Ralph Memolo Stories

Postscript: A Memoir

 

There is no end to the story of the Memolos. Already, in fact, by the start of the twenty-first century a fourth generation has been born and is coming to maturity. So now, as the last survivor of the first generation of Memolos born in America—and the last survivor of the thirty grandchildren born to my maternal grandparents, Rosetta and Ascenzio Diprospero—I offer this postscript, which focuses on my own life, to the Memolo family history.

 

As of this writing, in the summer of 2024, I am 87 years old, and live with my wife, Sylvia, in an apartment building in the Coolidge Corner neighborhood of Brookline, Massachusetts. I have had a life blessed with endless good fortune because, as I have always maintained, I possessed the wisdom and foresight to pick the right parents. I inherited from them the physical strength and good health and mental acuity that allowed me to take full advantage of the opportunities offered me by my education. Likewise, I chose the right time and the right place to be born.

 

I also owe a particular debt of gratitude to my five older siblings and their spouses. All of them, in different ways, were extremely generous and caring towards both me and my younger sibling, Shirley. The support, moral and financial, they provided my widowed mother was invaluable to me and to Shirley, who was three and a half years younger than me.

 

Like my older siblings, I came into the world when America was mired in economic depression, but unlike them, I reached adulthood at a time when America was enjoying an era of great prosperity. Specifically, I graduated from high school when low-cost public education had become more widely available to people of limited means than at any other time in this country's history. In 1955, when I turned eighteen, tuition at the University of New Hampshire was $150 a year. With board and room and the cost of books and miscellaneous living expenses, it was possible to attend UNH for about $700 a year.

 

Of equal importance, the wage structure in America, thanks to organized labor, had risen to a point where I could earn almost $2 an hour working the night shift at the Brown Company paper mill during my summer vacations. My pay from the Brown Company for a forty-hour week the summer I turned eighteen was more than twice what my father ever earned in the many years he worked almost seventy hours a week as the butcher at Mosca's Market. Over the course of ten weeks or so each summer, it was possible for me to earn, and then save, almost enough money to make it through a year at UNH.

 

I was the first in my immediate family, and the third of the four of my maternal grandparents' thirty grandchildren, to graduate from college. I should point out that some of my older cousins were unable to finish high school because they needed to take whatever work was available in order to help support their families.

 

After college, when I settled in Boston, I was able to develop my writing career because of the guidance and advice I received from a number of people who took an interest in me. The many articles I wrote for a variety of publications attracted enough attention so that I was able to put together a career in public relations— notably my twenty-three years as public information officer at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the agency which played a central role in carrying out the program of revitalization that dramatically transformed and enlivened the city of Boston in the last half of the twentieth century.

 

In 1966, the same wisdom and foresight that helped me to select the right parents enabled me to meet the woman I married. At the time, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) was seeking a managing editor for its monthly magazine, The Register-Leader. I learned of the opening and obtained an interview with the editor of the magazine, and while the interview went well, he informed me that he was about to offer the job to a young woman who seemed, as he put it, to be a better fit for the job.

 

I was somewhat miffed at that since I didn't think there were a lot of people, male or female, in Boston who were more qualified than I was, but the next day, the editor called to say that the illness of a staff member opened up a job as the magazine's news editor. Would I be interested in taking that position? I was willing to do so, but since I wanted time to continue my free-lance writing, we came to an agreement that I would work at The Register-Leader only three days a week. The day I arrived at my new office and wrote my first stories, I was told to hand them in to the new managing editor, Sylvia Levinson.

 

That's when I discovered that the editor had been absolutely spot-on in his assessment of Sylvia. She was, indeed, a wonderful editor, one with an unerring sense of how to take whatever I had written and improve it with any number of corrections. I was also smart enough to become her good friend. In 1969, three years after we met, we were married, and our long life together has been filled with much love and laughter and mutual enjoyment of each other.

 

 

 

 

Sadly, the city where I was born, Berlin, New Hampshire, has gone into a precipitous decline during my lifetime. When I was a boy, I lived only a hundred yards or so from the main gate of the Brown Company's Burgess Mill, and I can recall to this day all the clanging and banging and wide variety of other noises, that came from a vast mill complex, where 24 hours a day, virtually every day of the year, trees were turned into paper products of every kind. Still vivid to me is the sound made by the dozens of trucks laden with newly-harvested timber that passed by my house each day and the grinding and shifting of their gears as they made their way slowly, ever so slowly, up the small slope leading to the Brown Company's wood yard, where the logs they carried would be added to a pile that was almost as high as a small mountain.

 

As counterpoint to the truck traffic, there was the cacophony of passing trains. The Memolo house, at 590 Goebel Street, was only a few feet away, literally, from the railroad tracks used by the Boston and Maine Railroad and also by the Brown Company's own railroad that shuttled box cars between the company's Berlin and Cascade mills and the nearby B&M rail yard. All day long this shifting of trains on both tracks took place in preparation for assembling the freight train that left Berlin about 6 p.m each night, causing such a frightful noise as it rumbled past our house that we had to close windows and doors if we wanted to hear ourselves talk.

 

The sounds from the mill, the trucks going back and forth from nearby woodlands to the Brown Company woodyard, the trains that passed only a few feet from our door, all this background noise was punctuated four times each day by the whistle of the Burgess Mill. While the company operated around the clock, the whistle's first blast at 7:50 a.m. signaled the start of work for its large number of day laborers. It sounded again at 11:50 a.m. to signal the start of lunch hour, then again at 12:50 p.m. to end the lunch hour, and finally at 4:50 p.m. at the end of the work day. Mothers all over Berlin would tell their children that whatever they were doing at ten of twelve or ten of five, they needed to come home the minute they heard the mill whistle. Indeed, the whole city of Berlin seemed to set its clocks and to schedule many of its activities from the daily blasts of that whistle.

 

But let us put aside for a moment that whistle, and all the other sounds of the mill, and focus on the overpowering smell, one likened to rotten cabbage, that results from the manufacture of certain paper products. For many years, Berlin was known far and wide for the dreadful odor that wafted through the city each day, its relative strength and direction determined by wind and weather conditions. The smell, however unpleasant, came from a paper company that by the 1950's had over 4000 employees both in its mills and in its lumber camps throughout northern New Hampshire and Maine. The work these men and women did was hard. The working conditions in those mills and lumber camps were noisy and dirty and sometimes hazardous, but for many decades wages from the Brown Company allowed hundreds of families in Berlin and Gorham and other towns in northern New Hampshire to rise in the world.

 

Today, the Brown Company is gone, and there is hardly a trace of the massive mill complex that took up acres and acres of land both in Berlin and Cascade, three miles away. There is no rotten cabbage smell in Berlin any longer. The Androscoggin River that flows through Berlin—once so polluted with waste from the Brown Company mills that we often joked about how we could walk across it — now runs crystal clear. And there is no need for a whistle timed to the passing of the work day.

 

With the closing of the Brown Company, Berlin lost its economic mainstay, and along with it the many family-owned businesses that made for a lively and thriving downtown. A city with a population of 22,000 by the end of the 1950's has now shrunk to about 10,000, and Berlin's job base, such as it is, consists of people working for businesses that cater to tourists visiting northern New Hampshire, the local hospital, or two prisons—one Federal, the other operated by the state.

 

In my last visit to Berlin, in June 2022, I couldn't believe how the city—and the neighborhood in which I had grown up—had all but withered away. The Memolo family homestead, after falling into disrepair, has been renovated, but the neighborhood's business district, where my uncle's grocery/hardware store, Mosca's Market, was once a focal point, has all but disappeared. Only blocks away from the Memolo house are vacant lots where triple deckers once stood and many of the surviving houses are in disrepair. Berlin's once-active Main Street now has swaths of clear land where commercial buildings once stood and there is no longer a hotel to be found in Berlin itself. Visitors to Berlin need to find lodging six miles away in Gorham. That's also where a Walmart store has become, in effect, Berlin's downtown. Often, Berlin residents drive thirty miles to shopping malls in North Conway to shop or attend a movie or dine out.

 

In a story that appeared in the Washington Post, in 2020, the mayor of Berlin reported that while the city's unemployment rate was about 3 percent, a good number of Berlin families depend on community food pantries to provide them with enough food to get through the month.

 

 

 

 

Any account of my life illuminates and expands upon the point I made at the beginning of this piece: my good fortune to have been born at at time when someone from my background was able to find not only material success but also the fulfillment of so many of my hopes.

 

I was born in 1937, but in 1943, when I would have entered King School, two blocks away from my house, the city decided, apparently because of a dip in the birth rate in the 1930's, to close that school. Instead, children in the lower grades who lived, as I did, on Berlin's East Side, were put on school buses and transported each day to Marston School, which was located about a mile or so away from my home on Goebel Street.

 

The school bus I boarded one morning in September 1943 did more than transport me to school. It also took me out of a working class neighborhood and brought me into one in which a good number of the children I went to school with came from middle and upper income homes. To put it more clearly, there were two distinct worlds in Berlin, one overwhelmingly blue collar—the East Side was almost exclusively so—and the other, much smaller but predominantly white collar in the neighborhoods surrounding Marston School. Thus, many of my classmates were the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, business owners and Brown Company executives.

 

Because of that decision by the Berlin School Committee to close King School, I developed my closest friendships with children who had expectations and aspirations quite different from the children in my own neighborhood. I always had friends in my own neighborhood, but from the first grade to the day I graduated from high school I spent most of my time after school and on weekends, particularly during the school year, with children who were more than likely destined to go to college and take up work similar to their parents.

 

I was the boy from the East Side who now found himself in an environment that was in stark contrast to the one I had been born into. It was quite an experience for me, for instance, to visit the home of my friend Kenneth Van Kleeck, whose father was a Brown Company executive. There, I discovered a house with a downstairs and upstairs. The upper level had bedrooms and bathroom, and downstairs there was a kitchen and living room and dining room, and wonder of wonders, a second toilet. Who had ever heard or seen such a thing? And then, in the basement—which we called a cellar—there was a ping pong table and numerous toys and games.

 

Likewise, my other best friend, Stanley Israel, had a house with all those amenities, plus a maid who came in to help his mother. All this was revelatory to someone who lived in a neighborhood of triple-deckers, where the great amenity to most apartments (or rents, as we called them) was a shed-like room near the porch that provided space for the pile of wood and/or the oil tank needed to keep the kitchen stove going.

 

When I was with my Marston School friends, we played sports, of course, a lot of baseball and football. In winter we also found ways to sneak into the high school gym on weekends and school vacations to play basketball until some school custodian would come along and chase us away. But my Marston School friends also owned chemistry sets and electric trains. Stanley Israel even had access to a movie projector and a tiny collection of cartoons we could watch. He also had a record player and owned albums of the latest Broadway musicals, versions of which he had seen with his parents when they made trips to Boston.

 

This exposure to the world of my school friends instilled in me a vision of the world I would like to live in rather than the world I then inhabited. More to the point, I, too, hoped to live someday in a house that had an upstairs and downstairs and a basement where children would have an extensive play area. In my own house, the cellar was a dimly-lit space quite limited in its size since it had been carved out of solid ledge that was part of the house's foundation. Aside from space for the furnace and the coal bin and an area to store wood, it wasn't possible to walk upright any other place in that cellar.

 

So determined was I to do something about this that I found a small sledge hammer and a set of chisels that had been used to break ledge and I spent considerable time at a very early age in a quixotic effort to carve away more usable floor space. I never succeeded in chipping away more than tiny portions of all that ledge, but I had no doubt that sooner or later, if I but worked hard enough, I would turn the cellar at 590 Goebel into the gymnasium/play area I envisioned.

 

I, likewise, had decided on exactly the house I intended to live in when I grew up. Near the church my family attended, St. Kieran's, there was a grand Victorian house that was surrounded by a spacious and well-kept lawn and shade trees. When my mother and I would pass by that house on our way to and from church, I would point to it and tell her that when I grew up, I was going to live in that very house. I can remember how amused my mother was that her son, at such a young age, had such lofty ambitions for himself.

 

It was good that I wanted to move up to the lifestyle of my friends, but I was well aware, at a very early age, that if I wanted to elevate myself I should do well in school. I should also plan, as my school friends did, to go to college, even if it was unclear to me how that might happen. There was no one day when I set my mind on a specific course of action that would lift me into a new world, but I realized early on, simply from the social ties I had developed, that I need not end up as a mill worker or follow my father and various male relatives into jobs that required them to work long hours for not very much pay.

 

I bring all this up because recent research has determined that the most effective means of helping students from low-income neighborhoods to become more successful in school, and in life, was for them to have daily contact, in school and at play, with children from upper-income families. That research seemed to justify (and validate) the argument for magnet schools and busing programs that result in a school population with a diverse socio-economic mix. I can attest that I may be Exhibit A in proving the validity of that finding.

 

My mother, by the way, did not need any research project to know the benefits that might accrue to me from being exposed to the friends I made at Marston School. She was not inclined to boast about her children, or to pass out compliments very often either, but there was a certain pride in her voice when she would tell people, "He goes with the best kids. His friend is the doctor's son." That latter remark was a reference to my good friend, Stanley Israel, whose father was our family doctor. To my mother, it was all quite clear—nothing but good could come to a boy whose friends were the "best kids."

 

 

 

 

A prime example of how my Marston School experience widened my exposure to a world beyond the East Side can be seen in an incident that grew out of my mother's requirement that we all attend mass every morning during Lent. That meant that we all went off, on foot no less, to the 7 a.m. mass at St. Kieran's parish, almost a mile away from our house on Goebel Street.

 

Since another Catholic church, Angel Guardian, was only a few blocks away from our house, why was it necessary for us to make that much longer walk to a more distant parish? Well, Angel Guardian served the large number of French Canadian families in our neighborhood, and though it may never have been enunciated in a formal way, Italian families knew that we were not welcome at that church. We needed, instead, to go to St. Kieran's, the only one of Berlin's four Catholic parishes where sermons were delivered in English, not French. St. Kieran's, incidentally, had been built to serve Berlin's Irish Catholic population.

