The P.O.
…a memory…
By
Steve Galvin
" I would not like to be left standing as a mere spectator on the great stream carrying onward so many lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion."
From, A Personal Record, by J. Conrad
Terms Used
P.O. - the Post Office. Here it means the SPA, mostly
SPA - the South Postal Annex. The largest post office in New England,
located beside the South Station, on Dorchester Avenue along that arm of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Fort Point Channel. About fifty yards from Boston Harbor and Griffin's Wharf , the site of that famous Tea Party long ago.
South Station – the largest railroad terminal in New England, located in downtown Boston at Dewey Square, the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Summer Street. It has been remodeled to keep up with the resurgence of commuter rail. Although it is a shiny, modern looking place, it is only a shadow of its former self in the heydays of the American Railroad.
GPO – the General Post Office, site of administrative offices and office of the Postmaster. Located in downtown Boston about one mile from the SPA.
Regular – an employee guaranteed 40 hours per week, with overtime pay after eight hours in one day.
Sub – a substitute employee, not guaranteed 40 hours per week but likely to work more than 40 hours without overtime compensation.
Temp – a temporary employee, not guaranteed any amount of work hours, but not to exceed 40 hours in one week.
20 hour regular – same as a regular employee but guaranteed only 20 hours per week.
Gaffer – a supervisor
Cold cock – to whack some one along side their head so that the result is a KO.
Deep six – to throw something away, for good.
Employee pay grades:
Level 3 – maintainence craft, including janitors and elevator operators.
Level 4 - mail handlers
Level 5 – clerks and letter carriers
Level 6 – technicians
The pay differential is $1,000 per level.
On the clock – an employee at work
The outside – an employee's job outside of the P.O., the second job.
Neighborhoods of Boston:
The neighborhoods of Boston have changed in ethnic make up through the centuries. The fate of the native Americans living in the Boston area immediately before 1620 has been clearly described in the book King Philip's War, by Michael Tsougias.
The North End : this place has been mentioned in the narrative but a couple of interesting points could be added. The battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775 was fought in Charlestown right across the Charles River from the North End and the citizens of Boston were able to watch the entire battle on that sunny June day from a hill in the North End. You probably know the British won that battle but you may not know that it was a Pyrrhic victory. The American housewives had melted down their pewter ware for bullets and when those were gone, old scraps of iron were used in the cannons. These cannon caused terrible wounds in the British ranks. The cost to the British in terms of dead and wounded was staggering. The wounded spent a hot, humid summer in Boston waiting for death. Because of General Washington's effective siege, the British were trapped in the city. In March of 1776, Washington's general, Henry Knox, set up cannon on a hill in South Boston making the British position in Boston untenable. The British evacuated the city on Saint Patrick's Day, March 17,1776, on the agreement that if Washington did not shell their ships, Boston would not be burned. And that is how it played out, except that the last British ship could not resist sending a landing party ashore to burn down the outermost farmhouse
in South Boston at a place called Castle Island today.
The West End : In the 1950's the old West End was torn down as part of a program of urban renewal. The people who lived in the tenement houses there were promised a place in the renewed West End. This promise was not kept. The West End today is a complex of high-rise apartments and condos. This saga has been reported by urban historians and makes for amazing reading.
The South End : This is the Black neighborhood and deserves to have its history written by a native like one of my P.O. buddies who have told me wonderful tales of growing up there. In the 1980's, yuppies started moving in because of its proximity to their businesses in downtown Boston.
South Boston : South Boston (Southie) deserves a book of its own and in fact has several. The gang over there has their own anthem that I have heard sung from the halls of congress in Washington, DC to a beer and hot dog stand on the beach at Waikiki. Here it is:
"I was born over on A street, brought up on B Street,
Southie is my hometown.
There's somethin' about it, permits me to shout it,
Southie is my hometown.
There're doctors and preachers, lawyers and teachers,
Men from Galway and Down.
They'll make you or break you but they'll never forsake you,
In Southie, my hometown."
East Boston : East Boston (Eastie) was originally an island. In Colonial days at low tide cattle from the only farm there would wade across the isthmus into down town Boston. The farmer never bothered to brand his cattle because he lived on an island. His name was Maverick and his wandering unbranded cows were thus named: mavericks.
Dorchester : Today this large suburb has a variety of ethnic groups. When I was teaching Spanish, I asked the class to name places in the world where Spanish was spoken. "Grove Hall", a black student from Dorchester answered right off. Grove Hall is a section of Dorchester taken over by Puerto Ricans in the 1970's. One time back then, I had to visit my nephew in Dorchester and I went over there from the SPA by bus. When I left the bus terminal I took the wrong turn and a white bus driver hollered over to ask where I was going. After he set me straight I asked him how he knew I was lost. "You were headed into enemy held territory", he answered. There is an Irish section in Dorchester around Fields Corner with three Irish Pubs, one of them being the Irish Rover. It is on Dorchester Avenue which runs straight as an arrow, down to the SPA about five miles away.
All the remaining neighborhoods are interesting, Allston, Brighton West Roxbury, Roslindale, Hyde Park and Jamaica Plain. The latter one in particular, stands out. Let me tell you about it because I was born and raised there and have some expertise in the subject. But one thing first about those other neighborhoods like West Roxbury and Hyde Park. They are more affluent, more mainstream American places. They do not have that definite, strong, ethnic scent you get in Southie or in the North End or the South End. Also the farther Bostonians move away from the sea, the more they become conscious of the 'r' in the English language. Trouble is that in their effort to mainstream they put this 'r' in the wrong place. They say things like ideaR and they may say a place name like 'Bar Harbor' OK but then the ski resort in New Hampshire, North Conway, comes out 'North CoRnway'. They also start dropping that beautiful glottal stop of the inner city so that 'botl' comes out 'bottle'. More linguistics is coming later.
Jamaica Plain : JP for short was first settled by pirates and they named the place for that island in the Caribbean in and around which they plied their trade. Not all pirates were of the Captain Kidd ilk. These from JP were just sharp New England businessmen who could sail real good. In JP are several geological wonders; drumlins, glacial ponds, and drained glacial ponds called sugar bowls, which make for excellent sledding in winter. The jewel of the glacial ponds is Jamaica Pond, a sight to behold in any season. Jamaica Pond is connected by a ring of trails that pass by Ward's Pond, Olmstead Park, Leverette's Pond and then along the Muddy River to the Charles River. Olmstead Park is just a series of meadows through which kids chase dogs of a sun lit summer afternoon. There is a poet living in Salem, Oregon named Bob Monson who calls places like this 'green grass hotels'. If the name Olmstead rings a bell you are right. Frederich Law Olmstead was not only busy with New York City's Central Park, and Vienna's Ring Strasse, where the Frau and I spent our honeymoon, but he also had time for JP. He enclosed Boston in and emerald necklace, continuing in the other direction from Jamaica Pond with bridal paths, hiking and biking trails, all the way to the Arnold Arboretum, a world class horticultural park. From the Arboretum the trails continue on to Franklin Park, a place with all the open space amenities that the souls of city dwellers long for. Those names, Arnold and Franklin, belong to a race of Americans without prefixes, who shared their wealth by leaving their estates to the public trust, to you and me. Let me finish here with JP by showing you that, with all its wonders, it is not quite a Garden of Eden. There was a famous botanist in the 19th century named Bromley. He established an experimental garden for exotic plants in JP. Time passed and his gardens too, and on that site rose a string of tenements, that came to house the toughest gangs of white buckaroos in the city. In the 1950's the tenements were torn down at the same time the West End was leveled. Those wooden tenements were replaced by four storied housing projects, which in time came to house the toughest gangs of black buckaroos in the city. All in all though, Jamaica Plain is a lovely place.
Bullshit disclaimer: The quotes in the following narrative, second hand accounts and descriptions of performance of individuals are considered to be accurate for two reasons:
A bullshiter, given time, will expose himself for what he is.
No bullshiters have been quoted.
Odds and ends:
Frau – German for wife or Mrs.
Mensch – German/Yiddish for a human being with soul
A nice sa joba – Italo-american for a nice job
Gemeindegefuehl – a strong feeling of community
The P.O.
For Mike Echo, Ralph, Myers, Magoun and Gailbreath
Part One – The Platform
I entered the P.O. in November 1962 and got out thirty years later on my birthday, May 3rd, in 1992. Here is what it was like. First a little background: In 1958, if you were not in college, you got drafted. So when I dropped out of the Electrical Engineering College at Northeastern University, the local draft board sent me a letter of “Greetings from the President of the United States.” To give myself some options in the military in terms of schooling and assignment, I joined for three years. My school turned out to be the U.S. Army Language School in Monterey, California where I met Bob and Ralph Monson, Myers, Gailbreath, Magoun, Maniss and a whole lot of other interesting guys. We were to become Czech language specialists.
Monterey was a fascinating place in a wild and dynamic state. It is between San Francisco and Los Angeles, on the coast. Right next to it is Carmel by the Sea with its famous golf course Pebble Beach. Down the coast is the wilderness area Big Sur. Monterey still smelled of sardine canneries; Steinbeck’s bar was still there – a Mexican atmosphere with tourists; Jack Kerouac had just published On The Road ; guys were reciting Ginsberg’s Howl, and Maniss had buddies in San Fran growing pot in window flower- boxes at their pads. The Kingston Trio was singing at a place in San Fran called The Hungry Eye. At the Presidio of Monterey we had no duties, except school from 8am to 4pm, five days a week for forty-eight weeks. When we graduated we were pretty close. Then we were sent to Germany.
We monitored Czech military radio traffic from remote places on the Czech-Bavarian border. We lived in little hotels in Bavarian villages. After two years we were even closer. Then they put up the Berlin Wall; JFK extended our tour of duty a couple of months; we married German girls and then we were sent home. The two years in Germany and the year in California were very intense. We all had different plans and this here is the story of what happened to me in the thirty years since I said good-bye to my army buddies and went to work in the P.O.
First of all, the P.O. I worked in is the biggest one in New England, the South Postal Annex, for short, the SPA. It is in downtown Boston, near the site of the Boston Tea Party, on the Fort Point Channel, across from South Boston.
It is a rectangular block, 100 yards long and four stories high with a basement. On the roof is an enclosed firing range. Federal employees who carry a gun go there yearly to qualify as marksmen.
It is open 24 hours a day, all year. There are three 8-hour shifts with about 500 people on each shift. When I started there, there were only about a half-dozen women in the whole place. They all worked on the fourth floor.
The starting pay was $1.98 per hour. No one wanted the job. You were classified a substitute and not guaranteed 40 hours per week, but usually you could work as many hours as you wanted to, up to 12 per day for 7 days a week. But always at the same hourly rate, no over-time. After three years you became a regular and were guaranteed 40 hours a week and over time after 8 hours per day. From day one, as a substitute, you and your family had complete medical coverage. Free. To get appointed to the P.O. you took a test. Veterans got preference points, disabled vets, more points, and as a result, most employees were veterans. The regulars were mostly WW II vets. The subs were Korean vets or guys like me.
My first job was 3pm to 3am outside on the loading platform. I said good-bye to my Frau at 2pm, parked behind the P.O., came back out at 3am and was home at 3:30am. This was my routine for three years.
The SPA had its Supreme Commander, its OIC, its Feld Marschall and his name was Larry Martin. Some people are blessed to find a job in their life-time into which they can breath something of their soul. Such a person was Mr. Martin. Mr. Post Office. One day a mail handler got his arm caught in a conveyor belt. Loss of arm or loss of life was seconds away when Mr. Martin threw the circuit breaker and saved the man. Mr. Martin, a gaffer at the time (an acting or temporary boss) just happened to be in earshot when the accident happened, but he knew what to do. He knew how the conveyors worked. He knew how everything worked or how to fix it if not. He had made it his business from day one. So he ended up top dog. He ran a very tight ship. People either respected him or had crossed him, paid the penalty, and despised him. He was tough. Just this about the patronage system at work in the PO: Larry Martin would not have made it to the top if he did not have political connections. This is a given. However, once there, in charge, he turned out to be a most remarkably able administrator. Sometimes this patronage system worked well. He was also very dedicated. For instance: at Christmas time, which in the PO starts December 1st, Mr. Martin would rent a room in the Essex Hotel, across the street from the SPA. Now these were the days when the Post Office did all your mail, 1st,2nd,3rd class and parcel post. There was no UPS, no Fed Ex, no competition. That meant that the mail volumes in December were almost overwhelming. Mr. Martin was at the scene for long hours every day supervising supervisors, general foreman, regular gaffers and keeping the place running as smoothly as possible. Until, on December 26th, good king Larry looked out and saw that all Christmas cards had gone on their way along with all parcels and he checked out of the Essex and went home.
I met him once on my first day on the job. Once I just missed meeting him and once I was confronted with denying I knew him. The very first day on the job, new comers were given an orientation at 9am at the GPO in down town Boston. We were told that the P.O. was not a place to help you work your way through college or to supplement your income as a second job. We were told to report at 3pm to the SPA dressed to work outside in the cold October night and to be prepared to work a 12-hour shift if needed. At 3pm we 15 new mail handlers gathered in the lobby of the SPA ready for our first 12-hour stint. It was cold out. I wore my old army clothes, field jacket with liner, combat boots, woolen hat. The other guys were dressed warm in a variety of outfits that kind of made us look, as a group, like displaced persons on the run. The guard in the lobby was the former New England heavyweight boxing champion, Johnny Buckley. Long retired from the ring and moving on a game leg shot up at Normandie, Johnny was also the champion practical joker of the SPA. Our group’s wild and almost desperate look gave him an idea. He marched us to the freight elevator, brought us to the 4th floor, marched us to Larry Martin’s office door, instructed us to march in unannounced and form a column of twos along the wall facing Mr. Martin’s desk. Which we did. Mr. Martin was on the phone, turned away from us. When he hung up and turned around toward us, he was very surprised. It fell to me to explain how we arrived in his inner sanctum. Buckley of course had disappeared. That was my first encounter with Larry Martin.
My first boss was a guy named Maurice McDonald. Big Moe we called him or Baby because that is what he called everybody. He was big; had bum feet from the war; kind of looked like Jackie Gleason and came from Chicago. He was stationed in Boston during the war, met a girl here, married her and settled down here afterwards. I asked him once if he ever went back to Chicago. Here is his story: “ I was working the mail train and we stopped in Chicago for three days. I dropped in on my old buddies to see what they were up to and we took off for the racetrack. On the way we stopped for gas. One of the guys gave the attendant $20 and went inside with him for change. He cold cocked the attendant, cleaned out the cash register and on the way to the track gave each of us $50. I got lost at the track as quick as I could, got back on the mail train and never went back to Chicago again.”
Moe was in charge of platform operations, loading and unloading trucks, handling incoming mail and parcel post and out-going dispatches to the stations and branches. The platform ran the length of the building, facing the ocean. A cold place to work in the winter. Moe approved or disapproved requests for leave. He was like a godfather to us young guys. The basic reason we were in the P.O. was for medical coverage for our families. Even as a sub, you were covered. My son was born nine months after I was hired. There were no hospital bills at all to pay.
Many times when a man got caught off base – out of the building while on the clock, drunk on duty, AWOL, etc. Moe saved the man his job by limiting disciplinary action to a stern lecture. Moe knew all his men. He knew what they were doing on the ‘outside’. Almost everyone had a second, full-time job, a part time job, ran a small business, was going to law school or college. There were lawyers working there, accountants, cops, firemen, schoolteachers, construction workers – you name it – they worked in the P.O. In fact, I heard a regular employee tell a boss this, when told to load a truck one night: "Why me? I’ve been working all day. Get a sub to do it.”
We needed the job, we needed the medical coverage and we needed time off. This is where Moe came in. If he approved your absence, you got paid. If not, no dough .Moe knew about everyone’s personal responsibilities and never docked a man a day’s pay if there were serious money problems at home. He saved my bacon more than once. One summer I took my Frau and kids back to her hometown in Germany. I had to sweat it out for my vacation pay when I got back, because it had not been approved in advance. Being a junior man, a summer vacation was hard to get. I told Moe I was gone three weeks because I had the measles. He yelled over to the paymaster: “Pay the man! He had the measles. The German measles.”
Moe had a family himself. His youngest daughter was very beautiful. When she was eighteen she broke up with her boyfriend. The boyfriend stalked her and one day shot her dead. Moe had a lot of responsibilities himself and came back to work after two weeks. He was kind of pale looking but he still did his job. A famous philosopher, probably Voltaire, said that this is the 'best of all possible worlds'. But I kind of lean toward the Irish playwright, Brendan Behan, who put it like this:" It's not much of a world but it's the only one we've got".
Since Moe figures in many episodes here, it is important that you have a clear idea of the kind of guy he was. So here is one more view of Moe. I needed a brake job on my car real bad. These were the years with kids in diapers, mortgage payments on the house, car payments. A point in life best described by Zorba the Greek as: “The total catastrophe”. George Hilliard, a buddy from South Boston (hereafter, Southie), told me to go to his mechanic and to tell the guy that I worked for Moe. I did and I got a good brake job at a good price. Al, the owner, told me this: “I was an orphan at twelve and Moe took me in and raised me with his own kids.” I loved Moe. He had two weaknesses: coin collecting and steak sandwiches from a Greek deli in Southie. He was my boss for fifteen years. He retired to Naples, Florida. One of these days me and Hilliard and a bunch of the guys are going to drop in on him down there. Just out of the blue. We’ll bring him a steak sandwich from that deli in Southie.
Big Moe’s boss was a guy named Joe DiGiovanni. Joe D we called him and with Joe D begins the list of Italians in the P.O. who made it an all the more amazing place to work. Joe D was very intelligent man but he never had much in the way of schooling. He came from Italy when he was a kid and lived in the North End, a section of Boston that was all Italian.
This would be a good place to explain how Boston was set up along ethnic lines. It was like this: if a person lived in the North End, he was Italian. Now that did not mean that some ancient ancestor came from Italy. It meant either he was born over there or his mother and father were. At home they spoke Italian. The priest at their church was from the old country and his Sunday sermons were in Italian. The butcher, the baker, the barber – all from the old country. The North End staged its own festivals - pageantry and good food- Saint Anthony’s Name Day and a half dozen more, each one like that
Easter procession out of Cavaleria Rusticana. The Mafia headquarters was in the North End, run by the Anguilo Family.
Well the West End could be described the same way except they were Eastern Europeans. The guys I knew from there were from homes where Yiddish was spoken. The South End was black and a world unto itself with its own distinctive style like the other sections of the city. So too, Southie, the Irish section. In fact if you could not afford a trip to Ireland, you could get the feel of the place by hanging out in Southie for a while. East Boston, Eastie, was Italian but not so much so as the North End. Other parts of the city, like West Roxbury or Hyde Park, were more American than ethnic European.
Anyway, to get back to Joe D, he came from the North End, lived there all his life, spoke better Italian than English. Nevertheless, Joe had a good job in the P.O., where he was a general foreman. That meant he was in charge of the foremen who ran the platform as well as the area where the trains came in. Train mail was a very big part of the P.O. in those days. Joe D was over sixty at the time and those cold winter nights on the platform kept him in his office most of the time. But he always knew what was going on.
Besides veterans, young and old, the P.O. was a haven for people who had a set back in life or who had simply failed. This was a time when there were no computers, calculators, sorting machines, flexible conveyor belts, neat, little maneuverable fork-lifts; in short, this was a non mechanized operation. At the same time, mail rates and parcel post rates were low. And again, there was no competition. Mail volumes were staggering. How about sacks of parcels piling up to a thirty- foot high ceiling? How about no e-mail and every blessed letter in the world had to be in an envelope with a stamp and passed through the P.O.! To handle all the mail required an army of employees. In this army were some who in the 80’s and 90’s would be homeless. But in the 60’s they had a job in the P.O. (Rooms on Skid Row were $2 a night.)
Now what you have to know is that although there was an exam required to get hired, once you had taken this exam and were on the Civil Service list, there were other ways to get appointed to a job without waiting until your name reached the top of this list. The P.O. was a political pie. The Democratic or Republican State Committee made managerial appointments. There were also many appointments made to jobs at the lower levels: janitors, elevator operators, mail handlers, clerks and carriers, by other powers. A priest would call the Cardinal’s office and a job would be found for a family man who had been laid off from his electronics job. A state representative would get a job for a recovering alcoholic in his district. Since this place was open all the time, the person’s work hours would be tailored to suit his needs. It was an old, local, Boston, political tradition that had gone federal.
This army of employees was a battered and tattered one. To see us lined up to hit the time clock on the platform with our assorted, rag-tag, winter outfits, you would be reminded of that saying: ‘a gang that had been shot at and missed but shit at and hit.’ Except that in the case of many of the men here, they had been shot at and hit, be it by German, Japanese, North Korean or Chinese bullets. Besides the people who were trying to get their lives back together again, there were the DAV’s (Disabled American Veterans). These were men like Bob Maclean. But before I tell you Bob’s story let me finish with this episode with Joe D. One cold and stormy winter’s night I was unloading a sixty- foot trailer full of Sears Roebuck catalogues with Bob and a crew of Mail handlers. Those old Sears catalogues were as thick as telephone books and packed into ninety-pound sacks. The wind came right off the ocean with the snow and sleet onto the platform. The off-loading was slow going. A high level supervisor popped out of a warm elevator, checked the arrival time of out trailer and started raising hell with Big Moe about the fact that it was taking so long to get those catalogues off the truck and with such a big crew. Joe D happened to be going by. Here is what he told the big wheel: "Now listen here! This is the P.O. This is not General Electric. These men haven’t been hired because they are very efficient. They’ve been hired because nobody else wants them and we need them. A lot of these men got shot in the war. They’re DAV’s. They need work though and they’ll get the job done. But in their own time. Now get the hell out of here." We waited till the big wheel was back on the elevator and then we gave Joe D a big cheer. Joe came over to the trailer and yelled in: "How many of yous are in there?" Some one yelled back: "Nine!" Then Joe says: " Well half of yous come out and go for coffee". We liked Joe D a lot. .
The guy I was working beside that night was Bob Maclean. Bob's father was a burly, redheaded guy from Prince Edward Island. His mother was a tall Italian beauty. Bob was dark like his mother. He was a giant and a football star at his high school in East Boston (hereafter, Eastie). In school they gave him the name: 'the wrecker', because he was always smashing into something in practice or in a game, like knocking over the water bucket or stepping on the referee's foot. At his senior prom there was a dance called the balloon dance. The girl had a balloon tied to her ankle and her partner was supposed to step on it and break it and then the couple could leave the dance floor. Last couple to leave the floor got the booby prize for being the worst dancers of the night. The wrecker broke the balloon and his partner's foot at the same time. In Korea, during the Inchon invasion, Bob was in the first wave ashore. He stepped on a mine. It blew off his left foot and his right leg is still full of shrapnel. Bob was married, (the broken foot girl), and had two kids. He was always joking around and had a great positive attitude toward life that was contagious and uplifting, and that helped everybody get through those long, cold nights on the platform. He talked about Korea once in a while, sort of casually, without any kind of heavy emotion. Just let you draw your own conclusions. Like: after the Chinese had tried an assault on his position and had been cut down and repulsed by superior fire power, the GI's discovered that the first wave had had no weapons. After the natives had stripped the dead for their clothes, the GI's saw that the Chinese attackers were just boys. Or on his own wounds: the doctors at the military hospital in Tokyo told him the exact nature of his disability, what he could expect in terms of extent of recovery and pointed out that although it was a bad deal, there were in fact a lot of bad deals going around and many worse than Bob's. He was planning to run for the state senate and asked me to be his campaign manager. Wow!
There was a different atmosphere on each floor of the P.O. On the fourth floor were the administrative offices where Larry Martin, the superintendent, worked and all the other executives. There was brass galore around. Also on the fourth floor were the first class mail sorters. Each of these people sat in front of about one hundred pigeonholes and sorted letters. Every ten minutes a voice over a loud speaker called for a particular pigeonhole. The clerks would take the mail out of the pigeonhole and drop it on a conveyor belt that ran the length of the aisle where the twenty clerks worked. At the end of the belt another clerk would gather the letters into a tray. The trays ended up in a hamper that was pushed onto the freight elevator and brought down to the platform for dispatch to the various stations and branches.
If a clerk wanted to take a personal needs break, he would initial a roster hanging at the end of his aisle and was expected to be back at his work assignment in ten minutes. Each work position was furnished with an ashtray. Smoking on the job was no problem. Theses were the days when the surgeon-general was a two pack a day man. Lucky Strikes, I think it was. After two hours of work employees got a fifteen- minute break for coffee. Now this fifteen minutes break was port-to-port. That meant that if you went on break at ten o'clock, you were expected back at ten fifteen. Lunch was thirty minutes plus five minutes wash up time and was referred to as 'swing'. It was a boring and confining job albeit a sit-down job. However, it paid the rent and put groceries on the table. In the winter you were nice and warm. In fact, weather was not a factor at all for people on the fourth floor. They even kind of dressed nice. The brass was always about so it was necessary to tend to business and keep sorting that mail when sitting at those pigeonholes.
To fight the monotony some of the workers would opt for two fingers of whiskey at break time instead of coffee. Drinking was, of course, not permitted but widespread, nevertheless. It was an offence but not a fatal one. In fact the P.O. would not fire an employee for drinking. Such an employee would be required to join Alcoholics Anonymous and attend meetings weekly at the South Postal Annex before beginning work. So he could save his job and have a shot at breaking the habit at the same time. There was in fact only one fatal offence in the place: stealing.
The entire building was provided with a series of passageways equipped with peepholes for observing employees. These peepholes were in every room, rest rooms and locker rooms. The postal inspectors used them to insure the integrity of the mails. The system worked. Thieves were regularly caught with the opened letter on their person. The thief was given the choice of formal prosecution or being fired with the loss of all funds he had contributed to the retirement system. The consequences of formal prosecution would be worse, possible imprisonment, so the thief usually opted for the immediate firing. The inspectors were ingenious in the ways they caught these people. Like the victims of Reverend Ike. This guy was a preacher who drove around Boston in a big, white cadilac convertible. And he had a radio show. His pitch was this: if you prayed hard enough, your prayers would be answered. His gimmick was that if you had an official Reverend Ike prayer cloth, then your prayer got swifter results. The cloths came in different sizes; the five-dollar cloth was effective, but not so fast in getting results as the ten-dollar cloth. Well, there was a twenty-dollar cloth too and its results were dynamite. Send cash only please. At the height of his popularity, the letters were pouring into the P.O. and mail sorters with money problems could not resist stashing a couple of the Reverend's letters in the course of their shift. Here's how the inspectors nabbed the elevator operator Tony.
Tony had a gambling problem. Bookies circulated freely throughout the building. Let's say a clerk had the job of picking up special delivery letters. Well, he would cover the fourth floor and when he would have a tray full of these letters he would bring them down stairs on the elevator. This would be a good job for a bookie. He could make his rounds, collect bets, make payoffs and collect unpaid bills. And all the while in the line of duty. On the clock. Let's talk about unpaid bills. This guy Tony, the elevator operator, got paid every two weeks like everybody else. He was so far behind in his gambling debt that he would pay $75 every payday to the book. And all the while he is placing new bets. He had a nose for lousy nags. Reverend Ike is a way out. With the elevator full of mail, and while all alone, Tony stops between floors, tears open the letters for Ike, pockets the cash and throws the torn envelopes down the elevator shaft. Eventually the inspectors come across the torn envelopes, plant some marked bills in a Reverend Ike envelope and grab Tony.
Some thieves were too clever to get caught by peeping inspectors but caught they eventually were. Like the case of the thief down stairs, selling stamps. One time, a couple of years ago a clerk in the financial section down in the lobby had devised an almost fool proof system for stealing. He kept two sets of books. When the auditors showed up, he would pull out the phony book for them. The other book he had to use daily and clearly exposed his thefts. The catch was he could never take a day off, let alone a vacation. One day he got hit by a car walking over to the parking lot and one of his first visitors in the hospital was a postal inspector.
Now right here let me say something about the Mob because they reappear throughout this story, especially in the Italian section. At this time they sponsor a numbers game. The only one in town. There was a politician running for office every year in a town south of Boston named Kelley. His platform was that there should be a state run lottery, the proceeds of which would pay for the operation of the public schools and thus reduce property taxes. They called him Sweepstakes Kelley and he never got elected. But the Mob had a numbers game up and running. You can play three or four numbers, straight or box them. The payoffs are pretty good and almost always guaranteed. 'Almost always', I'll explain in a little while. Now you might say to this story about the elevator operator: 'why didn't he just default on the loan?' You ever heard the term 'leg breaker'? It's worse than that. There was a mail handler on the platform named Bobby O'Sullivan. We called him Bobby O. Everybody has a nickname or an abbreviated name. It has reached the state of an art in the P.O. My Italian buddy Frankie Quarterone is called simply 'Quarter o' One'. Anyway, one night the word on the platform was Bobby O got shot dead. ' A married man with seven kids, working a second job nights to make ends meet for his family is gunned down at his front door. Shot seven times. What is this world coming to?' That is how it played out in the Boston Globe. Here was the real scoop: Bobby O is a bar tender days. He places bets for his customers: for the dog track, the ponies, numbers, boxing matches, baseball, football, basketball, you name it. He also collects payments for the mob from customers who are betting more than they are winning. Weekly. He skims some dough off the top for himself. He gets caught. Warned. Then he does it a second time and they kill him. The mob does not play tiddly-winks. Anyways, that Reverend Ike cost a lot of people their jobs, like Tony the elevator operator.
