MEMORIES PT21

I graduated from St Matthews 8th grade in 1962 and that fall entered Cathedral
High School in Boston. Vernon Eldringhoff from the neighborhood was also
attending there, so we’d ride with Dad as far as the Forest Hills T Stop. Dad was
working for Jamaica Plain Glass then so he’d drop us off at the station on the way
to the shop. Then Vern and I would get off at Dover St and walk back to the school.
which was right next to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the chief church of the
Archdiocese of Boston. As grand as that sounds, it was located in what at that
time was a rundown neighborhood. I don’t recall much about that one year, other
than the poor drunk we discovered lying at the foot of the Dover St stairs who’d
either fallen or been mugged. We told the owner of a nearby barbershop who called
the police and the ambulance.

There is one other memory: the first day of classes we were standing in a line
and this boy nearby stared at me and then asked if I was Billy West who used to
live in Malden. It turned out her was Mike Tedesco, my next door neighbor and
playmate from Beach St!

After school, Vern and I would walk across the Broadway St Bridge  to the Red
Line station and ride the subway to Ashmont St Station, then take the Norfolk Ave
bus home.

But things were about to change. Alice and Phil Pais and their daughters Judy and
Little Alice had moved out of the second floor apartment to a house. I think that
was the impetus for my folks to find a house of our own again. The neighborhood
was beginning to go downhill and so they started looking at houses in the Boston
suburb.  

Eventually my parents purchased a new ranch house on Bicknell Hill Rd in
the town of Abington.

((324 words))

Written for the Family History Writing Challenge.