 

Pardon the digression, but our exclusion, official or implied, from Angel Guardian gives some insight into the ethnic/class divisions in Berlin in that era. In so many ways, the Berlin I grew up in had all the characteristics of a village in Quebec, which was no coincidence since the Brown Company had sent agents throughout the province of Quebec to recruit workers for its Berlin mills. The company's agents had also been sent agents to Boston and New York to steer recently arrived immigrants to Berlin, where the growing demand for paper all over America had led to the rapid growth of the Brown Company.

 

In those villages in Quebec, pastors of Catholic parishes were known to exercise enormous influence over the lives of their parishioners. Likewise, in Berlin, the pastor of Angel Guardian was a figure of great authority. He was involved, first, in the education of young people, from first grade through high school. The grammar school connected to his parish was located across the street from his church. He also opened, in another part of Berlin, Notre Dame High School. In addition to initiating (and overseeing) the many social activities sponsored by the church, he even started and ran a credit union where many of his parishioners deposited their savings and obtained their home mortgages.

 

The influence of the pastor of Angel Guardian was but one example of how Franco-American culture permeated the city of Berlin. Local news on the Berlin radio station was delivered in both English and French, there was a French language newspaper, and most French Canadian children attended the parochial schools connected to the three Catholic churches that served primarily the French Canadian population. Students in these schools were taught by nuns who belonged to an order that was based in Canada. A good number of these students then went on to Notre Dame, where they continued to be taught by the same order of French Canadian nuns they had in their grammar schools.

 

By the time we were teenagers, it was rare for students from Notre Dame to socialize with those of us who attended the public high school. This divide in public education, parochial versus public, did more than anything else to create the two cultures in Berlin, one French Canadian, and the other, much smaller, consisting of groups of people who were not French Canadian.

 

There was even a clearly defined difference in school athletics. The hockey team from Notre Dame, its players exclusively French Canadian, was a powerhouse, easily winning the state championship year after year. They routinely beat the hockey team from Berlin High School by lopsided margins. But Berlin High's basketball team repeatedly triumphed, by large margins, over Notre Dame's woeful basketball team.

 

Within the Brown Company, too, while many French Canadians held positions of great responsibility within the mills, very few of those men (and they were all men, of course) ever made it into the company's executive ranks. That led to talk, oh, whispers and grumbling really, about how promotions to the upper reaches of the Brown Company seemed always to go to men who wore the "ring," —that is, men who were members of Berlin's Masonic lodge. Catholics, whether Irish, Italian for French, were forbidden by the church to join the Masons.

 

Digression over. In that era when the Memolo family went off to early morning mass Catholics who intended to take communion were prohibited from eating or drinking anything after midnight. That meant I didn't eat breakfast before going off to church. When mass was over, and I had gone to communion, I walked back to our house on Goebel Street, and after having my breakfast, I went off to school, which, interestingly enough, was only two blocks away from our church. Nothing like beginning your day with a little walk of three miles or so before you got to school, particularly on chilly mornings in February and March.

 

It so happened that on my walk to school each day, I would meet up with Stanley Israel at his house, which was not that far from St. Kieran's church. Stanley's mother, once she heard of my early morning routine, came up with a brilliant idea.

 

Since our house is so close to the church, she told me, why don't you come over here after mass and have breakfast with Stanley. As a result of this very generous gesture by Mrs. Israel, I've always maintained, without any reservations, that I was the only Italian-American boy in Berlin—no, undoubtedly in the entire state of New Hampshire and maybe all of northern New England for that matter, to have learned, in 1950, what it was like to have a bagel for breakfast.

 

 

 

 

There is little doubt that I benefited from being introduced, at Marston School, to a world somewhat different from my own, but changing times, and a slight (very slight) improvement in the family's finances, also meant that both Shirley and I had a reasonably good chance of achieving greater success than had been possible for my older siblings and cousins—not that any of the foregoing were lacking either in intellect or ambition. It has always troubled me that my five older siblings and most of my first cousins, all of whom were hardworking and conscientious and articulate and, yes, quite bright, were not able to capitalize on the opportunities that were more readily available to people of my generation.

 

How lofty were these expectations—first, for me, and then for my sister, Shirley? Here we were, a family living on the edge of poverty—my brothers and sisters all have various part-time jobs before they were teenagers—but in 1950, my mother put together enough money to buy a set of the World Book Encyclopedia. In that era, a set of encyclopedias in any home was official certification that this was a family very serious about helping its children move up in the world.

 

I don't know whether there's any evidence that encyclopedias in a home invariably led to lives of purpose and accomplishment, but I know that in my case I wallowed night after night in those encyclopedias. I read my way through the entire set, and may have read some of the volumes more than once.

 

At school, I was considered a good student, although my high school record was not particularly distinguished. But I was always an avid reader, an inveterate news junkie from an early age and a frequent visitor and patron of the Berlin Public Library. I still delight in every memory I have of that library, particularly the little chairs and tables in the children's reading room that were a perfect fit for little people like me.

 

I would often stop in the library on my way home from school, and sitting in my favorite chair, I would pore over each issue of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, absolutely fascinated with stories of new inventions and glimpses of super-duper inventions to come.

 

Oh, I was a true believer in the inevitability of progress and a brighter tomorrow. I think I was caught up, in good part, by the euphoria so prevalent in post-World War II America. Why, cars were no longer boxes on wheels. They were sleek and stylish, as were every kitchen appliance, from toasters to stoves and refrigerators. And oh yes, there was constant talk of rocket ships that would explore the moon and distant planets.

 

I was particularly intrigued with this new thing called television. It seems that soon we were going to be able to sit in our living rooms and watch the World Series. I distinctly remember an article in a sports magazine with an illustration of how a television camera could be positioned so that viewers at home would get the same view of the game as the catcher crouched behind home plate.

 

There was a children's librarian, Julia Laffin, who seemed to know exactly the kind of books I was looking for, heavy on sports and sports heroes, as well as Hardy Boys detective stories. She was also aware that I was drawn to another genre, novels and biographies that detailed the rise to fame and fortune of people who had been born into straitened circumstances.

 

Miss Laffin, tall and thin and somewhat stern looking, would actually put new books aside from me. Then, when I entered the library she would call me over to her desk, and with a little smile on her face, she would hand me a book, saying "Here's another one I think you'll like."

 

I shouldn't forget my other "reading room," the East Side Drug Store, just around the corner from my house. Because I regularly ran errands for my brother, Tony, and that included going to the drug store to buy his cigars and sports magazines, and since every now and then, I used my tips from Tony to buy a comic book, the owner of the drug store treated me with some leniency when I stationed myself next to the store's magazine section to browse through the latest offerings.

 

I became so familiar with the sports magazines on display that I knew the exact day (and hour, too) when the next edition of publications like Baseball Digest or Sport Magazine were delivered to the drug store. Both Tony and I read each week The Sporting News, which was known back then, as the "Bible" of major league baseball because it contained copious information about every event of any significance that occurred within that sport, even the minor leagues. There was a time, when I was 12 years old or so, when I was able to reel off a bewildering collection of baseball statistics and lore about major leaguers past and present.

 

In the eighth grade—not because of my knowledge of baseball—I became a favorite student of my English and Civics teacher, Miss Rosadina Brooks, One day Miss Brooks asked me what newspaper my family read. When I told her the Boston Record-American, she drew in her breath and shook her shoulders, so troubled was she at hearing that I was being exposed each day to a newspaper owned by one of her arch villains, William Randolph Hearst. Maybe I should have pointed out to her that, yes, at our house we may have read Mr. Hearst's tabloid, but at least we received a daily newspaper. I'm not sure the same could be said for many of our neighbors.

 

She then told me she would bring me each week the News of the Week section from the Sunday edition of the New York Times so that I could see how a real newspaper so skillfully summed up the significant news of that particular week. Miss Brooks also felt I would benefit from reading the New York Times each day so she asked the librarians at the public library if they would allow me—still an eighth grader—to use the adult section of the public library, which received the daily edition of the Times. (It came a day late, of course.)

 

Library policy at the time did not allow children to visit the adult section until they turned 14 and had entered high school, but Miss Brooks assured the library staff that there was little likelihood her model student would cause a disturbance or even utter a sound. I am forever grateful to Miss Brooks, for introducing me to the Times, but I must confess my 13-year-old self thought the best thing about that paper was its sports section. Now, I could expand my daily intake of sports news beyond what was available to me from the Boston newspaper we read in my house.

 

 

 

 

I think of my boyhood as having two seasons. During the school year, I spent most of my time with my Marston School friends, but in the summer, when my school friends were often away at summer camp or on vacations with their families, I "returned" to the East Side and my friends in my neighborhood.

 

The East Side, to be blunt about it, was looked down upon by people who lived on the West Side. Working class families lived here and there on the West Side, but in that part of Berlin single-family homes far outnumbered the tenements so common on the East Side. Many homes on the West Side were also located on tree-shaded streets and had front lawns and backyards. There were some single-family homes in our part of the city, but they were more modest, more bungalow-like, and there were fewer tree-shaded streets or lawns of any kind. On the East Side, for instance, one block away from our house, there was a foundry and machine shop, as well as a small factory that produced and bottled bleach water. Zoning had not been a priority when Berlin was during the years of its greatest growth in the early part of the twentieth century.

 

As keenly aware as I was of the difference between the neighborhoods near my grammar school and the one where I lived, I think of the East Side in the 1940's and 1950's as a place that had a kind of sweetness and innocence about it, particularly for children. Organized play, such as Little League baseball didn't yet exist, and facilities such as basketball courts and tennis courts were not available until I had grown up and left Berlin. The Community Club, a YMCA-like facility —which no longer exists—was available to us, but its facilities were limited.

 

What we did have, however, was a lot of time, particularly on summer days, and somehow we would organize ourselves into teams to play endless games of baseball, some with nine players to a side, some with less, but with enough people positioned so that a game could be played. Our equipment consisted of balls, battered and taped, bats, cracked and held together by even more tape, and gloves that were of dubious quality. But we spent hours on various vacant lots and fields and backyards where, if not playing a game itself, we were hitting grounders to each other or simply playing catch. All of us were convinced that the only thing standing between us and a major league career was just a bit more practice.

 

As I look back on it, there was something remarkable about how we determined, without any supervision from adults, where different players fit into the system of different fields we played on. Younger kids could play on smaller lots, while older, more proficient players, moved up the ladder to larger fields of play once they developed their basic skills. Eventually, those who were really good "graduated" to playing on the regulation diamond at Community Field, which was used by the high school teams and the Berlin town team, the Berlin Red Sox. Alas, by the age of 13 or 14, I realized that, no matter how much or how long I practiced, I was never going to make it onto the hallowed ground available only to the best players in Berlin.

 

This was a time when even the smallest community anywhere in America had a town team that usually played on weekends. These town teams consisted of rather skilled players, many of whom had been standouts in high school. A few of them had played semi-pro baseball and some had even attracted interest from scouts for organized baseball. There were great rivalries back then between these teams from different towns, with the games between Berlin and the nearby town of Gorham exceeding all other matchups.

 

A notable fringe benefit of town team baseball for the urchins of my neighborhood was the opportunity to watch the Berlin Red Sox practice at Community Field and to chase after the foul balls they hit onto the bordering streets of the field. When we returned the balls, we were repaid for our efforts with bats that were usually cracked or balls that were pretty scuffed up.

 

I can still name the players on the Berlin team and who among them was a longball hitter, who a great fielder and what pitcher could throw a fast ball few people could hit as opposed to a pitcher who depended on control and slow stuff that made a ball curve or drop away just as a batter was prepared to tee off.

 

Later in life, in 1972, I wrote a story for the Boston Sunday Globe magazine about a handful of small towns in southern New Hampshire where there were still a few town teams that played on Sunday afternoons. My story focused on a particular game in Derry, New Hampshire, and it turned out that on the Sunday I was there to report on it, there was some question as to whether a game would be played at all because it seemed for a time that not enough players had shown up for each side to field a full team. But finally eighteen players were assembled, and while there were practically no spectators, except for some family members and a few friends of the players, the game went on and there was a certain magic—or so I tried to convey— to a bunch of people who remained dedicated to the excitement and beauty of two teams from different towns getting together on a Sunday afternoon to play baseball on a less than perfectly groomed diamond.

 

My neighborhood friends and I were able, even with the countless hours we spent playing baseball, to engage in any number of other activities, including cowboys and Indians, war games—there was always a problem finding people to play German or Japanese soldiers—Hide and Seek, Tag, May I, Simon says, etc. We were forever starting "clubs," while trying to create out of cardboard and pieces of scrap wood a "clubhouse," in which we would carry out our secret rites and rituals. One basic rule to all our clubs—you needed to know the secret password to gain admission. Another rule, absolutely, strictly enforced, was that no girl—meaning any sister who might tag along with you—was allowed anywhere near our clubhouse.

 

We had our special play spaces, too. The Rocks, as we called them, were a collection of giant-sized boulders (well, they were giant-sized to us) on a vacant lot near the Brown Company, that resembled, at least to our mind, the badlands of the wild west we saw in those western movies shown at the Albert Theater on Saturday afternoons. There was another play area, The Brook, which had a stream that ran (just barely) through a vacant lot and allowed all sorts of opportunities for us to create dams that altered its flow. Then there was The Playground. It came into existence sometime around 1950, once the city installed swings and see-saws in an area next to Community Field.

 

A major event in our busy lives was the Saturday afternoon movie. The cost for a ticket was 12 cents. If you had an extra nickel, you could also buy a package of candy from the theater's vending machine. Seventeen cents and you owned the world. Chocolate-covered caramels, called Milk Duds, were my favorite.

 

Not only was there a main feature, the western, of course, but following that there would be an episode from a serial featuring some hero who barely escaped death each week. Oh, the bated breaths when our heroes were in danger, and the deafening applause when the evil doers got their comeuppance. Then came the short subjects, greeted with even louder, lustier applause, particularly if the first choice was the Three Stooges. More cheering and outright pandemonium would follow if we were then treated to one or maybe two cartoons. Now it was time, depending on the cartoon selection, for a theater full of pre-teenage boys to see who could outdo each other in their mimicry of Woody Woodpecker's unforgettable "song," or the cackling laugh of Bugs Bunny after he once again outsmarted his pursuer, Elmer Fudd.