The third floor had about the same atmosphere but because it handled newspapers and magazines, it was a little less tightly controlled. It was possible to read Play Boy or Sports Illustrated 'on the clock'. Supervisors were always on the prowl here so it was impossible to get too immersed in anything.
The second floor handled parcel post and although you were pretty well boxed in as on the above floors, there was a certain amount of moving around involved in dispatching the cart loads of parcels. The work was a bit dirty so second floor employees did not dress as neatly as those on the third and fourth floors. Like their brothers above, some opted for a whiskey rather than a coffee break. The brass patrolled the second floor constantly.
The platform was a different animal. People upstairs felt boxed in by right. They were in a room with a ceiling and four walls. The only way out is through a door. If someone watches the door he knows if anyone leaves. The platform was a constant coming and going along its hundred-yard length. Employees were of course coming to hit the clock to begin work. But where were they going when they jumped off the platform? Some had hit off the clock and were simply through work and going home. Many others were still on the clock but going elsewhere. Far and wide. This is part of my story. But first a closer look at the atmosphere on the platform.
The weather was a determining factor. It was bitter cold in the winter with that east wind coming off the ocean. It snowed, sleeted and rained on you. The men had to be brought in out of the weather more often than every two hours. Once in, they had to take off their foul weather gear. The breaks were thirty minutes port-to-port. Some of the men had transferred over to the P.O. from the Navy Yard in nearby Charlestown. They brought along a custom from the docks that was adopted on the platform. It was called the Navy Yard break. If you were unloading a trailer truck and wanted a break for personal needs, you told the guy beside you where you were going and that was it. You went to the locker room, got out of your winter gear, picked up a newspaper of your choice, anything from the Christian Science Monitor to the National Enquirer, did your job, got back into your winter gear and returned to your assignment. It took forty-five minutes. You could not do this every day because your buddy was covering for you while you were gone.
The platform ran on schedules. Mail was dispatched or arrived on a carefully planned timetable. If you unloaded a trailer of mail from the airport, you had a break until the nest scheduled trailer arrived. It could be as long as one hour but sometimes the trailers were lined up waiting or a train would arrive and we would be sent to the train platform, which was in a subterranean tunnel called the pit. Very cold and damp in winter. These busy times were usually over by ten pm. If it was one o'clock in the morning, the gang might go across the street to an all night chop shop for ham and eggs. The place was surrounded by bar rooms. As time went by you got to know the bar tenders pretty well and it was more like being a member in some kind of private club. These breaks were good for moral and actually made the loading and unloading go very fast, since the your speed determined the length of your break.
Because of the weather there were very few visits from the brass. The reputation of the bosses we had, big Moe and Joe D, depended upon whether or not dispatches were made on time. The men controlled that. They took care of good bosses. Once in a while a reformer type foreman would show up. Ten minute breaks. The men went into what was called the stockade shuffle, moving but just barely. They would throw sacks of mail down the wrong shoot and it would end up at the wrong place upstairs. Within half a day the reformer would be out of there.
Newspapers came on to the platform through the weighing room. Every paper sent along a half dozen complementary copies. Two copies were for the men who unloaded the truck. One copy was for the boss of the weighing room. Three copies had to go upstairs for the tour superintendent. Here is what happened one day when these complementary copies were not sent upstairs. The superintendent that day was a tough Irishman named Peter Dinneen. He came to work at seven in the morning and wanted to have the morning paper with his coffee. He knew how the place was supposed to run. No paper meant that some one down on the platform was not doing their job. So down to the platform comes Peter. Real fast like. Now it's seven-fifteen and the night crew is still on the clock but taking their last half hour off as usual playing cards in the locker room, which is located in a mezzanine one flight of stairs up from the platform with a wall of windows looking out over the platform below. Peter charges up the stairs to get the name of every one up there, who is on the clock, for subsequent disciplinary action. That is: being away from your work assignment while on the clock. Now when someone working on the platform sees a boss headed up to the locker room he yells out: "Quincy!" This is a city south of Boston to which mail is regularly dispatched and also the code word for 'a supervisor is on his way up'. By the time Peter gets up to the locker room the cards had been stashed. The only excuse for being there at that time was a personal needs break. There were three toilets in the washroom, free standing, without stalls. Sure enough there were three men seated. Peter looks closely at the first man and says: What are you doing there?" The man tells him plainly and Peter says: "But you didn't pull you pants down!" Your man answers: "It's OK, Peter, it's an old pair." Peter shakes his head and leaves. The dilemma for a big wheel here is that he never knows for sure who might be the sponsor of a subordinate, so he is hesitant to come down too hard on someone. Politics here trumps high marks on the civil service exam, every time. It was quite possible that any employee, from a janitor on up, was a political appointee. That meant he had a sponsor. If a supervisor came down too hard on an employee, he might hear from the employee's sponsor, who could be anyone from a local politician to the Speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington, DC.
The mood of the men was calm. Most had seen war. The fires of youth had died down and neither Pete Dinneen nor anybody else got whacked along side the head for acting like a jerk. After Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, The Bulge, Inchon, etc., there was small chance of the P.O. making a veteran blow up. Plus there was the air of a charade to all our crises.
Probably the best way to describe the situation on the platform is this: the work came in bursts. Upstairs there was always mail on hand to be processes. It was a never ending, Sisyphus type of work. On the platform, however, you could be buried in mail, then a hundred men hit the clock and join in and an hour later there was no mail to be seen. It had all gone upstairs to be further worked. So the men on the platform have to be kept on the clock even though there is no mail on hand, more or less on standby. This stand by situation produced card games and all sorts of recreational activities and serious secondary pursuits. It is these secondary pursuits that this story is all about.
One more thing about the atmosphere on the platform; the platform had a reputation. The men were apt to be roamers. Five years before I started there, two hundred postal inspectors were called in from across the country to suddenly surround our P.O., the SPA. No one was allowed in or out. Mail operations were suspended for six hours. The inspectors discovered that there were over one hundred men on the clock but not in the building. Some were working another job across town. Some were home sleeping. Some were in Florida on vacation. After that raid the no-show days were gone but the memory lingered on. Some of the men still roamed but not so far that they could not be brought back quickly by a phone call.
This then is the basic layout of the P.O. and the type of men and the mood of the place when I started to work there in October 1962.
I had been unemployed since I got out of the army the previous March. I had seen all my savings from my army pay gradually vanish over a period of seven months. I was getting very nervous. My wife did not speak much English then but she believed that I knew what I was about. Then I got the P.O. job. I was so relieved that every day I went about my job like a mad man, whether it was unloading sixty foot trailers or freight trains. A guy with a lot of energy was welcomed by the other workers. Our dispatches were always complete and on time which made Big Moe and Joe D very happy and we got nice, long breaks between jobs. Anyways, after a year I had established a reputation as a good worker. I got promoted from mail handler to clerk and I got a job in the time unit filling in for absentees. The time unit was a small, heated office on the platform with two desks, telephones, typewriter, etc. A good spot for an undergraduate student. That's me, Northeastern University, foreign language major. Out come my books. Time to take advantage of the GI Bill.
The time unit is a preferred job location. It has all the benefits of the platform plus it is a sit down job, inside a warm office. Like all other jobs in the P.O. it has that one sour note resultant from the infamous postal inspectors raid: you have to show up. But after you get by that act of will power, here is what you have going for you on the platform: parking at no cost within one hundred feet of the time clock, several non-stop card games at varying stakes, three resident bookmakers with access to the daily numbers game, betting at dog tracks, horse racing tracks, and betting on sporting events, etc., on the clock availability to shopping in down town Boston; neighborhood like bars within five minutes where you can relax with friends; quiet nooks within the building where it is possible to study for a college degree, like me, or study for the bar exam, the real estate brokers exam, the fire or policeman's exam or for those who are not inclined to roam or study, you have an amazing group of world travelers of all races for conversation and illumination of your days, by God!
In the time unit I met Walter ‘Stretch’ Perineau, George McGrimley and a school teacher on the out side named Jack Frost. 'Frostie' they call him and he will later on do me a big favor. George was a big, six foot four inch, Boston Irishman, school- teacher and political operative. He was campaign manager for Louise Day Hicks, the leader of the anti busing foes in the seventies. He was overbearing like this: Being a schoolteacher he needed a job in the PO with a reporting time of 3pm. He was assigned to tour I, that is, midnights. Off he goes to the State House on Boston’s Beacon Hill, to the office of newly elected senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy. George gets transferred, but in error to days, that is tour II, 8am reporting time. Back up to Beacon Hill, but this time who should be coming down the street at the same time but JFK himself. Beacon Street is very narrow and when our man spots JFK coming toward him, he deliberately crosses over to the other side. JFK calls out to him and George roars back: “Don’t talk to me! You’re the kiss of death!” George soon got the job with the reporting time he wanted. This happened before I met George but I did witness an encounter between George and JFK’s brother Ted. George tried to belabor Ted with the fact that JFK, now in DC, had promised him a certain job while senator. Ted cooly replied that his brother’s debts were not his.
Stretch Perrineau was a black guy from Roxbury, the first of many blacks I worked with in the PO. Stretch was over sixty, when I met him. He came to the PO after retiring from the Pullman trains. Tall as McGrimley, half as wide and smooth as silk. He was street smart and smart smart too. We both worked tour III, 3 to 11:30 pm. One night on the way home he got off the bus in Roxbury at the usual time, around mid-night. This is the way he told the story: “I seen these four young punks trying to get up their courage. Then the leader comes over to me. Well I’m old but I never forgot what I learned in those years on the Pullman trains as far as taking care of myself. I grabbed him by the throat and shoved my hand into his testicles and I says: ‘That’s a razor you’re feelin’ longside your balls and if you want my 3 dollars, I’ll have your balls first. If not then you and your hoodlum friends get on out of here.’” He always carried a straight razor in his coat pocket. I’ve seen Stretch in action. Big George challenged Stretch to a fist- fight one night. Stretch was tall and lanky; George as tall, but a lot heavier and a lot younger. The fight lasted one punch. Stretch faked a right to the head and drove a left to the belly that took all the wind out of George and although he did not fall, he could not continue. The two of them had to establish some kind of modus vivendi because they ended up working together in the time unit. George took me under his wing. I learned a lot from Stretch too. Not about the PO but about other things like race relations.
There were a lot of men working on the platform but they were not interested in working in the time unit. A lot of these guys grew up in the depression and had dropped out of school early. I mean real early, like grammar school. They had a mistrust of their ability with numbers, and written reports and stuff like that. It took Stretch a long time to work his way in to the time unit. His description of his apprentice time would probably be the way most of these guys on the platform experienced it. Stretch's narrative goes like this: "We knew that the incoming tour had to know how much mail was on hand. Old Charlie Burbank would come over to the freight car we was in and stand in the door with that clip board of his in his hand, a pencil stuck on his ear and a cigar in his mouth. All of us kind of froze – well it wasn't like in the army when some one yells 'attention!'- the thing was, he had this very important job – had to do with mail volumes and reports – what Tour III had done and what was left for Tour I to do. Anyways we was to stop workin' when he showed up, 'cause he had to make his calculations and he could not do that properly if we was still throwing those sacks off the train. And as long as he was calculatin', we workers sort of quieted down. Being polite, you might say. And old Charlie would look around, up and down, and mark numbers down on his clip board. Now we all knew that this Charlie Burbank was just a-sittin' in that time unit all night. We figured he musta been workin' on all kinds of figures and numbers that had to do with that clip board of his that he always carried around. And you know what? I finally found out what his job was all about and it wasn't nothin' at all. No big deal. Here's what his complicated, administrative, sit-on-your-ass-all night job was all about. The deck of the inside of the freight car was marked off like a football field. All's you had to do was look at the floor and if you could see the fifty-yard line then the freight car was half empty. If you could see the 40 yard-line or the thirty-yard line you just jotted that down and back in the time unit there was a chart that told you how much mail was left in the car. Simple as pie. And all the while we was believing that this man was some kind of specially trained accountant or something like that.
It all fell out one night when Charlie called in sick and the boss handed me the clipboard and told me I was Charlie that night. I was flat out uneasy but I said OK. You see I didn't particularly like this Charlie and I said to my self I could do whatever the hell old Charlie could. Thing of it was, this Charlie, when he came into the freight car, well, he never said nothin' to us – you know, like,' how you all doin'?' or" bitch of a cold night out tonight' – or somethin' like that. It was like as we was too dumb to talk to. Anyways, I grabbed a clerk I knew, a brother, and he told me: "Hell, Stretch, ain't nothin' to it. You just mark down the number of the board on the floor that you can see. Back in the time unit they'll show you the rest. That's it." Well that got my West Indian blood up and I set my sights on old Charlie's job. And when he retired, I got it. And you know what? Well, since then I've been sittin' down , nice and warm and comfortable, playin' the numbers game. Hell, they had us bamboozled."
When my shot at the time unit job came along the guys I was working with did not want it for the same reason Stretch had explained. They had been bamboozled about the complexity of a desk job because somewhere along the line they had missed out on a solid grounding in the 3 r's. It happened in the depression when kids left school to help the family survive. The idea behind forced bussing was that some kids were being shortchanged in the schooling that they were getting in 1974. How bad was it? At a conference for secondary school teachers that year, I met a woman whom I had known for years. She had been an elementary school teacher and her field was remedial reading. She was still teaching the same subject but now she taught high school seniors. These kids wanted to be able to read the want ads in the newspapers but lacked the skills.
I mentioned the GI Bill and at first the colleges were reluctant to sign on. The GI's were admitted and it was up to the universities to run courses that would enable these GI's to catch up, to make up the deficiencies in their academic background. All of these veterans who applied for college admission under the GI Bill could of course read and write. They had not learned in high school as was now going on in Boston. They had learned in elementary school. I'm talking now about kids from Southie, the Polish kids, the Italian kids from Eastie and the North End and thousands of other veterans across the city and across the country. Whatever their academic weaknesses were in the eyes of college admission offices, those who applied knew how to read and write. How they learned these essential skills is an interesting story. Their elementary school teachers stressed reading, writing and arithmetic. Their teachers are no longer around in force as they were in the 1930's or 1940's. In fact, when you look around for them now, you could come to the conclusion, you know, like an archeologist would, that they must have come on the scene in a great, sudden, migratory wave. You might also think, if you heard these teachers described, that they came on a flying saucer from somewhere out in God's universe. The archeologist would state the facts from the evidence at hand: these teachers did a satisfactory job teaching their pupils the 3 r's. Although they are no longer here, certain things are known about them. Namely, they certainly would not have the required certificates to teach nowadays. Secondly, from written material describing them, it is certain that their job actually required not degrees in education, but rather three vows, those being, poverty, chastity and obedience. These teachers are still with us. In Jamaica Plain they were called Sisters of Saint Joseph or Sisters of Charity. They are now at an advanced age and living in New Jersey and watched over by a woman named Sister Sheila Holleran. Sister Sheila reminds successful graduates of the schools, staffed by these women, that their deep pockets should not be stymied by short arms. I have never seen or heard of anything being written about these women, Well, there have regularly been satires published on their life styles, especially on that vow of chastity. And sometimes people have told me of a wrap on the knuckles they got 50 years ago when going through their mill. They probably deserved a good shot in the arse like most teenagers. But I never heard of any their successful graduates say: "Thank Christ for those nuns who taught me the 3r's!" Anyways, I got my job in the time unit because the others, who were senior to me, never had the advantage of a Catholic school education. Stretch was exception. It must have been that West Indian blood of his. By the way, these out of this world teachers did their stuff all over this planet.
The problem with the time unit is that I only fill in there when some one calls in sick. I cannot count on getting time with the books. Now I get a break. You could call it a promotion. After the Germans met Julius Caesar, they were so impressed by his modus operandi, that they decided to call their own boss man, "Kaiser", ever after. The same is done everywhere and in the P.O. too. Harry Feinman was a Jewish political operative whose job was special delivery parcel post. He wore a long overcoat with a book in one pocket and a newspaper in the other. His modus operandi was this: set up gondolas to hold the parcels he would sort for the various destinations. Mail handlers culled incoming parcels for special deliveries and brought them to Harry. At 8pm Harry put them on the New York train and again at 11pm. Once things were set up Harry dropped into the weighing room, which was a world unto itself where among other types of mail, newspapers came in to the P.O. Harry would chat with Bill Sullivan, the supervisor there, pick up his favorite newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, chatted with his landsman Dave Dretler and then was off to the swing room for some serious reading. Now Big Moe knew what I was up to on the out side and one day he said to me: "Go out back and have the boys show you how to handle the specials. From now on your Harry Feinman". Harry's sponsor had come through with a job for him in the Boston's Federal Building in the Environmental Protection Agency. The last time I saw Harry I asked him if the overcoat stayed with the special deliveries job. He grinned and said: "No, but the newspapers do". This is a very good job. It means two solid hours with the books.
The P.O. was open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There were 3 shifts, called Tours I, II, and III. Each tour worked 8 hours with 30 minutes for lunch, called, swing. Each tour overlapped by 30 minutes.
Tour II, days, 7:00am to 3:30pm was probably the public's stereotyped view of the place: clerks inside sorting mail, others selling stamps and receiving parcels; mail trucks driving around the city collecting mail and mailmen delivering letters to homes.
Tour III, afternoons-evenings, 3pm to 11:30pm, is the subject of this story.
Tour I, midnights, 11pm to 7:30am, would require another book to describe. Since Tours III and I overlapped, some of the Tour I people appear here and perhaps give the reader an inkling into the bizarre nature of the Tour I scene.
There was a fourth dimension – weekends, especially on tours II and III. The stamp counters closed at noon on Saturday, the administrative offices were closed completely Saturday and Sunday. Commercial mail, junk mail or bulk mail was not processed. The work force was one tenth of what it was Monday through Friday. Mail did come in and go out, but it could be handled by a skeleton crew. The weekend superintendent was usually some junior boss who stayed out of everyone's way. Big Moe and Joe D had weekends off and a guy named Dick Louis covered both their jobs. Through the years I met a lot of guys like Dick Louis; guys who did not have a particularly happy home life but had good buddies in the P.O., had a nice job and were very good at it. Dick spent a good part of the weekend hours playing cards with his cronies upstairs. He was a smooth customer; on hand at the beginning of the Tour to make sure everything was set up properly and then when things seemed to be running smoothly, he disappeared until an hour before Tour I showed up. Dick kept a little notebook with the name of everyone who asked for leave on a Saturday or Sunday with the date. If you overdid it, he would refuse your request. My son was born on a Saturday and Dick refused my request for emergency leave. He did not believe me. Our union steward, George Rubin, went after Dick with: "What do you want the guy to do, bring in a diaper?" Dick approved my leave, reluctantly. This was his routine for over thirty years. In fact, everybody had their own routine on weekends but knew what had to be done do in order to be left alone. Weekends, the P.O. was like a car in neutral; up and running but not going anywhere until Sunday night at 11pm when Tour I showed up and the great monster slipped into gear.
The layout of the P.O. was this: it is located in downtown Boston at Dewey Square right at the South station, about 50 yards from the site of the Boston Tea Party. The open side of the building, the platform side where the trucks pull in and out, is on the Atlantic Ocean, a channel called The Fort Point Channel. The opposite side is bounded by the train tracks leading into the station. One set of tracks brings trains with mail into the subterranean area called the pit. At the opposite end of the building from the South Station there is an old wooden icehouse, used as a staging area for mail going to Cape Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Beyond the icehouse are the rail road yards running off towards the South End.
The lobby of the South Station forms the fourth side of the P.O. and you enter the P.O. through this lobby. It is a very interesting place. The lobby is a masterpiece of 19th century architecture, with beautifully plastered ceilings and a marvelous floor of polished granite. My buddy George Hilliard, a private contractor on the outside, says that there are no longer any plasterers around who are capable of doing that kind of specialized work. The place is huge. Besides the entrances to thirty-five train platforms, it contains a large restaurant serving full course meals, a liquor store, a newspaper stand, a stand up snack bar serving hot dogs and beer and the like, a drug store, a barber shop with chairs for twenty customers and of course ticket counters, baggage rooms, lockers, an enormous, elegantly furnished waiting room, and what is crucial to this story, The Club Car. But before we go on into the Club Car, the Catholic chapel should also be mentioned. It was located at the far side of the lobby. There was mass there Sundays at 11am. The Catholic men on the platform walk off the job at 10:45am and attend the service. The boss on the platform Sundays is Mad Man Myers. All bosses have nicknames. He is Jewish so he minds the store and the men see to it that he gets coffee, donuts and a copy of the Boston Sunday Globe when they return. If the men forget his Sunday Globe, Myers goes mad.
At the other end of the station from the chapel is the giant barbershop. When the South Station was in its heyday, before people traveled by car and plane, the shop was booming. Now there are just two barbers. A result of what Willie Nelson calls: "The disappearin' railroad blues." One is the owner, an old Jewish guy who brings his retarded son every day to help out around the place, sweep the floor, go for coffee, stuff like that. But he is never out of his father's sight. The other barber is an Italian guy from the North End. On Saturdays the P.O. guys get their hair cut on the clock. There is usually a wait but if you are on the clock it doesn't matter. Besides, there is a large selection of magazines.
The Italian barber speaks with a heavy accent. He had come to America with his twin brother in 1930, when he was seven years old, but he lived with his gang in the North End and usually spoke Italian there. One Saturday afternoon, as he's cutting my hair, I ask him if he ever went back to Italy. This is the story he told me. Now like I say, this is a sleepy Saturday afternoon in the South Station and there are six or eight P.O. guys sitting around waiting their turn and slowly they put by their magazines and start listening to his story. Here it is: Yea, he went back to Sicily once with his twin brother. He had an uncle living in Palermo who used to write them all the time and they could read his address on the back of the envelope and run to their mother with a letter from uncle Sal. In the thirties uncle Sal came to Boston and stayed with the boys for a year. In 1943 uncle Sal was back in Palermo at the address the boys knew by heart and they, the twins, who were by then twenty years old, were in Palermo too, with General George Patton's 3rd Army. The city is burning, the Americans and Germans are trading artillery fire, the noise and smoke are horrendous,and there's street fighting. The twins find themselves on the street where uncle Sal lives. Now as the story goes on it gets real quiet in the barbershop. Everybody is listening. The twins knock on the door with their rifle butts. The terrified family is in the cellar, women and children and 85 year old uncle Sal. He goes up to answer the pounding on the door. Germans or Americans? He sees two bearded American soldiers. The poor guy can't speak for fear. My barber says to him in perfect Sicilian: "What's the matter uncle Sal, don't you know us? It's your nephews, Pauli and Peter!" In the barber shop there wasn't a dry eye.
Now let's check out The Club Car. People who work in Boston's financial district and commute by train are likely to stop in here for a cocktail while waiting for their train home. People coming from a hockey game or a basketball game may stop in to celebrate a win or try to ease the pain of a loss with a strong drink before boarding their train for home. This is a four major league sports town. Who has not heard of the 'Curse of the Bambino?' Tour III employees of the P.O. start arriving there about 2pm. It may very well turn out that they never report for duty at all on that particular day. It is a long narrow place, divided into two sections. When you enter from the street, from Dewey Square, on your right is a long bar and on your left tables seating four persons. Half way toward the door at the other end of the place that leads out on to the magnificently marble-floored lobby, there are still tables on the left, but on the right is the work place of Frank Petrus, the chef. The food is excellent; steaks, home fries, French fries, fresh salads, hamburgers, etc. There is a waitress if you are ordering from a table.
Frank is a good cook. Even when his son was in Vietnam and he was drunk every day, he still put out a quality product. He stopped drinking altogether when the boy came home. You got bigger servings when he was drinking.
Billy Swan runs the bar. A big, handsome son-of-a-gun, great smile, usually very soft spoken, although the night the Boston Bruins lost the Stanley Cup final to the Montreal Canadiens in overtime at the Boston Garden, Billy stood on the bar and cursed with a thundering roar the fates that control such destinies here on earth. Whereupon he gave everyone a round on the house. The doors at this time were locked because it was way past closing time. Billy has a plate in his head. When you visit daily in a place like the Club Car, it is sort of like visiting family. Well, I mean you find out all sorts of personal things about the regulars. Many times they just out and tell you. I figured Billy got a head wound in Korea but Frank Petrus told me all about it. One night there was a guy standing at the bar using a lot of foul language. Billy told him to mind his manners there were ladies present. The guy challenged Billy to step outside which Billy did. And he, Billy, went first. The guy came out behind Billy and cold cocked him with a beer bottle. As he fell, Billy whacked his head real hard on that marble floor. Hence the plate. The broads go for Billy.
Across the street from the South Station is a bar called Brown's. Now the name of the street is Summer Street and it runs from Dewey Square at the South Station, past the Army Base, which is on the ocean, over into the docks in Southie. Merchant marines and sailors of all nations disembark down at the South Boston end of Summer Street and head up towards down town Boston via this street. Brown's is the first bar they come to. You enter a big roomy place, high ceiling, sixty foot long bar on the right, a few tables on the left and then again on the left, booths that seat six men running to the back door. There is a kind of a display window in the front looking out on Summer Street and across to the station. The windows have never been washed but if you get close enough you can see out. That is important because Tour II is famous for taking a beer break here of an afternoon and they always post a look out at the window. This lookout is watching for the Tour II foreman, a guy named Flanagan, who has been know to make a dash across Summer Street and into Brown's to catch his crew drinking there while on the clock. If the lookout spots him in time, the boys run out the back door. The boss's nickname is 'Swifty".
During the lunch hour Brown does a good business with the P.O. guys and working men from offices round about. This entire area is the old woolen district and the buildings now house all kinds of businesses, art studios and who knows what. There are always construction crews about renovating and restoring places. If a movie is to be made about Boston circa 1900 this is where it gets filmed. The one hundred fifty year old, five story, red brick structures were built to follow, in places, the curves of the winding streets. Brown's is a tavern. That means no women allowed. Take a bar where only men drink, and then allow women in, and well, then you have a metamorphosis. (It's just like in the P.O., the difference between the Platform and the fourth floor, in this respect.) After sundown Brown's can be dangerous. You don't have to go in armed, but a couple of buddies along is reassuring. You might say that after this description of the place that you would not go in there for love nor money. How about both? The P.O. guys are 'on the clock' that is, waiting for the next trailer to pull in or the next freight train to rumble down into the pit. As for the other part, you are with these guys, well let's put it this way; you've been to their weddings, christenings, divorces, relatives' funerals, bail hearings, and you have worked around the clock with them for a few years. You'll hear about them coming up. The bar tender here is a guy named Bill Alexander. Ex prize-fighter, looks it, about sixty odd years on the scene and never ruffled by anything that happens in this place. For instance, a guy stars singing Irish rebel songs at one of the tables and two long shore men take exception. The singer is out numbered and getting murdered. I tell Bill Alexander this and suggest he call the cops. Bill says no, in fact he hopes they kill each other. Brown's is not the Club Car.
Atlantic Avenue runs north-south through Dewey Square and borders The South station on the west side. Directly across the avenue from the side entrance to the station is the Essex Hotel. This is a three star hotel. The Essex is conveniently located and often tourist stay there on their visit to historic Boston. The hotel restaurant is not a place for P.O. workers. There is, however, a piano bar off the lobby and here the atmosphere is peaceful, cordial, and un-brown's like. The female presence and higher prices change the ball game. The piano player is a charming lady named Carmen. She plays evenings from seven until eleven and takes a break from eight-thirty until ten. It is on Carmen's break that the show biz streak in us comes alive. We sing to the accompaniment of George Hilliard's guitar. George is from Southie and a natural musician.
This basically is the geography of the P.O. There is of course the east side of the building which borders a channel of the Atlantic Ocea, the Fort Point Channel. This is where the platform is and between the platform and the channel runs Dorchester Avenue. P.O. trucks pull in here to load and unload. Employees on the platform park here illegally. There are a dozen parking places reserved for handicapped DAV's. There is all kinds of history around this place, recent and ancient. There was once a sugar factory located on this channel. Freighters would sail on up to unload through two drawbridges. The factory has been gone for fifty years but the drawbridges are still there. One of the bridges still has a bridge tender. This is the man whose job it is to halt traffic and open the bridge for ships. He has not had a customer in fifty years. It is a nice job. Further on up the channel is the Floating Hospital. It is so named because in the twenties and before, tuberculosis patients would be taken out into Boston Harbor on a boat in the summer for the fresh air. The hospital is still called the 'Floating Hospital', but now it specializes in cancer treatment. As you go further on out on Dorchester Avenue you pass Dorchester Heights where an officer under George Washington's command installed cannon, which he had dragged from Fort Ticonderoga and thus forced the British to evacuate Boston on St. Patrick's Day in 1776. The officer's name was Henry Knox and he went to the same high school in Boston as I did. But this story is supposed to be about the P.O. and, nevertheless, you cannot escape the props.
After three years of working on the platform as a sub clerk, I make regular. That means a guarantee of 40 hours a week and over time pay after eight hours. The apartment in Boston is too small now because we have three kids. Don't forget I'm Irish. With a steady government job and a loan from the Veterans Administration and $400 cash, I can buy a house in the suburbs. This is part of that GI Bill I mentioned. You need more than $400 down for a house in Boston for one thing and then there is something going on in the elementary schools that is unsettling for parents. My days off will be Tuesdays and Wednesdays, forever. During the week I work on the platform for Big Moe and weekends it's in the time unit with Big George.
