***Of This And That In The Old Adamsville Neighborhood-The Early “Projects” 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 they 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 and photographs 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, the Snug Harbor School. 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.      

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[Danny had taken a trip down memory lane and had actually gone back 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. Things like fishing off the jetty with his father, certain block parties that he attended, and various holiday events highlighted by the 4^th of July bonfire. That was a cue for me to express some of my own kid 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 am sure that a couple of generations later there are new Danny Vs and Frank Js raising the same kind of hell to make their mark in the world. The small world of isolated projects life, if not in the bigger picture world. I noticed in one of your photos taken from the front of the building that the old Thomas Crane Library was not down in the basement anymore. Someone had told me previously, or I had looked it up on the North Adamsville city website, that it had been moved up the street, up to Sea Street, to its own building.

All I know is at a critical point in the sixth grade that hallowed library saved me from the lore of 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, Ronny G., George H., and Sammy C. all veterans of Cedar Junction last I heard, wound up doing as you well know. Kenny G. who died in some prison farm down south after an armed robbery bust. And of course Peter M. found face down in some dusty back street in Sonora, Mexico with two slugs in his skull after a busted drug deal went awry and his people could never bring him home. Yeah, all to make some big noise in an isolated world for a minute on the back pages of the newspaper. I don’t know about you but even after I got “religion” on the crime stuff I was still held in thrall of those hard guys for a long time after. So it was a very close thing, very close indeed.     

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. Everybody who came out of “the projects” back in the 1950s (that is what everybody, residents and non-residents, called the Adamsville Housing Authority four-unit apartment complexes then, for good or evil) knows that there was only that one little convenience store to service the whole place if you needed some quick food purchases. The place is still there under a different name. Strangely there was not, and still is not, any large supermarket on the whole peninsula. I estimated once that the nearest shopping area is about four miles away, not easy when you like in my day had no family car or, as likely, a junk box that ran erratically. That lack of shopping access despite the fact that there were/are several hundred families living in those apartments many as least somewhat dependent on public transportation.Then the dreaded never-coming Eastern Mass bus which I spent half my youth waiting for, or I should say would have spent half my youth waiting for if I had not taken matters into my own hands and just walked to Adamsville Center or wherever I needed to go.

The real draw for us when we were young kids then at Carter’s was certainly the vast, vast to young eyes, display cases of penny candy (you know Mary Janes, no, not that Mary Jane, not then anyway, Bazooka bubble gum, Tootsie rolls, Milk Duds, root beer barrels, Necco wafers, etc.), soda (then called, ah, tonic by the civilized New England world now out of fashion, the word and the world) in a big ice-filled chest containing the Cokes and Pepsis of the day but also various flavored Nehis, Hires Root Beer, Robb’s, etc.), and Twinkies/Hostess cupcakes/Devil Dogs, Table Talk pies and I might as well add etc. here too. In short that sugar high we are all guarding against these days with a vengeance with weight programs, arcane and profuse medical advice, and sheer will-power but which fueled our fast brave young hearts then.

Many a night I would sneak out of the house after dark and walk down that seawall street, after hitting Ma’s pocketbook or bringing back bottles for redemption, to satisfy my sweet tooth ( which I still am inclined to have). There are other later stories, eleven and twelve year old stories, coming of age stories, some maybe true, some urban legends that my gang and I (some of those same guys who did not make it mentioned above) learned our first “clipping” skills (you know “five-finger discount,” hell, petty larceny) at Carter’s by the old diversionary scheme of having one guy grab Mrs. Carter’s attention and the other (s) grab what they could and nonchalantly flee the place. And later “clipped,” a tougher clip, our first packages of cigarettes, mine Parliament filtered, to be smoked behind the old school. Like I said some truth, some urban legend just in case the statute of limitations hasn’t run out.        

From the photograph of the unit that your family lived in at 115 Tally Road the old housing project looked the same, like it has existed in a time warp with the four-unit complexes looking exactly like I remembered them except the color of the houses has 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 and is now, according to your photograph,  overgrown and returned to nature brought another 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 know that you and your father fished off of that jetty on the projects side of the channel providing pleasant memories but 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 filled up the skyline then and that provided work for my hard-pressed father when he had work and provided more steady work for many fathers in the old days. Thanks again.      

Your projects experiences seemed to have been more positive than mine, maybe because your family left after a few years and didn’t get mired down into the beat down, beat around fellahin (peasant) culture, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about that. Certainly not all those childhood “projects” experiences of mine were unrelentingly awful. A lot of that sense of things, that wanting habits/feeling of being an outsider/being poor came more from my reflections later. When everybody was poor, or close to it, as a kid you really wouldn’t be that aware of it. I wasn’t really that aware of the divide while there except for one instance with a girl I liked who had a father who would not let me see her because I was from the projects, end of discussion as she told me. I had it rubbed in my face more when we moved to North Adamsville when I was in junior high and the kids would make fun of my clothes and lack of adequate hygiene. Worse in high school when the kids  found out my father was from Hazard, Kentucky a place mentioned in Michael Harrington’s famous book on poverty at the time, The Other America. Hell, our school was raising money and supplies to be sent to that very town. Jesus.