 

Getting that 12 or 17 cents for the movie ticket was another part of the Saturday afternoon adventure. I might be able on Saturday morning to sell some rags or scrap paper to Mr. King, the neighborhood junk dealer, who would weigh the merchandise very carefully and then, just as carefully, take out his wallet and dole out the few cents he owed me. Or I could collect the deposit on empty bottles I returned to various stores in the neighborhood, five cents for a quart-size bottle, but only 2 cents for smaller bottles. I always had a problem because the store owner would look at me and say, "You didn't buy that here. You got it from your uncle Mosca's store." Somehow, maybe because of the pleading look in my eyes, the store owner would fork over the dime or so for the bottles I had brought in.

 

Another of our play areas was the Boston and Maine train station, directly across from my house, and the nearby tracks. I don't know how many times each day we were in and out of that station, using its rest room and water fountain. The station also had a vending machine that dispensed candy bars for anyone lucky enough to have a spare nickel. And how about the great fun of putting a penny on the railroad tracks just before the freight train passed through so that we could then find the penny flattened into a piece of metal? I still wonder how one of us didn't get killed, given our constant fooling around on those tracks.

 

It was quite remarkable the way we practiced the fine art of amusing ourselves with hanging around the proverbial street corners or sitting on somebody's front porch on a rainy afternoon debating endlessly the major topic of contention for baseball fans all over New England, who would you prefer to have on your team, Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio? If that wasn't enough to keep us engaged, there were always our bicycles and the need to repair them or tinker with them in some way so that we could, theoretically at least, improve their performance and speed.

 

There was, of course, no shortage of playmates in my neighborhood. I have always said that when the children came pouring out of those houses each morning it was something like the circus act in which dozens of clowns keep emerging from a tiny car. It's still hard to believe how many people could fit into those "rents" of the triple deckers that were so plentiful in our neighborhood. Our family, with seven children, was of average size on the East Side back then.

 

Before I get too rose-colored in my nostalgia, I should point out that the large families on the East Side lived in housing that was often sub-standard in many ways. Landlords were not particularly generous in carrying out repairs and the apartments that had to accommodate large families did not afford much in the way of space or peace and quiet and privacy. Then, too, in winter—which can be long and fierce in Berlin—heat in these small apartments came primarily from the kitchen stove and maybe another stove in the "parlor," and the source of heat was either oil or wood. I can well remember that in most houses there was always the smell of freshly chopped wood, either from the wood box kept close by the kitchen or parlor stove, or from the piles of wood stacked up in the "shed" off the front porch.

 

In summer, our neighborhood was filled with the sound of tenants and home owners alike working away on nights and weekends sawing and chopping wood that was stored away for use during the winter months. Some of the wood was put indoors, either in those sheds or in cellars, but so much of it was needed to get through a winter that stacks of it would be stored outdoors, piled neatly and covered with canvas. It was a rare winter when the wood put aside in the summer didn't need to be added to before spring arrived.

 

 

 

 

My other "playground," in a manner of speaking, was Mosca's Market, also known as The Store. It was where my father, Rocco, worked. Oh, there were other people, mostly my Mosca cousins, who were employed there, but the undeniable presence at Mosca's was Rocco. He was first and foremost the store's butcher, but it was a busy place, and besides serving the customers who came to buy meat, he scurried around filling orders called in for delivery and also waited on the unending stream of customers, measuring out everything from a pound of hamburg to a pound of grapes or cookies or fetching a gallon of paint from the hardware section of the store. This was an era, of course, when only a few food products were sold prepackaged.

 

The Store was located at the juncture of Goebel Street and East Mason Street, the principal artery joining Berlin's East and West Sides, and just across the tracks from the Boston and Maine station. When the railroad was Berlin's lifeline to the outside world, Mosca's Market was at the crossroads of both the passenger station and the freight warehouse nearby, where goods that arrived by rail were stored until they were picked up for delivery to various businesses. This was the hub, in short, of a great deal of Berlin's personal and commercial activity.

 

It may be hard to imagine, but in the world before the internet and ubiquitous phones, The Store also functioned as a communications center. There were people who would drop in not necessarily to buy anything but to bring news that was then conveyed to other people who dropped by. Often people who came to shop might then hang around, chatting and exchanging gossip with other customers. It was not unknown either for some of the male customers to gravitate to a storage area in the rear of the store where they would drink beer and chat.

 

Another intriguing feature of The Store was a rudimentary speaker system that was connected to the juke box of a saloon (one of three in our neighborhood) two storefronts away. Thus, customers shopping for groceries could expect at any time to be serenaded by the latest love song on the hit parade that some customer in the saloon paid a nickel to play. At times, if there was a customer in the saloon who took a liking to a particular song, that tune might be played time and again. If the right song was playing, my cousin Armand Mosca, who prided himself on his ability as a dancer, might even latch onto some customer, usually an older lady, and waltz her around the store.

 

I think of myself as having been The Store's mascot. I was always hanging around, ostensibly helping out or just getting into things I shouldn't have gotten into in the first place. I really had this notion that I was a vital part of the management team, not so much for what I could contribute, but because I was, as everyone referred to me, Rocco's boy, and that gave me a special distinction. For most customers, Rocco was, in essence, Mosca's Market. There were people, I can attest, who would mention to me, usually in a lowered voice so my Mosca cousins couldn't hear, that they traded at Mosca's mostly because of their friendship with Rocco. He was also widely known for the sausages he made. At my father's funeral, there were forty-five cars in the cortege that went from the church to the cemetery.

 

No wonder, then, that I considered the store to be my combination playground and work place. Often, though I was all of eight or nine or ten years old, I would even find a way to listen in on conversations going on between one of my Mosca cousins and a visiting salesman. I seemed to think I deserved to be included in whatever they were discussing, even after they politely, or not so politely, told me to go busy myself elsewhere.

 

My principal duty was to sort the bottles returned by customers so that they were ready to be picked up by the delivery persons who brought the next shipment of beer or soda to the store. Some of my other "jobs" consisted of helping my cousin Oreste "Sonny" Mosca, Jr., peck potatoes and stoke the coal-fueled furnace in the basement of the store.

 

First, the potatoes. In late summer and early fall, Oreste senior would travel to Maine to buy bushels of potatoes from farmers. After he returned home the burlap bags filled with potatoes were dumped into a huge pile in the basement of the store. Then, Sonny and I had the job of "pecking" the potatoes, which meant putting them into fifteen pound bags—a full peck—or into seven and a half pound bags—a half peck.

 

In winter months, Sonny and I were expected to shovel coal into a sizable metal box that was connected to the store's furnace. (Actually, Sonny, three years older than me, did about three times as much shoveling.) A screw-like gear arrangement powered by an electric motor would then carry coal from that box into the furnace.

 

We also had to clean out the ashes left behind by the burnt coal. These ashes, or clinkers, as we called them, would be put into heavy metal containers and somehow, with a great deal of straining, we (or Sonny mostly, but with me tagging along) wrestled these barrels up a flight of stairs to a spot on the sidewalk outside the store where they were picked up by the city's garbage collectors.

 

When Sonny and I went down to the basement to peck potatoes, we would each take with us a popular pastry, a Drake's Devil Dog, and while eating that, we washed it down with an ice-cold Orange Crush soda. Whatever I earned for my labors was a fringe benefit compared to my real pay, that Devil Dog and soda.

 

Sonny and I also filled shelves with canned goods throughout the store. Later, when I was a bit older and could carry a full box of groceries, I would go along with my cousin, Armand, to deliver orders to the store's customers both on the East Side of Berlin and in Cascade, three miles away. When I went with Armand to Cascade, our final stop would take us to Mona's Restaurant, where we would reward ourselves for our hard work with a piece of freshly-baked blueberry pie and a glass of milk.

 

In our trips to Cascade, I could expect to be fawned over by all the Italian ladies on our route. (Practically every Italian family in Berlin and Cascade shopped at Mosca's.) Here again, the attention and compliments they lavished on me came from my being Rocco's boy. Many of these women were not only friendly with my parents, but they would recall to me that my father, years before, had been the one who delivered groceries to them.

 

Delivering groceries was also something of an education, since I got to see the inside of a lot of houses, particularly those on the East Side. That's when I discovered that not everyone was as assiduous in keeping their houses as neat and clean as my mother and my aunts.

 

One of my more interesting adventures as Armand's helper came from the several times I was with him when we made deliveries to a rundown building on Main Street with a saloon on its ground floor and cheap rooms in the two stories above. The saloon, always busy, could become a rather rowdy place on Friday and Saturday nights when lumberjacks from the Brown Company's wood camps came into town. On those nights, whatever festivities took place downstairs continued after hours in the upstairs, which gave rise to the view that the upstairs portion of the building was, in fact, a brothel.

 

I'm not sure whether there was a brothel, as such, operating on Berlin's Main Street, or just a rooming house that accommodated the needs of lumberjacks and the women they met in the saloon, but I can attest that this building was very much a place for after hours drinking. I can say that because I went along with Armand when we delivered several cases of beer to this place on Saturday afternoons. I believe there was some kind of regulation in New Hampshire at the time that made it illegal for grocery stores to deliver beer, but I'm not sure that law was ever strictly enforced. Nevertheless, when we delivered beer to this location, Armand would drive down a narrow back alley that brought us to the rear entrance of the building. Then to circumvent still further that regulation about deliveries of beer, Armand would always make sure to put a couple of loaves of bread on top of each case of beer so it would look as though what we carried upstairs was nothing more than a box of groceries.

 

I was no more than 15 or 16 years old at the time, but I was now able to report to my school friends, in a rather, casual, almost jaded way that yes, I had actually set foot inside the upstairs portion of the infamous building. So, what did I see, what kind of high jinks took place there? My friends couldn't wait to hear. Alas, for the most part what I saw was a dingy, dimly lit rooming house, which had a sort of living room and a kitchen where we delivered the beer. But twice, I had got a glimpse into the living room, where there were a couple of young woman, not particularly attractive as I recall, sitting around. They looked to my practiced eye as if they were just taking it easy until they would be called upon to entertain the clients who would sooner or later come staggering through the door.

 

I would have liked to spice up my friends that I had sure-fire, vivid proof that I had seen a functioning brothel. But in Berlin, in 1953, that I had been inside that infamous place—and that I had seen the women who supposedly, maybe, possibly worked there—was sufficient to give me some notoriety among my peers.

 

The summer I was 14, my cousin Sonny took over a milk delivery route and I was hired to be his number one assistant. I can't recall what I was paid, but that didn't matter as much to me as having a job that required me every day to lift heavy wooden crates filled with bottles of milk. Oh the dreams I had about adding so much muscle to my puny frame that by the opening of school all my friends would marvel at my transformation over the summer vacation.

 

Sad to say, but by the time school started I still didn't resemble in the least the photo in those full-page ads on the back cover of so many comic books promoting Charles Atlas's body building program. But it was not for lack of trying. Already, even before my stint as Sonny's assistant, I had, on the sly, sent away for the vaunted Charles Atlas regimen, lured on by the promise that I would receive, as an introductory offer, a "Muscle Meter." Much to my disappointment, the instrument that was supposed to help me measure my muscles turned out to be a cheap paper tape measure. Undaunted, however, and out of sight of my sisters—who would have made fun of me, I'm sure— I would do the stretching exercises that were supposed to turn me into a rippled mass of muscle. Nature, I can report, was not so easily fooled.

 

But, my lack of new muscles aside, I enjoyed my summer job, mostly because our first stop each morning was Mona's Restaurant, where we would deliver the milk she had ordered. Sonny would then buy a half dozen of Mona's freshly-baked doughnuts, which we ate while sharing a quart of milk as we drove to the next stop in our route.

 

It might seem from the foregoing that my association with my Mosca cousins was primarily one that provided me with doughnuts and pie and Drake's Devil Dogs. That's only party true. I was also free to nibble away at items all over The Store, but under strict rules imposed by Armand, I could eat a peach or apple, for instance, but only if they were so blemished that they could otherwise not be sold. The same rule applied to bananas, which I was free to eat also, provided the banana was so ripe it had turned to mush.

 

I was also a helper of sorts for my cousin, Eddie Sinabaldi, who had taken over a small restaurant on the ground floor of the Sinabaldi's family home. His brother, Orrie, had opened the place in the late 1930's, when he called it—get this—the Ritz. It was really nothing more than a soda shoppe, featuring sundaes and soft drinks, and its food offerings consisted mostly of hot dogs and hamburgers.

 

At some point, Eddie had this idea that I should set up a news stand outside his restaurant on Sunday mornings and sell Sunday newspapers to passersby. There certainly was no shortage of passersby, given all the churchgoers coming and going from Sunday mass, but I was never the "Extra, Extra, read all about" kind of newspaper vendor. As people passed by, I stood there and every now and then sort of mentioned to potential customers that they could get their Sunday papers from me. Only a few people, I should add, took me up on the offer.

 

After a month or two, Eddie decided, rather charitably, I think, that the news stand outside his restaurant wasn't working out that well because it was located just a few storefronts away from our competition, the East Side Drug, where there were enormous stacks of newspapers and where most people, by habit, bought their Sunday paper.

 

My Sunday paper venture was on a par with my stint as a vendor at baseball games. Here I was teamed up with my enterprising cousins, Sonny and Armand, both of whom felt there was money to be made selling soda and popcorn and candy bars to fans attending the Sunday afternoon baseball games of the Berlin Red Sox at Community Field. They also knew just the cracker-jack salesman who could help them turn a tidy profit—me.

 

Sonny was pretty good at this vending business, making his way through the bleachers hawking his wares. I was possibly the worst vendor in the history of vending. First off, I was too interested in watching the game, so most of the time, I just stood there, gazing out at the field. Now and then, prodded by Sonny, I would let the fans know that I was selling soda and popcorn, but both my cousins decided, after a few games, to give up on a venture that didn't turn out to be quite as profitable as they imagined it would be.