This spot in the time unit is crucial to my plans for finishing undergraduate work at Northeastern University and maybe even graduate school. Weekends on the platform are like Sleepy Hollow and the time unit is the perfect place to study. There are distractions however. Big George is a political operative. He is a teacher for the City of Boston, actually by this time in his career he is a pupil adjustment counselor. That is a fancy title for an old time truant officer. George tracks down delinquent black kids from the South End and Roxbury in the housing projects there. George says that there is a special place in Hell for the architect who designed those projects. They know him with his six foot four inch frame and booming base voice roaring through the halls. It's a dangerous neighborhood even if you are black. There is, for example, a one square mile area around the MTA station at Dudley Street in Roxbury that led the USA in homicides in 1965. One time George was sent to track down a teenager who had been out of school for over a month. George cornered him in the fourth floor stair well of a housing project and the kid pulled a knife on George. George disarmed the boy but had to appear in court. In his own words: "The judge's name was O'Sullivan. One of our own, you see? So I figured I was home free. Well the judge asks the kid why he pulled the knife. The kid said he was afraid of me. The judge turns to me and asks me what I had planned to do to the boy. 'I'd a put him through the meat grinder, Your Honor, and that would have been the end of the problem.' The judge dismissed the case against the boy immediately".
George McGrimley was a child, a grandson of the Boston political creature. His passion was the body politic. It was in his blood. If James Michael Curley had been his father or grandfather it would be understandable. Well, that was just a biological technicality. He was a true son of Curley's Boston. His father had been a railroad worker and was killed in a train accident when George was five years old. Through a friend who knew someone in ward politics who had access to city hall, George's mother got a job cleaning out the public rest rooms in Southie. Thus she was able to keep her two kids together and thus was probably born George's awareness of the political system. Every Sunday afternoon George lectured in the platform time unit. He covered a wide range of hot, political topics: forced bussing, desegregation, affirmative action, or ' the resuscitation of the Republican Party in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts under the leadership of John Volpe' (his words). Here he is on segregation: "Whites can work with blacks, serve in the military with Blacks and even take orders from them, but they don't want to live beside them." George was a devout Roman Catholic, Jesuit trained and always straightforward, never a dissembler in an argument. More than once he was challenged to step out into the street and back up his opinions with his fists. One time the question of homosexuality arouse - the audience was permitted to interrupt George and ask him questions – and George suddenly became quiet and confided with us that even 'they', the Jesuits, had no answer for that question. How astute was he? Try this: at one of my first McGrimley lectures on presidential politics and desegregation in October of 1963, he proclaimed in a booming voice: "If JFK is fool enough to go to Dallas next month, he'll get the BB. Right between his eyes."
George is active in the politics of the Teachers Union. He sees me studying all the time and assures me he can get me a job teaching in the City of Boston. Boston is the highest paying city in Massachusetts at this time. George is a guy you either like or hate. I like him. His behavior borders on the self-destructive but it is always a dynamic few hours spent with him. One Saturday night we drive out for pizza. His car is parked right there at the platform at the time unit. George is fuming about the state of affairs with Japanese auto imports. It's off down Summer street we go to the docks at Castle Island in Southie where they unload the freighters. He drives right by the guard shack with the no trespassing sign hanging on the door and on to a tour of rows of off loaded Toyotas. On the way out, the guard is out of his shack now and he stops us. The guard has a shotgun. McGrimley: "Well, lad, it looks like it's off to the brig for us. But we've been there before, right?" "Maybe you, George, but not me," is the best I can muster up. George talks his way out of it again.
Every now and then I do not get to work in the time unit. At the opposite end of the platform from the weighing room, right next to the icehouse are three bays where parcel post is unloaded. Perry Weinberg is the boss here. Every so often if he is short of help and buried with mail, Big Moe sends a group of us down to dig him out. Perry survived WWII but lost both feet somewhere in France. Like Bob Maclean he has a very upbeat outlook on life. He has a tall stool that he leans back on and with the help of his crutches he balances himself and directs operations from a spot right outside a small office where he takes his breaks. We do not get long breaks with Perry because it is usually a hectic situation when we get there, so we just go like hell, clean the place up and leave. Perry is a West End Jew and talks Yiddish. I practice my Bavarian dialect on him and he tells me jewish jokes. "You know," Steve, he says, "the Irish and Italians came to Boston in waves, but not the Jews. They just came Yidl by Yidl". His regular crew is protective of Perry. They move his car around for him and make him as comfortable as possible while he is on duty. I probably only worked for him a half a dozen times through my years on the platform, well, we always said hello, he: "Was machst du?", and me : "hab i die Ehri!" I never realized till years later how well we had bonded, when one day he saved my bacon. But that happened much later.
There are a lot of decent bosses in the P.O. like Perry Weinberg. Some are men who graduated from college during the depression and the only place they could find work was here. With their education they were able to get promoted and after four or five years in the military in WWII, they returned with over ten years of government service to their credit. These men were the ones who ran the place in spite of various political hacks who appeared regularly as make believe bosses. They were decent men. Take Mr. Kelleher, for instance. He was generally called ' If you please Kelleher'. I don't know what his first name was. He worked the second floor but once in a while he showed up on the platform and when he gave an order it was always preceded by the words: " if you please." One night a gang of us were working for him and we were unloading a star route, forty foot trailer. This is the designation for a private transport that contracts with the Post Office to truck in mail regularly from certain locations. The driver of the tractor trailer backs his rig up to the platform and signs in with the supervisor in charge. This particular night it is 'If you please' Kelleher, who was a slightly built man with thick glasses. The back doors of the trailer are sealed so we have to wait for the driver to break the seal and open the doors. Then we take over. Now this particular driver starts swearing. First it's the f'-in seal that wont open; then it's the g-d ramp, and on it goes. He leans against the side of the trailer and as we unload it he continues his monolog. Right about now 'If you please' comes out of the office and gets wind of this guy. "Stop right now!" he says to us. Then he turns on the driver. Now what you have to know is that the star route driver is by contract obliged to unload his trailer with whatever help the Post Office may have available. 'If you please' turns on the driver and lays him out in spades. Things like: "These men are decent, hard working men, family men, Christians and do not have to listen to your obscene language." He explains to the driver that he is of a mind to send the men off on a coffee break and the driver can unload the mail by himself. The driver quickly and humbly apologizes and starts unloading the mail by himself. He is completely silent. One by one we join this poor bugger otherwise he would be there for a week. He completes the job with us and leaves in his now empty trailer. He says thanks to us before he leaves. The men, even though they have heard all the bad words over and over in their life time, have a great deal of silent respect for bosses like 'If you please.'
In the course of the years you get to know just about all the guys on the platform pretty well. It starts out working twelve hour shifts with them, listening to their life stories, taking or not taking their advice on race horses, going for ham and eggs with them, having a beer in Brown's with them while on the clock and keeping an eye out for Swifty Flanagan, meeting them by chance on the way to work in the Club Car and then saying the hell with work for the night, going to their kids weddings, bringing them into see Dave Dretler if they get into a legal jam. Stuff like that.
If a guy on the platform spots a traffic cop coming down Dorchester Avenue with a fist full of parking tickets, he gives the alarm and we are all spared a twenty dollar fine. Money has a specials terminology here: $5 is called a finif, $10 is a saw buck, $20 is a double saw buck, $100 is a c-note, $500 is half a yard and on it goes. A quarter is two bits, fifty cents is a half a buck, seventy-five cents is six bits.
You can talk to a guy who can answer your question on any kind of home-owners' project: carpentry, plumbing, electrical, masonry, in-door or out-door painting, roofing. Everybody is on the clock and glad to pass the time. One time when I was teaching high school, my principal asked me to coach the soccer team. Inner city kids like us played stick-ball, kick the can or baseball but never soccer. There was a guy on the platform who immigrated from England and over a cup of tea he told me every thing I needed to know.
As a time clerk you can sometimes help get a guy's request for a couple of days off approved by passing it along to a supervisor at the right time. The guys generally look out for one another. Later on when you ran into one who had bid a job upstairs it was like meeting some one you had gone to school with. There were all kinds of races and religions and although race wars were starting up in Boston over desegregation, we got along together pretty well. Take Charlie Quigley, for instance. They called him just 'Q'. Q was a big, heavy, black guy. He was like one of those Soviet weight lifters you would see in the Olympic games. What looked like fat was muscle. He had a used appliance business in Roxbury, repaired washers, dryers, refrigerators and sold and delivered them. My first year in the P.O. he wrestled a washer up three flights to my apartment in Jamaica Plain. Years of moving this stuff around had made him very strong. One night a guy in a big ford station wagon was stuck in the snow on Dorchester Avenue. Three of us could not budge him. We stopped pushing to catch our breath just as Q jumped off the platform. He told the driver to give it a little gas, put his shoulder to the wheel and off it went. I passed by Charlie on my way home the night the call came that my father had died. Q looked at me and said: "Somethin' bad happened, Steve, didn't it?" I answered: "Yea Q, but I'll be ok."
The platform was not short on eccentrics. Johnny Klokman was a big rawboned mail handler who was a gravedigger on the outside. You could picture him wrestling a corpse into the coffin or manhandling a coffin into the grave. Johnny took a lot of kidding about his outside job but it did not bother him at all. One reason for the kidding was the way he dressed. This was the time before Tony Ragucci, the union steward, negotiated the mail handlers uniforms and everyone wore old clothes on the platform where the work was sort of dirty. Except Johhny. He always wore leather dress shoes, a suit or a double-breasted suit jacket over a pair of slacks. The implication was grave robbing. As time went by it surprised no one when he showed up with a new outfit on. Some one would say: "Johnny had a burial today." There would be a chuckle and that was it. Colorful characters abound here.
While we are in the cemetery let's mention Sam Katz. Sam was one of those guys who is on the border between genius and insanity. He had at one time a good job in the financial district where his stenographic talents were amazing. At this time he had drifted into the madness area and was holding his own as a postal clerk. He would walk around reading a dual language French novel and after he finished a page he would tear it out and throw it away. I checked out his French from time to time. He was the real thing. One day I threw a 'comment ca va?' at him and he told me he had just made $250. He went over to Harvard Medical School on the way in to the P.O. and signed a deal whereby they would pick up his body when he died and transport it to their morgue free of charge and then give his wife $250 for the cadaver. Au Revoir, Sam.
On Tour I Nick DiStefano works parcel post in an area between the back wall of the platform and the railroad tracks. Sometimes I work with him until I go home at 3:30am. Sometimes he disappears for a couple of hours. After a while I figure it out. He disappears on Friday nights only, that is, around 1am Saturday morning. One Friday night there is a card game going on on Tour I and Nick is in on the action and there is a Polish guy named Stan playing. All of a sudden Nick gets up and says to Stan: "idu domoi." That's pretty close to Czech and means I'm going home. It also means I'll be working by myself for the rest of the night. Home for Nick is the North End and the reason he leaves for a few hours is that he has to set up his vegetable pushcart in the open-air market near Fanuel Hall in downtown Boston.
Fresh produce comes into Boston by truck and the big supper markets send their buyers down to the terminal to bid on the stuff and take what they want. What's left is for the little guys with pushcarts. The open-air market is a colorful Boston tradition. If you are even just a tourist it is worth stopping by of a Saturday morning. Guys like Nick set up their stands with the reddest of the tomatoes on top of their cart facing the potential buyer. If some one likes what they see and asks for a couple of pounds, Nick bends down and deals them the garbage from underneath the cart. Same thing with oranges, grapes, potatoes and the like. It is an old trick. It works on tourists but not on those Polish women from Chelsea or Southie who will start squeezing the goods before they pay. I've seen these women smell a cantaloupe and then shake it along side their ear. This tactic of course brings a howl from Nick, but the women howl back, they won't be fooled. All this is part of the show. Now you may think of a vegetable vender with a pushcart in the street as a low-income person. Think again. This guy Nick owns property in the North End, knows how to make a buck, and knows how to turn that first buck into many more. Once a guy like Nick makes a score, there is no stopping him.
Gambling is in the air in the P.O. and in the city at large. It is a well-run business in the North End. Guys play for a score that will empower them to become businessmen. And they will pick a business that they are familiar with in the city. A score means a sizeable win at a gambling venue. One possible venue for a score is the racetrack. There is a dog track here, Wonderland Park, in the city of Revere just minutes away from the P.O. There is a horseracing track, Suffolk Downs, also located in Revere. The mathematics of gambling at a race track go something like this: fifty-five percent of money bet must be returned to the bettors by law, five percent is for overhead and forty percent is for the owners profit. That means if you go to the track regularly you will end up with only fifty-five percent of the money you started with. There are a lot of mathematics-defying people around here. Take Joe Fortunato for instance. In 1955 Joe retired as a janitor. He lived in Boston and took the MTA to Suffolk every day for the rest of his life, which turned out to be 33 more years. In the course of his years at Suffolk he got to know everybody there from cashiers to trainers, stable boys to grounds keepers and also of course, jockeys and their ponies. In fact in 1990 when there was a giant remodeling and expansion of the track, they named the street leading into the grandstand Fortunato Way in honor of Joe and of his 90th birthday. Here's the bottom line: a guy on the platform was married to one of Joe's daughters and he told me that when Joe died at the age of 98 he left each of his four daughters $25,000 in cash. Now is that 55% of forty-five grand? I don't think so.
Here's the deal on the P.O. unions: there were two: the mail handlers' and the clerk-carriers'. The background was this: postal workers had a secure civil service job. The starting pay for a clerk in 1962 was $1.98 per hour or about $4,000 per year. Any time a contract was negotiated, the government's position was this: give them fringe benefits but no raises. The fringe benefits were good: 26 days of leave per year; this leave could be accumulated if not used and applied to total time served when figuring retirement; 13 days of sick leave per year, which could also be accumulated; free medical coverage. This was not a big deal in 1962, especially when you consider that practically every job came with vacations and medical coverage.
But membership in the unions grew and the unions kept up the pressure at contract negotiations through the years with some remarkable results. On the platform we had good union representatives. They were clerks or mail handlers, not salaried by the union, but who had won the right to negotiate with management while on the clock. When not on union business they did the regular work as others on the platform. Tony Ragucci was the mail handlers' steward. He spent all his time arguing with the men about different points in the next contract and by the time formal negotiations began, Tony had worked out a plan of attack. The union sponsored its own health plan, which included free dental coverage for members and their families. The carriers had uniforms so why not the mail handlers? They got them. The union reached an agreement with the P.O. that provided that land would be purchased and a fenced in parking lot with security guards would be made available to all P.O. employees at the SPA. A shuttle bus would run around the clock to bring employees from the parking lot to the SPA. The men on the platform were not too excited about this at first because they parked right in front of the platform anyway. Ragucci pointed out that this was illegal parking and it would be harder and harder to get away with and to have your own secure parking space in the heart of Boston was worth a raise of $1,500. Ragucci's parking lot became a reality. It was on A Street in Southie, directly across the Fort Point Channel from the platform.
The clerks' steward was a guy named George Rubin. George was like Ragucci in that he got the clerks on the platform what they needed, in terms of scheduled reporting times, schemes and hassled supervisors to approve leave that they had previously disapproved. There came a time when the fringe benefits were about as high as they could go and the push was for more money. Strikes by postal workers are illegal. But the illegal happened. The clerks union threatened to strike and the mail handlers' union agreed to go out with them. A group of clerks in New York City, in the Bronx, actually went on strike. The unions across the country promised to follow them. President Nixon stepped in, told the federal negotiators to grant pay raises and the threat of a national strike ended. We now had a nice job. In fact a clerk in the P.O. made more than a schoolteacher. People who used to ask me how come I was working in a place like the P.O., were now asking me if I could get them or their kid a job there.
Ragucci retired and had been succeeded as steward by a guy named Billy Quinn. Billy and I had started out as mail handlers together and Billy was a teacher in Boston too. He was also a vigorous opponent of forced bussing and a union activist in the schools. After the pay in the P.O. improved he left teaching and took over in the SPA as union steward. He was a very determined negotiator, especially in regards to winning members' grievances against management. Billy got into it pretty heavy with the brass on the fourth floor and they put a postal inspector named Luke Moran on his trail. They were hoping to catch Billy out of the building while on the clock. One Saturday night Billy dropped into the time unit, gave me his time card and told me he was going over to the postal garage on A Street to talk to a mail handler about a grievance and then he was going to the Irish Rover for supper. That was an Irish Pub in Dorchester about ten minutes drive from the SPA. He would be back in two or three hours. Would I hit his time card out and in for swing? Now no sooner did he drive away from the platform than Luke Moran comes out of the freight elevator looking for 'steward Quinn'. Luckily I spotted him before he got to the time unit and I hit Billy off the clock for the night, made out a request for emergency leave, signed it in Billy's name and dropped it in the working folder. Luke was up and down the platform after Billy and finally had him paged over the loud speaker throughout the building. When I heard the page I went over to Luke and told him Billy had left for the night. He demanded to see the signed request for leave form and then he left grumbling to himself. Billy called about an hour later and congratulated me on my cover up with the words: " I could rob a bank with a guy like you". Billy was at our retirement party and repeated the compliment to me. My Frau didn't think it was a compliment. A few years later I ran into Bill in down town Boston. He was dressed in a suit and tie and was now president of the mail handlers' union working out of an office in Washington, DC. He told me he was making $90,000 a year with an expense account and a secretary. We had come a long way from those $1.98 days on the platform. I was still a member of the mail handlers' health plan and was having trouble collecting on a very heavy surgery bill one of my kids had run up. Billy jotted down the facts and told me he would take care of it when he got back to DC. He said he'd give it top priority so I would not be tempted to rob a bank. Billy and me still talk with a Boston accent if you know what I mean.
When Ragucci's parking lot was opened, it was staffed by mail handlers around the clock. It was a good job and it went to the senior mail handlers on the tour. There were two on duty all the time and their only responsibility was to check that cars coming into the lot had an authorization sticker from the P.O. One time a clerk on Tour III did not return home after his tour of duty on Saturday night. The family checked around with relatives and friends and finally called the police. On Sunday afternoon the police showed up at the SPA, since this was the last place he had been seen. They came to our time unit and we went over the records from the time clock. Sure enough he had hit off the clock at 11:30pm. I had to call the mail handler on duty in the parking lot, Joe Vickey, and tell him to walk around the lot and look for a dead body in one of the cars. Sure enough Joe found the guy slumped over the wheel, dead of a heart attack. From then on every mail handler on duty in the parking lot shack had to make the rounds once during his tour and check for dead bodies.
Now one time I had to take a series of comprehensive exams at Boston University and I did not have enough time to go home every night. For two weeks I slept in my car in the P.O. parking lot. The very first night I told Joe, whom I had known by sight for years, that I would be sleeping in my car and not to report me as dead. Joe did as I asked and even arranged for the guy who took his place on his days off to do the same. Every thing worked out and I was grateful for the attention Joe had shown me so one night as I drove out of the lot I slipped him a fifth of whiskey and said thanks. After that a couple of weeks went by without my catching sight of Joe. I stopped by the guard shack one night on my way out of the lot and asked the mail handler on duty where Joe was. The guy told me: "Some arse hole gave him a bottle of whiskey and he went off on a spree. He's drying out now and should be back next week." I did not know Joe was a recovering alcoholic but I made a point of not giving whiskey out for favors any more.
There were some crazy people in the P.O. too. Now that word 'crazy' can be overworked but not in cases in point here. Take Barney Hall. The biggest problem for most employees was getting time off. You could call in sick or request emergency leave. If you did not report for duty and did not call in you were AWOL. If you requested leave but had already used up your yearly allowance, then too you were marked AWOL. Being classified as AWOL meant that the long drawn out process of being fired had begun. Medical evidence was a possible solution, a means of being excused for an unscheduled absence. Phony medical evidence was problematic. You could not always find a doctor ready to lie; you might get caught in the process, fined and then fired. One other possibility for being excused for an unscheduled absence was 'extenuating circumstances'; eg. sickness in the immediate family, a blizzard that made means of travel to the P.O. impossible or verifiable personal problems. Barney Hall and his wife worked on the 3nd floor sorting newspapers. Maybe reading all those newspapers like the National Enquirer gave Barney his big idea. This is how it played out: Barney was gone for a week. No call-in, just failed to show up for work. When he came back, he went to the time unit to get his time card and fill out a reason for absence form. Barney had been out of town. Way out. And no means of transportation back to the P.O. He had been taken to Mars in a flying saucer! Hold it right there! You've heard of the prank where a chimpanzee joins the peacetime army or something completely absurd gets a life because of the paper work train. Barney signed the standard absence form, a legal document used many times in a court of law in labor union grievances. At the bottom of this federal form is a caveat: $10,000 fine, imprisonment or both possible if false information is submitted. It is not the place of the clerk who collects the signed form to read or comment upon it. The immediate supervisor either approves or disapproves it. If disapproved, the employee may request the postal employees' union to appeal. The union is required by law to represent all employees who have a grievance, whether or not they belong to the union. Now the federal government cannot be sued but the union can be sued if they refuse outright to help any employee. You see what's coming? Instead of Barney being laughed out of town, the paper work starts to ferment. The newspapers get a hold of the story. Barney probably leaked it to them. This was also the time when the country was awash in flying saucer sightings. What was the outcome? Now first of all you have to realize that the P.O. does not like negative publicity. Postal thieves are dealt with privately. Then again, the best defense is said to be a strong offense. With the case dragging on, Barney disappeared again. This time for two weeks. To Mars again. This time with a witness. His wife. And now the National Enquirer prints story. Barney and his wife go on a lecture tour, appear on television, give interviews describing the flying saucer, the Martians, daily life on Mars and other wonders of space travel. By this time they had quietly separated from the P.O. They had a new source of income. What about the rest of us, the people who had worked with them? Well it was sort of like having some cousins who were nuts. They are not institutionalized or anything like that but the family just never talks about them. They are accepted as such. Then these crazies go public somehow! In the P.O., no one was surprised by the whole thing. The memory of Barney and his wife was just filed away under the heading of P.O. remarkables.
About this time I luck out. I get a job in the weighing room on the Platform. There are ninety bays at the platform where trucks can pull in. The first one you come to around the corner from Summer Street is reserved for the weighing room. Here's the set up. There is an entrance for employees and postal customers at the very corner of this rectangular building. There is a lobby with elevators and a financial section where the public can buy stamps, mail packages, etc. It is very busy because the businesses around the South Station use it to service their postage meters and do their postal business. Behind the counters is located the second-class mail section where newspaper and magazine accounts are managed. The stamp counters close to the public at 6pm. There is a lot of cash on hand as well as money orders and stamps, so there is a giant vault, probably ten feet by ten feet where everything gets locked up at eleven pm. This large room where the vault is located is called the financial section and connects through a locked door to the weighing room. Authorized personnel only. The weighing room handles permit mail and second-class mail. Newspapers are unloaded in the bay reserved for the weighing room, put on carts, pushed to the freight elevator and sent up stairs to be sorted. All second-class mail is logged in at its arrival time. Newspapers are sacrosanct, that is, a mail handler assigned to handle newspapers arriving at the weighing room may not be called away for any other work. He is a specialist. There are some heavy hitters out there waiting for their Wall Street Journal or such and if it is not in their mailboxes on time they will be on the phone to the Post Master's office. They get results.
The weighing room itself is about twenty feet by twenty feet. Small mailings of a hundred pounds or so in sacks are dragged in and left for the inside crew. These are a group of three or more clerks who will work all night in the room. The room is heated and has one chair. The boss is a Southie guy named Bill Sullivan. He sits in the chair and watches, answers questions about mailings, and receives visits from employees who want to get out of the cold. He is stern, good sense of humor and particular about who comes to visit. There is no loitering allowed by Bill.
Now here is how the mail is processed. First and third class mail can be sent with an imprinted number on the envelope instead of a stamp. The business sends a check to the P.O. to cover the cost of the mailing. The weighing room clerks weigh the entire mailing, calculate exactly the number of pieces received and the cost and check to make sure that the mailer has enough money deposited in his account to cover the cost. While mailings of a hundred pounds or so can be handled by the inside crew, it is the outside crew that handles the larger ones. The platform floor just outside of the weighing room has a floor scale for weighing cartloads of mail and a scale in the street on to which trucks can drive to be weighed. The trucks are weighed full, unloaded, then weighed empty and the pieces of mail involved can then be calculated. There is some heavy work involved outside and the weather can be tough. Seniority picks the inside crew. Stations in life could be categorized as being either on the inside crew or the outside crew. I am on the outside crew. So are George Hilliard, Bobby Knoll, Bob Eaves, and Soupy Campbell Jr. We are classified clerks. There are four mail handlers: George Harris, Jim Babineau, Soupy Campbell Sr. and Billy Owens. Here is the point about assignment to the weighing room: there is money involved, The First National Bank might drop $50,000 worth of first class permit mail on us. Maybe it's dividend checks. Advertisers have huge mailings that are time dated. There is no room for screw-ups. If Bill Sullivan has his hand picked, experienced crew on duty he is happy because everything goes smoothly and fast. If any boss should try to take one of his crew to work another job, Bill gets up out of his chair, all six foot two of him, and raises holy hell. We're safe. One other thing, the clerk in the financial section who checks the accounts on the permit mailings coming into the weighing room, has the responsibility of locking up the vault at 11pm when Tour III goes home. That means that the guys working in the weighing room have access to the financial section all night. That means four or five big desks where you can have your supper and spread out the newspaper and relax in peace and quiet. And no one can surprise you because they have to ring a bell to get you to open the locked door. There are all the necessary office supplies there also if you have need of them. I am now a full time student at Northeastern University.
I hit the clock at 3:06pm during the week and head for the weighing room. En route, though, I jump off the platform and move my car out of the way of the mail trucks to a spot further down Dorchester Avenue beyond the platform but still within easy reach if the traffic police come and start giving out tickets. Once in the weighing room I check with Bill Sullivan to find out what mail is left over from Tour II. The clerk who runs the accounting machine for permit mail is a guy named Frank Lemore. He is a WWII veteran and has a kid in high school who is a good all-around athlete. In the course of the evening we are going to be brought up to date on his kid's progress. As soon as the newspapers start coming in and Frank sees the headlines he will deliver his daily sermon starting with the words: "Our leaders really suck!" These are the times when the Vietnam war is starting to get ugly. This is before the Tet Offensive, before the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the press, before the country knew about the use of agent orange. Frank's kid was a senior and Frank could see his kid getting drafted and ending up over there. My army buddy, Magoun, was in Saigon in 1958 and when we were at the Presidio of Monterey, he had told me that it was a great duty station and we should all reenlist and request assignment over there. When we hooked up again as Czech linguists in Vienna in 1962, he still thought about reenlisting for embassy duty in Saigon. He married a Viennese beauty, who changed his mind about Saigon and now he is at UCLA. I will not be able to get his take on the scene over there for thirty years. In the mean time my reading is confined to Bertold Brecht, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and my conversations with my P.O. buddies are not focused on foreign relations. At home there are three kids, my wife, and a house to take care of. There is no time for reading about world affairs.
The WW II vets in the weighing room kid Bob Maclean and the other guys from Korea about the first war America did not win. The peace symbol that the hippies in San Francisco use is called by a weighing room clerk named Barney, 'the footprint of the American chicken.' The secretary of Defense, McNamara, says we will be out of there in a year but we hear loud and clear what Lemore says at the same time. By 6pm the amount of incoming mail slows down. It is Friday and for me a night to relax with the boys. It's off to Brown's will Hilliard, Knoll and George Harris for supper and a couple of beers. Our buddies will mind the store and send for us if things get busy.
What do four guys in their thirties talk about in a tavern? 'Of shoes and ships and ceiling wax…', it's a pure delight. A great sandwich, they call them grinders here, a cold Naragansette beer, a cigar and good company. George Harris is always upbeat, a soft-spoken joker, never a discouraging word. Bobby Knoll has such an even disposition that as time goes by you can't help but notice that his personality is out of the typical. He was in the submarine service. The navy selects sailors for assignment on subs on the basis of an even temperament. If you ever meet a veteran of the subs you will see what I mean. George Hilliard is a ball of fire. These guys are all from Southie. George is a short, powerfully built guy. Very bright. Street smart too, like most of his buddies. George Hilliard is an army vet. When he was in the service he played in the US Army Band. He even looks like Paddy Maloney of The Chieftains. Now you might think that this is no big deal, the army band. Here's the story: the draft has been going on for years; draftees are most likely to end up in the infantry; then it's advanced infantry training; then it's twelve months in the field, in fox-holes, firing howitzers, marching around, etc. The US Army Band is a desirable out. A million guys have the same idea and only the very, very best make the cut. The bass is George's specialty but he will teach me guitar.
George had a construction company on the outside but it folded. He now does jobs here and there. Like this week he and Bobby Knoll finished painting the windows of a five storey factory in Southie. George posed as a painter, got the contract, hired the scaffolding and did his first-ever painting job. After they hooked up the scaffold, the owner told them he never saw painters start on the street floor. George explained to the owner that it was the latest idea of those efficiency experts. George did not know how to operate the hoisting mechanism. But that night in the P.O. he found some one who used to be a professional painter and learned the ropes. When he finishes telling this story he lets out a great bellow of a laugh. He had out foxed them again. Knoll just grins.
In the P.O. you find men of all trades and skills. They are on the clock and if you get to know them or are recommended by someone, they will gladly share their expertise. These guys have a serious side too. George Hilliard and Bobby Knoll have a buddy named Paul Maguire in Vietnam. They grew up together and now they haven't heard from him in a while. But it is time to drink up and head back. This place is informal but these guys have a routine. Each buys a round. You leave with four beers under your belt. Now it's back to the platform for four more hours and maybe some overtime.
