went down the third time by the on-duty life guard, a young mother rather than the average muscle-bound college guy or buxom college co-ed who craved those jobs to wile away the summer days and pocket coin for nighttime expenses. The key to Allan’s anger and his strange elderly dreams is what this is all about, the so-called breaking of the Code of Omerta that we lived and died by back in the day and which made plenty of sense then when we were about some stuff that the public coppers and other authorities would not have approved of. But to get into a snit over some long-gone event (especially with his mother who passed away over a decade ago is no longer around), to “threaten” hit men and much else seems excessive at this point. So I will tell you the real point of why Allan in in a doldrums huff.

That day, that day which I think Allan is right about being somewhere when we were around eleven, possibly twelve not the eight of my original piece not only had that young mother life guard been on duty to save Allan’s ruddy ass but had brought as was her practice her young daughter Ginny along. This Ginny was a lanky kind of raw-boned tallish girl who I had a serious crush on at the time. So naturally when I saw her I went over to make “my moves,” those being some silly schoolboy talk about whatever eleven, maybe twelve- year olds would talk about. So in a way Allan is right when in his now infamous rebuttal is right that I was not observing every freaking action he was taking but I will state for the record, will swear on seven sealed Bibles that I am the guy who heard his faint cries for help and alerted that young mother life guard who saved his sorry life.      

The reader should know that the so-called crush on Ginny did not go anywhere at the time since she was a Squaw Rock girl. The Nollie Point assignment her mother drew was connected with the housing projects where Allan and I grew up (and Pete Markin and Sam Lowell too), the low rent end of town. Squaw Rock was, and I believe still is, the high-toned end of town where those who in the 1950s were living some aspect of the golden age, or at least had the wherewithal to buy the new ranch houses that were all the rage then as a sign that they had become the vaunted middle class. So no way was that young mother, for that matter was Ginny once the peer pressure was exerted if necessary, going to go for some projects boy. And she didn’t. I will admit that when Ginny and I got to high school (we went to different junior high schools) at North I tried again to see what was what but the code of the Squaw Rock girls (and maybe her mother too) was still in force.           

Here is where the rubber meets the road, the real reason that Allan has daggers in his eyes these days. Recently I went to an ad hoc class reunion (ad hoc because after the 50^th reunion all agreed that something every couple of years and less formal was more appropriate) where I ran into Ginny. We got to talking about this and that until we kind of worked our way back to the day when her mother had saved Allan down at Nollie Point. Ginny laughed when I told her that I had been sworn to secrecy by Allan not to mention the incident to anybody under our boyhood code and that speaking about it to her was the first time I had done so in that some sixty-year period. The laugh was because she was particularly aware of the incident and who was saved, had known that Allan had gone on to some kind of career in the publishing business. So, until I read his lame so-called rebuttal I thought not much about having mentioned it to Ginny.    

The reader can guess, or I hope should guess, that Ginny and I continued talking not only that class reunion night be thereafter and have had several dates (although her two marriages and my three make “date” a little passe) to see what is what. Her girlish Squaw Rock code now long gone, thankfully. If you want to really know why Allan is wishing me in the ocean depths, digging whatever in Neptune’s patch here is what Ginny told me. In high school as I was ardently pursuing her to no avail Allan also was trying to get to first base with her. Closer to the nub though, closer much closer to the truth Allan had met Ginny at a previous ad hoc class reunion I had not attended and had gotten nowhere with her. Strange doings, life.