Sure, during the projects days there were fun bike rides around the peninsula and up to the Blue Hills, treasure hunts down at Adamsville beach, an occasional barbecue across the street at the park when the family had a car and some extra money, trips over to that abandoned farm adjacent to the outer edge of the projects and which had, true or not, some history as being haunted which scared the bejesus out of us when we were young, skating, if you could call my efforts skating more like tumbledown jack, on that make-shift pond they would ice up in front of the rental office, and the like.

One of my two favorite memories was when I and my two brothers, Paul and Kevin, you knew them although maybe you did not know that they would eventually succumb to the “life,” do time and live on the margins of desperado society,  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 two would scout the next place. That saved time so that by eight o’clock 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, stuff from the school, cartons, paper and such, and dried wood from the beach.  

[Danny had mentioned an amusement park, Paragon Park, that everybody went to which was located 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, more likely, 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 Nantasket 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 amusement park though was the merry-go-round well worth preserving and a couple of arcades which perhaps were not. I, while there, got to thinking about all the smells, the taffy, cotton candy, steaming hot dogs, sizzling hamburgers and steaks complete with onions and green peppers smells mixed in on windy days with the salt sea air. Thinking too about the rides, the Wild Mouse, bumper cars, Ferris wheel and when older the rocking rolling roller coaster which I was finally able to ride only because a girl I was with was crazy for to do it (and crazy for me which explains my bravery in a nutshell). And most of all I still miss not playing Skee which is how I met my first “girlfriend” at age twelve or thirteen (not the girl crazy for me, that was later). See for some reason I had developed a certain skill for the game and would win some decent prizes so one day this girl was watching me and watching my technique. She tried to play but was a bust. She then came up to me and say, please, please win her a prize. Well naturally when a girl says that what is a guy to do but do as commanded. I think I won her a small doll or something. She was delighted and to show her delight she asked me to walk over to the beach with her and sit on the seawall. Later we, as the sun started going down, kissed for a while, a long while. So you see why I miss Skee and see why later in life I was a sucker for any woman who said please, please. But Danny you knew that.      

The same fate is true for the Surf Ballroom which as you may remember was located at the far end of the beach, it too now long gone replaced by condos from what I could see. That was the place we went for the dances on Friday and Saturday nights later on when we were out of high school and we went in order to meet girls who wanted to dance and… A lot of girls from North Adamsville went to those dances but strangely they would not give North Adamsville guys the time of day, or would not give me the time of day, saying they were looking for new blood, new guys and not guys they have known or seen around forever. (Probably they didn’t want to have to hear about their shattered reputations back in the old town was the real reason.) Still I met some nice young women there while dancing like crazy to the local favorites, the Rockin’ Ramrods, who did great covers of the Stones and their signature song, and end of the evening song too, was the Kingsmen’s  Louie, Louie which everybody went crazy over. Of course since we were under-age then if we wanted to drink liquor we had grab some wino and get him to make a purchase and drink the stuff out on the beach or in a car. The booze was certainly a draw for some of the young women who were more than happy to go outside during intermission and walk the beach or sit in a car and have a drink. Or, if you were lucky, after the dance was over but that is a different story for some other time.   

[Danny mentioned that he used to hitchhike places in order to get around, mainly around town and asked whether I had done so. Pretty easy to do in those days when you probably knew who was picking you up when you did it in North Adamsville.]  

Danny- I too used to hitch-hike everywhere in the old days, including a few times across the country in the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. I have been stuck in more Podunk towns at two in morning trying to hitch a ride than I care to remember. I always had a good word about truckers in those days because, long hair or short, they would pick you up for the company or because you reminded them of their sons or something and drive you long distances (buy you a diner dinner too if you got a good guy). Now young people have to look it up on Wikipedia to find out what hitch-hiking is.

 I remember a few years ago just outside of Carlsbad, California I spied a young couple on the entrance ramp of U.S. 5 hitching and was so surprised to see them out there on the freedom road that I went from the fourth lane over to the breakdown lane to pick them up (and to make sure the cops didn’t grab them). I took them to their destination LA about 100 miles up the road although I had only planned to go to Laguna Beach that day. Needless to say I regaled them with stories about the old hitchhike days, days when any given VW bus or stray automobile would pick you up within two minutes of sticking out your thumb. They listened a little non-plussed but were thankful for the ride. But such a method of travel is too dangerous these days (maybe back then in the 1960s 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 who would stop the car and run after you. Not for the faint-hearted that was 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.