Round about eight o'clock people star dropping into the weighing room. They first say hello to Bill Sullivan. I've never actually seen Bill throw anybody out but somehow people know when they are not welcomed with Bill. A lot of times they just like to tell Bill what they are up to. He's a good listener. One night the freight elevator operator drops in to talk to Bill. He's a Black and has known Bill for thirty years. He sits on a mail cart by the window and lights a cigarette. In comes Stretch Perineau with his take on the days news. Stretch always mentions his West Indian bloodline. Stretch doesn't stay long. Right after him, a new guy named Stanley Allyne, another Black, is passing through and he catches the last of Stretch's take on Vietnam. He explains that if the French Foreign Legion could not take out the Cong, no one could. Stanley also somehow gets to mention his blood line. French, via Martinique. He gets no encouragement and leaves very soon. At this point the black elevator operator gets up, puts out his cigarette, turns to Bill and says: "You know, Bill, it's getting' to the point around here where I'm the only plain old nigger in the place.
But sometimes they want to talk to Dave Dretler. Dave works in the financial section with Frank Lemore. Like all the other ethnics in this story the Jews are just plain remarkable. Dave is a Jew from the old West End. A lawyer. Accidents, divorces, you name it, Dave's your man. Dave has his name printed on his business card with the telephone number of his down town Boston office on it. Underneath that number is the weighing room number with the note: 3pm to 11:30pm. Dave sits at a desk behind Lemore. There is an empty chair beside the desk reserved for his customers. You sit down there, tell Dave your tale and he tells you what to do. Most of the time there is no charge. If he has to do things back at his office for you or appear at your divorce hearing or such, then there is naturally his legal fee. A kid ran a red light and broadsided me on my way to work one day. Smashed in the side of my car real bad. The kid had no insurance. Dave told me what to do. You get it? You get your legal problems taken care of while you are at work, while you are on the clock. Everybody knows Dave from sweepers to bosses.
Sometimes instead of Brown's I take a break in the swing room upstairs over the weighing room. That's the place I told you about where Pete Dinneen broke up the card game. Well it's a big room, lockers on two walls, five big tables with benches on each side. On Tour III there is a lot of fast paced action there. A card game, an order of gourmet food from the North End being devoured by a crew, guys glad to get off their feet, noise, shouts, laughter, heavy clouds of cigarette smoke. I play chess up there with a guy named John Gell. John's father was a missionary in Africa and John grew up there, spent a couple of years attending Berkley out in California where he got hooked on chess and forgot his studies. He is a business head, owns rental property in Cambridge and works in the P.O. for retirement and health insurance purposes. When I was stationed in Bavaria I played chess with a German who had spent five years in a Soviet POW camp in Siberia. He had spent those years playing chess with his Russian guards. I thought I was pretty good but John Gell always smokes me. He says things like this as you play: "You don't want to move there, because in three moves the game will be over. Take that move right back and think of something else." John would rather teach you to be a better player than beat you. He has something of the grace of a missionary about himself.
There are other categories of employees besides regulars and subs. There are temporary workers called temps. These are people whose schedules are very flexible as determined by the mail volumes. If the mail is light they will be sent home. They are used on the platform during the busy hours on Tour III, say from 4pm to 8pm or 10pm. The temps on the platform are a high-spirited gang. They are married guys with a lot of bills, trying to make ends meet. They will work their four hours on the platform, Big Moe will give them a good break and they will make their own fun. On the outside they are policemen, firemen, schoolteachers, you name it. They treat their job on the platform as a night out with the boys; joking around, a game of cards, cigars and sometimes, serious business. They do not drink. Some of them signed on to pay for a refrigerator or pay off a loan and now ten years later they are still at it. Well if they had four or five years in the military, that counts toward a retirement pension from the government and their incentive now is to hang around for a few more years.
Two temps are assigned to the weighing room. Izzy Fine and Bob Eaves. Izzy is a Jew from Southie. All of these neighborhoods in Boston have a variety of ethnic groups in them. Southie is predominantly Irish but there are Poles, Lithuanians, Jews and others there too. Izzy Fine is about five foot ten and weighs in about two twenty five pounds. A lot of that weight was muscle in his younger days. He played football for Southie High and established the fact some Jewish boys are very good with their fists. He is now a policeman for the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, a fiefdom unto itself. Sometimes visitors to the weighing room are looking for Izzy to fix a traffic ticket for them. Bill Sullivan gives Izzy all the room he needs to operate. One night after a call to the Registry a grateful speeder asks Izzy what kind of cigarettes he smokes. Izzy's reply: "Scotch!" One night I'm putting my German books away and Izzy comes by. He tells me he studied a foreign language once. Hebrew. He says the Rabbi finally told him to try something else.
The other temp, Bob Eaves, is a work of art. Bob is the building inspector for the city of Chelsea located across the Charles River from Boston. Chelsea is a story in itself. Briefly, it has a veterans hospital on a hill overlooking the Charles River basin and a lot of industry and tenement houses. Some nice residential areas also. The Mob runs Chelsea. Bob Eaves is a handsome, suave guy, powerfully built with a great sense of humor. When I was looking for a house to buy, Bob offered to get me one in Chelsea through his connections with HUD, the federal program for urban development. When I needed a new car, Bob offered me the opportunity to get my old car crushed into a block of metal and dumped into the Atlantic Ocean for $100; whereupon I could report my car as stolen and get the insurance money. This was possible through his connections with the Mob. I declined. However, on a tour of down town Chelsea with him, I did buy a brand name suit for my wife for $75 in a store with boarded up windows containing a slue of top of the line clothing items, all brought there courtesy of the Mob's hijacking division. Bob's son is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and his exact duty station in early 1970 is unclear and Bob is worried. Come to find out, when his son got back to Hawaii on leave, that the boy was flying bombing missions in Vietnam. He was bombing Hanoi. Bob did the same thing thirty years before. And that brings back to mind that remark by Brendan Behan.
Things are really rolling for me now. The weighing room is perfect for my studies during the week and weekends with McGrimley in the time unit are good enough. One more semester at Northeastern University and I will have a BA in modern languages, German, French and Russian. In the mean time I met an interesting guy here who is getting his degree in education at the same time as I do. He is a temp. His name is Phil Martel. The first time we worked together we were unloading a truck with small parcels. It was his first night on the job. Now there is this security guard called 'the admiral'. He is a Navy vet, probably around forty and he gets a kick out of coming up behind a new guy and goosing him. The new guy, first night on the job, needs the job most likely, knows you can fired for fighting, usually just stares in surprise. The admiral plays this trick on Phil. Phil wheels around, grabs the admiral by the throat and crotch and dumps him off the platform. Now it's the admiral's turn to be surprised. Of course there is a bunch of guys looking on and they all give Phil a big cheer. We hit it off pretty good. He has some very well defined opinions on a wide range of subjects and we have great sessions on politics, religion, art and all those fascinating facets of our literate world. He is a violent anti-clerical. All our discussions are over coffee. Incisive thinking and beer drinking are a mismatch according to Phil. He lives with a sweetheart of a redhead in an apartment in Southie overlooking the ocean. She's pregnant.
With all the time I spend in the financial unit and the time unit studying, it not surprising that people know I am a student. Well they know if you have legal problems you see Dave Dretler; if you have a traffic ticket, you see Izzy Fine; now I'm on the list, as a translator. Once in a while I get called up stairs to translate something for the dead letter section. This is an office on the fourth floor where they open mail with unreadable addresses and try to figure out from the contents where the letter either comes from or is supposed to go. If the letter is in German they call me. The dead letter office is a special place. These letters could be just as well thrown out but the P.O. has a half a dozen of its most handicapped people working this mail. There is no pressure on these people and to employ them like this has to be considered as a corporal work of mercy by the P.O.
Fortunately my bosses are tolerant of my activities. The only thing Big Moe says is: "What good does it do to know how to talk German?" I will spend my teaching career trying to answer that question for budget cutters on the school committee. The only guy I try to avoid having to see me over the books is Joe D. When he comes into the financial section for his nightly break with coffee and the newspaper, I silently put my books away and slip out back onto the platform. Joe doesn't stay very long. One night at closing time, I'm standing on the platform and a car pulls up. It's Joe D's ride home. As he passes by me in the shadows, he pauses and looks in my direction and says : "Hey kid! If you don't get that degree, it aint my fault." I think these guys are sort of rooting for me. Bill Sullivan is my corner for sure.
Once in a while people come looking for me and Bill calls me out of the financial section. Phil Martel he sends on in. One night Charlie Diaz comes into the weighing room looking for me. Charlie is a guy I went to Northeastern with in the Engineering College. He got a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a 2nd Lieutenant's commission in the Army. We hooked up in Germany when he was a Captain of an infantry company on maneuvers along the Czech border. I was working at that time in a radio outpost on a mountain top in the Bavarian Forest. There was one good restaurant in the nearby village. Its owner was a young German, one of those Herrenvolk types. He lorded it over the waitresses and the cooks. I meet Charlie there. His jeep driver waits outside while we eat. Charlie's company is on maneuvers so he is dressed in his combat fatigues, with a carbine and a 45 pistol strapped to his side. Charlie hangs the carbine on the back of his chair. We put in our order with the waitress. I know all the help pretty well. Then the owner comes rushing over to our table, yelling that no firearms are allowed in his restaurant. Charlie ignores him and takes his 45 out of its holster, pulls the receiver back and loads a round into the chamber. All this under the owner's nose. The super man blanches white and retreats out of the place, fast. The help gets quite a kick out of seeing their martinet boss run out of his own place. Then we dine. Charlie is going to make the Army a career and is home on leave. He is headed for Vietnam. I know its bad over there, but I don't know how bad. I tell Bill Sullivan what's going on, hit off the clock and Charlie and I close down Brown's. The next night Charlie spends in my home. My wife cooks him a Wiener schnitzel and the three of us reminisce about our good times in Germany. We decide right then and there to meet in Munich a year from now when he should be rotated back state side and I will be finished with school. It never happened that way. The next time the three of were together was at his military burial. He was twenty-nine years old.
The months are flying by now. My buddy Phil Martel and his red head have gotten married and they have a son named Scot. They came down with the baby to my place and we celebrated. I gave them our infant's crib. Phil signed a contract to teach out in a town in western Massachusetts. History is his specialty. "If they don't have a strong head of department out there, I'll take over and make it my job," says old hot head Phil. And his parting shot: "And if my son were 18 years old, we would move to Canada before I'd see him going off to kill and be killed in Vietnam." The red head looks at him in awe. I do too, sometimes. Incisive thinking is his trademark and sometimes it's chilling, the things he comes out with. And he means every word he says. Red would go with him to the North Pole. I know that for sure. Her parents live in Boston and whenever they come for a visit he shoots over to the P.O. Bill Sullivan sends him into the financial section and off we go to the cafeteria for a pow-wow over coffee.
George Hilliard is now instructing me on how to jack up a garage and pour concrete under it. This one of those do it yourself home projects that I can undertake later, after a thorough schooling from an expert, on the clock. Now that my undergraduate studies are coming to an end, George has started giving me guitar lessons in the financial section. Bill Sullivan has retired and the new boss is a guy named Charlie Levangie. Guitar lessons in the financial section are OK with Charlie but no card playing.
Charlie is a veteran of WWII, combat engineers in Germany. Charlie married late in life. He has no children. His wife is a retired army nurse. Charlie is a gentleman from head to toe; doesn't drink, smoke or swear and never raises his voice to anyone. What is unusual about this is the fact that he grew up in a very tough neighborhood in a town just north of Boston. He played baseball for the local semi-pro team, catcher, hung about with a bunch of tough hombres, but none of their mannerisms rubbed off on him. Charlie is very conscientious. Here is his war story:
"We combat engineers were many times with the very first troops entering a German city. We had to blow up obstacles, blockades, buildings and stuff like that. In Frankfurt, while the fighting in the streets was going on, we had orders to go into the Deutsche Bank, blow the safe and check the vault for valuables like bar gold. I was a staff sergeant and happened to be the ranking NCO on the job. What happened when we blew the safe was unbelievable. Hundreds of bank notes filled the air with all the dust and smoke. We were all flabbergasted and started stuffing money into our pockets. Some of it was useless Reichsmarks but then we started finding some serious stuff. There were, laying all around, negotiable USA Treasury notes in denominations of $10,000. I picked up two and put them in my pocket. The other soldiers did the same. There was another sergeant in our unit there, Codder was his name, and he pocketed ten of these Treasury notes. About two weeks later we were retooling about twenty miles behind the lines when I got called to meet with the CO of our battalion. The major told me that intelligence had learned that there were $1,000,000 worth of Treasury notes in that vault in the Deutsche Bank where my unit was operating. My men were to place any of these notes in their possession in an envelope and drop it in the CO's mailbox. No names, no questions asked. If any soldier is later found with a Treasury note in his possession he would be court marshaled. Well, I delivered the message, put my two notes in an envelope and did as ordered. Most of the men did the same. Sergeant Codder, the one who had ten of them, kept his. We sailed home on the same troop ship and he showed them to me when we docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I saw him put them in his duffle bag and he walked down the gangplank just ahead of me. No one checked his bag. That was $100,000 cash in 1945! After that I never saw him or heard from him again." When one of the guys finished telling a war story like this, well, there was silence all around. There was nothing anyone could add or say to a story that was perhaps the most amazing thing the speaker had ever witnessed in his entire life. You know what I mean?
OK, I got my BA and a job. Instructor of German at a junior college 30 miles from Boston. Two classes that meet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. They call me professor at the college. Wow! I also sign up for the MA program at Boston University. Busy, man, busy. Getting enough sleep is the problem for me at this point. I get four hours at home and have learned to nap for forty-five minutes in the P.O. I sleep in the vault in the financial section. When you are sleep deprived, you can get forty winks just about anywhere. When I head for my home in the suburbs it is late, after midnight. When I come to a red light in those sleepy towns south of Boston I just stop, look left and right and continue through the red light. Time, man, time! I get caught. Three times within three months. The third time means I will lose my license. With this car of mine I am one up on Zorba in the catastrophe thing. A neighbor who is a policeman explains that I can fill out the back of the traffic ticket, take it to the district court house and request a 'show cause hearing' with the judge. I may then argue that I need my car to support my family. It may or may not work. It depends upon the judge. OK, off to the courthouse. Once inside I am told that my request will be handled by the clerk of court. I know what a clerk is. I am one of a thousand in the P.O. So I want to see the big guy, the judge, right? Wrong. The clerk of court is the big man. Watch this: First of all his name is Sullivan, one of my own. I have a chance. I plead my case. He asks where I work in Boston. I tell him the Post Office, the SPA. He asks me if I know Larry Martin. It's like Saint Peter's case, "Do you know the Nazarene?" I look the clerk right in the eye and guess, "Yes, I have met Mr. Martin and I have to say he is the most respected man in the Post Office." Good guess. Stupendous guess. This guy, Mr. Clerk of Court, is Larry Martin's bosom buddy. The Democratic State Committee connection. They both raise gray hounds. My three tickets are deep sixed by his honor, I now have a clean driving record, only from now on I am to wait until the light turns green. "And say hello to Larry from me!" Hell, I'll give Larry a kiss from you.
But let's get back to my hide out. I have my own little corner in the financial where I study and leave all my dictionaries and reference materials. I have the same routine: Tuesdays and Wednesdays off from the P.O., other week days in the weighing room, week ends in the time unit with big George.
George continues to be his old controversial self. On weekends he is now acting boss on the platform. His first day in his new position he gets into an argument with the motor vehicle boss. The motor vehicle service is a separate fiefdom and the platform boss needs their cooperation to get trucks to haul away the outgoing mail. McGrimley's style leads to an impasse right away. The motor vehicle service boss is a little Italian guy from the North End. George picks him up by the seat of the pants and the scruff of the neck and throws him on top of the outgoing mail in question. George's first day as boss is also his last day. But the fall out does not end with George's termination as supervisor. This Italian guy feels himself publicly humiliated and lets it be known that he is going to get a 'contract' out on McGrimley. This is the time before Mario Puto's book was published but everyone here knows what a 'contract' is.
The desegregation issue in the Boston Public Schools is heating up and my buddy McGrimley is right in the middle of it. He has become the campaign manager for a woman from Southie named Louise Day Hicks, who is running for School Committee. One Saturday night George leaves the time unit for a political caucus at the home of Mrs. Hicks. It is 7pm. I am to hit him out to lunch at 8 pm and in from lunch at 8:30 pm. At 9 pm he phones me with a: "Did you hit me out to lunch, lad?" Me: "Yes, at 8 pm and you're back on the clock 8:30." George: "That's too bad. I've been locked up here at the police station on Broadway since 7:30. Got into it with one of our own in uniform." This is a very serious situation, requiring secrecy because of McGrimley's enemies; and swift legal action to spring him. After a tense 24-hour period of sweating out my job, things turn out OK. George's brother is a savy lawyer and he gets big brother out of the slammer in Southie quickly and I cover the tracks in the P.O.
Mrs. Hicks' campaign is successful and later she goes on to campaign far a seat in the U.S. Congress. George is with her all the way. One Sunday afternoon we are sitting in the time unit and McGrimley is beaming. Mrs. Hicks has won a seat in Congress. The phone rings. A friend informs George that Mrs. Hicks has appointed a businessman from the North End as her congressional aide in DC. George is wild. He's on the phone to her office. George to me: "I gave her 5 G's for her campaign and she appoints that Guinea as her aide and not me!" He gets through to Mrs. Hicks, presents his case and listens. Hangs up. George (soto voce): "The Guinea gave her 50 G's."
But George thunders on unnerved. He is active in the Boston Teachers Union and has decided to run for its president. Now there is a prohibition about postal employees campaigning for public office and it is not clear if it applies to a union of municipal employees. George's enemies are planning to leak word to postal authorities about Georges plans. George gets wind of this and hires a biplane to fly up and down the Fort Point Channel along side the platform trailing a banner reading: "McGrimley for President".
Big Moe is still running the platform. He knows I got my degree and one day he's doing a crossword puzzle and asks me for the German word for the number 4, with five letters. Well, the word is 'vier', only four letters. I take a lot of flak about this, you know, '…he's going to college for German but he can't count to four yet…', but come to find out later, while researching to save my honor, that the crossword abbreviation Gr does not mean German but Greek.
Life in the weighing room is about the same as always. Hillard's buddy, Paul Maguire, is back from Vietnam, honorable discharge for medical reasons and working with us on the outside crew as a sub clerk. Paul is a natural leader. One night I'm unloading a truck full of sacks with George Hilliard and Bobby Knoll. Paul comes to help and starts telling us how to separate the sacks. Bobby looks at George and asks: " Did you make Paul the boss here all of a sudden?" We all laugh but Paul cannot help himself. We end up doing it his way.
Lemore still starts every day with his speech about our leaders. His kid is now out of high school and in basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. What used to make us smile to ourselves when we first heard him rip into our leaders in Washington, now brings no smiles. Even Barney, the guy who invented the joke about the footprint of the American chicken, no longer criticizes the student demonstrations. He does not have a son in infantry training but he has a daughter in college demonstrations. And we have learned that college demonstrations can be fatal. The Kent State shooting to death of four unarmed college students by the National Guard is only months old.
Barney is an interesting guy. He was born on the same street as I was in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. Although he is about as old as some of my six sisters, he never knew any of them. Ma sure kept those girls under wraps. But let me tell you about Barney. Barney was 18 years old on December 7, 1941. He and his buddy Pat McCann went down to join up the next day. They were refused. The problem was they had committed a felony. He and Pat had stolen a car when they were 16 years old. The police caught them, the car was returned undamaged to the owner but they had been booked, released and put on probation. They were not eligible for military service. Outside of going to jail, not being able to join the service was the worst thing that could happen to a young guy. Now in Jamaica Plain there was a political dynasty named Craven. The parish priest, acting on behalf of the parents, marched the boys down to Craven's office. Craven then took the boys to the police station and after he had been closeted with the chief for a long time the boys were called in. It was winter and a kerosene stove was heating the chief's office. The boys' felony records went into the fire. The next day they joined the US Army Air Corps. They both became bombardiers on the highly expendable B-17's. Pat died in a raid on the German city of Nuremberg. What happened was that because of bad weather the bombs were not dropped on Nuremberg, but on a little village twenty miles northeast of it named Lauf. Pat's plane went down on the way back. The village was wiped out, although some people survived, like my wife, who was six years old and visiting her grandmother there at the time of the raid. Whose take on this scene here do you like, Voltaire's or Brendan Behan's?
But let's get back to Barney. Barney flew bombing raids over 'the hump' into China. The veterans normally did not talk much about their wartime experiences. Well, they would tell funny stories like Barney's air raid on a Chinese city occupied by the Japanese. The underground had radioed to the Americans the exact location of the Japanese headquarters building in the city. Barney saw the bombs hit the building but because of the steep roof they caromed off and destroyed the building next door. Mission a failure? No. The follow up report by the under ground was that the building next door was a whorehouse and the Japanese commanders were all inside there. Barney's B24 eventually went down over Burma. He parachuted out in time but hurt his back on landing in the jungle. Anti Japanese headhunters lugged him out to an American landing strip for evacuation.
Guys like Charlie Levangie and Barney were straight talkers. No embellishments to their reminiscences. Once after we got Charlie going on his Deutsche Bank story, Barney brought in some souvenirs to the weighing room. On his squadrons missions into China he had taken photographs of the formation from his B24. This was of course against regulations. The pictures were very clear, blue skies, close to the other planes and then he would identify the ones that did not return. One photo showed a B24, again very close by, that had just been hit, wing disintegrating and starting to fall out of the formation. Of course he knew the crew of that plane personally.
So here is the story of two kids who started out as Juvenile delinquents in Boston, got a break from the law and ended up decorated war heroes. Another thing about Barney: he was flying the hump with some guys from Brooklyn who knew how to make a buck smuggling. The price of cigarettes and whisky was very high and the crews were in a position to make profitable sales. Barney came home with ten grand. He put five in GM stock and bought a gas station with the other five. His back injuries from the parachute jump into the jungle of Burma forced him to retire, so to speak, to the P.O. The thought of Barney never fails to bring a smile to my face. We were born in a poor neighborhood and Barney was an orphan. An Italian family had adopted this blond, blue eyed little boy and raised him through the years of the depression. When he sold his gas station he bought a home in an affluent suburb and raised his family there. His daughter was an honor student at Boston University. From his neighborhood of doctors and lawyers, Barney brown bagged it to the P.O. for twenty years. Just a nice success story out a seemingly hopeless beginning. By the way, Barney was his last name. Imagine what it must have been like for him; fighting for America in WWII with a first name of Adolph!
This would be a good spot to mention another buddy and a WWII veteran. Jack Smith. A giant of a man and, as usual, endowed by his creator with the gentlest of dispositions. Jack was eighteen when he glided into Holland with General James Gavin and as part of Montgomery's miscalculated operation Market Garden. A DAV with a lot of seniority, Jack has a special job. He hangs out on the fourth floor waiting for an emergency call dealing with mailboxes around the greater Boston area. Say for instance, some one crashes into a mailbox and knocks it over. Then Jack is your man to get it and bring it back to the platform or even up to the fourth floor if it is not too big. Some nights he is on the go for eight hours and some nights there are no emergencies at all. Jack has roaming rights. First of he hits the clock at the P.O. garage which is on A Street in Southie about a mile from the SPA. This is so he can sign out a P.O. truck and drive it over to the SPA and park it at the platform until it is needed. Now once in a while a new supervisor comes along and decides that Jack should be sorting mail on the fourth floor until an emergency call comes in. This gets Jack's goat and when he finally breaks away, he cannot resist stopping by the weighing room and phoning this supervisor and anonymously telling him that he sucks. This is hilarious because Jack was born and raised in New York City, in the Bronx. He is the only one in the building with that distinctive, easily recognizable accent.
Jack is a good friend of George Hilliard and his ability to legally roam over the entire Metropolitan Boston area makes it very convenient for our extra curricular activities on the platform. Sometimes Jack finds me out in my study nook and we talk. He doesn't spend so much time on his deadly adventure with the 101st Airborne Division, although he did say that at one point General Gavin jumped into their foxhole and briefed the men on the situation. He rather likes to talk of his comrades in arms, living and dead. He goes back to the Bronx yearly and visits the graves of the men who served with him. He has a light side too. On a quiet night when he has a pick up in Dorchester, he will gather me, Hilliard and an Irish guy from the fourth floor, named John Whelan, and off we go to The Irish Rover. Time for music, dancing and a beer. Whelan is a regular there, knows the clientele and talks Irish with the bartenders. He sings like a lark and the band will ask him to do a number before he leaves. It's fun to travel with a celeb.
Nothing is static in the P.O. New technology is being installed gradually and new, more efficient ways of routing the mail are devised. Paul Maguire makes regular and applies for a job as supervisor. This involves a hearing and interview before a board of senior bosses. One interviewer asks Paul what makes him think he can handle a position where he will have to supervise thirty postal clerks. Paul says that if he was able to lead 250 infantry men around Vietnam for 12 months and bring most of them home again, then he surely will have no problems with thirty postal clerks. Paul gets the job. Paul is dynamite. He is flat out very bright and goes right up the ladder of promotions. Before I leave the P.O. he has Larry Martin's job of running the whole shebang.
His last night as a clerk on the platform, Paul and I go out for dinner. Paul is a Dorchester boy so down Dorchester Avenue we go in his car all the way out to Fields Corner and site of The Irish Rover. It's a quiet night there, no music, just the regulars at the bar and a few couples in booths around the place. Paul is newly married and when I ask him if there is a little Maguire on the way yet, he tells me a grim fact. He has been to the Veterans Administration Hospital for a check up and they sent him down to the big military hospital outside of Washington, DC, The Walter Reed Army Hospital. In Vietnam Paul was doused with a chemical called agent orange. He will have to undergo surgery and kidney treatment, dialysis, for an indefinite period of time. The prognosis is unclear at this point but Paul is not about to father a child with his life in the balance. We were at it a long time and when I get back to the weighing room, Bob Eaves meets me with the news that Big Moe started looking for me just after Paul and I took off. Moe is kind of bent out of shape. I tell Moe of Paul's report from the military doctors and everything is OK, back in proper perspective. You can talk to Moe.
George Hilliard also becomes a boss and is put in charge of collections. When you drop a letter in a mailbox there is a list of times on the box indicating when your letter will be picked up and brought to the P.O. George is in charge of seeing to it that theses collections are made on time. Perry Weinberg's job has been eliminated; Perry gets a real sit down job upstairs on the fourth floor in a department called employee relations. His old gang misses him. Perry's old office on the end of the platform next to the icehouse is turned over to George Hilliard. It quickly becomes a meeting place for our gang.
There is a strange phenomenon connected with first times doing something. For instance, there is one legal parking place on Dorchester Avenue in front of the P.O. It is a parking meter. My very first day of work at the post office, it happened to be empty when I drove by, so I parked there. That never happened again in thirty years. But these first time happenings can be bizarre. Take George's first holiday as a supervisor. It was a Columbus Day. There was only one mail collection in downtown Boston. George had to work because he was the junior supervisor at the SPA. He sent Bobby Knoll to the garage to check out a truck to do this one collection and told him to take his time. In fact George was put in charge of the entire postal district for that day. All other supervisors had the day off and there was only a skeleton crew on duty. All branch post offices were closed. I had to work that day too, and I was having coffee with George and in Perry's old office, kidding him about the days when he was a sub-clerk working the on the outside crew with me and Bobby and Bob Eaves and the other guys and now today he was in charge of the entire postal district. Then the phone rings. It is unbelievable. There is a prison about twenty miles south of Boston in a town called Walpole. A bank robber locked up there has an apparent attack of appendicitis. He is rushed to the nearest hospital, which is in the town of Norwood, right near Boston. His girl friend is there in the emergency room, dressed as a nurse. When the robber is wheeled in, she slips him a gun and they take off in her car. The pursuit and manhunt include state police helicopters, which spot a postal truck in a drive way of a residential house in Dedham, a town right next to Boston. The police land, surround the house and at the same time call the postmaster to find out if there is an authorized postal truck on the road that holiday. The postmaster, that supreme commander of all postal supervisors, whose picture hangs on the wall of every local post office, a person appointed to that lofty position by the most powerful politicians in our nation's capitol, and a person whom a regular postal employee will never meet face to face, is rousted out of his holiday quiet by the state police. He's the one who calls George while we are having coffee in Perry's old office. George tells the PM that there are no post office vehicles authorized out in the suburbs and in fact all vehicles are in the garage on A Street in South Boston, duly accounted for. George hangs ups, looks at me and says: "How long has Bobby been gone?" Bobby had stopped in at his brother-in-law's birthday party in Dedham on his way back to the P.O. garage and got to meet the state police chief who had his gun drawn and pointed at Bobby when he left brother-in-law's. But like I pointed out earlier, Bobby Knoll was a graduate of the submarine service and did not faint or panic. He quickly got out of the spotlight when the bank robber was finally gunned down later that day by that same chief of state police. Bobby also did not get to meet the Post Master because of the way George Hilliard covered up for him with a masterpiece of double talk that only a guy from Southie could produce.
Tour I has to mentioned here briefly. We called it the midnight tour or simply: midnights. The problem with working the night shift is this: how to you change your sleeping habits on your days off? Most people find it impossible. Some of the men who worked this tour in the post office were strange. The financial section was of course closed on midnights but the weighing room was open and run by an air force veteran named Eddie Reagan. Eddie was responsible for logging in the newspapers, which arrived during his tour of duty.