 

My mother, always perceptive, sensed that I was never going to be the dynamo that went out there and conquered the world of business. She used to say of me, "He's a good boy, but he pushes himself back." She said that like someone who couldn't understand how she had given birth to someone who lacked the energy and drive and desire to get out there and beat the competition. I was ambitious enough—I certainly had big dreams—but I seemed to lack the personality to muscle my way to the top.

 

My mother just couldn't believe that anyone fortunate enough to be born in America wouldn't want to go at it full force all the time, thereby reaping all those riches that were available to anyone who worked hard and was, in the parlance of that time, a good worker. She particularly admired those men in our neighborhood who held a full-time job in the Brown Company but also had part-time jobs they went to on nights or weekends.

 

There's a story I've often told about an incident that pinpointed, much to my mother's dismay, what a dreamy, feckless kid I seemed to be. It took place when I was twelve years old or so, on a Saturday morning in spring. Now that we could shut down our furnace for a few months, we could carry out our annual spring cleaning of our cellar. For several months a good portion of the cellar had been filled both with piles of wood and coal, and a furnace producing a good amount of ashes, so by spring the place could be pretty grungy.

 

On this Saturday morning my brother Tony and I began the cleanup. Right off that put me at a disadvantage. Nobody was in Tony's league when it came to carrying out a job with energy and force. He threw himself into his work, sweeping away and putting things in order while I followed along, working much more slowly and with much less vigor. Finally when we finished and went upstairs for lunch, Tony had a report for my mother.

 

"Ma, I have to tell you something," he said, pointing towards me."This guy's no worker."

 

"Oh no!" she replied, the tone of her voice filled with as much alarm as if she just been told that I had come down with a dread disease.

 

There was, of course, a good reason for her disappointment. In her world, one was either a good worker or, well, it's hard to imagine the dreadful prospects for someone who seemed, from Tony's report, to be afflicted with terminal laziness. What would come of me?

 

My mother, in her own way, decided to address that issue head-on the summer I was about to turn sixteen. In her view, the time had come, metaphorically, and in a real way, to shove this baby bird out of its nest. It was all very fine that I had been a helper at Mosca's Market and at Eddie's small diner, but that hadn't turned me into the kind of worker she expected me to be.

 

Her solution was quite simple. In northern New Hampshire, it was a rite of passage for young people to go off in the summer to work in any one of the many resort hotels found throughout the White Mountains. The wages were not great, but the hotels provided food and lodging as part of your compensation, and for certain jobs, bell hopping or waiting on tables, a good worker could expect tips. Some of these places were little more than country inns, but there were a good number that offered their guests l8-hole golf courses, lavish meals and night clubs with headline entertainers from New York and Boston. Guests at these larger hotels often stayed for two weeks or more, and some would spend a good portion of the summer at these places.

 

So, in June 1953, when school let out, my mother ordered—and I mean ordered— Tony to take me around to nearby resort hotels so that I could find work for the summer. With Tony nudging me along, we went into two or three hotels where I inquired, somewhat tentatively, as was my fashion, about the possibility of my becoming part of the hotel's staff. Alas, there were no takers, maybe because although I was almost 16 years old, I could have passed for 12 or so—which, indeed, I did at the local movie theaters where I had been able to pay the under-l2 price for a ticket until I was almost 15.

 

Somehow, even with my diminutive appearance, a couple who owned a small hotel in Twin Mountain, about 25 miles from Berlin, decided I was well suited for a job as general assistant to their hotel's handyman, Emile. The hotel was called The Grand View, which was quite apt since its front-porch provided a breath-taking, panoramic view of a good portion of the White Mountains.

 

It was quite an adventure for me to learn what it was like to live away from home and to hold a real job. I particularly enjoyed my time with Emile, working with him on everything from fix-up chores to cutting lawns and trimming hedges and cleaning and spiffing up the hotel's public spaces. We even went into the nearby woods to chop down trees and cut them up for firewood the hotel needed for its fireplaces since it it remained open until Columbus Day.

 

In the evenings, when Emile became the bartender in the hotel's cocktail lounge, I helped out in the kitchen. Now and then, I was also the hotel's resident bell hop, which meant I earned a few dollars, a very few, from tips that guests gave me when I delivered baggage to their rooms. The husband-and-wife owners were suitably impressed with the energy and vigor I put into my work, and at the end of the summer they added a $25 bonus to the $100 they paid me for my two months's work.

 

The next summer, determined to earn more, I got a job, along with several of my friends from Berlin High at a larger resort, Wentworth Hall in Jackson, which was the next town over from Twin Mountain. At Wentworth Hall, which was a hotel in the grand manner, my pay was $100 a month, plus free room and board, which meant a room shared with several of my co-workers in a rundown cabin and dreadful meals served in the staff cafeteria.

 

My friends and I became part of the kitchen crew, with special responsibility for helping to prepare and serve lunches to guests who came each day to a patio area that overlooked the hotel's swimming pool. We also assisted in the hotel's central kitchen during the dinner hour. It was quite an experience to be in the middle of that busy kitchen, seeing close-up, the executive chef overseeing the staff of line cooks who turned out fancy, gourmet meals. One of our duties was to carry out menial tasks for a pastry chef who effortlessly created dessert concoctions—Baked Alaska, Cherries Jubilee, ice cream parfaits—none of us had never heard of or seen before.

 

We also got to watch the hotel's garde manger turn out hors d'oeuvres and salads that were a wonder to behold. He had once been employed by Hollywood studios to prepare banquet scenes, and possessed of a kind of show-business personality, he would wow us with his ability to take a radish and with a few deft moves of his sharp knife turn it into a tiny rose. Then there was the hotel's butcher who, as a sideline, produced the ice carvings that were a center piece for the hotel's lavish midnight buffet table. We would look on, fascinated, as he turned huge blocks of ice into swans and mermaids, and once quite memorably, produced the Statue of Liberty, complete with a torch consisting of a lighted flash light embedded in the ice.

 

It was also an introduction to an adult world of hotel staffers, particularly those who worked in Florida resorts in the winter and then came north for the summer. These were people who tended to be a rather raffish lot. Some of them seemed to function quite well, even though they drank heavily. They were also involved in living arrangements—so it was said—that were not always heterosexual. It was quite an introduction to an adult world far from anything usually encountered by a group of innocent high schoolers.

 

My two summers working in the hotels may have begun to ease some concerns about my ability to hold a job, but this question about what would become of me still didn't seem to be settled as I grew closer to graduating from high school. Yes, it seemed that I was one of the students who should go on to college, but there was some uncertainty about how I would be able to do that. My father had died when I was ten (and my sister, Shirley, was seven), but my mother, a genius when it came to financial management, had managed to get by with Social Security survivor benefits and help from my older brothers and sisters, as well as the income from our rental properties, four small apartments at 590 Goebel and a two-family house next door at 583 Champlain Street.

 

My mother had also acquired in 1949, with interest-free loans from her sisters, Jennie Mosca and Louise Poretta, the triple-decker my grandparents had owned at 490 Goebel Street. The income from all these apartments was largely taken up by the cost of taxes, water and sewer charges and constant repairs. In any given month, if emergency repairs were needed, there was great anxiety about whether income would exceed expenses.

 

If a tenant moved out and one of our apartments was empty, there was an all-points bulletin issued across Berlin, with relatives and friends all over the city trying to find a new tenant for my mother so that she didn't lose more than a month or two of rental income. Also, when a tenant moved out, everyone in the family was expected to help out with the painting and cleaning and fix up that would make the apartment more attractive to potential renters.

 

My mother—barely educated enough to read and write—could be a masterful negotiator with various repair people she needed to keep those properties running, and she didn't hesitate at lodging a complaint, loudly and vociferously, if she felt a job hadn't been done right. She was equally adept at looking for ways to shave a few dollars off a bill presented to her.

 

She also devised various cost-saving measures, one of which was for me to shadow any tradesman she hired. "You stay next to the man," she said, "and when he needs his tools, you hand it to him." I'm not sure that my contributions as a johnny-onthe- spot assistant to the carpenter/plumber/painter reduced labor costs by that much, but it seemed not to bother the various tradesman that I was there to save them from taking two or three steps to reach a particular tool, and it seemed to satisfy my mother that we had made some effort, however minuscule, to save a dollar or two.

 

She had an uncanny knack for remembering every bill she had paid, down to the penny for some item, her water bill, say, and could rather effortlessly reel off if the cost this year was higher or lower than the year before, and maybe even the year before that. She was quite capable of recalling these expenses until a few weeks before her death, one month before her 96th birthday. I've spent my entire life trying to imagine what she might have done had she an education and the right opportunities.

 

I may not have inherited my mother's ambition (and her guile), but the good fortune that has followed me throughout my life was at work in 1955, because right after high school I was hired at the Brown Company, and the money I earned that summer, along with some help from my family, enabled me to pay for my first year at the University of New Hampshire.

 

But more significant than the amount of money I earned was the fact that I could put aside my pay and use it for my own purposes rather than turn any of it over to my mother. This was a milestone event, one without any precedent in our family, and probably for most families in my neighborhood. My siblings, until they were married, always turned over a portion of what they earned to my mother. In the world I grew up in what you earned did not belong exclusively to you. This system, simple and efficient in its execution, has always struck me as similar to that of ship-wrecked sailors, say, who realize that their survival depends on the sharing of food and water.

 

My savings that summer helped me pay my tuition and room and meals at UNH, but during the school year I relied on the $5 dollar bill my mother sent me each week to cover my living expenses. My siblings, supportive as always, would give me cash gifts for Christmas and also helped by buying me clothes, something they had done all the time I was growing up.

 

Summer employment at the Brown Company helped me again to pay for my second year at UNH, but the next summer, when the Brown Company wasn't hiring, I was left without a job. Lucky for me, my brother, Tony—who knew everyone, I mean everyone in Berlin—helped me get hired by a construction company that was doing some work for the Brown Company. On that job there was a week when I worked so much overtime that I earned $156. I had been paid in cash and as I walked home I kept stopping to count again and again the money in my pay envelope. I couldn't believe that I had earned that much money in one week.

 

I must add this about my bountiful pay day. As mentioned earlier, my earnings when I worked for the Brown Company, and on the construction job, were the result of gains made by organized labor during the New Deal years. How strong was organized labor in a working class community like Berlin? In the early 1950's, I joined three different labor unions before I was twenty-one and I even paid union dues to the construction union over the winter months so that I could get hired the next summer. In Berlin, by and large, you were either in a union, or you didn't work.

 

The enormous sum I made that one week was destined, of course, for my savings account so I could pay my UNH tuition, but I kept wondering all that summer whether it was worth going back to UNH in September. I just couldn't imagine, even after I graduated from college, being able earn that much money in one week. In fact, a number of years would go by before I earned a comparable amount.

 

Yes, changing times had widened opportunities for someone like me, but in 1955, when I graduated from from high school, only ten of the 80 students in my class went on to a four-year college.

 

 

 

 

My UNH experience was a monumental turning point in my life. Overnight, I was thrust into a world unlike anything I had ever known or imagined. Until I arrived at UNH, for instance, I had never in my life been inside a bookstore. Imagine my surprise when I found myself in a store that was filled with endless shelves of books, more books, it seemed, than were contained in the Berlin Public Library.

 

I particularly remember the multi-colored rows of Modern Library books, and I recall telling myself that I wanted someday to own (and read, I hoped) every last one of those books and live in a house where I would have enough bookcases to hold all of them. The first book I ever bought, other than a text book, was the Modern Library edition of Fyodor Dostoyevsksy's Crime and Punishment. I think it cost $1.35.

 

When I look back at those first few months at UNH, I'm surprised that I survived at all. I had no idea what college was all about or what I was supposed to do now that I was there. For example, when I started attending classes, I saw that everyone had notebooks and that they were taking notes on what the professor was saying. Well, since everyone else was doing it, I soon bought notebooks and began taking notes, too. My level of sophistication was such that I once asked someone what exactly is a resume, actually pronouncing the word like the verb rather than a noun.

 

I caught on quickly enough to what was going on, so that I managed to get reasonably good grades, although I don't think I ever recovered from having to abide by the requirement that male students at publicly-funded universities could not receive their degrees unless they completed two years of training the Reserve Officers Training Corps. Yes, every Thursday afternoon we put on our military uniforms and marched around the University's parade ground. Even more puzzling to me is why we were forced to take, for credit, absolutely useless courses, taught by Air Force officers who prattled on and on about how the United States had the might and the power to win the Cold War. Recalling that silly ROTC requirement can still send my blood pressure soaring.

 

Otherwise, every day I was reminded all over again of the vast difference between high school and college. While I had been able to coast through high school, I learned rather quickly that much more was expected of me at UNH. My compositions (or themes, as they were called back then) for freshman English would come back to me festooned with corrections and pointed questions about what I was trying to say. I've always maintained that I learned more in the first semester of freshman English at UNH than I had in my entire four years of high school. Who knew that there was such mystery, and art, to writing a cogent, lucid paragraph?

 

I was helped, I think, by meeting a group of kindred spirits. Each of my new friends came from backgrounds similar to mine, which meant that they also hadn't experienced until then anything similar to the life and activities found in Durham, New Hampshire. They, too, were learning, step by step, about any number of things that were new and novel and intriguing.

 

I recall how we, cautiously, carefully, began attending concerts in which people performed classical music. We were less intrepid, in those late-night discussions in our dorms, spouting off about God and religion and free will versus determinism and the problems of race in America. I'm still embarrassed when I remember how certain I was that everything coming out of my mouth was bold, exciting and never thought of before by anyone anywhere in the world.

 

Particularly memorable to me was the small movie theater in Durham, which regularly featured foreign movies, complete with subtitles. And the movies, oh, they were far, far removed from Hollywood fare. It was as if we were being introduced to a new art form. Never as long as I live will I forget the night I saw Fellini's La Strada.

