MEMORIES PT15

We moved from Capen St I think in 1959 or 1960. The new place was
a first floor apartment a few blocks away at 18 Evans St. Our landlords were
Phil & Alice Pais who lived on the second floor and Mr& Mrs Kenney and their
son Tom lived on the top floor. Evans St was a more of an Irish Catholic
neighborhood than Capen St; after all, St. Matthew’s Church was just down
one block on Stanton St.. There was no alleyway to play stickball in but there
was a big empty lot right across the street where the old school had burned
down so we played baseball there.

Of course there was a different bunch of kids to play with here, some with
some cool nicknames: Dewey, Hoagy, and Miser for example. I’m not quite
sure where kids like myself, Vern, and Gerard who were a bit quieter and
read a lot fit in with the others, but I don’t recall ever getting into any fights
with those guys.

What I do remember is Hoagy and I pretending to be knights with sticks
for swords and trash can lids for shields. There was also the times a
bunch of us would walk down to Milton Lower Mills and onto the trails next
to the Neponset River, tossing rocks at the boats and sneaking through
the back yards of some very large houses to a dense stretch of woods
with some very old, large trees where we’d play “Capture the Flag”.  

By now I’d been riding my bike for a year or so and there were things I
wanted, like comic books or a transistor radio, so I got my first job
as a paperboy. Over the course of the next few years I’d deliver the
Boston Herald, the Daily American and the Herald Traveler. One of my
paper routes was over a mile away in the VFW Parkway Projects and
at one point I was trying to collect my paper money from female
customers who wouldn’t open their doors all the way because it was
during the Boston Strangler’s reign of terror.

((353 Words))


Written for the Family History Writing Challenge