Eddie Reagan had two mail handlers who helped him every night, Ernie Crump, aka the 'Indian fighter', and Sam, aka ' Sinbad the Sailor'. Ernie Crump had a wooden leg. He had a very pronounced hitch in his stride because that land mine he stepped on in France took the leg off above the knee. They called him the Indian fighter because his grandfather was said to have been one. Ernie had a scar across his face that ran down from along side his right eye, over the cheekbone and down to his jaw. It was a beauty. He was short, husky, with close cropped steel gray hair and a beautiful set of choppers that shined bright white when he smiled. In his younger days he would have fit in perfectly if cast as Steve McQueen's side kick way the hell out in Shanghai in some water front den of iniquity. Alcohol did not seem to affect Ernie very much at all. He and Eddie and Sam rendezvoused somewhere to have a few drinks before they hit on the clock. It was most of the time in Eddie's car, which was always parked on the scale in front of the weighing room. Eddie drank from the bottom shelf, something called 'Green River', a blended whisky! The only one who showed the effects of drinking was Sam. I gave him the name Sinbad the Sailor because he had been to sea for thirty years with U.S. Navy. For another thing he had this way about himself: dead serious expression, jet-black moustache, navy watch cap and an athletic build and stature that belied his years. He was always digging into the work with vigor, smoking his eternal cigarette and planning his next break with Reagan, his mentor and the Indian fighter. That serious expression stayed on his face even when he was very drunk. The way you could tell how drunk he was, was by the degree of his list. And he always, for some strange reason, listed only to starboard. Tour I was a special place, almost like another planet.
After I had left the platform and was working on the fourth floor I heard a poignant story about Crump's grandfather. I was working with a guy named Frankie D, a WW II PT Boater. He was in charge of a volunteer group of veterans who were seeing to it that the graves of veterans buried in Greater Boston were properly decorated for Memorial Days observances. They had access to the national archives and spent a lot of their free time on the project. One of their goals was to make sure that the graves of veterans who had received special decorations, like the Purple Heart or a Bronze Star or anything like that were to be decorated accordingly. They checked the list of veterans who had received the Congressional Medal Of Honor and found the name of Ernie Crump's grandfather among them. The grave was then suitably decorated for the holiday and in fact Frankie D delivered a letter from the Department of Defense affirming and describing the award. The family had had no idea that the grandfather was such a war hero. Frankie D could not get over the fact that the grandfather had never talked about his Congressional Medal of Honor. The grandfather, the letter to the family stated, was awarded the medal for his bravery at the battle of Wounded Knee. From the drawing, quartering and beheading of King Philip in 1676 (his father was Massasoit, who showed the Pilgrims how to survive the first winter of 1620-21 and Philip's son was sold into slavery in the West Indies), from then until the killing of the Sioux chief, Big Foot, on December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee, there had passed over two hundred years. Are you with Brendan Behan yet, or still clinging to Voltaire?
But let's stick to the Tour I gang. All hands drank heavily. Eddie Reagan had been a pretty good semi pro baseball player in his youth. He was a pitcher. His fastball left him in the service. Eddie was a nose gunner on a B24 that got shot down by a German jet plane in 1945. He said he saw it coming but it was so fast that there was no chance of hitting it. His bomber crashed landed behind the front lines in Soviet held territory. The Soviets did not report the crews' landing, transported them eventually by train to Vladivostok where they boarded an American ship for San Francisco. From San Fran he traveled by train to Boston, took a cab home and walked into his mothers's kitchen unannounced after having been long given up as killed in action.
When I was a sub clerk I spent many nights working with Eddie until 3:30am. Eddie always had a great line of chatter. He was a great joker. Slowly as the night progressed he and his Tour I buddies would get drunk. It was always hard to tell if he was sober because when he was drunk he acted sober and when he was sober he acted drunk. This trait almost did me in one night.
I had completed my course work for my MA degree and had a deadline to submit my written thesis. The work was all done long hand and needed only to be typed up. The night I chose to type it, I arranged to have the responsibility of closing the vault and locking up the financial section. I waited until every one on Tour III had gone home and then sat down to type out my papers. Before I started, however, I went out into the weighing room and told Eddie that I would be staying in the financial section and working there late and that when I was finished I would lock the place up. Now like I said, Eddie had this way of coming on with a lot of banter and you could never be quite sure if he were not half cocked to start. This particular night he was drunk and he got drunker as the night wore on until he passed out about 2am. About 3am he woke up, heard the noise of me typing coming from back in the financial section and he called the security guard and told him some one was trying to break into the vault. The guard banged on the door, demanded I open up and when I did he drew his revolver on me. This particular man was very old, had never been in the military and his hand with the gun in it was shaking. I was scared. Fortunately, I had an empty stomach. This guard had never seen military service but he marched me on up to the fourth floor to some who had more than his share of military action, the Tour I superintendent, Robert Sullivan. Bob had left a leg in Germany and was a decorated war hero. He immediately took the gun away from the security guard, put the safety on, and sent him off for coffee. We had a long talk. The boss could do that on Tour I at 3am. I explained what I was doing. Then he asked me about my studies and told me a little about Germany. He didn't like the Germans, even twenty odd years later. He wished me luck in my career and told me not to use the financial section anymore in the middle of the night. The point is I could have been fired but common sense prevailed. He obviously kept the matter to himself because I never heard any comments about it later on. Eddie Reagan certainly did not remember anything. Robert Sullivan was a gentleman. He should have lived long and happily ever after. But his love was the sea. He sailed out of Gloucester one day in late August with his son and grandson. A sudden, powerful squall blew up and all hands were lost.
Some Saturday nights when McGrimley is not around I spend a couple of hours with professor Moriarity. Professor, because he is a school psychologist for the City of Boston, or maybe just because the name matches that of Sherlock Holmes' nemesis. Moriarity does the books for all second class mailings. He has a desk at the back of the financial section. Paul is his Christian name and he is a South Boston boy. Some people have a guardian angel on duty with them all their lives. Or maybe they are just lucky. Paul was at Iwo Jima. 20,000 marines got hit there but Paul got through it all unscratched, just a case of malaria and a punctured eardrum. In fact, later on in life he was signed on to a research project by Harvard Medical School that had uncovered data that indicated that malaria sufferers were somehow protected from heart disease.
One night Paul and I were the only ones in the financial section. Paul was going over the second class accounts and I was studying. I had two desks covered with German books, dictionaries, papers written and typed. The door opened and in stormed Larry Martin. He had a key. He had called minutes before on the telephone; Paul had pick up the phone, put it to his bad ear, heard nothing and hung up. On our CEO! Mr. Martin rushed down stairs from his fourth floor office and demanded to know why Paul had hung up on him. Paul explained about his bad ear from Iwo Jima and then answered Mr. Martin's question about the particular second class publication under investigation. Mr. Martin left, absorbed in thought, and never noticed the full blown foreign language operation going on under his nose. Gott sei Dank!
After the end of WWII the government put into effect the GI Bill for veterans. It was paying my undergraduate and graduate tuition twenty years later. Paul got a degree in psychology from Harvard and had an interesting meeting with the dean of admissions there. At first, some universities were up tight about admitting students whose main qualification seemed to be their status as veterans. These same universities quickly learned to like the prospect of warm bodies filling empty seats in lecture halls with their tuition guaranteed by the federal government. After Paul had presented his credentials to the admissions' office he met with the dean who reviewed his papers and could not resist this parting shot at Paul: "Mr. Moriarity, tell your friends in South Boston that Harvard University is not another beachhead."
Paul's special interest was in the writings of a student of Sigmund Freud's named Theodore Reik. Fascinating stuff. About this time, I had my MA in German and an offer to sign a teaching contract with the City of Boston, German language teacher, full-time. The pay was good; I would have to give up my job as part time professor, and probably would be able to quit my job in the P.O. Working one job sounded pretty good to me. I asked Paul's advice. Paul paraphrased Freud's advice to Reik, when Reik left the University of Vienna and was torn between career options in Europe and the United States. The advice was that for the small decisions in your life, it always pays to get a trusted opinion; but for the serious decisions, like who you are going to marry and where you want to work, you make them by yourself. Using Freud's idiom, you already make such decisions subconsciously before you start asking around. I took the job in Boston in September of 1974. Judge Arthur Garrity signed a law into effect the previous June of that year stating that the City of Boston was to immediately desegregate the public school system.
My buddy George McGrimley had come through for me. McGrimley the political dragon, breathing fire and preaching redemption for the democratic party at the ward level, city, state and federal level. In fact, one of his favorite forms of 'hello', was: 'How are things down at your end of the ward?' US Navy veteran, Boston college graduate, George had worked his way up in the world and politics was his passion. He was one generation away from the first political emergence of the Irish American and Boston still remained a hot bed of the old political machine and the democratic party fervor. Every Sunday afternoon on the platform with the Boston Globe spread out on his desk in the platform time unit, George held forth against all comers, on the best possible strategy for the democratic party at all levels. The only chance you got to make a point, was when the phone rang and some political crony of George's called in to report on the situation in his part of the ward. If you started to unravel one of George's arguments, he would turn up the volume and if he couldn't drown you out he would threaten to throw you out. That was my buddy George. And death came. His oldest daughter, Linda, graduated from college and got a job teaching in Alaska. She got married there without George knowing it. She married a Protestant. You could say George was firm in his beliefs, convictions, views, but that would hardly cover the territory. Negotiating with him was like trying to negotiate with Mao Tse Tung. His daughter knew this, of course, and chose to present George with a fait accompli. George accepted it. There was a grand reunion and peace was restored in the family and Linda went back to her teaching job in Alaska and died suddenly at the age of twenty-two. George held the funeral in Boston. I went to the wake. George was a devout Roman Catholic, educated by the Jesuits. Linda was daddy's girl. How would he handle it? On the way over to the wake the image of a father burying his beloved, favorite daughter was overwhelming. George met me at the door and brought me over to the open casket and as if he were introducing me he said: "This is our Linda." She was less than a year married and laid out in her wedding gown. She looked like the 'Sleeping Beauty'. George was like a rock. His was the strength of the true believer, the power of faith. George accepted the death of his daughter as the will of God, a part of the divine plan that is beyond mortal comprehension. I had seen George, over the years, in some tough situations. Now he was as unfaltering as ever. 'Death had no dominion' here. George retired from the P.O. the following year and I had a parting glass with him in a pub in Southie on his last night. He wished me luck and said he would not ever be back to visit with his old buddies in the P.O. " How come, George?" I asked. George went to confession once a month. He had his own opinion on everything under the sun but he listened to his confessor. "The P.O. is an occasion of sin for me, Steve," he said. That was the rule we learned from the catechism at age seven: 'avoid any occasion of sin.' For George at fifty-seven years it had the same import as at seven years. He never came back. He confessed his sins, did his penance and amended his life. Amen, George.
One of the changes coming to the P.O. was computers. Instead of a time card every employee had a small plastic card about the size of a credit card with his name printed on it and his social security number punched in holes on it. Instead of a time clock there was an electronic device that read your social security number and recorded the time and type of hit you were making, be it beginning, out to lunch, in from lunch or end time. The computer generated all kinds of data and a new job was created called technician. It was step up in pay from a clerk, about a thousand dollars more per year. It involved a certain amount of expertise in postal matters and the jobs were posted for bid by qualified employees. Just at this time my job teaching for the city came through and a new postal building was completed attached to the SPA and making it twice as big. The weighing room was moved to the new building and was now completely separated from the financial unit. I would have no place to do my school work. I bid the technician's job. There was little chance I would land the job because the computer system had already been in place a few months and clerks who were running it were assumed to be the ones to be appointed. Some things happened in the P.O. in the course of the years that were very strange and could only be explained as coincidental. And yet, I am superstitious and look beyond coincidence some times. There was a board of supervisors who would interview prospective bidders. If I did not get the job, I could quit the P.O. anyway, because the city paid pretty good. I knew the supervisor in charge of the computer program and also in charge of the interviews of technician candidates. I had met him casually from times he stopped by the time unit on the platform on weekends to check on the installation of new equipment. He knew my name. The night before the interviews he had parked his car in front of the weighing room and when he wanted to leave for home he discovered he had a flat tire. It was his son's car and there was no jack in the trunk. He saw me on the platform and asked if I knew anyone who had a jack. I changed his tire and the next day I passed the technician test and interview and got the job. Very strange.
By the way, part of the job qualification required a clean record in your years of postal service. I had one bad mark against my name. I was written up with a letter of warning once and marked AWOL for a week when I had stayed home studying for final exams in my MA program. The holiday immediately preceding my interview, it was the fourth of July, I had to work in the time unit and I got a call from Perry Weinberg. "Steve", Perry said," the bastards made me work the holiday. I'm the only supervisor in the building and in fact I am the only supervisor in the entire postal district. And I have the responsibility for everything. There are a lot of bosses junior to me, but they nailed me at the last minute. But listen to this, I'm sitting at the superintendent's desk up here on the fourth floor and looking through some personnel files on employees and I came across your folder. There is your request for administrative leave in it and of course it has been refused and you are marked down as AWOL. If you make out a new request and get it to me this afternoon, I will approve it and destroy this AWOL notice. I can do this in my position today and if they don't like it they can lump it." My record is now clean.
It still looked as though I would have to quit the P.O. Where could I do school work? How could I get by with four hours of sleep? But I gave it a try in September of the desegregation year, 1974. Once on the job teaching for the city it became clear that I would have to hang on to the P.O. Desegregation and bussing had the school system in an uproar. It was clear that my teaching job might not last. The P.O. job had gotten a lot better pay wise. We actually went on strike under president Nixon and got a big raise for our efforts. I still had a spot in the weighing room although most of my buddies had retired or moved on. McGrimly was gone, Hilliard and Maguire were supervisors, Barney, Charlie Levange, Lemore, they all retired. My fiery friend, Phil Martell, had paid his last visit to me in the financial section. He wore the mask of death, Hodgkins' disease, in the middle of his first year teaching. So much for taking over the history department. His red head, me, my wife, his son and mine will be friends forever. That's for sure. My new job as technician would be on the fourth floor starting in August. It would be a different ball game from the platform. And I am still in the Zorba the Greek mode living in the suburbs.
My last day on the platform is no different than any other day, just as madcap and full of fun. Actually, a typical day on the platform never happened. Anyways here it goes: I hit the time clock on the platform at 3pm. McGrimley has not yet retired and he bursts out of the time unit, gives me the nod and we're off in that Fiat of his. He is involved in some kind of litigation with the Boston Public School Department and we drive to his lawyer's office at #1 Beacon Street. I am to deliver an affidavit to an office on the fifth floor while he double parks. This is the corner of Beacon and Tremont Streets, one block away from Bullfinch's magnificent Statehouse and right across the Street from King's Chapel Burial Grounds where the fallen commander of the patriots at the battle of Bunker Hill, Joseph Warren, lies. Bunker Hill is in Charlestown. Along side Captain Warren, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner are buried. Sumner was clubbed into unconsciousness in his senate office in our nation's capitol because of his out spoken stance on slavery. He never completely recovered. You get the irony evoked by these historical props, Charlestown's Bunker Hill, abolition? Well, I deliver his documents to the fifth floor and I'm back on the corner of Beacon and Tremont at 3:15pm. No McGrimley. But there is a red light there and the driver of the first car at the light is staring at me. It's Big Moe. "How's it goin', baby?" he asks as the light turns green. He starts at 3:30pm. McGrimley shows a few minutes later and I'm back on the platform at 3:30pm. The weighing room is jumping and I'm starting a half hour late. Charlie Levangie briefs me on the manpower situation, Hilliard and Knoll are running late but Eaves is in early. Off we go. The same truck drivers pull in every day so we know them pretty good. In fact at Christmas time, their bosses, the owners of the mailing outfits, send us presents, all kinds of stuff, like one year I got a set of twenty-four high-ball glasses. I still have a half a dozen. They're engraved with a cannon and every time I pour Jim Beam into one I say 'Prosit, James Watson!' He was the owner of the mailing firm.
One of the biggest mailers has a black driver named Fred. He's five foot two. When he goes into the weighing room with his paper work the guys have a lot of fun with him. Barney asks him if it's true he used to be six foot tall but jumping out of all those second floor windows to escape jealous husbands shrunk him down to five feet. Fred can give it back and he likes being one of the boys. Anyways, by 6:30pm we get a break. All mail received has been weighed, postage calculated, double-checked, funds deducted from the mailers' accounts and the decks are cleared for a moment. During this three hour rush, other things have been happening that have nothing to do with the U.S. mail. Hilliard and Knoll have showed up, Eaves is with us too, calamaris have been ordered from a restaurant in the North End that has a first class sea food chef. Jack Smith is on the road and he will pick the food up and have in at the weighing room before 7pm. The bookie has been by; bets have been placed, winners paid off, debts collected or promised to be paid soon. The weighing room has been stacked with news papers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, Boston Record, New York Post and stuff like that. Plaintiffs and defendants have come by to make an appointment with Dave Dretler to review their cases later that night, after 7pm. We ask Bob Eaves to explain the inside story of the big gambling bust in Chelsea that very morning where 25 bookies were arrested in a big crack down on crime in that city. It is the headline of the Boston Evening Globe. Now Eaves is a guy with style. When you ask him a question like that he stops what he is doing, smiles, takes of his gloves, offers you a cigarette, lights his own, inhales, exhales and gives you an entertaining story. He says that first of all everybody on the street had gotten wind of what was coming and didn't have anything incriminating in their pockets. Their lawyers had been put on alert and their defense all worked out in advanced. He wraps up the story of the big bust like this: "When I left Chelsea to come in here, all the book makers were back on the street and, in fact, I played my numbers with one of them about 2pm." Jack Smith is here now with the calamaris and we go back into the financial section for supper. It smells good, the chef makes them with a great tomato sauce. After supper I take care of a couple of small mailings and there is a lull. It's about 8pm. I light up a stogie. Stretch Perineau is coming back from his supper and kind of saunters over to where I'm standing out side the weighing room, looking out across the channel towards Southie. We are standing beside each other looking at the parking lot on the other side of the water where they are parking some school buses. Sometimes it easier to talk to some one when you are standing beside them and looking away. "What are they afraid of?" Stretch asks. A simple question, right? And kind of right on target. Maybe that's too simple a way to put it. You're talking about a lot of people whose community is having its fabric shredded. This is Adler's 'Gemeindegefuehl'. That deep set 'sense of community' that has to be taken into account. "I don't know", was the best I could answer him. This here is my hometown. I was born and raised here. I started working as a messenger boy in down town Boston when I was sixteen and I never saw a Black out side of Roxbury. It never occurred to me that that was a peculiar situation. It was accepted. Things are changing now and I have to believe it is for the better. That's what I tell Stretch and he says time will tell. Right about now Charlie Q comes over to us and says he wants a word with me. He looks kind of white. Here is Charley Q's problem. His time card is stuck in the electronic badge reader. There has been a big addition built on to the SPA so that the entire building is now about 200 yards long. When the guys hit off the clock for swing and walk out to the Club Car or Brown's for a beer, they spend half their time walking so they take their time card and hit out at a badge reader right at the end of the building near the concourse of the South Station. This is unauthorized, but nobody could find out unless your badge got stuck. Being a technician I know how to take the things apart, which I do right away for Charlie Q. It takes about five minutes. Then he gives me one of his great smiles and he doesn't look white anymore.
When I get back to the weighing room, some more trucks have pulled in and I help the guys get rid of the mail. Hilliard has his guitar and he and Knoll are headed for the Hotel Essex and I should meet them over there. It's about 9pm. I check with Izzy Fine and Bob Eaves. They are back from their card game up stairs in the swing room and they will mind the store. On the way out through the concourse I'm walking along side of Frank Lemore. He likes to get a couple of raspberry turnovers for himself and Dretler at the bakery in the station. Frank has already given his daily speech about how much our leaders in Washington suck and we have a calm chat about sports. Sports talk in Boston is a lingua franca you can use in any bar room or anywhere else in the city with complete strangers. Frank runs into a long lost buddy in the station, introduces me and the two of them start reminiscing. I head on to the Essex. Hilliard has his guitar tuned and a beer ordered for me by the time I get there. Carmen, the beautiful piano player, has gone on break and turned the floor over to us. There are some German tourists there and we entertainment them with a few of those Oktoberfest numbers. Hilliard can play guitar to anything you sing. The Germans really like it and they send a round over to us. We keep the music coming for a while and then after they send another round over we stop and join them at their table as Carmen comes back to her piano. George Harris, the mail handler in the weighing room, comes rushing in to tell me that I am being paged on the platform. I've already been paged twice. Hilliard and Knoll stay with the Germans, I order them all another round and hurry back to the platform.
It's 10pm. Fateful calls have come to me in my years on the platform. I'm not worried about the mail piling up at the weighing room, you could rob a bank with Eaves and Fine and Big Moe is a man you can talk to if there is some kind of administrative problem. It's those calls from the out side that come hard. Like the call the night my father passed and Charley Q spotted me leaving or the night the Frau called and said: "You have to come home right away, the baby is in the hospital with laryngitis!" It was meningitis and when everything was OK again we had a good laugh about that one. Or like the night my sister called from the Floating Hospital up the street from the SPA. Her 18 year old son was there and the worst happened. That night too, I left the P.O. immediately and headed for her home in West Roxbury. But before I left I needed two things, money and courage; money for a bunch of groceries for the gang of mourners that would be gathered at my sister's; courage for the ordeal. I stopped in at Perry Weinberg's office at the other end of the platform. Perry wasn't there but Jack Smith was. He gave me a c note and three fingers of VO. Those calls had started with a page so I feel uneasy when I get back from the Essex.
What's up I ask Charlie Levangie. "Lemore's looking for you." Dretler had gone home early and Lemore did not want a good raspberry turnover to go to waste! I take the turnover with a sigh of relief. I pay Frank for it, sit down and chat for a while. Lemore is a good man and he's right about our leaders. He wants to tell me about his old buddy he met in the concourse when I was walking out with him. This guy went to grammar school with Lemore and they played baseball together. Semi pro. He now works for the Mob and he tells Frank that if anyone ever bothers him, Frank just needs to let him know and it will be taken care of. At this point the gunsel pulls back his double breasted suit coat and indicates a heater in a shoulder holster. Frankie thanks him and says good bye. The amazing thing about this story is the contrast between the two men. Lemore is a very decent family man, a devout Christian, hard working, all his life long. This guy who grew up with him, who was born on the same street as Frank, is a gunsel. So much for environment.
Gunsel, by the way, is an interesting word. It means of course a gunman but it is Yiddish and, as the fellow said, it has a few more vitamins in it than gunman. The ending –el is a diminutive ending like the one on the name Hans in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. Diminutive endings in the Germanic and Slavic languages can mean the thing named is either younger, smaller or dearer. It can also be sarcastic, implying in this case that this guy is just a 'wana be' gunman. But the gun- part of the word could also be derived from the word for goose, which is 'gans', where the vowel a is modified in the dialect. This would mean this punk with the heater under shoulder is just a little goose. Now a goose is a particular farmyard animal that city people have no good idea of in terms of behavior. Agrarian societies like to mock people through use of animal metaphors like silly goose, dumb ox, big bull and stuff like that. The Irish have a beauty: 'Nuair a chacann ge, cacann said go leir,' when one goose shits they all shit. You see what I mean about linguistic vitamins? (This may be the last of the linguistics).
By now it's close to 11pm and Frank Lemore has to lock up his accounting machine in the vault and lock up the financial section. No more permit mail is accepted after 11pm. The outside crew and the inside crew are washing up and Tour I is coming aboard. That old grandson of an Indian fighter, Ernie Crump, stumbles into the weighing room looking for Eddie Regan. When Ernie has been drinking that scar across his kisser gets really red. He only has one whole leg so that, drunk or sober, when he stumbles around it his natural way of going. He goes out the back door and Sinbad the Sailor comes in the front door. He's looking for Eddie too. He's been drinking with that one legged son of an Indian fighter but he doesn't stumble, he just kind of lists to starboard as becomes an old landlocked swabie. Sinbad trusts only those who work midnights. He doesn't ask anybody about Regan. He is silently listing in the middle of the weighing room, when the door opens and a well dressed middle aged man and woman come in with a sack of mail. They are from the Audubon Society and although they realize that the weighing room closes at 11pm and it is now 11:15pm, they would very much appreciate it if their mailing could be accepted. It is very important. They are talking at Sinbad. He takes out a cigarette and a lighter. The man from the Audubon brings the permit papers over to Sinbad and holds them out so Sinbad can read them. Sinbad can't read anything at this point. All he can do is try to ignite his cigarette with his lighter, which is turned up so that the flame comes out of it as if it were a blow torch. At this point I have finished packing my briefcase and leap into the situation before the astonished Audubon man faints. Everything is OK, the mail will be processed, and Good Night to you sir. Sinbad is all ready out the back door. Eddie Regan comes in the front door, it's 11:30pm, and I head for home. I'll be there at 12:30am.Tomorrow is Saturday. No 5:30 am reveille.
Part Two The Fourth Floor
What I liked about the fourth floor from day #1, when Johnny Buckley marched a group of us new sub mail handlers into Larry Martin's office as a gag, was the noise. The first class letter mail has been put into trays and is traveling around the length of the building on conveyor belts that have metal wheels that make a racket. It is a noise I immediately associate with my first hour in a pay status and the first paycheck to follow. Lady luck delivered me on that first day to a permanent assignment on the platform and the men and adventures just described. The thought of sitting on a stool all night and pigeonholing letters was not appealing. After a few months on the platform, the thought was repulsive. Sometimes on overtime, we were sent up to work the mail on the 4th floor for three hours, from 11:30pm to 2:30am. A buddy from the platform advised me on how to beat the system and work my overtime on the platform. The clerks sorting mail on the 4th floor were first of all a close-knit group of reasonably dressed people. And of course each stool was provided with an ashtray for the smoker. When we appeared on the overtime scene, dressed in our outlandish winter wear which we declined to take off, we disrupted the tranquility of the landscape. But then when we lit up our short, black, foul smelling cigars, called guinea stogies, the regulars started coughing more than working. The supervisor would soon ask us if we would prefer to do our overtime on the platform. It worked often enough. The prospect of being permanently assigned up there was not good. Let me give the layout of the place.
The fourth floor is reached by passenger elevators at the Summer Street end of the building located in the lobby next to the weighing room. First area you see is the machine area where clerks sort mail by electronic means. The machine pops a letter in front of them, they read the zip code, press certain keys and the letter flies through the machine and lands in a tray at the back. This is a job for young eyes and nimble fingers. Larry Martin's office is opposite the machines on the platform side of the building. Next comes the rack area where clerks put 1st class mail in sacks, which are hanging on racks. Finally come the old time rows of stools where clerks sit and sort mail into pigeonholes. There are two freight elevators spaced evenly apart and a staircase at both ends of the building. It was in one of those freight elevators that the inspectors grabbed Tony with Reverend Ike's money. Up near Larry Martin's office are several other offices for the brass. There are two time units, partitioned off from the workroom floor where the technicians in charge of racking employees' time cards work. Each time unit has a counter, open to the workroom, and where an employee can fill out requests for leave and handle his administrative paper work. That's it. A lock up. I will be in the time unit at the end of the building opposite the old-time rows of pigeonhole sorters. This area is known as the primary. Four guys are assigned to this time unit, me, Arthur Sullivan, Leo Ferrin and Frank DiBiase.
Arthur Sullivan is a short, handsome guy, US Army veteran and he has two beautiful daughters who work in the SPA. Leo Ferrin is a West End Jew, a short, wiry guy, US Army veteran whose wife works here too. Frank DiBiase is a US Navy veteran, a PT Boater. When I walk into the time unit on my first day on the fourth floor, they don't know me from Adam. They have all been in the P.O. for over twenty years and know how the place runs, politically as well as physically. They don't know how I got the job. They don't know about my chance meeting with the big boss, Jim Henley, and how I changed his tire. They think I have some powerful connection down town. Down town is the GPO where the Post Master holds court. Let them think it. Let me profile these three guys for you since I will be working with them until the end.
All men named Sullivan are called 'Sully.' Just like guys named Campbell are called 'Soupy'. Sully is about sixty, and always takes the supervisors exam because he would love to be a boss. He scores lower than whale shit every time. What gripes him is that the bosses are always asking his advice on how to do their job. He comes from the same part of Jamaica Plain as I do and so we immediately have a tribal bond. Plus he is dying to find out who my sponsor is.
Sully was a bricklayer on the outside. The skilled tradesman has to contend with periods of unemployment. So Sully joined the P.O. As he got older and the work got too tough for him, he thought he would run for a post in the bricklayers' union. His sharp tongue and gift of gab got him into a corner he couldn't get out of. These were the days of tough union infighting. Jimmie Hoffa had just disappeared. Sully did not want to disappear so he left the trade completely. His passion in life was going to Florida in the winter when the construction business in Massachusetts slowed down. He and his wife would fly from Boston to Fort Lauderdale, take a cab to his hotel in the town just down the roar a piece from the airport called Hollywood enjoy their gambling passion everyday at Gulfstream Racetrack or the greyhound track or playing golf. He had a big score at Gulfstream one day and when he got back to Massachusetts he bought a two family house on cape cod. While playing golf in Pompano Beach he ran in to an old pal from Jamaica Plain who was retired. This guy told Sully that his son worked for a bank in Boston and that a big toy manufacturer was hiding money there. That meant that a big deal was in the offing and it would be a good time to buy the company's stock. Sully bought as much as he could, the stock split and he was sitting pretty. He gave his stock holdings to his older daughter who used it as collateral to buy an apartment house on Cape Cod. His younger daughter was diagnosed with MS. Sully bought her and her husband a house right next door to his. His wife dedicated herself to caring for her daughter and Sully became the babysitter for that grandson that we were to hear so much about in the time unit. His wife would not leave Boston anymore and Sully's days at Gulfstream Park were over. When his wife developed emphysema, the doctor advised Sully about the effects of secondary smoking on his wife. He stopped smoking. Cold turkey. Leo could not believe it. This was a guy who had been smoking for over sixty years.