 

At the same time, some people I knew owned long-playing 33 rpm records of classical music and record players and that helped me further to learn the difference between a symphony and a concerto and a sonata. For the first time in my life, I now had a room to myself and on my little radio I would tune in every night to the classical music played on a program, Music Until Dawn, that was broadcast on WBZ Radio in Boston. (Imagine that: an AM radio station playing classical music from midnight until daybreak!)

 

Some nights, when atmospheric conditions were right, and I angled the radio just right, I could also get a mostly clear signal from WQXR, radio station of the New York Times, which aired chamber music recitals at 11 p.m. each evening. That came on after the hour-on- the-hour roundup of news directly from the newsroom of the New York Times, as the announcer used to say.

 

By then, God bless the memory of Miss Brooks, I not only had a subscription to both the daily and Sunday New York Times, but I occasionally bought at a news stand the New York Herald-Tribune because, even though the paper's owners favored Republican candidates, it had great columnists like Red Smith and Walter Lipmann. I was also becoming familiar with The New Yorker, as well as the New Republic and Nation Magazines. Berlin was a little over l00 miles away, but I felt as if I had been transported to a distant planet.

 

At the time, Columbia Records offered a "subscription" deal, whereby you could buy at a discounted price four long-playing albums if you agreed to buy a certain number of albums over the next year. I remember to this day each of the dozen or so albums I bought through Columbia's Record Club program, and the music from every one of those albums has always had a special meaning for me, particularly whenever I've heard one of those pieces played live in a concert hall.

 

Although I had always been a reader, it wasn't until I got to UNH that I began to understand the difference between reading and serious reading. Once I caught on to that, though, I may have spent as much time at UNH reading books I wanted to read rather than assigned reading from most of my courses. Let's face it, for a young man of nineteen or so, who was developing literary aspirations, why wouldn't I care more about reading the Hemingway novels or Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, or Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks rather than wrestling with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? In the summer months, I spent almost all my non-working hours making my way through my "lists" of great and serious novels.

 

Quite soon, with all the music my friends and I were listening to and all our serious reading—and all those late-night bull sessions—we were well on our way to becoming real-life, genuine intellectuals, or so we thought. Having become so familiar with a smattering of great literature—and thinking of ourselves as more sensitive and learned than many of our fellow students—we wanted to put some distance between ourselves and the less cultured souls in our midst. By senior year, we had all moved into off-campus apartments rather than have anything to do with those students who lived in dormitories. Oh, and fraternities, and sororities—who would want to join something that resembled all too closely in its rituals those "clubs" we put together when we were ten or eleven years old?

 

I was fortunate (as always) to meet several professors who seemed to take some interest in me and my coterie of friends. One of these faculty members, Ted Miller, had been my freshman English teacher, and I found it hard to believe that any one individual could possess so much knowledge. I remember telling my friends, in all seriousness, that this guy, Miller, seemed not only to have read everything of any worth in the English language, but had also committed giant-sized chunks of it to memory.

 

It was simply beyond me how, in the middle of explaining the meaning and substance of a short story or poem, he could allude to some other short story or poem by another author, and then, from memory, recite several lines of poetry or cite a telling phrase from that second author to reinforce the point he wanted to make about the author we were studying.

 

Would I ever reach the point where I, too, could seemingly pluck out of the air allusions to poems and short stories and novels, and in so doing, score a point in an argument? Already, of course, I was unlikely (as were any of my friends) to let a snowy day go by without looking out the window and reciting, soulfully, I might add, parts of the last paragraph of James Joyce's short story, The Dead, in which he wrote of snow "falling gently all over Ireland, falling gently upon all the living and dead."

 

There were two young bachelor professors in the UNH English department, Peter Hayward and Joe McElroy, who had rented a house outside Durham that was, in every sense, the epitome, at least to us, of those country houses in which so many English novels took place. Somewhere along the way, my friends and I had become friendly enough with Hayward and McElroy so that we were invited to parties at their house. That gave us the opportunity to see close-up the startling change of behavior and decorum among otherwise dignified, tweedy English professors once they got a bit tipsy. Wow, didn't that put us into a rarefied circle!

 

Ted Miller now and then invited us to his apartment, which, of course, had walls lined with countless numbers of books, as well as handsome works of art, and there he would talk to us of novels and poetry and maybe play a bit of music from some new LP he had just bought on a stereo set that was state of the art. What a treat it was to be sitting in Ted Miller's living room, knowing that we were among the select group of people, even in this, a college town, who were listening to a recording of Dylan Thomas reading "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."

 

Miller was the epitome of the well-turned out English professor in his Harris tweed jacket, Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, striped ties, grey flannel trousers and highly shined cordovans. I yearned for a day when I would have as many books on my shelves as he had on his and owned as many record albums as he did. I assumed that by then I would also be able to afford those tweed jackets and the accoutrements that went with it.

 

Ted Miller regularly went to concerts in Boston and it was his practice to buy extra tickets and invite students to attend those events with him. Once he invited me and one of my friends, Floyd Cone, I believe, to a concert at Symphony Hall in Boston. It was the first time I ever entered a genuine concert hall (UNH concerts were played in a multi-purpose auditorium) and to this day, each time I enter Symphony Hall, I thank Ted Miller all over again for helping to introduce me to the world of concert going.

 

During my UNH years, we made several forays into Boston, and once to New York, that added a tiny bit to our awareness of the world at large. My memory is still vivid of my first trip to Harvard Square and how amazed I was to find, in one small area, several book stores. I remember in particular seeing a bulletin board somewhere that was filled with notices about a number of concerts and plays and poetry readings and art exhibits taking place practically every night throughout Cambridge. I had thought it was something rather extraordinary that in Durham there was a movie theater that showed foreign movies, but now, after a visit to Harvard Square, I began to realize that there was an even wider and more exciting world out there that I knew very little about.

 

I came away from UNH with a lifelong commitment to reading serious books of all kinds, fiction and nonfiction, and an awareness and appreciation of music and art, as well as ideas and critical thinking. I had even developed a rather rough idea of becoming a writer, although I didn't really know what that would entail or how it was supposed to come about.

 

Personally, I've always felt that after four years at UNH I was finally prepared to enter college, which I more or less did, but on my own. Thus, my post-UNH years.

 

 

 

 

In June 1959, when I graduated from UNH, I was uncertain about what I should do. Furthermore, I was facing the possibility of being drafted and spending the next two years in the Army. There were draft deferments for anyone enrolled in a legitimate academic program, but once I graduated I lost my student draft deferment and was put back into the pool of potential draftees.

 

Since there was no easy way for me to avoid the draft, and since I didn't possess any talent that would interest any employer (except for being able to recite, more or less, the last paragraph of The Dead), I didn't feel I had any choice but to enroll in graduate school and work towards getting a master's degree in English. It took me all of four weeks in graduate school to confirm what I already knew, that I didn't care that much about becoming an English teacher, and therefore had no reason to spend any more time at UNH.

 

Along with my vague notion that I could become a writer, I also had an aching need to get out into the world and begin soaking up all the Experience I needed in order to write Great and Meaningful Literature. I still had no idea what I was supposed to write, of course, but I was well aware that I should, as a first step, expand my horizons beyond Berlin and Durham.

 

I did spend time in Boston, right after I left UNH visiting with a friend from Berlin who had become a graduate student in English at Boston University, but I soon ran out of money, so I headed back home, resigned to being drafted. Since it was holiday time by then, and the Selective Service didn't draft until the holidays were over, a couple of months went by while I awaited the call from the draft board.

 

In the meantime, I read and filled my notebook with Great Thoughts and Great Ideas for stories and novels I was going to write once I got this Army nuisance out of the way. While waiting, I went back to Durham for a few weeks and then hitchhiked (Jack Kerouac's On the Road was at the height of its popularity) to Washington, D. C. to visit a friend, John Townsend, a classmate from Berlin High and UNH who was working for the Department of Commerce.

 

I had been in Washington just a few days when I got a call from my sister, Clara, who was the clerk of the draft board in Berlin. Her message was short and direct: In two weeks I was going to receive my draft notice. Faced with that prospect, I went to the Yellow Pages of the phone book and began calling recruiting offices from the other armed services, trying to find a reserve unit I could join. A reservist could fulfill his military obligation by going into the service for six months, but would be required after that to attend meetings at a reserve unit one weekend each month for the next five years. I considered that a better alternative than two unbroken years in the Army.

 

Alas, my calls to the first entries in the Yellow Pages, the Air Force and the Army, revealed that there were no openings just then in their reserve programs. I turned to the next listing in the Yellow Pages, the Coast Guard. All I knew about the Coast Guard was that it had a proud record of stopping and arresting rum runners trying to smuggle bootleg liquor into the United States during the Prohibition era and from time to time rescued boaters in distress.

 

When I called the Coast Guard recruitment office, I learned that someone who was supposed to go into the Coast Guard Reserve that week had just cancelled. Can you go now, this week, the recruiter asked? Any other time I might have had to think about that, but with the Army about to draft me, I decided then and there to join the Coast Guard. Before the day was out I had passed my physical and mental exam and was sworn into the Coast Guard. A couple of days later, I was on a train that took me to the Coast Guard base in Cape May, New Jersey, where new recruits were put through 14 weeks of basic training.

 

After Cape May, and then an obligatory training cruise to the Bahamas on a Coast Guard cutter, I spent the rest of my six months of active duty at the Coast Guard base in New London, Connecticut. While in the Coast Guard, I had made friends with some fellow reservists who were young lawyers from Washington, D. C. All of us were due to be released from active duty in mid-January, the same week as John F. Kennedy would be inaugurated. My lawyer friends kept telling me about what an exciting place Washington was going to be once the Kennedy era began, and since I had no other plans, I went along with the idea of starting my work career in Washington.

 

What made me think there was a place waiting for me in John F. Kennedy's Washington? Well, it so happened that I had a "connection," a very, very tenuous one, with the new administration. My brother, Tony, was friendly with someone who had been a local chairman of the Kennedy campaign during the New Hampshire Presidential primary (which Kennedy won), and that was supposed to put me in a position to get a job with the incoming administration, or so I thought.

 

Indeed, with Tony acting as the intermediary, it was arranged for me to meet my so-called connection at the pre-inaugural reception for a delegation from New Hampshire that had traveled to Washington to attend the Kennedy inauguration.

 

But, the night before Kennedy's inaugural, Washington was buried in a foot of snow—this in a city that didn't have snow removal equipment. The National Guard was called in to clear the major streets so the inauguration could take place, but many inaugural events, including that reception for the New Hampshire delegation, had to be cancelled. I did manage, however, to get in touch by phone with the person in the New Hampshire delegation I was supposed to have met and he assured me that I would soon hear from him.

 

I was well aware that President Kennedy might have other things to deal with before deciding what role I should play in his administration, but I didn't have enough money to live on until then. With starvation imminent, I was forced to take the first job that came along, which was working as a bank clerk.

 

I did have that one friend in Washington, John Townsend, and after I got in touch with him, he and I rented an apartment. Finally, in April I heard from my New Hampshire contact that I might be able to get a position, a low-paying, low-ranking one at the Library of Congress, but I had decided by then that Kennedy's Washington, however exciting it was for some people, was not where I wanted to be, so I stayed in my bank clerk's job just long enough to save the money I would need to live on when I moved to Boston. There, I was going to begin my career in earnest by finding a job that was connected in some way, still vague in my mind, with writing.

 

In October 1961, I arrived in Boston and moved in with my sister, Donelia, and her roommate, Dee Torro, in their basement apartment on Clarendon Street in the Back Bay until I could find a job and get my own place. Within a few weeks, I was successful in getting an interview with the editor of a weekly trade newspaper, New England Hotel and Restaurant News.

 

At my interview, the editor handed me a press release and told me to turn it into a news article. His newspaper, he informed me, didn't just run press releases. No sir, in his paper press releases had to be rewritten so they looked as if they were genuine news stories.

 

My entire knowledge of journalism at that point consisted of those few glimpses in motion pictures of a reporter who, with a battered fedora on his head and a cigarette dangling from their lips, sat at a typewriter "batting out" stories about the arrest of criminals and other low-life characters. I swear that I was hired for that first job because I was able to do a reasonably good imitation of a guy seated at a typewriter who looked (even without a fedora on my head and a cigarette hanging from my lips) as if he knew what he was doing because the editor, with little more than a quick glance at what I had written, hired me on the spot. My pay would be $65 a week.

 

Now, with my new-found wealth, I was able to move from my sister's apartment to a rooming house on Marlboro Street where my rent was $12 a week. This was a time, it should be noted, when handsome Back Bay townhouses had been converted into rooms and tiny apartments (shared kitchen privileges and shared bathrooms) that were rented out to students and young people. Years later, the kind of building I lived in back then and many others similar to it, underwent extensive renovations and emerged as multi-million dollar condos.

 

My room was in a building next door to the Atlantic Monthly, and I took that as an omen of sorts. It was quite clear to me that once I got into this "writing" game, and began to meet people, I would probably become friendly with my next door neighbors, and once they got to know me, they most likely would want to publish my stories and poems. I'm afraid my idea of a writing career at that point was based on the kind of fantasies I had when I was twelve years old and thought that with enough practice at fielding ground balls I would someday make it to the big leagues.

 

First though, I learned the many ways to make a press release seem as if it was in fact a legitimate news story and also how to cover meetings of trade associations connected to the hotel and restaurant industry. Now and then I even won stubborn approval for my work from the editor of the paper, who was an absolute tyrant and who spent most of his day yelling and screaming at his hard-working, ill-paid employees. His son, who was his assistant, was an idiot. People were hired and fired there practically with some regularity. I happened somehow to survive that madhouse and outlast three of my associates, all more experienced and capable than I was. In a matter of months I also decided that I had had quite enough of that dreadful editor and his son and so, with a bit of money I had saved up, I decided to leave that job and launch myself into something vaguely (vague was still big with me) connected to writing.

 

I was ready for the big time, or so I thought, but it didn't seem as if the big time was yet ready for me. Or to put it another way, my scant experience as a journalist didn't cause other newspaper publishers to pursue me with job offers, nor did I know what the hell I was supposed to write now that I was free of the restraints from my nine-to-five job.

