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

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

Recently I went onto 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 class list. A guy named David Patrick who I had seen around the school but did not know (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). 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 happened of interest over that previous 50 years, stuff at least that you wanted classmates to know about.

Dave caught my attention originally because he had put down that he had been on the second Selma to Montgomery civil rights march down in Alabama in 1965. Since I had been active in the civil rights movement back then and had been surprised that anybody else from my tough Irish and Italian-dominated working-class town had seen the need to do so I sent him an e-mail asking for more details. He eventually, after some hesitation due to his shy personality, told me the story. And I then wrote something up to honor such a simple act of bravery. That initial contact got us exchanging a few e-mails on other subjects about the old town, about high school and about why we were so alienated that I have consolidated and placed below.  

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[Both Dave and I were stuck by the fact that today anyway we find that back then we had many interests in common and shared a mutual fit of teenage angst and alienation although we never crossed paths.]  

“As I acknowledged earlier I can see where we had much in common in high school and might have become fast friends. I note that you say you hated North Adamsville High with a certain vehemence that can be sensed 50 years later. I finally got over that feeling not long ago but to show how alienated I was then if you had asked me what happened to my Manet [our class yearbook] this is what I would have told you. Look in the Neptune River. That is where I threw it shortly after graduation I was so hungry to move on, to get out. And after a few fits and starts for much of my life I denied/avoided or dismissed North Adamsville and the school. As a silly example of the lengths I would go I would avoid going on the expressway so I didn’t have to see the Haven Bridge that goes over the Neptune River from the road.  

A lot of that had to do with being poor, dirt poor, never having money or clothes and basically being laughed at by many of the kids at school for being something of an odd-ball. A lot had to do with parents who were clueless about what I was about, and couldn’t do much about my over-sized dreams anyway. It did not have much to do with teachers though like it was with you, Mr. Leone, and his cabal. There were many other weird teachers around then when you think about it but they left me alone for the most part. (Mr. Horton for one who today would be up on charges, and rightly so, for sexually harassing every girl student he could get his hands on)

I can sympathize with your feelings of isolation without friends. Frankly, the only serious friend, really only friend, I had then, also poor and bedraggled, was the great runner from our class, Brad Badger, whom I first met down in the Germantown projects in elementary school. Many nights, mainly summer nights, without nothing else to do and no where to go, we would sit on the steps of old North and talk about breaking-out, just getting out from under whole stupid scene.

I note that you mentioned that you played tennis (with the “slows” which I also had except on the track team) and played football (which I did not do as you seem to think) and I wish you had (and me too) been able to talk to kindred. That angst/alienation/disenchantment was all around the country then as we found out when all hell broke loose with the various counter-cultural movements that developed among the angst-filled, alienated, disenchanted just like us later in the 1960s decade.      

Of course all of this is just to lead up once again to that tantalizing topic, girls (of course we mean young women but let’s stick with the times appropriate term). More particularly that “Queen of the Loners” you mentioned whom I am today already half in love with and I don’t even know who she is that you casually mentioned at the end of the last e-mail. I already told you my smitten story about the “unapproachable” cashmere sweater girl from high school, or rather the one that I still vividly remember today. Your description of the Queen of Loners fits about half a dozen women I had serious relationships with (wives, live-ins, etc.) since high school so I am very curious about her and why you mentioned her. Were you smitten (quaint word) with her? Seems like it. Did you, unlike me and the cashmere sweater  gal who had me all balled up in junior year, try to pursue her then or was it hopeless (objectively hopeless, not our boyish hopeless)? Can you tell more? Isn’t such gossip covered under some Geneva Convention, some statute of limitations, or something like that? If you just want to play the gallant at least tell me if she is on this site.     

I believe that Squantum kids, a lot of them, looked down at the rest of us since that was the relatively leafy suburban section of North Adamsville but I grew up from junior high school on to high school on Walnut Street near Duggan Brothers Garage on Hancock (along with Ernie and Elsie Mense, Sissy Baldwin and Moe Fontaine from our class). They subsequently cut the street in half to create the Newport Street by-pass. Believe me we were NOT looking down at anybody-this area was among the serious poor sections of town-probably like your section of Walton. Have you ever read Pat Conroy’s Prince Of Tides that was our family-Northern version-hand me downs were a way of life with us

P.S., short P.S., if you want to be the king hell king loner rather than the prince-in-waiting I will be glad to give you that designation. I think you might have tied me back then anyway.