Sully tells me that DiBiase has an Irish mother and a Guinea father and that guys like that are a problem because they are neither fish nor foul. 'Guinea' is a word he uses to explain things and is not a pejorative expression for him. For instance, one of his daughters, the one with MS, married an Italian and he is always bragging about how smart his 'guinea' grandson is. Leo Ferrin calls DiBiase the rabbi because he sits studying his paper work and never hears the phone ring or gets up to help someone who is at the counter. Leo talks Yiddish good and I like to practice my Bavarian dialect with him. He says Dibiase has 'a Loch im Kopf', which is good Yiddish and good Bayrisch for ' a hole in his head'. All three are easy to work with. Sully and Leo are the best of buddies.
Since Sully was a bricklayer on the outside, he knows a lot about construction projects and is willing to share that know how with me when I'm in a big do-it-yourself project at home. He is an all-around entertaining guy and by his own admission a lady's man. He was stationed in Washington State near an American Indian reservation for the entire duration of WWII. The Indians called him 'blanket arse.' Leo Ferrin listens to all of Sully's state-side war stories in silence and later I find out that Leo was in the 101st Air Borne and in the middle of the action at the Battle of the Bulge. Leo, like Sully, knows an awful lot about the nuts and bolts of the operations on the fourth floor. One of our jobs is to put the time cards out for the employees who report at 3pm, 4pm, and 6pm. Later we do the same for the Tour I people at 11pm.
I've been on the fourth floor a couple of months now and getting to know the different areas and the people who work there. Here's how you get to know everybody. At 2:55pm you take 30 time cards and put them into slots in a rack hanging on the wall. As you place the cards in the slots you read the names printed on them. Then you stand there for ten minutes waiting until the people have reported for duty, hit their cards and have headed for their work assignment. While you wait you kibitz with everybody waiting in line. At five minutes past three you collect the cards of employees who did not show up and head back to the time unit to write up a late slip on each one. Usually the same people are late every day. Most of these have jobs on the outside and their schedules are tight. Like mine. Some call in for sick leave or emergency annual leave and you write up a request for leave form for them, which they will sign and submit for approval when they return.
Some people are never late, never call in sick, never request emergency leave. Bob Ranton is one of these. When I go over the electronic print outs of the employees' time clock rings, Ranton's is always perfect. No adjustments needed. Exactly 40 hours per week. When the people line up to hit in, he is always first in line. He was in the Navy for four years and did not want to reenlist, so he joined the army for six. By the end of the year employees are required to have used up their allotted 26 days of annual leave. A dead line is set for using this leave and is usually the last week in November. Ranton has a problem meeting this deadline. He is a super conscientious worker. Before I go any further on the fourth floor let me tell you what's going on in school. It is September now and here comes the teaching job. D-Day for me is here.
My day starts with reveille at 5:30am and a one-hour drive to my school in Boston. I don't want to be late on my first day so I get there at 7am. I'm the first teacher there. The door is locked so I ring the bell. Now my strategy with the school job is this: do not tell any one there that I also work in the P.O. I saw the problems that McGrimely had in that respect. The janitor opens the door for me. He is a clerk on the fourth floor. His name is Bob Ranton. So much for my big secret. I swear him to secrecy and my teaching day begins. It goes well. I teach five classes of German language. This is a college preparatory school and the kids are go-getters. School ends at 2pm. Teachers are required to remain in the building until 2:15pm. I am due in the P.O. at 2:45pm. I jump in my car and speed off toward Southie. On the way I stop at a red light and there is a school bus opposite me full of black kids coming out of Southie. The bus is being stoned by white kids running along side it. The black kids are leaning out the windows yelling at the white kids. I pull into Ragucci's parking lot, run across the channel bridge on Summer Street, into the lobby, up the elevator, grab my time card and hit the clock. It is 2:49pm, but you are allowed to be up to five minutes late. The boss of technicians is a guy named Dan Barry. I am the last technician to hit in. Everyone else is already at their work place. He kind of stares at me. Fuck him and the horse he rode up on. I'm still thinking about that school bus. Down at the time unit Sully takes me under his wing immediately. He likes being boss. He and Leo help me get squared away and everything goes OK. At 8:30 I swing and shoot down to the platform swing room. The weighing room is gone and the financial section is locked up at 6pm every day. In the swing room I run into Jack Smith. Jack says the swing room is quiet all night long because mail operations have moved from the platform to the new building. There are lockers there for letter carriers who come in from time to time. It might be possible to get forty winks here. Just as I say goodbye to Jack Smith, Jack Murphy shows up. Jack is Athletic director at a high school in Cambridge. He was also a two-sport All American at my alma mater. Jack has a locker beside mine and and some good advice from time to time, since he is playing the same game as I am, teaching and the P.O. He has rigged up a row of chairs behind the lockers and he naps there from 6pm to 7pm. Thus there is a bunk open for me. At 11:15pm I hit out and go home. I get there at 12:30am. If I get those forty winks I can do it because I still have Tuesday and Wednesday off.
The computers generate a ton of paperwork; between employees' print outs of their time clock rings and the data relating to mail, which we weigh at the time unit. The P.O. has decided to run this place more efficiently and, by weighing all the mail that comes in by class, it will be possible to get a handle on costs. That's OK with us, we have a good job that pays a little more and we are more or less indispensable. That is to say they cannot bounce us around to other jobs.
We handle the pay and leave requests of about three hundred people. This means dealing personally with these people from time to time. The four of us do a pretty good job of it but Sully shines at it. There are a wide variety of types here on the fourth floor. I have been in the P.O. over a dozen years now and a lot of women have been hired. The P.O. has always hired Blacks but as time passed they made an effort to hire more and to make more of them supervisors. Let me give you an example of the tactics used to hire minorities.
About 1970 there was a new job created, the twenty-hour regular. The benefits are the same as a normal, full time, forty hour regular, but one half: 2 weeks vacation instead of four, 1 week of sick leave instead of two, etc. They work five four-hour days, usually from 6pm to 10pm. They earn a social security pension instead of a government pension. They can be either clerks or mail handlers. It is a nice job for housewives or for anybody for that matter. The P.O. decided that there were not enough Blacks in this category. They took a buddy of mine, Jack Frost, graduate of the platform time unit, and then became the very first twenty-hour clerk in the place. Jack was a math teacher on the outside with twenty years experience, and they gave him a special assignment. He was to report to a community center in Roxbury, the black neighborhood and teach people how to take the exam for twenty-hour employee in the P.O. His classes ran four hours a night, Monday through Friday. After a month his thirty students took the exam and then he started with thirty new ones. The plan worked out pretty good.
A lot of twenty-hour clerks work in the primary and we get to know them. Leo Ferrin's wife is one and Sully's younger daughter was one until she bore that gifted guinea grandson of his and retired. Weekends on the fourth floor are very quiet. Saturday I do all my schoolwork, correct exams, make lesson plans, contact parents if necessary and school stuff like that. Sunday I catch up on my P.O. paperwork. Whether it's Sunday or a week day I have a routine known as the 4 s's : shit, shower, shave and shampoo. During the week there is a fifth: sleep. So everything seems to be working out OK for me on the fourth floor. That's good because now I have four kids and two car payments, a mortgage on the house and while kids in college once seemed light years away, the count down has begun: less than six to go for number one son. Zorba! Zorba! About January of year-one teaching in Boston, the teaching job starts to go south.
The federal court ruled that the schools where Blacks go are not as good as schools where Whites go and that must be corrected. I told you about the kids who were seniors in high school and could not read the want ads. The solution was to be bussing. The ruling was the truth; the solution created big problems. First of all there were at the time 90,000 students in the school system. Bussing them around costs more money than the city has in its budget. School buildings have to be repaired at the same time, as part of the court ruling. There is no money budgeted for major repairs. The teachers' union is threatening a strike and the bus drivers' union is threatening a strike for more money. It is projected in January that all schools will have to be shut down completely in April because of the money problems. McGimely phones me and says: "Well lad, how do you like that? I get you to the promised land and down come the Stars and Stripes and up goes the Jolly Roger." Vintage McGrimely but I'll hang on to my P.O. job.
At school one day I get a call from my Frau. She's watching the morning news and it shows state police helicopters landing on a school roof and armed police going into the high school over in Southie. She thinks I should come home. My school is calm but to get from my school to the SPA I drive through Roxbury and Southie. It's ugly. This whole issue has been simmering for a couple of years. One time back on the platform Stretch Perineau asked me what the whites were afraid of. Sully says there is nothing to be afraid of because the color does not rub off. He has a black girl friend. There are a lot of blacks working on the fourth floor, especially in the primary. The black women always come to Sully to get their problems with their pay checks straightened out. They trust him. He's anti-racist and they know it. Speaking of people on the fourth floor, this would be a good time to talk about them.
There is an area next to the primary where loose mail is fed to the workers on conveyor belts. The clerks throw it directly into sacks, which are hanging from racks. Like all fourth floor jobs, this one is tightly supervised. About thirty clerks work there on Tour III, the busiest tour. This particular area is called the racks. After I have filled out requests for leave, they will have to be approved or disapproved by the immediate supervisor. Supervisors keep a record of employee's attendance. Paul Thornton is the supervisor in the rack area. He is not liked. He insists that the clerks are late at six minutes past three and they be written up immediately. He cannot be at the time clock at three so it is up to me to enforce this regulation. I, as a graduate of the free wheeling platform, do not and this causes problems. Well, if they are ten minutes late and I slip them their time card, it most likely will not be noticed. Besides how can you write up a guy like Joe Slattery? Joe is a DAV, US Marine Corps veteran of Guadalcanal. Joe was in on that close combat around Henderson Air Field, when bullets were gone and the troops used rifle butts as clubs, and fists, screaming and yelling out and the Japs all around and stuff like that. There are others like Joe and I'll take my chances with Paul Thornton.
Charley Smolinski is a big Polak from Dorchester. And right here let me say this about ethnic names or cuss word names of description in general. Ethnic terms are usually used for clarity. There are not just Irish living in Southie, so if you describe a guy as a Harp from Southie, then you have a quick thumb nail sketch of this particular character. Likewise a Guinea from the North End. You can tell a Black just by looking at him, but I've heard stretch Perineau call a Black a no good nigger. You figure it out. By the way, in the Polish language, a male is called a Polak. A polish woman is a Polka. I cannot resist linguistic asides and they get better. Getting back to Smolinski, he's big and following God's tendency, gentle and soft-spoken. McGrimely was the exception that proves the rule. Generally, it's the little Napoleon types that start the trouble. Charlie's brother is doing time for manslaughter. His particular neighborhood has a high percentage of criminals, both convicted, serving time and still at large. This desegregation thing has the city in an uproar, with bussing and equal housing initiatives. Charley is standing beside me waiting to hit in. "Charley, how come the Blacks don't move into your neighborhood?" He smiles at me: "It's like that message they put on a package of cigarettes. It may be harmful to their health."
Frank Gonzales is from Puerto Rico. He is black. He went to a Catholic school down there in San Juan and speaks English well. He signed a contract with the Minnesota Twins to play ball for them but after two years in the army he had lost that hand-eye coordination needed for major league baseball. He moved to Boston in June, got a job in the P.O. in July and his ten-year old daughter and seven-year old son started in the Boston Public Schools in September. This is a particularly tough year to start school here in Boston. I get to know him first when he changes his name form Gonzales to Colon. His name in a Spanish speaking country is Francisco Colon Gonzales. When he applied for a job in the P.O., they asked him his last name. The Spanish custom is to add the spouse's name to your own family name after marriage, so his last name in America has got to be Colon. As we worked together on that, it turns out his kids are having problems in school. The new desegregation rules require a listing of students according to color, white, black or other. His son is black like Frank but is daughter is white like her mother. This is not a big deal in the islands but the ten year old picks up on what is going on in Boston and teases her little brother at the dinner table: "Ha, ha. I'm white and you're black." Frank wants to know what the hell is going on here. Hang on Frank, it gets worse. Frank will soon become one of my two Spanish teachers at the SPA.
It's not all heavy stuff up here. Fourth floor breaks are only 15 minutes long. Quite a change from those Navy Yard breaks on the platform. Sometimes I grab a cup of coffee with one of the guys from the racks. One day it's Billy Nagle, a DAV, U.S. Army. His war injuries are catching up to him. Working in the racks is a stand up job. Billy: "You know, when my father-in-law died, I was thirty-nine and my mother-in-law was sixty-nine. My wife asked me if her mother could move in with us. I said, sure, even though I never really got along with the old lady. Well now I'm sixty-nine and I feel lousy. I have trouble standing for a long time and I can't eat much. And that old gal is ninety-nine and you should see her put away the meat and potatoes. She's going to bury me."
But some times it is very heavy stuff. Jim Bragg, a young, quiet, clean-cut guy from the racks, committed suicide on a Saturday night. He was a Vietnam veteran. These guys seem to carry a heavier burden than WWII or Korean veterans. Monday at three o'clock as soon as we get to the time unit we find out. Everybody is stunned. Kind of sick. At three-thirty, supervisor Thornton shows up and is his usual pain in the arse self. He wants a list of clerks who called in for leave over the weekend. He says he is going to straighten them out. Then he says to Sully that it was too bad about Jim Bragg. Sully comes right back with: "He only did one thing wrong." Thornton looks at him: "What was that?" Sully: "He should have come in here first and shot a couple of lousy supervisors." That's my buddy Sully, a Jamaica Plain boy, and never at a loss for a word. Like the time a call came in at the supervisor's desk for a clerk in the racks named Dick Breen. Now the rule is no personal phone calls, but we in the time unit always relay messages. If the call comes to the supervisor's desk, then it depends upon the supervisor. This particular night Thornton was the supervisor and he did not relay the message. Dick Breen was out the following three days. When he returned and filled out his request for leave, he told us, me, Sully and Leo were standing there, that his wife had been sick and called the P.O. and when he got home she was passed out on the floor. No body knew what to say. For a coupe of seconds it was painfully silent. Then Sully, never a sentimentalist, "Dead drunk again on you, huh Dick?"
One of my favorite characters on the fourth floor is Freddie Dailey. He is a short chubby guy with a round face and big eyes. He works in the racks and drives foreman Paul Thornton crazy. He will disappear for weeks on end and Thronton will start ranting that this time Dailey has gone too far, this time he is going to lose his job and stuff like that. Then Freddie will show up, come to the time unit, fill out the absence form and head for the racks. Thornton will disapprove the request, Freddie will go to the union; the union will demand a hearing and get the leave approved, either because of a technicality that Thornton overlooked or some last minute dubious medical evidence.
The men like Freddie because he is a good worker and a great entertainer with the yarns he spins about his adventures during his prolonged absences. Once in a while I would have cup of java with Freddie and always an interesting conversation. He was orphaned at a young age and was on the street selling newspapers by the time he was twelve years old. He lived in the South End and sold papers on the street corner in front of Charlie's Sandwich Shop, which besides being an eatery was also a brothel. By the time he was sixteen he had fallen in love with one of the gals from Charlie's. The gang there adopted him, plain and simple. To hear him tell the story it sounded almost romantic. It certainly wasn't a boring life for him. And somewhere along the way he learned to read and write. Since I was the one who did the payroll, I knew that on his long-term absences he had no paycheck coming in from the P.O. Here is how he survived on one trip that he took to Los Angeles:
He left Boston with plenty of money and three weeks leave, approved in advance. He had a room in one of those, small, cottage- like houses on a side street off the main drag on Venus Beach. He hung out in a piano bar in the neighborhood and by the time his dough ran out he had gotten to know every one there, the regulars, the bar tenders, the waitresses, the piano player, the hookers and the owner. And like I said, people kind of liked Freddie right away. So when it was time to go, I mean when he had been there for over two months and his P.O. money was gone, he stayed on as bar tender. He could also play piano. That was something he had picked up at Charlie's and so once in a while he would stand in for the piano player out there in on Venus Beach. Then one day he was back in the SPA with that grin of his, handing Thornton his request for leave to cover that absence, walking over to the guys at the racks and before anyone could say anything he would ask: "Was it busy last night?"
Freddie's wife had died young and left him with a daughter who was now married and living somewhere in New York. And he had another side. He liked art, fine art. In Boston there is a world-class museum called The Museum of Fine Arts. It is on Huntington Avenue about three miles from the SPA. The museum has a restaurant and sandwich shop and also a very interesting lecture program. The lectures are given by experts in various artistic disciplines; be it painting or art history or whatever. The lectures are open to the public for a fee or free to members of the museum. Freddie is a member. Before he comes to work at 4pm in the P.O., he has lunch in the museum and attends a lecture. Sometimes the lectures are quite involved and turn out to be a series of lectures extending over a week or more. In the course of the years this has been his routine.
Freddie has found his special interest, sculpture, in fact, the art of smaller, cast, bronze and silver works. He has acquired quite a degree of expertise. Summers he will hit all the garage sales in the metropolitan area and now and then come up with something of special interest. His biggest find was a silver statue of a group of three knights on horseback. He bought it for three hundred dollars from an antique stand on a street in Cambridge because it reminded him of a work he had seen in a lecture by a professor from Yale University. He had the piece photographed and mailed the photo to the professor at Yale and showed me the answer he got. The piece was an original by a famous artist and Yale would give him $35,000 for it. Freddie keeps it in a safe deposit box for his daughter. "I'll just blow that money if I sell it," he tells me, "but in the mean time it will just grow in value."
It turns out Sully is a combination of a male Dear Abby and Dr. Ruth for the women in the primary. All his advice is given out at the counter of the time unit and in a normal conversational tone of voice. No whispers with him. One middle-aged woman complained to him that her second husband had a very small penis. Sully comes right back with the advice that she should demand oral sex when her husband was done. A black woman with a white husband tells Sully she is pregnant with twins and hasn't decided on what to name them. His advice: buck wheat. Call one Buck and the other
Wheat. Leo and I listen in amazement. Some of the women can handle him. Marie Doyle is a supervisor in her sixties and Sully propositions her one night and she comes right back with: "At this point, Sully, I rather have a good shit." Then along comes one of those over the hill red-hot mamas and has to talk to Sully about her pay. Well, Leo and I can handle it too but no, she'll wait until Sully comes back. When he does come back there is a long tete-a-tete covering a wide range of topics. She may never leave, she is enjoying it so much. Finally Sully tells her that she is the kind of woman he likes. "In what way, Arthur?" she asks. "You have what all my women have in common. Varicose veins."
Leo cautions Sully against going to far. He also cautions him against smoking so much. Sully tells Leo the only reason he, Leo, doesn't smoke is that he is too cheap. Leo then goes into his pantomime of Sully. Leo has this amazing talent at mimicry that is hilarious. Leo himself is a very straightforward guy. He is against smoking because he lost an older brother to emphysema. He told me he almost lost a daughter to the hippie movement. She went to live in a commune out in Arizona for three years. He and his wife, Selma, never gave up on her. The daughter finally gave up on the commune life, came home, married a nice guy and presented them with two grandchildren. I always try to draw Leo's Yiddish out and have some fun with my Bavarian. He told me his grandparents were Polish Jews and were part of his West End family when he was growing up. He loved them dearly and always tried to learn their language. One time his parents told him he was going to go to a school on Saturdays where he would learn to talk Jewish. When it turned out to be Hebrew instead of Yiddish, Leo got mad and refused to go.
Both Leo and Sully have a rule concerning supervisors who ask questions about the running of the place and that is this: tell them nothing! There are a lot of technicalities involved in running the place and a new foreman cannot be expected to know everything overnight. He needs the cooperation of the people whom he supervises. We in the time unit need the cooperation of the supervisors to get our paper work taken care of. One hand washes the other, here as elsewhere. If a boss is cooperative, he or she will be told all they need to know, but no more.
Every floor has two time units and all are coordinated with an office on the fourth floor next to Larry Martin's office called the data site. The boss of the data site and of all technicians on Tour III is a guy named Frank Quarterone. He is always referred to as Frankie Q or ' Quarter o' One', in the vernacular of the P.O. workers. With Frankie Q let me begin an account in detail of the Italians in the P.O. It's a lot more than Chianti wine and olive oil. Frankie was born in a village in Sicily in the twenties. When his father died, his widowed mother brought six-year old Frankie with her to America to live with relatives in the North End. They lived not only in an Italian section of Boston, but they lived on a street in the North End where half the people were from Sicily and in a tenement house where all of the people were from the same village. The people around young Frankie all spoke the same Sicilian dialect. In 1965, Frankie made a trip back to Sicily to visit his relatives there. One of the things Mussolini did when he came to power back in the 1920's was to start a school reform which stressed learning the standard Italian language, as is spoken in Rome. When Frankie got to his parents' village, the people were amazed at his language. Although they understood Frankie, no one had spoken like that in almost fifty years. This phenomenon is called linguistic change and to date scientists do not have a clear explanation of it. My own Boston dialect is dying out too. When I started teaching in Boston after being out of town for a few years, I relaxed and threw off that media driven American accent for my old Jamaica Plain speech habits. The kids thought I sounded strange, like maybe I came from Chicago. End of linguistics lesson for today.
Frankie had a habit of dropping into the time unit to relay the latest decrees from his boss, Dan Barry. This computer system had a lot of bugs that had to be worked out and everybody had their own ideas on how to do it. Usually, Frankie had a list of beefs from the higher ups. Leo interrupts with something like: "Frankie, you gotta get us some extra help when they call overtime. And not some new guy, who knows nothing and who we have to teach right on the spot. That's like throwin' a drowning man an anchor!" After a while we would slowly turn the conversations to things closer to his heart, like: "are you going to Sicily this summer?" And stuff like that. Frankie has a heart of gold and he is on our side when there is a problem with the brass. But he is nobody's fool either, so we try not to overdo it with him. Here is a little insight into Frankie's soul:
Having grown up in Boston and not having spent much time in school, Frankie knew a lot about what happened on the street scene. He made his score at the track and turned it into a taxi medallion. The city limits the number of taxis by requiring each one to purchase a medallion. These cost a lot of money. Frankie bought one, then another and finally had three when he decided to sell them and buy a home in the suburbs. In the P.O. he had a civil service job that was always described by his mother as a 'nice sa joba'. In fact when she talked on the phone to her relatives in Sicily and they asked her what Frankie was doing for a living, and that is the phrase she would use: 'a nice sa joba'. Frankie got the first supervisor's job in the new data site. He had an uncle in the construction business and Frankie spent one month at it before he realized the P.O. was more to his liking.
He had a son, named Frank, and two daughters. When the son was twenty he was in a very bad car crash. The boy was rushed to the Massachusetts Hospital in Boston and after a night of surgery he seemed to be on the road to recovery. But he did not regain consciousness. The best the doctors could say about the boy's condition was that he might regain consciousness at any time. As the weeks went by, Frankie lost patience with the doctors. Finally he took his wife and two daughters with him and went back to Sicily, to a place near Taormina. There, in a little village in the mountains, near where he was born, there is a church with a statue of a black Madonna. The Madonna is revered by the people there and is traditionally prayed to in desperate cases. Frankie and his family joined in nine days of prayer to the Madonna, a novena, on behalf of the boy in the Massachusetts General Hospital. When they returned to Boston, the boy woke up. He soon recovered completely.
In front of our time unit there is a floor scale. Mail handlers push big carts loaded with mail on to this scale. We weigh it, mark its destination and type of mail on a card and the mail handler sticks this card on the mail and brings it to the primary for sorting. This weighing in only takes a couple of minutes but as we do the job we kibitz with the mail handlers. This weighing in goes on all night and as the weeks go by we get to know all the mail handlers pretty good and pick up on the latest gossip around the fourth floor. Such as: well, life on the platform had been like life in the tavern: just guys. It's different here on the fourth floor. There are now a lot of women working here. The P.O. is also encouraging women to take the exam required for supervisor. They do and in time there are quite a few women bosses. Paul Thornton has taken one of these younger ones under his wing with big plans for her in his future.
The kids who sort the machine mail at the other end of the fourth floor are smoking pot on the clock. We call them kids because they are mostly in their twenties. Being a machine clerk means good money but it is a very intensive type of job. Sometimes airmail sacks are brought directly to the fourth floor from the airport if there is a suspicion that the sacks may contain drugs. The sacks are laid out on the floor in three rows of about ten sacks in each row. The state police come with their dogs and have the dogs sniff out the drugs in the sacks. Sometimes the dogs bolt and run into the machine area where the sniffing is really good.
One of the mail handlers who comes across or scale every night is the fourth floor bookie, Americo Iacossa. Rico for short. This is a perfect job for a bookie. Rico is in his sixties. He made a score many years before and bought an apartment house on Hanover Street in the North End. It is a four storey brick building. On the first floor is an Italian bakery, with a big room with tables and chairs, where you can enjoy their product with an expresso. Rico lives on the second floor. On the third floor live his sister, husband and two kids, on the fourth floor lives his grandmother and two widowed sisters. Rico was born in the North End. His people come from a section of Italy called Abruzzi. Rico does not like Frankie Q, the Sicilian. Like all bookies, Rico is sharp with numbers. He is a good card player. I've never seen anyone shuffle cards like Rico does, like some kind of a magician. He plays some games I never heard of up in the swing room with his buddies. I've tried to follow one particular game but can never figure it out. Klabiash, I think they call it. Stuff like that. He can figure odds and pay-offs pretty quick. Is there a big score in the numbers game in my future? That's my question for Rico. Here's his advice: Don't play for the big score. Some guys chase a number for years and never catch it. Pick a number, a four-digit number, play it for a week. Box the first three, 25 cents each and put a quarter on all four. Cost you only $10.50 for six days. And you get plenty of action for your money. It's the only way for a workingman to play the numbers. The ponies are different." Also sprach Rico.
With Rico comes a glimpse of the inner workings of life in the North End. The Mob lives in the North End. I mean that is where they call home, marry, raise their families. They do not normally bring their job home with them. The Don rents the room in the bakery on the ground floor at Rico's house for a card game the last weekend of every month. The Don lives right around the corner. What's it like having neighbors like that? Well, one time, a couple of years back, there was a gang of teenagers raising hell around the North End. Feeling their oats. The people called the police but got no lasting results so they contacted the Don. Here's what happened. The Don's men grab the ringleader and they take him for a ride. Not far. It's at night. They stop on an overpass over the Expressway that runs through down town Boston. They dangle the kid by his ankles from the overpass, maybe twenty feet above the roaring traffic. They put him back in the car and bring him home. "Next time," they tell the kid, "we drop you." The gang diappeared.
One night I drive Rico home. It is a Saturday night and we get to his place after midnight. The Mob's routine is to play cards, starting around 6 or 7pm.The bakery closes at five. Around ten o'clock they would send out for dinner. Don't forget this is the North End with some of the best Italian restaurants in North America all around the neighborhood. Now in the North End on Saturdays, the rubbish men empty the barrels. If they come late Rico won't be able to put the barrels away until he gets home from the P.O. This is the case the night I drive Rico home. The Mob has finished their dinners and has thrown all their garbage into Rico's barrels, which are standing right outside the door. Rico has a cake for my kids that the baker made and I get out with him to get it. He sees all the garbage in his barrels and flips out. Apparently this has happened before and Rico has complained to them about it. Now he just kicks open the door and starts yelling. First of all you don't kick open the door on a gang of guys playing cards, especially when you can be sure some of them are armed. Rico's start yelling louder and louder, in Italian, turns his back on them and takes me upstairs. Yelling all the while. He slams the door to his apartment real hard. I get the cake, thank him talk to him a bit, trying to calm him down and leave. I have to walk down the stairs past the card game. The door is closed but I can hear them still at it. On the street the barrels are all empty. I drive away slowly to the corner and then I floor it.
Speaking of the Mob, let me tell you a story that Quarter o'One got involved with. The Mob had an operation going on in Chelsea, that town across the Charles River from Boston. It was a big deal by their standards, a game with a lot of deep pockets from Providence Rhode Island every weekend. It ran from Saturday night until Monday morning. It was a convenient time for every one because the factories in Chelsea were closed and the game, in fact, took place in a factory. That way it didn't bother the neighbors. There was a police lieutenant named Sheehan, who worked nights and passed by the factory on his way home from work and noticed something going on. He shut down the game. Well the Mob really liked the location and it was just plain inconvenient for them to notify everyone of a change in location and all that. So they decided to just pay off the cop. Lieutenant Sheehan wasn't that kind of cop. He stuck to his guns. But he must have his price the Don figured. Time to check him out. The lieutenant was straight, had a home in Dorchester and four kids. The oldest girl was fourteen and went to an expensive, Catholic girls' school in Milton, an upscale suburb. How could he afford it? This is where Frankie Q came into the picture. His oldest daughter went to the same school and was pals with the lieutenant's daughter. Through the conversation of the girls, Frankie learned that the girl's tuition was too much for the family and she would not be able to continue. Frankie still rubbed elbows with the boys from his old neighborhood once in a while. In the middle of the night the Mob dropped an envelope with more than enough to cover the girl's bills at the school on the front door steps of the school early one morning. "For the expenses of Mary Sheehan, from a friend of the family", was all it said. That game in Chelsea resumed.