 

I did manage, with unemployment insurance, to pay for a cheaper, smaller room in the Back Bay and somehow managed to survive on about $3 a week. Two young women I knew (one from UNH) lived nearby and they would provide me with an occasional meal and the use of their telephone since I couldn't afford one of my own.

 

That winter I was hired by the American Cancer Society to write press releases during its fund-raising campaign, and there I worked for Arthur Monks, an extremely talented writer and former newspaper reporter who was head of the Cancer Society's public relations office. Under Arthur's tutelage, I began to write stories about cancer research that he was able to place in Boston newspapers.

 

This was a time when someone like Arthur, with his sterling reputation, would literally hand stories he had written—in his case about advances made by cancer researchers—to reporters he knew at Boston's daily newspapers. Often the reporter would then incorporate the handout (what else could you call them?) Arthur had given him into some story he was already writing or simply snip a paragraph or two from the handout and rearrange a few sentences and then run it under his own byline. (I say he and him and his because female reporters were such a rarity back then.) It was a bit frustrating the first time I saw a story I had written, and given to Arthur, appear, with only a few sentences rearranged, in a Boston newspaper. But it was a tiny step forward in terms of my career.

 

After the Cancer Society's fund drive was over, I managed on my meager savings to rent an apartment on Newbury Street. No, it was not the part of Newbury Street with stores selling luxury goods. My new place was at the upper end of Newbury Street, closer to Massachusetts Avenue, where there were plumbing supply houses and paint stores and parking garages.

 

My rent in 1963 was $87.50 a month for a living room, a small kitchen, with a hot plate and refrigerator, as well as a bathroom and one large closet. My bed consisted of a mattress that rested on a piece of plywood supported by four concrete blocks. I had "found" the plywood and concrete blocks at the construction site of the new Prudential Center two blocks away from my apartment house. That bed was a step up by the way. Until then, my bed had been a mattress rolled out on the floor. My new bed matched the sofa I had created out of a wooden shipping crate someone had thrown out, along with another mattress I inherited from a friend who had moved away. Book shelves were likewise constructed of boards and bricks.

 

Through some people I met at my monthly Coast Guard Reserve meetings, I was introduced to a young man who had started a small ad agency. After we talked, he asked me to write some ads for one of his clients, the owner of a shoe store in Brookline who was gearing his marketing and advertising program to attract customers from Boston's large college student population. I ended up writing a story about this clever, eye-catching ad campaign for a trade newspaper, Boot and Shoe Recorder. It was the first story I ever sold and I earned $33 for my efforts. Not mentioned in my story was that I had also created and written the shoe store's ads.

 

By then, I had learned—thanks to Arthur Monks—how to send out "querys" to magazines in which I outlined ideas for stories I could write. I even managed to sell several of them to trade magazines. That fall, without any advance query, I had submitted a story to Boston Magazine on a lecture series, The Ford Hall Forum, that brought in distinguished speakers for weekly lectures that were free and open to the public. This was a lecture series, dating back to the early 1900's, that was intended to help educate and enlighten Boston's large working class population. Over the years, it had presented any number of very well-known speakers, everyone from Robert Frost to Ayn Rand, as well as various journalists and political figures, many of whom were quite controversial and consequently caused quite a stir. I was a regular audience member at those Ford Hall Forum lectures.

 

Success at last. It turned out that there was a new editor at Boston Magazine, Jerry Hickey, and he happened to like my story on the Ford Hall Forum. He also asked me if I had anything else I could show him since he had just taken over the magazine and was short of material for the next issue. Ah yes, my Coast Guard connection.

 

The Coast Guard had taken one look at me and decided I wasn't about to help them capture "rum runners" or brave stormy seas to rescue people from sinking ships. I was given the rank of Journalist Third Class and actually had a badge on my uniform of a quill and pen, indicating my speciality. The major benefit of my rank was that I didn't have to go off with the rest of my unit to a Coast Guard base (or ship) for the required two weeks of training each summer. Instead, I did my "training" in the Coast Guard's public information office at the Customs House in downtown Boston, writing press releases and keeping the press informed of any imminent Coast Guard search-and-rescue operations. My day went from eight to five and I went home at night to sleep in my own bed.

 

With my newfound expertise on all matters related to the Coast Guard, I was able to help Hickey out by writing an article, practically overnight, about the Coast Guard's heroic work. More to the point, I was able to get my hands on a once-in-a-lifetime color photo of Coast Guardsmen literally plucking fishermen off a ship that was just about about to go under. Hickey now had a dramatic photo to put on the cover of his first issue, which contained two stories by me, one, "Rescue at Sea: The Coast Guard on Winter Patrol" and the other about the Ford Hall Forum.

 

Jerry Hickey became a great friend of mine, and for the next few years I had stories in almost every issue of Boston Magazine. At the time, Boston had a section at the front of the magazine, Arrivals and Departures, that was modeled on The New Yorker's Talk of the Town section. I ended up writing a good number of these Arrivals and Departures pieces, covering everything from my interview with the former burlesque queen, Anne Corio, to the luncheon series for oh-so-proper Boston ladies who attended the Friday afternoon concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to the once-a-week film festival for devotees of classic silent films at a VFW post in Revere Beach.

 

While writing other pieces, most of them more lengthy but not so quirky, for Boston Magazine, I also began selling articles to a number of other magazines on a host of subjects, all of which had something to do with Boston. For a time, I even wrote a monthly column for a magazine in New York that covered the hotel business.

 

In my small apartment on Newbury Street, I would read closely, very closely, word for word, in fact, every piece in every issue of The New Yorker. I practically memorized some of these stories, so intensely did I look for clues and hints on how to frame a piece, how to set a tone, and mostly how to take disparate pieces of information and weave them into a whole. I've often said, only half jokingly, that The New Yorker had become my graduate school of journalism. At the same time, I also read almost as closely any number of other magazines, and, of course, the New York Times.

 

When I refer to my reading, I'm not talking of a leisurely pastime. I really went about this campaign to educate myself with great seriousness. I used my precious few dollars to buy books from the many second-hand bookstores in Boston back then, but I relied heavily on the Boston Public Library at Copley Square. I decided on certain authors to read and would methodically go through most of their significant works. I also branched out into areas I knew nothing about. When Jane Jacob's book Death and Life of American Cities, was published—thereby changing the whole approach to city planning in America—I not only read her book, but read, over the course of several months, a shelf (literally) of books on city planning and urban design that I found at the BPL. I didn't know it then, but my effort to learn more about urban affairs proved quite useful to me many years later when I began working at the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

 

In those years on Newbury Street, I was following, without knowing it, the two basic rules that are essential for anyone who wants to become a writer: Rule Number One, apply rear end to chair. Rule Number Two, write. Every day, one way or another, I was writing something, either nonfiction or fiction.

 

When I look back at those days on Newbury Street, I think of them as among the happiest years of my life. I don't think I ever understood at the time what a chance I was taking when I assumed that I would sell enough stories each month to pay my rent and living expenses. I know this one thing for certain—I never again worked as hard as I did during that time. I used to wonder, in fact, if there was such a thing as a day off because one way or another, I was constantly thinking about and planning what other stories I could write after I finished whatever I was working on.

 

Back in Berlin, there was some consternation about my career choice and its progress. Typically, in immigrant families, the first member of the family who graduates from college enters a profession that is, a) highly respected, and b) pays well. A sterling example was my cousin, Remo Sinabaldi, who had squeezed in enough courses in three years at UNH to get admitted to Tufts Dental School and went on to become a well-known oral surgeon in Boston and long-time professor at Boston University School of Dental Medicine.

 

I would send my family copies of magazines with my stories in them, and while that gave them some idea I was making headway as a writer, they weren't entirely convinced that anyone whose bed consisted of a piece of plywood supported by four concrete blocks was a genuine rip-roaring success.

 

All this time, of course, I was still trying to write the pieces of fiction that were going to bring me fame and fortune, if they ever got published. My constant frustration, of course, was that I always had to put my fiction aside to do something that would bring in some money. I had finally reached a point where I earned $100 or maybe even $150 for a full-length magazine article, and maybe $50 or $75 for shorter pieces or a book review. I had also reached a level where editors paid me "on acceptance," which meant I got a check once they bought the story rather than having to wait until the article was published to get paid. Being paid on acceptance is a big step up for a free-lance writer.

 

In September 1966—I had been in Boston five years—just as I began working at the Unitarian Universalist Association, I wrote a story for the Boston Sunday Globe magazine about the sale of the Ritz Carlton Hotel to real estate developer, Gerald Blakely, president of Cabot, Cabot and Forbes. It was widely assumed that Blakely had bought the fabled hotel, which was now somewhat outdated, because he intended to demolish it and build an office tower on one of the city's prime pieces of real estate. But lo and behold, Blakely decided not only to renovate the hotel but also—and here was the real kicker—to retain in every respect the tradition of impeccable service that made the Ritz Carlton so well known all over the world. This was, in essence, a man bites dog story.

 

In doing the story, I also had a chance to recapitulate all the stories about the Ritz Carlton's exacting (and somewhat eccentric) practices, which extended to a screening system whereby Mr. Wyner, the hotel's owner and founder, and his private secretary, would decide who was suited to be a guest at his hotel. Certain show business types, say, or unsavory political figures, had often, very discreetly, been denied the privilege of staying at the Ritz-Carlton. My story, I hasten to point out, was hardly the kind of world-changing journalism made famous by Woodward and Bernstein.

 

Not long after the story appeared, I got a call from Jacqueline Lowe, who was vice president for public relations and marketing at Cabot, Cabot and Forbes. She wanted me to know that Mr. Blakely thought so highly of my story about the Ritz Carlton that he had bought dozens of copies and sent them to various friends and business associates all over the country. She then said, "I realize you're a writer, but would you be interested in joining our company and producing material for our sales and marketing department?" She also mentioned a salary that was well beyond what I was earning just then with my part-time job at the Unitarian Universalist Association and my free-lancing.

 

My hope had always been that my free-lance writing would give me enough money (and time) to work exclusively on my short stories, but when Ms. Lowe called, I was writing free-lance stuff at a frantic pace, but still not making enough money so that I could have a stretch of time in which I could work on my fiction. I had also just turned thirty, and though I didn't worry much about it, I had no savings, no health insurance and was still living the life style of a graduate student. I had, however, moved from my small apartment on Newbury Street to a real apartment on Park Drive, one that had a stove in the kitchen instead of a hot plate and a bedroom separate from the living room. But I had yet to move up to a standard-size, conventional bed.

 

That call from Jacqueline Lowe came a couple of weeks after I had covered, both for Boston Magazine and The Register Leader, a ceremony at Arlington Street Church at which a number of young men protesting the war in Vietnam chose either to turn in or burn their draft cards. Soon after that event, the Federal government indicted Dr. Benjamin Spock and five others for conspiracy in helping young men evade the draft.

 

A day after the demonstration, I dropped by Boston Magazine to turn in my account of the Arlington Street Church event when Jerry Hickey remarked that he liked a book review I had written for him that had just arrived in the morning mail. But somewhat to my surprise, it took me a moment or two to recall the book—it called for a sweeping reform America's health care system—that I had reviewed.

 

That's when I realized that my idea of doing a bit of free lance journalism on the side had become much more than that. I had become so consumed with turning out material I could sell that I experienced some difficulty in remembering, even if only for a few seconds, something I had written.

 

That forgetful moment in Jerry Hickey's office was very much on my mind when Jacqueline Lowe offered me a job that paid more in a week than I earned in a good month. This was my Frostian moment, when I faced "Two roads that diverged in a yellow wood." Yes, working full time, might make it even more difficult for me to write fiction in my off-duty hours, but at least I would for the first time in my life be earning a decent salary. I did not take "the road less traveled by," wherever that would lead.

 

My decision to accept the offer from Cabot, Cabot and Forbes—and accept a delay in my intent to write meaningful fiction—was clearly a capitulation on my part and a postponement of my plan to become a writer of serious literature. But that was a disappointment I was willing to live with and one, quite frankly, I have not regretted all that much. After all, it turns out that I've been able, thanks to my early retirement, to have more than thirty years in which I've been able to devote myself to writing a considerable amount of fiction.

 

I was quite successful at Cabot, Cabot and Forbes (I was even given an increase in my salary soon after I began to work there), but I wasn't entirely satisfied with writing about the wonderful office parks and high-rise buildings being developed by my employer. Then again, I was well aware—and endlessly amused also—with the irony (several layers worth) of a Memolo from the East Side of Berlin, New Hampshire, being hired by one of Boston's old line real estate firms because he had written so knowledgeably about the cherished traditions of a luxury hotel.

 

I might have steeled myself to remain at Cabot, Cabot and Forbes, but in the fall of 1968 I learned that Boston University was in the process of expanding its public relations staff, so I got in touch with Robert Minton, who was head of BU's public relations office. Minton, as a free-lance writer, had written for Boston Magazine, and he knew enough about me to suggest that I might be the person he was looking for to do public relations for BU's School of Fine and Applied Arts (SFAA).

 

At the time, the new president of BU, Arland Christ-Janer, who was himself an artist, had decided that one of BU's best means of promoting itself was to get more media exposure for its very fine programs in music, theater and art. The person hired to do that would be a member of the University's public relations staff, but would work out of an office at SFAA and answer primarily to the dean of that school.

 

I was aware that BU had graduated a number of well-known actors and actresses and that its music and art schools were also highly regarded, but I wasn't that familiar with what happened at a school that trained young people to be artists and musicians and actors. No wonder I was somewhat taken aback when I walked into my interview at SFAA to find myself facing a panel of people, including its dean, two assistant deans and the heads of the art, music and theater divisions, all of whom were eager to hear about my plans for promoting their school. In my work for Boston Magazine I had written a number of pieces about Boston's cultural life, and since I had also kept abreast of doings in Boston theater and music, I was able to conjure up enough of what I knew, or seemed to know, to convince the assembled gathering that I was indeed the public relations wizard they were seeking.