With Quarter o'One as boss and Sully and Leo backing me up with their expertise, things are going OK for me in the P.O. I can still get the four s's taken care of on Tour III. Dan Barry has a bug up his arse about me for some reason. Probably because I'm running late a lot. Also, I make mistakes sometimes with the input of data, mistakes, which he catches the next day. What happens is that Friday nights I usually get together with George Hilliard and some of the boys from the old outside crew of the weighing room. I have no 6am reveille Saturday morning, so with Sully or Leo covering for me, I meet the boys at the Hotel Essex for a couple of beers and we even sing a few songs. Carmen, the piano player, likes us because we perform while she is on break and the hotel guests are so glad when she returns they give her a big round of applause. Now when I get back to the time unit I have to input into the computer columns of figures having to do with mail volumes. Some times I can't see straight and transpose numbers. Dan Barry raises hell with me on Monday. But there seems to more to his ranting than transposed numbers. Don't forget I'm a second hand student of
Theodore Reik and professor Moriarity.
Mine is a balancing act; at home, at school and at the P.O. If there are problems at home, then that is my first priority. Everyone from here to Zorba the Greek knows what I'm talking about. School is pretty straight forward, like I said this is a college preparatory, exam school and there are no problems with the students. I am the only one teaching German, so outside of some occasional administrative stuff, I am my own boss. The P.O. is on keel most of the time, except when Barry gets on my case. Another source of trouble in the P.O. is my modus operandi. Having been broken in by McGrimley in the platform time unit where employees' sponsors were more important than postal regulations, I have some bad habits. Like inputting into the computer paid leave for employees before the supervisor has gotten around to approving the request in the first place. In fact, he may disapprove it. These type of things usually do not get out of hand but certainly could, like the time McGrimley cold cocked a police man in Southie and I had hit him on the clock and had him in a pay status when he was sitting in a jail cell on Broadway over there. Well, all of a sudden the school job is whacked out of sync. My German job is going to eliminated. This was a point in time where it looked like I was going to become financially secure for once. Following the example of the Irish hero Cuchulain, I'll go out fighting.
The desegregation and bussing issues as well as affirmative action have shaken up school programs. The city raised money for its bussing costs by eliminating programs like music, art, physical education and foreign languages. On the other hand it was decided to increase the number of Spanish language courses. At a faculty meeting in June the head of the foreign language department asked me if I could teach Spanish. "Vivi en Mexico por varios anos, Senora", was my answer. That's: "I lived in Mexico for several years." I had left Monterey after graduation from the Army Language School with a Czech linguist named Dave Maniss and we headed for Mexico City. Dave had studied at the American University there before being drafted and still had contacts in the city. We spent two weeks there and I picked up a few phrases from the natives like the one above. Well it is no big deal for language teachers to change their language to accommodate changing times. I had two months to learn Spanish.
In the meantime our school still had a student exchange program going with a school in Germany and I was responsible for taking twenty kids to Berlin for three weeks that summer. Everything went OK over there except for two incidents. I was in a Bierkeller with some locals and the subject of Vietnam came up. Being the only American present I started to explain the Domino Theory. They just chuckled, interrupted me and explained war as something that the little guy, the ordinary citizen, has absolutely no choice in. When the National Socialist said: ' march', the German citizen had to march, with no questions asked about whether or not it was just to invade Poland or any other place. And these guys were not anti American. The second incident hit closer to home. There was a picture in a German newspaper, front page, taken in Boston, of a black guy trying to escape an angry mob by running up the stairs to an apartment house. One guy had the Black by the shirt tails, trying to pull him back down the stairs and the owner of the house was trying to pull the Black free and get him into the safety of his home. The black guy was my Spanish teacher to be from the fourth floor, Chico Colon. The apartment house was the one I passed every day going to and from the P.O., at the corner of Broadway and A Street. Chico was on his way to Ragucci's parking lot on A Street. The Germans I met socially in Berlin did not mention this picture to me but I knew what they were thinking: minorities cause problems or something along that line. Sometimes you have to travel abroad in order to get a fix on just where your country is headed.
Back in Boston and back in the P.O. and out come the Spanish books. My Puerto Rican buddy survived his scare on A Street. He said he was scared when it happened, just like he was scared during a firefight in Vietnam. At least in 'Nam you had a rifle, he said. The Spanish lessons resume over coffee with Chico but his breaks are not long enough to get the job done. Plus, I do not like to monopolize his break time. In the course of the evening he will weigh mail a half a dozen times at our time unit and I will fire a bunch of questions at him then and that will have to do.
Now I get another good break. I meet Karl Ryan. Karl is a clerk on the fourth floor but he disappears as soon as he hits in. His assignment is to run the firing range on the roof. He is a WWII US Navy veteran, a DAV and he speaks fluent Spanish. He is also a Southie boy and a good friend of George Hilliard's. It was George who put me on his trail. Here's Karl's story:
Karl joined the navy when he graduated from South Boston High in 1940. On December 7, 1941 he was stationed on the battle ship Arizona in Pearl Harbor. Karl got up early that Sunday morning and took the motor launch ashore to attend the early mass at the chapel on the land. His best buddy on board the Arizona was a kid also from Massachusetts named Manny Braga. Karl called for Manny on his way out to the motor launch but Manny told him that he was going to go to the late mass that day. Manny was from Fall River, Massachusetts and was the first combat casualty from that city in WWII. There is a beautiful bridge leading across the bay into Fall River today named after Manny, the Braga Bridge
Karl went on to do thirty years in the Navy, reaching the rank of chief petty officer and retiring at the age of 48 and coming to work at the SPA. He had many interesting assignments in the Navy, including work with ordnance, which qualified him to run the firing range at the SPA, as well as years of service in Mexico and Chile with the Naval Attache. In Chile he lived with his wife and children on the economy, that is, in the native community. The Navy had sent him to their language school and Karl could read, write and speak Spanish very well. Karl patiently answered my questions, corrected my writings and provided a lot of insight to Hispanic culture. Karl became a good friend and shared his expertise with me covering a range of subjects. I had just bought a cabin in the forest of northern Vermont and had no idea on how to go about starting a wood fire. Karl had the answer for me. I bought a chain saw and again had no idea of how to use it safely. Karl laid out the rules for me, carefully and thoroughly and I have succeeded in using the chain saw for over twenty years without cutting off any fingers or hands. And of course he insisted on having me qualify for a federal firearms certificate with the 38 caliber pistol.
He, again like Chico, did not have a lot of free time to spend with me working on Spanish but he introduced me to the man who ran the postal employees' education center. This was an agency headquartered in the SPA, which helped employees to improve their skills in things like typing, postal procedures and a wide variety of subjects that might be useful for the employee who wanted to advance him or her self in the P.O. One of the subjects covered was Spanish. There was a course available for self-learning based on the US Foreign Service School's language program, complete with tapes by native speakers. This was first class learner's material and it was available to me on Sunday afternoons. What started out for me as the 4 s's, now had grown to six with the necessity of sleep and Spanish. During the week I sit in the time unit with books spread out on my desk and on the other side of my desk is the scale where the mail handlers push carts of mail to be weighed. My breaks are no longer at Brown's but with my Spanish teachers. I am a little up tight about facing the music in Spanish.
Before I start on my first day teaching Spanish, let me lay a little linguistics on you. Spanish evolved from Roman Latin, slowly from the time of Christ to 1492 AD. That is why it is called a Romance language. The same scenario goes for French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. These languages are different today because of the original ingredients that went into the batter, like the mother tongue of the indigenous people in France, Spain, Romania and Portugal and the type of Roman Latin they were weaned on. In the case of Italian, the change from Roman Latin to modern day Italian is explained by the phenomenon of linguistic change. That's code for 'who the hell knows?'
English, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, belong to a family of closely related languages called Germanic.
Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, belong to a family of closely related languages called Slavic.
Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, belong to a family of closely related languages called Celtic.
These four families are distantly related, which means they evolved from the same language. How they changed is brought to you by the makers of Grimm's fairy tales. Watch this: the Grimm brothers showed that words in the original language beginning with the letter d, change that to the letter t in the Germanic languages. Duo in Latin becomes two in English. Likewise, a letter p in the original language, changes to f in English; Latin pedis becomes foot in English. There are a whole bunch of these transforms and are catalogued under 'Grimm's Law'.
German linguists in the nineteenth century proved that languages spoken from Iceland to India were related and, in fact, derived from the same proto language. American linguists have carried the work further by trying to show that there was a common mother language on this planet. There was a great American linguist at Stanford University named Joseph Greenberg who showed how all the indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere are related. It took him thirty years. Then he went to Africa and did the same type of work over there, showing that the 1500 African languages can be traced to a very small number of proto languages. My figures are vague here because the only entry in Encyclopedia Americana under Greenberg, refers to Hank Greenberg who hit a lot of homeruns for the Detroit Tigers decades ago. Work by archeologists and biologists seem to be confirming the hypothesis of American linguists.
The terrible implication here is that the French and Germans must have had the same ancestors, or the Irish and the English or the Russians and the Poles, or the whole lot of us. Enough to make some puke.
English started out as an Anglo-Saxon, Germanic dialect in 500 AD. In 1066 AD the Normans brought French to England and ruled the roost foe 200 years. That's how English got bent out of shape; it's part Germanic and part Romance. And that's why Spanish is easy to learn for an American.
But let me say right here that 'easy' is a bad word to use. You have to know your stuff real good or you can get into trouble. Language is very tricky. Like the words of that song: "your lips tell me, no, no, but there's yes, yes, in your eyes."
Before we leave this realm there is one more thing to be said about Spanish and Italian that you may not know. The American Indian tribes living on the great plains spoke different languages. They communicated with each other by means of a highly developed sign language. This sign language slowly disappeared as Spanish spread north after 1492 AD. Most linguists are uncertain about the origin of this sign language. Not me. After spending thirty years working with Italians in the P.O. and spending time in Boston's North End, it is clear that the Italians have always had a highly developed sign language. You've experienced it in traffic snafus. But it is much more elaborate than a few hand, finger and arm gestures. The point is that Christopher Columbus was an Italian.
On my first day teaching Spanish, I point some of this out to the students. Especially the part about Spanish being easy. Then I tell them that I am an expert in grammar and will explain anything that seems confusing. Now in a class of twenty plus kids here in Boston, there are bound to be native born Colombianos, or Mexicans, or Puerto Ricans or any Hispanic country you can think of. So I pick one of these native born speakers and appoint them the class expert on pronunciation. And off we go. The kids like that approach and the class expert feels justly appreciated for what he or she is.
Things seem to be going OK on all fronts. In the mean time I am getting to know the gang on the fourth floor pretty good. There are a lot of black men and women here and they have that Gemeindegefuel I mentioned. In fact Sully asked me one day if all Blacks know each other. The women are certainly aware of unattached males and fix them up with an unattached females. Since I am now a friend of Sully's, I have been accepted as a Whitie you can talk to. My best buddy among the Blacks is a guy named Joe Caines. He sings with the P.O. choir and his church in the South End. In a beautiful tenor voice he belts out an aria for me once in a while right in the primary. Carmen's Don Jose is his favorite role.
The SPA has an art department located in the basement under the platform. It is open days but when the work piles up, it stays open on Tour III. The art department makes all the signs that are needed throughout the entire postal district. At holiday time they decorate the entire building, especially the lobby and the cafeteria with appropriate murals of Santa Claus, turkeys, Jack O'Lanterns, Easter Bunnies and stuff like that. Vinnie Forti was a short, fat, Italian guy from the North End. He was a WWII veteran and was assigned to sort mail on the fourth floor in the primary. When things got busy in the art department, Vinnie would work down there. He preferred that greatly. We handled his pay roll time in our time unit. A little background on Vinnie:
Vinnie's mother was a widow born in Italy and to support herself and her only child, she worked out of her own kitchen for an Italian style restaurant downstairs in her apartment building. As a kid, Vinnie did not like going to school so he stayed home and helped his mother cook. He ended up in the U.S. Navy as a cook. After the invasion of Italy he was stationed on a destroyer anchored off the coast of Sicily. One day the admiral of the fleet came on board with an inspection team. The inspection included a meal on board. Vinnie's culinary genius had already been discovered by the destroyer's captain and Vinnie had the job of cooking for the officers' mess. When the admiral sampled Vinnie's cooking he had him immediately transferred to his flag ship. Later Vinnie followed the admiral to a land based operation in Rome for six months. Vinnie claims he ended up having an affair with the wife of the chief of police in Rome. I'm not sure about that but I am sure the chief of police there was not Scarpia, Tosca's nemesis.
Now here is his style: he does not want to sort mail, so Sully and I make sure his time card is not racked with the other employees. This way no supervisor will catch sight of him and grab him for mail sorting in the primary. Once on the clock, Vinnie will high tail it down to the art department where they will find something for him, to do, even if they are not too busy. They like Vinnie. Everybody does, not just the wife of Rome's police chief. Vinnie has a hot plate in the art department and sometimes will make an omelette or something like that for the day crew when they are working overtime. Here is his modus operandi in the P.O. cafeteria. As soon as he gets settled in the art room, he takes the day crew's order for coffee and heads on up to the cafeteria. He gets a large Styrofoam cup of coffee. Instant coffee without adding hot water. He has his own hot water down stairs at his drawing board. This is enough instant coffee to make a dozen cups. He then picks up donuts or Danish whatever his fellow artists wanted. At the cash register, he charms the old lady who runs the place and walks off without paying a cent. Well, at holiday times he does exactly what she asks in terms of decorations. Back in the art department they like Vinnie because, besides his little kitchen and his likeable personality, Vinnie is a hell-of-a painter. They can count on him to finish up the toughest job and get it right the first time. The day crew leaves at 5pm and Vinnie locks the place up at 11pm. It is a spacious place, two big rooms, well lighted, closets, lavatory with shower and comfortable chairs. Sometime, when the locker room on the platform is not convenient, I sleep in the art department. It is only open Monday through Friday but Vinnie gets me a copy of his key so now it looks like I have a mini apartment in the SPA. One Saturday night I head down there for a nap and I see a guy coming out of the art department and carefully closing the door behind him. When I open up and turn on the light there are four guys asleep in there. It looks like a shelter for the homeless. Vinnie gives keys to his pals. He's got a lot of them.
When Vinnie retired we had a very special party for him in the art department. By invitation only. Bobby Knoll and Bob Eaves brought the wine. Vinnie cooked some hors d'oeuvres for us. George Hilliard brought his guitar. I brought Sully down from the fourth floor time unit. Jack Smith and John Whelan were there too and John sang a couple of Italian numbers for Vinnie with George accompanying on guitar. But the star of the show was the belly dancer. At the time I was facing the prospect of teaching another year of Spanish and it would be advanced, third year level stuff. I had to enroll at the University of Massachusetts and take a course, twice a week. The University of Massachusetts has a campus in Boston right next to the JFK Library in South Boston. The class I was in had mostly college-aged undergraduates who were completing degree requirements in a foreign language. One night a coed asked me during our break at the university, if I knew anyone who would like to hire a belly dancer for a party or special occasion. She had taken lessons and was looking to make some extra money for college expenses. She even had a business card printed up. Right away I thought of the upcoming party for Vinnie and made a date with her for that particular night. This coed was what you would call a head turner. It's like this, you walk down the corridor in the college chatting with her and every guy coming the other way has to turn his head in passing and get a second look. Spectacular. Like the one who caused the Trojan War. Now I have to figure out how to get her into the SPA. Every employee has to have a picture ID to get past security at the door into the lobby. There is, however, one security guard who is a graduate of the weighing room and if he is on duty that will be the way to go. Also, I will have to tell the Tour III superintendent that I am bringing my 'niece' into the building to show her around the place. I have to cover all the bases. The Tour III superintendent that night turns out to be Paul Maguire, so it's OK for my 'niece' to come in. In fact Paul even comes to the party. The party is a huge success, the stuff legends are made of, a legend which I am sure my gang has become in the annals of the P.O. among the rank and file clerks and mail handlers. Our dancer played right up to Vinnie, charmed him beyond measure and delighted the audience. A sweet goodbye for a beautiful guy, Ciao Vincenzo!
Things work out for the 6-s's program and time flies by. People seem to have come to terms with bussing. They have moved out of the city to such an extent that the whole dynamic of bussing has lost its impact. Boston hired a black superintendent of schools and he complained that funds for innovative programs were short because of the expense of bussing. He said to us at a faculty meeting that it had reached the point where black students were being bussed to schools that had become predominately black.
Frank Petrus's son is home from Vietnam and the regulars at the Club Car take him up to Saratoga Racetrack in New York for a weekend. They go up there three times a year anyways, so this is just a good excuse to make a special run. Bill Swan goes with them. They leave Friday night by charter bus after they close down the Club Car with some strong partying and they will be back Sunday night.
Up on the fourth floor Supervisor Thornton continues to harass the troops. He has an affair going now with a new, young, female supervisor. Sully thinks one of the clerks will drop a dime on him to let his wife know what's going on. Thornton brags one Friday night that he has just bought a new car, a cadilac, coup de ville. He says he always wanted to have one before he kicked the bucket. He kicked the bucket the very next night. He died of a heart attack in his girl friend's bed. It was an embarrassment for the family to get the car out of there and back home.
In February 1978 Boston gets whacked with a monster blizzard. Logan Air Port closes, the South Station closes, the buses stop running, all the roads are closed, schools are closed for fifteen days and the SPA is closed for a week with the a bunch of workers trapped inside. I got there just as the storm started and parked my car in Ragucci's parking lot right next to the Fort Point Channel. The snow started falling at 2pm, so that meant that Tour II could get home. The forecast was bad so a lot of people on Tour III did not report for duty. Tour I did not come in at all. Dan Barry stayed on to keep the data site manned. He had four technicians with him. Whoever was caught in the building by the storm had to sleep there. The story of the blizzard is a tale unto itself but here's two items. Food ran out after the second day in the restaurant in the SPA. The same happened in all the restaurants in the South Station and in down town Boston. Foreman Barry and his gang were a sorry looking crew by the start of day three. All the candy machines in the place had been emptied. George Hilliard invited me over to his home in Southie to shower and sleep and eat. I did not take him up on that but I did ask him to have his wife, Barbara, to cook some thing up for the gang in the data site. She is Italian and baked a big pan of lasagna, which George walked over with and delivered it to me on the platform. I brought it up to the data site and saved the day and the moral of them all even Dan Barry.
The other thing to mention is my car. I had a Volkswagen Rabbit and I watched the Atlantic Ocean rise up over the roof of it twice in the first twenty-four hours of the storm. It took a week after the roads were cleared to get a mechanic to start it. My insurance company offered to replace the muffler and exhaust system. Parts and labor would come to $350. What to do? Go see Dave Dretler. Dave: " The law in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts states that the owner of a motor vehicle that has undergone flood damage, may not sell that vehicle without telling the buyer of the flood damage. No one in their right mind would buy a car that has gone completely under sea water twice! Demand fair market value from your insurance company for that car." OK, Dave. I had bought the car new for $3500 one year before. Since it was a German car and the value of the German Mark had risen, the insurance company had to pay me $3800. It pays to have buddies like Dave.
After the episode with the feeding of the hungry in the data site during the great blizzard, Dan Barry more or less got off my case. He had always been too busy to really go after me but he kind of frowned on me and once he even tried to track me down. My routine was this: I hit the clock at 2:45pm in the data site and racked the badges of the clerks reporting for duty at 2:55pm in front of the time unit. In the ten minutes in between I changed from my schoolteacher suit and tie to my clerk's jeans and shirt. I moved fast. One day Dan had a bone to pick with me about something and wanted to grab me as soon as I hit in at the data site. He was not fast enough. I hit the clock and am out the door of the data site like a shot. Unbeknownst to me he tries to follow me out the door of the data site and then down the stairs to the platform, three at a time, across the platform, through the weighing room, up the stairs to the swing room where I had a locker beside Jack Murphy's. Somewhere along the way I had lost him. He's twenty years older than me. Then he figured he would get back to our time unit on the fourth floor before I could. Wrong again. I change very fast, maybe 90 seconds, cut through the inspectors office and into there secret corridors of peep holes and pop out behind the fourth floor time unit at 2:56pm and rack the badges. After the clerks hit in at 3pm Dan comes puffing along. He talks to me for a couple of minutes about an error I made with the input of data and then he leaves. Two things: One I have a buddy who is an inspector and he gave me a key to his office and to the peep whole corridors. Two, this guy Dan is fighting something. Pretty soon I find out what has been bothering him about me so long.
A few months later his son dies and all of us technicians go to the wake. His son is laid out in the open coffin. He is about my age. Very thin. He had suffered all his life from tuberculosis and had never been able to work or play sports. His name was Kevin Barry. You would have to be Irish to get the connotations here. I met Dan's wife and offered her my condolences. The boy looked like her. She was extremely thin and fragile looking. She looked so fragile that I could imagine this great grief actually breaking her in pieces. So every day Dan leaves his home and his sickly son and comes into the P.O. and sees me, irresponsible looking, roaring in at the last minute, smoking a cigar, and, well that's the image. I understand him now. I shake his hand and look him right in the eye, offer him my condolences and take him aside and ask about that name he gave his son. What else, it's an Irish wake, he pours me a drop of the creatur, we drink together and we say goodbye. Everything was OK after that between us.
One problem solved, another on the horizon. The school informs me that further cuts in the budget will necessitate the elimination of more faculty. In my engineering days at Northeastern University I had taken so many math courses that I am actually qualified to teach high school math. I will become a math teacher, Algebra I. The material is no big deal but the method of teaching math is something else. I look up another P.O. expert and old buddy from the early platform days, Jack Frost. Jack has been teaching math for over twenty years and is now also a twenty-hour clerk. He lays it all out for me in August and in September I start. It goes OK. Every night in the time unit I lay out the math books and correct papers while the mail handlers push carts of mail over the scale for me to weigh. I'm married to these books and do not wander much from my time unit.
The head of the math department is a Korean War veteran, U.S. Air Force. He is a down to earth, no nonsense type. He runs a world-class math department. There are about a dozen math teachers. Some are genius types. They are not happy to see me. This boss is a professional and he expects all his staff to have been math majors in college. I'm a foreign language teacher.
But I'll try like hell. By the way, that 'world-class' bit was not just for effect. My boss here has taken kids to the International Mathematics Competitions. One of his protégées won a gold medal in Havana, Cuba.
My school schedule now will still include two German courses and three eighth grade Algebra I courses. My boss gives me these instructions on day one: "Keep these kids busy every minute! If you do, you should have no problems. Just never let up." I follow his advice and things go smoothly. Then the last day before the Thanksgiving Day break, my algebra class finishes up their work with about ten minutes left in their class. I tell them to put their books away and relax. They do and all hell breaks loose. My boss has to come in and restore order. I never made that mistake again.
The year goes by OK. In June my boss tells me that I will be teaching a course in Plane Geometry in the coming school year. He gives me the teacher's edition of the students' text. That's the one with the answers to all the problems in it. It comes with his warning: "Do not bring this book to school. These kids are sophomores and pretty savy. One of them will swipe it on you and then we're in the shit."
Over the summer I tackle a couple of chapters in Geometry in the P.O. It is not too bad but there are sixteen chapters in the book. In September I still have two German classes and three Math, including one Geometry. And it happens. I bring the teacher's edition to class and it disappears. The hockey player in the last row is the most like suspect but how to get it back. The hockey coach is also the Physical Education teacher here, so I have a pow wow with him. He's from JP too. The book show up on my desk the next day, no questions asked. It stays in the P.O. after that.
Geometry is actually an interesting subject and I enjoy teaching it. This must rub off on the kids because there is a good atmosphere in the class. This is a college preparatory school and the students are under a lot of pressure to get good grades and get into a big deal university. I mean their parents want it, their teachers expect it, the school administration preaches it, their culture has hoisted this burden upon them. This is the formulaR: good grades = a good college = a good job = good pay. I tell them," the purpose of education is to find out about a lot of interesting, intellectual ideas that will make your personal lives thrive. Don't study for a job!" Fortunately none of my students denounce me to their parents or to my higher ups, so I just go on with my subversive philosophy undetected. In the mean time, out of compassion for them and their lot in life, I make sure they get plenty of laughs while in my class. That's probably what I do best.
One of the girls in my Geometry class comes to me after the first marking period and tells me that she is upset with her grade of C. I'll arrange to get her a tutor if she is so upset and then she tells me that she has never gotten a C in her entire scholastic career. This is the beginning of a strange set of circumstances that become apparent to me with time. Girls do not seem to do as well as boys in Geometry. Even very smart girls. Boys who do not particularly shine in other subjects do well in Geometry. Could the ladies be wired differently? In modern foreign languages the girls seem to pick up on the spoken language quicker than the boys. They have a way with words. A famous Danish linguist, Otto Jespersen, said this about male versus female language: "If the rearing of infants were left entirely to men rather that women, with their gift for baby talk, then the children would not speak until they were five or six years old." Like this: "What did junior say today, dad?" "He didn't say anything to me and I didn't say anything to him."
The Czechs have a motto, Pravda vitezi, truth is victorious. And that has been true for the Czechs a couple of times in the twentieth century. Most spectacularly in 1989 when the Iron Curtain was drawn back. My buddy Sully has a bumper sticker that reads 'Shit happens'. He has some expertise in that situation. Then there is the one 'Love conquers all', which is sort of like my favorite, 'Humor conquers all'. I made that baby up myself. And I also like the one: 'Iligitami non caborundum est'. It means: 'don't let the bastards get you down!' I think you can get through life with these last two alone. Here is what I mean:
My boss at school, the head of the math department, told me one June that in September that I would have to teach Algebra II. He gave me a copy of the text. I put it on my desk in the P.O. Every time that summer, when I had some spare time, I would look at that text and get one of my buddies and down to the Club Car. Just the thought of Algebra II drove me to drink. Algebra I has stuff you remember from high school. Algebra II is a different ball game after 30 tears. Usually I am looking forward to the opening of school in September for two reasons. Number one: I start drawing paychecks again. Number two: same as number one. But this Algebra II could be real bad. A lot of these kids are smarter than I am and will be teaching me after a month.
First day of school in September my boss tells me: "Steve, I have bad news. You won't have that Algebra II class. You will be teaching a new course, Algebra C." Here's the deal: in order to play the numbers game with the federal court, a lot of poorly prepared minority students have been kept on the rolls even after they fail in their course work. A group of thirty, that has never passed a math course here, has been assigned to a course called Algebra C. The guy telling me all this, my boss, the head of the math department, is a great teacher, a great administrator, a great human being and a dedicated professional who will die at his desk, doing the job he loves. I get the message. Teach these kids something they can use in their lives, keep them out of trouble.
The thirty students are mostly black, a few are Hispanic and a few are white. They are about the age of high school juniors, say 16 or 17. They are not intimidated by whitey or anybody else or by the prospect of a poor grade in math. They would rather be somewhere else. Me too. We get along OK. Maybe I talk their language. There is a lot of practical stuff you can teach kids without going off the deep end, like how to figure overtime pay, income taxes, interest on car payments. In fact, as long as the curriculum is not set in stone for these kids, it is possible to do all kinds of things with their math studies. You can even sneak in a little algebra or geometry on them. You can even tell them stories, like the one about those English men who sailed in an open boat from the South Pole, 800 miles across the open sea in an open boat, without a radio and found a safe harbor. Shackelton was the captain and he did it by his knowledge of geometry. What's geometry? Well, it not too bad, it's like this…and off we go. Two kids are really good and I tell my boss about them and he pulls them out and assigns them to a course that suits them better. I miss them.
Three of the toughest cases, I have sitting in the front row. They go from hostile on day one to not hostile by June. That's the best I can do. They refuse to be impressed by anything I come up with from the world of mathematics. But like I said: 'Iligitami non cardorundum est.' Toward the end of June the seniors leave. On their last day they go around the school with their yearbooks and have friends and favorite teachers autograph the books. In the middle of my Algebra C class, the door opens and in comes a girl whom I taught for three years. She is a senior and would like me to autograph her picture in the yearbook. I am glad to do it and stop the class right there and write a few words under her picture. She is a Haitian, very beautiful, in fact she looks like a movie star. My three toughs in the front row cannot take their eye off her. Then, when I finish writing, she bends down, puts her arm around my shoulder and gives me a big kiss. I say a few words to her in French and she is out the door. My toughs are stunned, they are stupefied, they are impressed. Finally. I just tell them to eat their hearts out.
When mail handlers bring mail over to our time unit to be weighed, they can't help but notice I'm always doing math. The funny thing about math is that half the population hated it in school, never did real well at it and are suspicious of the nuts and bolts of higher mathematics. Well, the hate part probably has something to do with that old 'hickory stick'. The 'never did well' part probably has to do with the fact that some of their schoolmates were probably math whizzes. In that situation it is like having a tin ear and being thrown in with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The suspicion of higher mathematics has to do with the traditional awe accorded to mathematicians of old. I mean those ancient Egyptians were regarded as magicians. Archimedis and Euclid? When some one starts quoting them just shut up and listen! Then along comes some German genius and discovers calculus. And maybe you had to take a course in say, differential calculus. You respect the old bugger even if you'd rather be painting nudes in an art class. Then a French mathematician comes along and says: "I think, therefore, I am." Now what the hell is that supposed to mean? It isn't even math, but because he was a mathematician, everybody is bamboozled. Anyways, these mail handlers and sweepers who come by the time unit think I must be good at math. I ain't. They ask me questions about math now and then. Like this Chinaman, Gow Look.