 

Once hired, I busily began learning as much as I could about the School and immersing myself in its activities, all the while churning out press releases and otherwise preparing new printed materials boosting the school and its distinguished faculty. I arrived at an opportune moment. BU in 1969 and 1970 would be celebrating its bicentennial so there was money available to stage significant artistic events and that helped to draw considerable attention to the school.

 

In the meantime, this was the era when campuses across the country were in turmoil because of students protesting the war in Vietnam, and BU happened to be a hotbed of student unrest. So, when demonstrations and protests broke out at BU, I would have to leave my office at the School of Fine and Applied Arts and run off, quite literally, to the main office of the university's PR department to help out with handling media relations.

 

While at BU, I also became a feature writer for the BU alumni magazine, Bostonia. In addition, I had continued, as a free-lancer, to write articles for a number of publications. That brings up an amusing sidelight about how I came to the rescue of another editor of Boston Magazine who was desperate for material to fill his magazine.

 

The Boston Magazine my friend Jerry Hickey worked for was suddenly sold one day to the owner of Philadelphia Magazine. Overnight, Hickey was fired, and the new owner hired, on an interim basis, a fellow named Russell Adams. That was an interesting turn of events because Russ Adams was head of the news office at BU at the time, and as such, I was technically a member of his staff.

 

Adams wanted the job as editor of Boston Magazine, but he didn't want to give up his job at BU until he was certain the publisher would name him permanent editor, so for several weeks he was doing his BU job while simultaneously trying to put together, on a trial basis and in some secrecy from his BU bosses, the next issue of Boston Magazine. He, like Jerry Hickey several years before, needed to find articles to fill the next issue of the magazine, and since he knew I was still freelancing, he asked me if I might have something he could use for his inaugural issue.

 

First, I gave Adams a story I had been working on for the Boston Sunday Globe magazine about changes in the publishing industry in Boston. Then I wrote a story about how one of Boston's oldest and most adventurous theater companies, The Charles Playhouse, was facing a financial crisis and might have to suspend its season. That gave Adams at least two stories to bring to the magazine's new owners.

 

Soon after, Adams, having proven himself with his inaugural issue, was named editor of Boston Magazine, and he asked me if I wanted to join the magazine's staff, but I refused because it was common knowledge that the new owner was a volatile figure, with a penchant for firing editors and staffers. True to form, a year or so after he hired Russell Adams he fired him, and not long after that, he fired the editor he had hired to replace Adams.

 

I was quite content with my job at BU, but one day I got a call from my old friend, Arthur Monks, who had moved on from the Cancer Society to run his own public relations firm. Arthur had been retained by the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) to do some preliminary planning for the city's celebration of America's Bicentennial, and while doing that, he discovered that a new director of the BRA, Bob Kenney, was looking for a public relations person. He had told Kenney about me, and when I contacted Kenney, he asked me to come in for an interview.

 

It was obvious, from what Arthur Monks had told me about the BRA, that whoever took the job of doing public relations for that agency would be facing quite a challenge. The BRA had been established in the late 1950's to begin the rather daunting task of pulling Boston out of decades of economic torpor and physical decline. Unfortunately, the BRA's "image" as the savior of a city in decline suffered severe damage when, as its first major redevelopment project, it literally bulldozed away numerous apartment buildings and small businesses in Boston's West End neighborhood, thus displacing thousands of working class families.

 

Worst still, the West End was redeveloped as a neighborhood of high-rise luxury apartments, with rental rates that were well beyond the reach of those residents whose homes had been razed. The notoriety of the BRA's project in the West End was such that Jane Jacobs used it as the best example in the country of how not to carry out urban redevelopment when she wrote her monumental study on the need for preserving the livability of American cities.

 

The BRA had been far more effective, however, in uprooting the burlesque houses and honky-tonk bars of Scollay Square to create a center for government buildings, with a particular focus on creating a new City Hall that attracted national and international attention (and astonishment) for its bold and dramatic design. That project, along with a cluster of similarly modernistic buildings, all surrounded by a six-acre, brick-paved plaza, was widely viewed as the catalyst for encouraging a remarkable new era of private investment throughout downtown Boston.

 

The BRA director in that era, Ed Logue, had earned considerable and well deserved renown for having put together what he called "a big, bold, fast-moving program." But his program had the benefit of being lavishly funded by the Federal government during both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The BRA, at one point in Logue's tenure, had some 700 employees.

 

Poor Bob Kenney. He took over the BRA just when the Nixon administration had virtually cut off the flow of any Federal money to Boston. He also was left with the unglamorous nuts-and-bolts job of bringing to fruition much of the program announced but only begun under Logue.

 

The day I met Kenney he told me he was tired of being asked if the BRA was still in business. Apparently it would be my job to help the public understand that, yes, the BRA was still in business, and by the way, Kenney was doggedly working to fulfill not only Logue's program but also to set the BRA in a new direction, one in which its planners looked beyond large-scale projects that could only be carried out with generous funding from the Federal government.

 

An interesting and very minor footnote to Boston history: The day I was hired by the BRA—this was in January 1972—the Boston Globe carried a story about the BRA granting a contract to a construction company that would begin restoring the exteriors of the city's public marketplace next to Faneuil Hall. This was a project that had been in the works for a number of years. I had written a story about it for Boston Magazine seven years before, but until the day the BRA selected a contractor to begin this project, nothing had been done to save structures that were ready to fall in on themselves. The Globe story about the Faneuil Hall restoration contained a last paragraph, a by-the-way item, noting that in other actions that day the BRA had appointed a new public information officer.

 

So began my 23-year long battle—the word is not an exaggeration—to inform the public of the fine work being done by the BRA. It turns out that Bob Kenney was only partly right when he said people still wondered if the BRA was still in business. The BRA was able on any given day to attract attention, but most of the time these were stories that didn't cast the agency in a very favorable light. More to the point, the BRA's lack of Federal funding in the early 1970's meant that projects long promised—new parks, new housing, etc.— were subject to delay, and that led, in turn, to growing doubts about the agency's effectiveness. By the 1970's, the number of staff employed by the BRA was half of what it had been a decade earlier.

 

Then, too, there was the never-ending saga of that West End project. I can safely say that there were few days, in the 22-plus years I was with the BRA, when there wasn't some mention, from passing references to full-blown articles, in the media, in Boston or elsewhere, to that infamous project. The BRA had a library open to the public, and over the years countless students from Boston's colleges and universities (and other researchers, too) would visit to study documents relating to the destruction of the West End.

 

On a personal note, there was an older woman, a former resident of the West End, who would come to my office regularly to recount to me what a frightful experience it had been for her and her mother to have been evicted from their home because of the West End project. She even offered ample, believable proof that the trauma of displacement was instrumental in her mother's death. If I was away from my office, she would sit and wait until my return so she could once again let me know what she and her neighbors had had to endure.

 

It was as though this woman was a spectral presence sent to remind me that I should curb my instinct to claim the BRA had the expertise (or all the answers) on how to create a "bigger, better, busier Boston," which was the phrase often used by a Boston mayor who had begun the city's urban renewal program. I could only listen patiently and commiserate with this former West Ender, and eventually we became such good friends that our chats had very little to do with the destruction of her neighborhood. When I retired, she even dropped by and gave me a small gift.

 

So, yes, when I went to work at the BRA, there was a well-founded suspicion (and hostility) towards urban renewal in general and the kind of public support there had once been for some projects, such as the clearance of Scollay Square, was not as strong as it had been in the previous decade. There were now environmental regulations that required more detailed studies and reviews before projects could gain necessary approvals and a much greater awareness of the need to preserve Boston's historic character. Also, citizen activism, fostered by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam protests, had changed what the public expected and demanded from an agency with the broad, some would say, unfettered powers of the BRA. To put it another way, no political figure in Boston ever lost any votes by expressing his, or her, animus towards the BRA.

 

The BRA, in the early 1970's, found itself besieged by a number of court cases, challenging various aspects of its program, and the press coverage of its activities, all too often, I'm afraid, focused on various neighborhood groups protesting the BRA's actions. Increasingly this issue of density—or the "Manhattanization" of Boston, some called it—had become a matter of greater concern than it had been when Boston first began to develop its new skyline.

 

And who could blame the public for its growing disillusionment with high rise buildings when the city's newest, tallest high-rise building, the John Hancock tower, was completed, but essentially "mothballed" because it was plagued with falling windows? For two years or more a sixty-story building that was supposed to be sheathed in reflecting glass was covered by plywood panels, all of them painted black, until its architects and contractors could solve the window problem. It was as if the most prominent landmark on the Boston skyline, the tallest building ever constructed in New England, had become one enormous billboard that said, "Beware large-scale redevelopment."

 

Oh, my days were not dull. The Globe had one reporter assigned full-time to covering the BRA, but there was also the Globe bureau at City Hall, which at one point had five reporters. The Herald also had two, sometimes three, reporters working out of City Hall, plus a real estate reporter who covered the BRA. Add to that reporters from the city's neighborhood newspapers, quite numerous at the time, not to mention reporters from television and radio stations who dropped by City Hall each day, looking for the controversy-de-jour, which quite often turned out to involve the BRA. This was also an era when so-called underground newspapers flourished in Boston and their reporters could be quite aggressive in their coverage of the city's development issues. On any given day, then, in some form or other, there was likely to be a news story about the BRA, often with political ramifications that were not always favorable for the city administration.

 

My job, alas, perfectly fit the classic definition of public relations in that I was supposed to turn mountains, that is, bad news, into molehills, while trying at the same time to turn molehills, that is tiny bits of good news, into mountains. How well I recall the hilarity (and good-natured kidding) when I would visit the City Hall press room to share some news about what a great job the BRA was doing and the reporters would respond by badgering me with questions about some BRA project that was not going so well.

 

I was, nevertheless, well-liked by most of the media because they knew that I tried to be as honest with them as I could be, given the realities of City Hall politics. They also appreciated me for being so well informed (and therefore quite helpful to them) in their coverage of the BRA and Boston's development program in general.

 

Over the years, I became something of the "institutional memory" of the BRA and was respected by a large number of people, both in the press and within City Hall, because of my knowledge of Boston's development and the political and economic context in which certain of these events took place.

 

My proficiency and hard work helped me to survive when for various reasons I was not looked on with favor by some of City Hall's more political types, including the two mayors, Kevin White and Ray Flynn, who held office during the time I was at the BRA. Among other things, I chose not to be a "volunteer" in either of their political organizations. That alone was enough to give me some notoriety in a building where employees were expected to give their all (and some of their money, too) to help incumbent mayors get re-elected.

 

There had always been tension between City Hall's political types and the BRA, which had a staff that was made up of architects and city planners and engineers, people, in short, like me, who had been hired because of their professional proficiency and not their political connections. Not only were our salaries a bit higher than other city employees, but many of us also happened to live outside the city, which came to be considered a transgression within City Hall when one of the city's most pressing problems was "white flight" to the suburbs.

 

The city, in fact, had established a residency requirement for its employees. Someone like me, who already lived outside of Boston when this new policy went into effect were supposed to be exempt from having to move into the city, but we were still treated as "outsiders" and perceived, falsely of course, as not being sufficiently committed to the city, and most of all, to its mayor, to live there.

 

There was a period of five years in the late 1970's when I went without a raise while promotions and raises were handed out to more politically active city workers. One BRA director, who was extremely close to the mayor, even admitted to me that disfavor of me within the mayor's office was the reason why I was not included on the list of my fellow workers (all more politically active) who were about to receive promotions and salary increases. I'm trying to be tactful when I say, disfavor. His actual words to me were that some people in the mayor's office "want your head on a platter."

 

The grumbling about the fact that I might be replaced reached a point where one day I ran into a politically-connected lawyer who looked at me, and said in mock surprise, "Hey, you look pretty good for a guy who's full of bullet holes."

 

So, why did I put up with that kind of nonsense? First, my attitude was that I went to work each day and put my heart and soul into my job. If anyone wanted to get rid of me, they were free to do so, but I would have to be pushed, I wasn't going to jump. Also, there was the undeniable fact that I was damned good at what I did, and it was some comfort to me that I was regarded as such by most of my colleagues and by people in the media. At one point, I was even cited by Boston Magazine in their "Best" edition as the best government spokesperson in the city.

 

Having one foot in City Hall, so to speak, and trying to keep the other foot well away from that building and some of its more tawdry aspects, was similar in a way to how I had once straddled the two worlds of my friends from Marston School and my friends in my East Side neighborhood. As an adult, I did something similar by keeping separate my work life and my life away from work. Indeed, I was quite the anomaly in City Hall, a bookish guy from Brookline, an Italian-American who grew up in northern New Hampshire and who had no political connections to anyone in Boston but who managed nevertheless to function within the city's political culture, all while retaining his interest and preoccupation with matters— reading, cultural events, some writing (whenever possible)—far removed from his 9 to 5 existence.

 

I was friendly enough and personable enough, but I made a practice of not socializing outside of work with my colleagues or other city employees and developed quite a reputation, as one Globe writer once put it, "as the only public relations person in Boston who doesn't go to lunch." At noon, I closed my office door while I ate my lunch and read. In good weather, I frequently took an hourlong walk to the Back Bay and back, and precisely at 5 o'clock, and not a minute later, if there was nothing that required me to stay at work (and from time to time there was), I left City Hall behind and resumed my private life.

 

My professional life may have had its challenges, but my private life was in some ways close to the ideal I envisioned when I was younger. Not so incidentally, the condominium Sylvia and I purchased in 1978 on Thatcher Street in Brookline was located across the street from a very attractive park. Indeed, the slight slope of Thatcher Street itself and the elevation of our building made it seem as if that park was, for all intents and purposes, an extension of our living room. I don't think a day went by when I failed to remind myself that the very pleasant view outside our window was somewhat different from growing up in a house that was a few scant feet away from railroad tracks.

 

Then, too, I had stepped up my acquisition of books once I became a bit more affluent. By then, I had accumulated a library that filled book shelves in five different rooms of our apartment. Some of my collection, books on Boston, for instance, were quite extensive. At one point, I had a miscellany of book shelves in my small study on Thatcher Street that were so extensive they loomed over my desk, raising the specter that if an earthquake hit Brookline, I would probably be buried under an avalanche of books, which, I used to tell myself, was not a bad way to die.

 

By then, I also owned sport jackets, as tweedy as any worn by any English professor on any college campus, and I also had put together a fairly good collection of classical music records and discs. To top things off, my bed was roomy and comfortable enough to make me forget (not entirely, of course) the cobbled-together plywood-concrete block set up that I had slept on for a number of years.

 

But far more than the creature comforts of an attractive home and the relative prosperity I enjoyed was the fact that when I arrived back in Brookline, I had the loving companionship of Sylvia and the world we enjoyed together. By then, Sylvia, a skilled amateur cellist, hosted get-togethers of other amateur chamber music players, in our living room, and we were regular attendees at concerts all over Boston. That sort of thing went a long way towards offsetting somewhat the hurly-burly so prevalent in City Hall.

 

I must admit that the unpleasantness of my work days aside, I enjoyed to some extent having a front-row seat on the doings of city government during an extremely interesting period in the history of Boston. I came to know some remarkable and wonderful—and selfless—public servants. I also became acquainted with some of the City Hall characters whose quirks and oddities could be amusing. I even had the satisfaction of playing a very small part in the events that marked Boston's dramatic resurgence over these past fifty years or so.

 

But most all, I managed in those years to keep my focus on means and ends, and in particular, this one aspect of the city's pension system—city workers could retire at age 55 at about half pay. My feeling was that I had already invested a good number of years in the pension system, and if I stuck it out, I had a fairly good chance of being able to retire well before I turned sixty-five.

 

I kept in mind a remark I once heard at the Ford Hall Forum from the literary critic, Dwight MacDonald, when he was asked how he could tolerate working for Time Magazine. Look, he said, a job is something like a street car, it gets you from one place to another—that's it. Sure, the street car ride in my case could be bothersome in some respects, but it might be getting me to where I wanted to be, and that, after all, is what really mattered.

 

My expectations about the pension as a combination of a get-out-of-jail-free card and metaphorical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow worked even better than I had anticipated. First, I was finally given significant pay raises in the 1980's, and then in 1993, just short of my 56th birthday, the BRA, seeking to reduce the number of higher-paid staff, offered an early retirement incentive. Anyone who was 55 or older would have five years added to their age in calculating their pension amount if they chose to retire. That was of vital importance since the amount of any city worker's pension was determined by your age when you began collecting your pension. The older you were when you retired, the higher the amount of your pension.

 

Suddenly, one day, by administrative fiat, I was entitled to the pension of someone who was 60 years old. That was all the incentive I needed. I retired, but remained as a consultant to the BRA, at half pay, for a period of l8 months.

 

I should note that, pension and early retirement aside, I also received, in a curious way, an acknowledgment of my professional competence from the same mayor, Kevin White, whose administration had decreed that I be denied any pay increase for several years. After I retired, my old friend, Jerry Hickey, now a professor at the BU's journalism school and editor of the BU alumni magazine, asked me to write a story for his publication that would provide his readers with an overview of Boston's recent development history.

 

The story had to have a BU angle, and that would come from no less a personage than Kevin White, the four-term Boston mayor who, once out of office, had become a professor at BU. I arranged an interview with White at the very elegant office he occupied in a townhouse owned by BU, and we had a pleasant hour-long chat about the growth of the city in recent years, which, in his opinion, was unlikely to have happened except for the considerable help of the Federal government, dating back to the Kennedy era. But, at one point, he departed from whatever we were talking about, and turning towards me, he said, "Yeah, you know something? You always did know your stuff."

 

That was a moment of some satisfaction for me, but the real pay-off for having spent so many years at City Hall came from the modest city pension I began collecting when I was in my mid-fifties. I've always referred to it as a life-time "Guggenheim" grant because it allowed me to take up full time, and without any distractions, the writing of fiction.

 

Oh yes, my writing career. In my years at the BRA, I may have written a million words or so about the renewal/rebirth/revitalization/rebuilding of Boston. I wrote speeches and press releases and scripts for slide shows and brochures of every kind. I was involved in the writing and editing of countless BRA reports and publications and also prepared dozens of briefing papers for various BRA directors so they were properly prepared for interviews with the press. I also met with visiting government officials from all over the world who came to Boston to learn more about the city's development program.

 

My workload, and quite frankly the stress of my job, made it quite difficult for me to continue writing fiction during those years. I didn't stop completely or give up on writing (or my reading, which was my salvation during those BRA years), but I didn't have the time, or energy, to write anything of any length. As always, however, I did make notes and wrote fragments of stories and filed all this material away for a time when I would be free from my full-time job. It was a marvelous feeling for me, once I retired, to find that I was able to incorporate into my stories scenes and snippets of action in the many "notes" I had made during my nine-to-five years.

 

In short, I was fully prepared for my post-BRA career. Many people expected that I would write some kind of memoir covering my BRA experience. That might have been so at one time. Indeed, during my BRA days, I had actually circulated to a number of publishers a proposal for a book that would tell the story of Boston's recent development history. Publishers were quite impressed with my proposal, but none of them were interested enough to give me the advance I would need in order to leave my BRA job to write the book.

 

Once retired, however, I decided that I was done forever with writing about development in Boston. I was moving on. I actually gave all the material, from planning documents to proposals for futuristic developments, that I had accumulated, some of it one-of-a-kind stuff, to the Boston Public Library. The library staff was delighted to have my material since they had lost many reports and publications on Boston's planning and development history when a broken water main flooded the lower level of the Copley Square building.

 

In my retirement, I have been able to write a number of short stories and a novella that are available on my website, ralphmemolo.com. I also wrote and self published a novel, A Perjurer's Tale, that concerns itself with the political culture of a city that borders the Charles River, as well as the Memolo family history.

 

A word about my website—I write stories to be read. Of course, one way to have your stories read is to send them to magazines and hope that they would be published. In the meantime, if they aren't published, it was almost as if the story had never been written.

 

So, with modern technology, why not put the stories out there on the web? God knows, the few people who might thus read them probably outnumber the people who would have read them had they been published in some literary quarterly.

 

(Today, virtually no general interest magazine publishes fiction, with the exception of The New Yorker, and they publish much less than they once did.) By putting my stories on the web, at least the people within my orbit could read them, and by some quirk, they might even be read by someone outside my own circle.

 

But the main point is that at a relatively young age, I was free to do what I had always wanted to do. Not only had I been able to retire early, but Sylvia, five years later, at age 60, retired from the news office at Harvard Medical School, where for a number of years she wrote articles about research being done by Harvard doctors. During the last five years of her time at Harvard, she was the managing editor of a publication, Harvard Heart Letter.

 

But now, both of us were able, as I've always put it, to go out and play, which meant we could more fully enjoy our interest in music and cultural events and luxuriate in just having time to do as we pleased rather than answer to the demands of our employers.

 

Both of us, I should add, could appreciate the freedom from jobs that had been particularly demanding. Sylvia and her co-workers in the Harvard Medical Area News Office published a weekly newspaper, which meant that quite often Sylvia was up at 5:30 in the morning, or working well beyond regular office hours, writing stories under great deadline pressure.

 

Sylvia, once retired, took on a new job as the artist manager of one of Boston's most admired classical music groups, the Triple Helix Piano Trio. In addition, with her increasing involvement in playing chamber music, she became the resident cellist for chamber music get-togethers at our condominium on Thatcher Street. My role was to serve as the resident cook who prepared the lunches and dinners we served our musician friends.

 

The retirement years have been a blessed time in our lives. Sylvia helped design and edit a book published by the Brookline Senior Center to commemorate the town of Brookline's tricentennial celebration. She also helped promote a concert series for the Brookline Public Library and gave weekly lessons in English to a Korean physician who was in Boston on a research fellowship at the Harvard School of Public Health.

 

Both Sylvia and I were involved in the formation of an organization, the Brookline Community Aging Network, whose purpose is to help Brookline seniors age in place. Also, for a time, we were the Boston "box office" for an organization, Pro Musicis, that sponsored concerts and appearances by young classical musicians who agreed, in turn, to perform in settings—drug treatment centers, prisons or other facilities where classical music is rarely presented.

 

For several years, my writing branched out to include captions and gag ideas I sent off each week to a cartoonist in Canada, David Brown, who used them as the basis for cartoons he sold, mostly to business magazines and newspapers. Over a five-year period, I came up with some 1000 or more of these "gags" that were the basis of cartoons David Brown sold almost weekly to Forbes Magazine, as well as the business pages of various Canadian papers. Our collaboration may have reached the peak of success when a gag I sent him was the basis for a cartoon that he sold to Playboy and another to the British humor magazine Punch. I eventually gave up on my "cartooning" because it took so much of my time and the proceeds—I got 30 percent of the fee David Brown was paid—really wasn't worth it, once the Canadian dollars were translated into American currency.

 

Sylvia and I became rather well known over the years in our neighborhood and throughout Brookline as the couple who walked everywhere. Not many days went by when we were not out and about, doing our errands or walking to and from various activities, notably concerts in Boston and in Cambridge. Sylvia, in addition to her music, took pilates classes, while I took various courses in music history from Brookline Adult Education and classes in art appreciation at the Museum of Fine Art.

 

For fifteen years, I was the leader, or referee to be more accurate about it, of the Current Events session Friday morning at the Brookline Senior Center. All too often, I'm afraid, our discussions could turn quite boisterous as the participants, all quite knowledgable, tried to best (or outshout) each other in very spirited exchanges. I also taught, once when I was still at the BRA, and again the year I retired, a course on the history of Boston's development program to graduate students in BU's Urban Studies program.

 

Our travels, while not extensive, were quite interesting. Since Sylvia and I prefer not to fly, we did our traveling, nineteenth century style, by rail and steam ship. In 2005 we made our first transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary II to attend a wedding in London of Sylvia's cousin's son. On that trip, Sylvia took her cello with her and in the apartment we rented in London, Sylvia hosted chamber music sessions with London musicians she had met on line. She was also invited to the homes of some of these musicians.

 

We made other transatlantic crossings to London on the Queen Mary II in 2007 and again in 2014. During our first trip to London, we also visited Paris and during our second trip, we spent some time in Italy. One notable feature of our 2007 trip to England was a week we spent in Dorset as paying guests of a family who took us to visit historic sites and gave us a "feel" of what it was like to live in a small English village. Our trip in 2014 was a theater tour, which allowed us to see a good slice of London theater, along with chamber music concerts at Wigmore Hall.

 

A particularly memorable trip for us was one we made in 2014 from New York City to San Francisco, via the Panama Canal, on the Queen Eliabeth II. After a week in San Francisco, we took Amtrak to Chicago, spent a week there, and then boarded the Amtrak for our return to Boston. In 2018 we also got a glimpse of our neighbor to the north when we took a Queen Mary II cruise to Quebec City and the maritime provinces.

 

Our trips, no matter how enjoyable, the many concerts and plays and cultural events we've attended, no matter how wonderful, and the joy we've derived from all the friends we've made over the years, all these things have mattered greatly to us, but nothing quite equals for either of us the immense pleasure we've derived from having been able to spend so many years together.

 

 

 

 

I began this account by writing of how fortunate I was to have been born to the right people at the right time and in the right place. That laid the foundation for a life far richer than I ever imagined, but I have been doubly blessed because, once I reached maturity, I met and married the perfect person with whom to share my life.

 

It is difficult to corral all the adjectives I would need to describe Sylvia. She is extremely intelligent, of course, and blessed with imagination and a gift for clear thinking. Beyond that she is principled, moral, sensitive, and determined—and that comes with a capital D. She is exacting (and sometimes exasperating) in everything she does, whether hanging a picture (and adjusting it several times until it's just so) or translating the findings of medical researchers into stories that were clear and understandable to the lay reader without losing the essence of the very complex subjects she wrote about.

 

Her professional success as a writer and editor were but one facet of her many skills. She has the analytic power it takes to identify problems and the ability it takes to solve them. This was best illustrated by what she accomplished when she became artist manager for the Triple Helix Piano Trio, one of Boston's most outstanding chamber music ensembles. This was something entirely new for Sylvia, but with characteristic energy she began to generate new promotional material for the group, including ads, a brochure and a newsletter, all of which she both designed and wrote. This material was then included in mailings she made to concert presenters across the country. Within two years, the group's growing popularity—The Boston Globe had selected them as Musicians of the Year—was such that other classical musicians of note in the Boston area approached Sylvia, asking if she would represent them. That would have entailed more work that Sylvia was willing to take on, so she politely turned them down.

 

Yet another facet of her creative spirit has been particularly evident in the design and decor of the apartments we have lived in over these many years. In our early years together, when our resources were more limited, she found ways to "repurpose" pieces of furniture that she found in second hand stores and antique shops. Her speciality back then was using bright and attractive fabrics to cover unsightly walls. As the years went by, her faultless taste was evident in everything from her choice of paintings and art work for our walls (not so unsightly now) to furnishings, carpets and every aspect of design throughout our various residences.

 

Sylvia had been introduced to the cello when she was in grade school and played it somewhat in high school, but she put her cello away for the next twenty years or so. Then, at age 40, she took out her cello, which was practically falling apart, had it rebuilt and began taking lessons from a student at the New England Conservatory. She then studied for nine years with a cellist of some standing in Boston music circles. So dedicated was she to improving herself by attending workshops and "cello" camp in summers that she became a rather skilled amateur. For a good number of years she managed somehow to combine her cello playing (and constant rehearsing) with her very demanding job at Harvard.

 

Every family gathering, whether within the Memolo family, or one involving many of Sylvia's relatives, has always been brightened by her appearance. She is the epitome of the courteous, well mannered guest, more interested in hearing what others have to say rather than talking about herself. As a daughter, she was beyond wonderful, as a sister she has been devoted and loving, and as a friend she is attentive and caring, loyal and trustworthy.

 

I've said more than once that I've had more good luck in my life than any one human being can expect or deserve. How else can I explain being able to spend all these years with a woman who has given me so much pleasure, joy and heartwarming companionship?