There was a sweeper on the fourth floor named Gow Look. He was a very friendly guy and when he cleaned out our time unit we always joked around. Like the time he told me he had arthritis in his left shoulder and couldn't lift his arm up very high. He went to the doctor and the doctor told him it was just old age, after all he was 68. He then raised his right arm for the doctor, way up high, and told the doctor that his right arm was 68 years old too and there was nothing wrong with it. Sometimes I would get him going and he would tell some interesting stories about life in China. Come to find out his first name was Look and it was only a Chinese custom to give your last name first. Anyways, he came from Shanghai, where he had a little chop house. When the Japanese came to town the going was rough but he survived. He lost his chop house but they didn't get his money. After the war he eventually made his way to Boston where he had relatives. He wanted to become a mail handler and asked about the exam. His English was tough but he was pretty smart and sure enough he became a mail handler. He invited me and my family to dine with him in Boston's China Town. We made a day of it in the big city with the kids and met up with Look for dinner. The eatery was not your typical Chinese restaurant. It was more like a boarding house, eating at long tables, family style. Look insisted on ordering for us and the results were not your typical Chinese-American entrees. Our youngest kido would not touch anything. The older ones gave it a good try. The Frau and I struggled to keep up appearances, washing things down with strong Chinese tea. All the while, Look sat at the end of the table drinking coffee, eating a ham sandwich with potato chips and smiling at us. I kidded him about his not eating Chinese but he just kept smiling. He seemed to command a degree of respect in the place.
There were a lot of Chinese kids at my school and Look taught me some Chinese expressions to lay on them. The Chinese in Boston were from southern China and spoke a variety of Chinese called Cantonese. In the northern part of China they speak a language called Mandarin. This Mandarin is now the standard language for the entire Peoples' Republic. Both languages are written with the same Chinese characters. That makes it simpler, right? Wrong. In fact Cantonese does not have a written language for itself. This is the last of the linguistics because I'm in way over my head here. Look eventually opened a restaurant, Cantonese style, in a city north of Boston and had his son manage it until he retired.
Rico, the bookie, did not work Saturdays. There was a young guy, a sweeper named Mike Upton,, who took bets on horses, dogs, sports and numbers. He grew up in Revere and hung out at Suffolk downs. He was quick with numbers and figuring odds and pay-offs like any upstanding bookie. One Saturday night he asked me if I could teach him some math. Mike loved horses and he wanted to take a leave of absence from the P.O. and study animal husbandry at the University of Massachusetts. He needed to take a course in algebra to get accepted to the program. I brought in a book, Algebra I, and we go off to the swing room for lesson one. Sully covers for me. Algebra starts out with a classification and definitions of numbers. Well, you remember fractions and decimals. They are part of it. There's more to it, like this: whole numbers, rational numbers, irrational numbers and even imaginary numbers. I taught this a couple of years and I know how to make it clear to beginners. You know what I mean, like, take the mystery out of it. But with Mike there is a problem. This is his field, man, his forte. He does not need to know the nomenclature because he intuitively knows how numbers work. After the first session he looks at me and says: "Thanks, Stevie." He calls every one like that, in the diminutive. That's also his last lesson. But he is still friendly and I place bets on the numbers with him every Saturday
Now the numbers game is not as straight forward as you might think. At least in the mind of players and bookies. It's like this: my Puerto Rican buddy, Paco, comes across the time unit scale around 5pm every night with the number of the day. If it is a number like 372, they call that "a nice number'. If it is a number like 002, well that's 'feo', and ugly number. The bookies call a number close, if it is in the 'run down' and this refers to the way the number is calculated and goes beyond the scope of this discussion. But there is a philosophical twist to it too. One time the number 555 came out. It was May, the fifth month. A week later in June, I told Mike to play 666 for me. He said: "You can't play that number, Stevie. That's the sign of the beast." These guys know the Book of Revelations. It figure's for gamblers, doesn't it?
As usual, I am way behind on my bills. My son is going to college now. If I had fifty grand I would be in the clear, daylight, running room. You know what I mean? Well, Rico had taught me how to bet as a workingman ought to, but now I figured I'd go for a big score. I have this old number that I play with Rico, 4711. One time back in the seventies we put up some German teachers at our home as part of the school's foreign exchange program. One of them gave my wife as a parting gift, a bottle of perfume, called 4711. That was the street number of the factory in Paris that produced it and that was the name of the stuff too. It had cost me a lot of dough over the years. This number just never popped. It was due, man. I asked Mike how much I would have to put on old 4711 to win fifty grand. This pay off of course would be tax free. That was the nice part of doing business with the Mob. There was, however, their other side. Mike: "You'd have to put a saw buck on it, Stevie. All four, straight for $10. But don't do it. Here's why: Stevie, it would be cheaper for them to knock you off than to pay you fifty grand. They could get a contract on a guy like you for $5,000. See what I mean, Stevie?" While we're on the subject of math let me tell you about John Coffee.
John Coffee was a Korean War veteran, a DAV. He had lost his right leg from the knee down. They called him 'Duke' because that was how his license plate on his car read. He worked Tour I and he was a technician like the rest of us. He worked in the data site because there you do not have to deal with employees. John had a short fuse. When he got to work at about 10:45pm he would park in front of the platform at the door to the elevators in one of six spaces reserved for handicapped employees. If the guys on the platform had taken up these spaces, John would double park in front of them, turn off the engine, get out, lock the car and disappear. The guys parked in the handicapped spots could not get out. This cured everyone of the temptation of parking in handicapped spots. If you did not take his parking space, you could not help liking John Coffee. He reminds you of Bob Maclean with his positive outlook and sense of humor. But while Bob Mclean could only joke about his leg dripping pieces of North Korean shrapnel, John Coffee could take off his wooden leg and shake it at you. The women in the data site flipped out when he pulled that stunt unexpectedly on them.
Johnny's sons were boy scouts and Johnny was the scout master. One of his boys was in high school and failing Geometry. Johnny got me to come out to his home on Saturday mornings and work the boy through the stuff. You know Geometry is not that bad but a lot of kids, girls and boys, just don't get it. It's almost like they don't want to get it. This seemed to be the case with Johnny's kid. He was pretty smart. Anyways, after getting through high school he went off to college. "How's our student doing?" I'd ask Johnny every night on my way out. Well the kid quit college in his second year. So I stopped asking about him. About a year later Johnny calls me over to his desk and gives me a computer magazine. It's one of those ten dollar a copy jobs for experts in the field. The Geometry boy is now a computer whiz and writing articles on computer games that he has played at various computer expos across America. Apparently he started playing those games when he was supposed to be doing Geometry. He making more than his father and me combined. In fact he has an accountant who tells him to stop earning money in October or it will all go to the IRS.
Johnny gets more done on one leg than the rest of us on two. Besides being a scoutmaster, he runs the entertainment committee for the old age home in Dorchester. Johnny throws a birthday party for the old ladies who have a birthday coming up in the next month. He is also master of ceremonies. These parties always have surprises for him. Like the time there was only one lady who had a birthday coming up that month. John had her age, 92, written in frosting on the cake. After the singing of Happy Birthday and the cutting of the cake, she whispered in his ear that he had no right to publicly announce her age. John had to apologize. Or the time the cake cutting was interrupted by a senor who again whispered in his ear the names of the eighty year olds who had high cholesterol and who were under doctor's orders not to eat ice cream or even cake! Johnny reminded me of the guys on the platform; he went about his job, a humble one by some standards, with a certain dignity and a great sense of humor that belied his youthful experiences under his country's colors.
There are good guys on the fourth floor and they far outnumber the number of creeps. Take Roger for instance. He starts out in the P.O. as a sweeper. He had a drinking problem but he got it under control thanks to the P.O.'s program with AA. The P.O. has been slowly but surely moving away from its old patronage system of appointing bosses and any level of employee for that matter. Roger has worked his way up to elevator operator and would like to take the test for supervisor in the maintenance craft. You might tend to underestimate this job but it is complicated enough; like being in charge of thirty employees and being responsible for maintenance schedules for a dozen elevators, hearing union grievances and generally keeping things running smoothly. Anyways, Roger comes over for some advice on taking the exam and especially concerning English and Mathematics. He is a pretty smart guy to start with and he gets his promotion. It is a sizable increase in pay. He remains his old friendly self and in fact comes over to the time unit regularly with a joke or a story to smile about. One night and confides to us that his daughter is graduating form grammar school and he shows us her picture. Turns out that it is his foster daughter that he and his wife adopted by mail with the help of missionaries in Guatemala. They have been sending the missionaries money for this orphan's support monthly ever since the girl was born and the girl writes them and keeps them up to date on her life in Guatemala. Roger carries her picture with him always and when you ask him how that Spanish beauty of his is doing, he will gladly stop and give you all the latest. But let's talk about the twenty-hour regulars up here on the fourth floor.
There is a big gang of men and women that report at 6pm and work until 10pm, Monday through Friday. Sully's older daughter is one and Leo's wife, Selma, too. Selma is always getting after Sully about his smoking. One of the women clerks is about thirty-five, tall, heavy make up, and kind of slim. There is a creep of a mail handler who decides to make a play for her. She has a husband, three kids, a home mortgage, car payments and is probably at the point in life where Zora the Greek's wife was. Anyways, I told you some strange things happen in the P.O. listen to this: this mail handler brings us mail to weigh all night at the time unit and has three things on his mind: the woman twenty-hour clerk, his possible promotion to supervisor and his kid, the football star at his town's high school. In the space of six months here is how it plays out. He has an affair with the woman. Her husband finds out and kills her with a hammer. The creep gets promoted to supervisor. His kid, the football star, gets killed in a car crash coming from his senior prom. The creep has a heart attack, does not recover his strength and has to give up his supervisor's job. He is sent to work with the gang in the dead letter section. Now let's back to talking about some of the good guys who are twenty hour clerks.
Bobby O'Neil was a twenty hour clerk, Monday through Friday, 6-10pm, assigned to the primary. These were the guys who came to the SPA every night after a day on the full time job some where in the city. They started with four or five years military service, worked a couple of years in the P.O. when they first got married and were short of cash and then found themselves in a spot where a government pension was a definite possibility if they could hang on. But they came in to work with a lust for some jokes and camaraderie and to unwind, which they did in a very inoffensive way. In other words they were always upbeat and fun to talk to. They are of the same temperament as the temps on the platform. Bobby was a U.S. Navy veteran of WWII. He had served on board the aircraft carrier Missouri and was on deck that day when General MacArthur sat down with the Japanese and the peace treaty ending World War II was signed. Every year Bobby went off to a convention for shipmates from the 'Big Moe'. He was a handsome, dapper guy from Southie with a winning smile.
On the outside Bobby was a janitor in the Boston Public Schools and a buddy of Bob Ranton, the janitor at my school. Before Bobby O got out of the Navy he had to spend time at the veterans hospital for back injuries that were slow to clear up. The veterans hospital was in Jamaica Plain and in fact right behind the house I grew up in as a kid. This hospital had a ward up on the eighth floor for veterans who came back from the war with mental problems. Some of these guys were in tough shape. Once in a while a patient would jump to his death.Two or three times a week the nurses would bring a group patients down to the ball field near my house to throw a softball around and maybe get a little game going. They tried to slowly mix the guys with mental problems in with guys like Bobby and get them back into the real world. Bobby and his buddies would adopt one of these tough cases and try to turn them around. Their technique was simple: as they walked down to the ball field they bitched about everything at the hospital; the food, entertainment, noise, routine, almost everything except the staff. They kidded each other about their injuries, hid an amputees' prosthesis on him, complained about unreasonable wives, told jokes, followed sports like true fanatics and had a bookie in the hospital who always had a tip on an upcoming race at Suffolk Downs. Don't forget these are young guys at that time. Mostly they were outgoing. A recovering mental patient could not pass Bobby or his buddies without stopping for a smoke or a little talk. They'd talk about anything from their penis to their pension. Here is the story of one of the patients these guys adopted and brought back from the brink.
All Favola was an eighth floor patient but not a hopeless case. The doctors just could not get him to come around completely. Al was not injured physically but he had undergone something in Germany that had done something to his emotional well-being. He never went into much detail about it. He was 28 years old at the time and the doctors at the VA did finally bring him around to the point where he could be safely discharged from the hospital. Bobby O and his buddies kept in contact with Al and got him to take the exam for a maintenance level position in the post office. His old veterans' hospital buddies teased him about living with an aunt until he finally got his own apartment in Eastie. Then they teased him about his giving them all a pain in the ass because they had to drive him to the VA hospital for his check ups. So he got his drivers license. Then they fixed him up with a widow in Eastie (where else?) and before he was forty, Al got married. Bobby O and his buddies never gave up on Al until they had a happy ending on their hands.
After I got to know Bobby O and we talked about the school he was janitor in and about the school where I taught and he introduced me to Al one day when Al was sweeping out our time unit. After Al went on his way, Bobby went on to tell me about Al's rehabilitation and he said that he never found out exactly what happened to Al in Germany except that Al was in a tank that got hit. Everyone in the tank got killed except Al and it was five days before they pulled him out of that tank. That's as much as Al told Bobby O but I guess that's all you need to know to understand why a person could snap. One Saturday night Al told me the complete story of what happened to him in Germany. Here's how he came to do that:
Thanks to Vinnie Forti I had a key to the art department and Saturday nights I did some schoolwork there. It was well lit, quiet, comfortable, equipped with a typewriter and even a Xerox machine. One night Al saw the light shining from under the door as he passed by and came in to check the room out. I happened to be playing some German music, folk songs, on a tape that I used with my students. At my school in my classroom on Friday afternoons during the last class of the day we sang German folk songs. These are the songs that are sung by the people in Inns, Gast Hauses, over there in the course of an evening of socializing with beer drinking and just plain laid back relaxing. Before TV. When we sang in my classroom the kids, sixteen year olds, loved it. For once in the week the grammar books were put away. They put their heart and soul into it. This is the music that was playing as I chatted with Al in the art department. There was always a bottle of Jim Beam where I worked and I offered Al a shot but he said no, but kind of lingered and gabbed a bit before he pushed off with his broom. As time went by he would stop in at the art department every Saturday night and bat the breeze. One night when my German music was playing he stayed longer than usual, lit up a cigarette with shaky hands and asked me about my tour of duty in Germany and kind of loosened up. He lit one cigarette after another, and talked. Al liked music. He'd heard those songs before; the ones I had my students singing. He'd heard them in Europe right after the war ended. They brought back memories that, once he got them on his tongue, just kept coming out. He smoked and I drank and when he finished, he said that I was the first person he had ever told the whole story to. Here it comes.
Al was a tough kid with fast fists from Maverick Square in the Italian part of East Boston. A wise guy with a chip on his shoulder. A young punk. At sixteen he got kicked out of school for cold cocking a teacher and that became a pattern for him in a string of jobs. He would have ended up in the can but for some people who were looking out for him as best they could. They got him into the army in 1943 before he got a police record. Somehow he got through basic training and tank school without any problems. But that chip was still high on his shoulder. He shipped over to France as part of the replacement force in November of 1944. He job was to be a member of a tank crew, the loader. In December of 1944, during the lull just before the Battle of the Bulge, his tank platoon got a night off for rest and recreation as best as they could find it in a half bombed out French wine cellar. Twenty young GI's tried to live it up a bit. The men were slow to break it up after last call. The First Sergeant went in and read the riot act to them. Before anyone could move, the wise guy from Eastie shot his big mouth off. The First Sergeant was a tough veteran, ten years older than these replacements and not about to take any lip from an eighteen old. The two of them went at it. Al cold cocked him. One punch. His buddies dragged him away, back to their unit's position and waited for the worst, the next day. The First Sergeant had been humiliated in front of the men under his command. He would exact his vengeance. All he had to do was to report the incident to the Military Police and Al would be done for. Nothing happened the next day or the one after that. Then the Germans moved.
The Battle of the Bulge broke out. Al's unit was immediately ordered into action. His tank was a 34-ton, medium tank with a crew of five. The inside was a metal box about the size of a small room. There was a driver and an assistant driver up front in the most dangerous seat. If there were a direct hit both of them would be killed instantly. The gunner was behind them with the loader at his side. Al was a loader. The tank commander sat on the right side under the top hatch. There were five escape hatches, two on top, one on the bottom and one on each side. The Germans had a better tank, called the Panzer. It had heavier armor and a deadly cannon, the 88 millimeter. Al's tank was hit in the first days of the battle. The driver and his assistant were killed right away. Al was wounded but survived five days until passing GI's rescued him. During those fiver days in total blackness, the other two crew members died a screaming, mad death. Al could not help them. He could not move. The driver's body was laying on him. For Al the worst was over it seemed. The hospital in France had him patched up and on his feet by April. But the medical wonders they performed were only on his body. There was something way wrong in his head. They held him another month, the war ended and Al was about to be released from the hospital. He would be released back to his old tank outfit. That's the way Army paper work goes. Then it seemed that Al got a break. He was given a final physical exam by a doctor named Chase. Al says he can still see Dr. Chase's face in his dreams. This doctor took the time to read Al's folder and talked to Al about those five days and nights in the tank with the dead and dying. The doctor then wrote a medical directive calling for orders to be cut transferring Al immediately to the Walter Reed Military Hospital in Virginia. The key word here was 'immediately'. This was 1945 and the waiting list for transport stateside was long if you were non-medical. The orders were cut and sent to Al's old tank company. The written orders pass over the desk of the man who runs the company, the First Sergeant. In Al's case, the man he had cold cocked. The First Sergeant deep sixed the orders. He had other orders in mind for Al. It was Graves registration.
Each GI is issued a pair of dog tags that he wears on a chain around his neck at all times. Name, serial number and religion are stamped on the tags. The tags are rectangular except for a small notch on one side. When a soldier is killed, one tag is jammed into his teeth at this notch and the other tag is sent to the department of military records. The whole operation of getting this done, and keeping things straight, is the responsibility of a unit called Graves Registration. After a battle the job is carried out as soon as wartime conditions allow. It is an on-going process. By the end of May 1945, the work in the field was 90% completed. The last 10% had to do with deaths that had occurred in various places isolated at the time from the front line ground battles. Air crews, killed in crashes in Europe, had been buried often quickly by villagers in out of the way places. Tracking down these graves, exhuming the bodies, identifying them and arranging for transport of the corpses to burial grounds was the end of the business that Al was given by his first Sergeant. Here is the story in his own words as I remember them:
"I was attached to a unit in Aachen. That's a big city in Germany near the Belgian and Dutch border. It was just a pile of rubble then, in May of 1945. The unit was Graves Registration. There were twelve of us; the twelve apostles, they called us at headquarters. There were two Brits, two Belgians, two Dutchmen, and five American and the commanding officer.The CO was an American, a captain. The Brits were soldiers and the rest were civilians. We traveled the border country, Belgium, Holland and Germany, north from Aachen toward Nijmegen. That's about 60 miles on a line but we zigzagged in and out of towns along the way. About the only things military about us was our three jeeps and a deuce and a half. And we called the captain, captain. That's all.
The first day we pulled into a little Belgian town late in the afternoon. Maybe five or six. But it stays light real long over there. We had supper in a little restaurant on the town square and somehow the priest found out we were there and he joined us. We were all sitting around the table, the food was all right and there was plenty of cognac. The priest told us that an American bomber had crashed there in January and they had buried the crew of six in the churchyard, off to the side, figuring they would be moved later on anyway. He said they did not have coffins for the men so they buried them in canvas shrouds. He talked all French so our Belgians translated for us. Captain said we’d meet him there in the graveyard early the next day. Then the priest had a cognac with us. He was real quiet. Then before he left he said something that the Belgians didn’t translate for us. When he was gone they just said he wished us courage. The inn keeper was there all the while listening in and he gave us all a bottle of cognac to take for the next day. All the while we were there that night the locals were there too and one of them had a squeeze box and he would play once in a while and sometimes the other locals would sing along. That’s where I remember hearing some of those songs you sing here. Like ‘Lili Marlene’.
The next day was bright sunshine. I remember it real good. No wind. No clouds. Warm. Just like here in Boston in late May. The priest was waiting in the graveyard when we got there. He showed us where to dig. The bodies weren’t very deep. Maybe four feet deep. But you had to dig deeper to get a hold on the shroud. It was wet. It took two of us to lift it up so it wouldn’t break apart. Captain cut the shroud away with a knife and we saw the face. In profile like. And when Captain tried to get the dog tags the head kinda rolled around toward us all who were looking on. There was no other side of the face. Then he cut away the rest of the shroud so we could go through the pockets for personal belongings, photos and stuff like that. The smell was real bad. It took about a half hour for the first body and we had five more to do. We took a break. Captain had figured we would be out of there by noon so we had all our gear already loaded in the jeeps. The cognac too. After that first one we went back to the jeeps for the cognac. We finished about two in the afternoon. The bodies were all loaded on the truck and Captain ordered me to go with the driver to the depot back toward Aachen where the bodies would be off loaded by me and the driver. We were then to double back and meet in the next town on our list. I remember thinking as we were going along in the truck, please God don’t let us get lost and get there in the dark. By the time we got there I had finished the bottle of cognac. After we off loaded the bodies we stopped for supper in another one of those little places where locals gather, to sip wine or beer and talk and sure enough some one plays a guitar or something and they sing. Those same songs. Like the ones you are playing here for your students. We were just the two of us so the locals joined us and found out what we were doing. They were very friendly and when we left they packed us off with more cognac.
It was ten at night when we caught up with the rest of our detail. They were in the town restaurant waiting for the mayor. This was still Belgium and the people were very friendly and had joined our guys at their table. The cognac was on the house. Well we had stuff for them too, like cigarettes and food, steaks and chicken that we picked up from the PX along the way. So we talked and ate and smoke and drank and tried not to think about tomorrow and there was always music and those songs. Like folk songs and WWII songs. And then the Mayor came. He talked English. A plane had crashed just outside of the town. Four crewmembers had to be buried fast because the Germans were shelling the town and the area around it. No coffins, no shrouds. Just as they were when they pulled them out of the plane. They were in a field without any markers and the mayor would meet us tomorrow and take us there. The Captain had a list of towns in this area that had reported war dead buried by civilians. But there were no dates. So he asked the mayor when they crashed. May 1942. They were British. RAF. Three years in the ground. We all went to bed with cognac.
Bodies in the ground five years are horrible. We knew what we were going to find so in the morning we had the cognac first. Then went to work. It was worse than we thought. We sent out for more Cognac. We finished that job and that was the last one I can remember from start to finish. After that all I remember is parts of days, no order, no rhyme or reason to it. Inns in Belgium, Holland, Germany. Smoke filled. That music. Digging . Tearing open shrouds. And dog tags. In the teeth. Cognac, beer, wine, scotch. Before, during and after. One day something happened to me and I woke up in a military hospital in Aachen. I asked the nurse what the date was. August 1. I had lasted over two months on the Graves Registration detail, I thought. But then she said I got there on the fourth of July."
The army doctoring was not your family physician type of operation. Doctors were always moving on, like their patients. Continuity of records was not a practicality of a war theater. All they had on Al was the immediate cause of his admittance to the hospital. Shrapnel wounds, severe blood loss, nervous collapse. Surgery, sedation, IV’s and complete bed rest, that would be about it. The end result would be that Al’s youth and rugged constitution would see him rise to a physically, apparently healthy consciousness. The extent of the head problem would remain beyond the scope of a five or ten minute exam. Certainly the emotional devastation would be obvious and the orders would be given to have the now ambulatory patient shipped stateside. Through the usual channels. Not through his attached unit, graves registration, but through his original unit. Al is to be put on a deuce and a half with a dozen other guys being discharged from the hospital and dropped off at their respective units. The war is barely twelve weeks over in Europe. Al’s tank unit is still in Aachen. Satan is still the First Sgt. He is waiting for Al. Again. Al will be back in Graves Registration. He is standing in front of the hospital waiting for the truck. Before the truck gets there, Al’s guardian angel does. He brings Dr. Chase. The doctor recognizes Al, probably from the agony on his face, and pulls Al aside. The truck comes but Al is not to get on. Dr. Chase is livid. Who screwed up? How could this have happened? Justice, right prevails. Al is air lifted to Walter Reed.
What happened to Al after Walter Reed is all good: the transfer to the VA Hospital in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts where the care is good; there he meets Bobby O’Neil, that irrepressible, survivor type from Southie and a bunch of other guys who are slowly but surely recovering from wounds, physical and otherwise. You could say with a degree of accuracy that Al Falco came back from the dead. I wish this story were not true but as Brendan Behan said: “It’s not much of a world but it’s the only one we’ve got.”
And yet war meant different things to different people, like Frankie D, the PT boater. Frankie D had been a PT Boater in WWII. His hobby was going to his old unit's yearly conventions and helping out in an organization that was restoring a salvaged PT Boat. The boat was eventually put on display at a naval museum in Fall River Massachusetts where it is moored along side the battleship Massachusetts and the destroyer JFK. Frankie D tried to track down his old shipmates. One day he told me he had located the commanding officer of his old PT Boat and had an appointment to meet him the following day. Here's what happened: the guy, Frankie D's former CO, had his own insurance business in a town south of Boston. He told Frankie that he didn't care if he ever saw another PT Boat in his life. He said he still had nightmares about being on one. He wished all his old shipmates good luck but he did not want to hang out with them. Frankie D was baffled by that.
From where we sit in time unit we not only get to meet a lot of people but we can see anybody who happens to be passing by. One afternoon Paul Maguire comes by with a group of foreign officials who are checking out our P.O. and its modern mail processing machines for possible use in their own country. Paul is the boss of Tour II now and he loves his job. He looks good, relaxed, healthy. As he walks by I realize that the group of foreigners are Vietnamese. I yell over to him if he wants some artillery support. He laughs his great, deep, contagious laugh and says that he already shook them all down for weapons. Then it's back to those math books. But first I have a favor to ask of Paul. I need an extra telephone at home. Paul will take care of it.
At 2:45 pm I am to meet Paul Maguire at P.J. Connely's Pub in Southie. Paul has a telephone for me, an extension phone. His brother-in-law works for the telephone company. It's a birthday gift for my teenage daughter. The pub is in Southie at Andrew Square about a five-minute drive from the SPA. This particular day I bust out of school at 2 pm with the kids and I am at P.J.'s at 2:30 pm, before Paul. I'll have a beer. The place is crowded. Every time I look down the bar at the bartender, he is looking the other way. No beer for me. Paul comes in the door and the bartender is right there with : "Hi, Paul, what'll you have?" Paul: "I'm all set, Gerry." Paul gives me the phone and before I run and before Paul heads for the booth where his buddies are sitting, I find out why I didn't get served.
P.J.'s is South Boston profundo. Every one there is white, Roman catholic, democrat, and card carrying union member. You've heard of places where you can't get in without a tie. This place is the opposite; you can't get in with a tie. Well, you can get in but you won't get served. If a guy comes through the door with a suit and tie on, like I did, they figure he is an undercover cop or a narc agent. That's why I didn't get a beer. The scene in the Club Car compared to this place is 'babes in toyland'. Here's what's going on in P.J.'s:
First of all a stranger doesn't get served. If he hangs around long enough and finally gets his beer, the glass will be half soap water. If he doesn't take the hint at that point, it will get ugly for him. Now the dialogue with Paul is not innocent. 'Hi, Paul!' is coded. The use of the first name means Paul is a member, and well known here. 'What'll you have?' is a standard greeting but here it is just being polite. Paul is recognized as a decorated war veteran from 'Nam, agent orange crippled and unable to drink, hasn't since he got home, but they ask him anyway. Not to, would be against their customs. Paul uses the bartender's first name. Every one here is a club member.
Before I leave I get a fix on the guys in the booth Paul is headed toward. The white headed guy is a local kingmaker. It's like it says in their anthem: 'lawyers and preachers.' The guy beside him is a cop in civilian clothes, and a temp in the P.O. I can't see the guy opposite the cop but the guy sitting on the outside opposite the kingmaker is Bobby Knoll. Bobby's there for security. He's big and you just take one look at him and know you would not want to get physical with him. Paul is very intelligent and ambitious. He is going to give it his best shot before agent orange croaks him. The kingmaker doesn't waste time. They are not here to drink, talk baseball or broads or racehorses. The place is cover; no enemies will walk in the door unexpectedly, no one can hear what they are talking about. The drinks are props and they'll leave a big tip. The kingmaker reminds me of my chess playing buddy John Gell. He has taken his game to a higher level than the opposition.
What else is going on in those booths in P.J.'s? How about real estate deals? Houses for sale in Southie do not make it to the real estate pages of the Boston Globe. It's all word of mouth, there are no real estate agent fees and no Blacks or Hispanics moving in. What else? The second time I dropped into P.J.'s it was to meet George Hilliard. No tie this time. As soon as George saw me , he called my name, got up and left his buddies with a: "I gotta go, this guy's my ride." George muscles me back out onto the street. Me: "What the hell is goin' on?" George: "Those three guys in that booth are planning to rob a store downtown. They asked me if I wanted in. If they tell you the details and you say no, well then there could be a problem. If the job goes sour, they might get around to blaming some one who knew about it, like me. That's why I bolted when I saw you. They were about to go into the details." Hilliard thinks fast.
In December I get a break. A teacher of German retires and I pick up two German courses and drop three Math courses. Here's the deal, if you teach an Advanced Placement course it counts for two courses. That means I only have to teach four courses. The day before Christmas vacation I meet with my Advanced Placement German course. They are a little suspicious of me. Do I know how to talk German? Kids like to be taught by some one who knows their stuff. Maybe I'm just a warmed over math teacher. Here's how that first class goes: I go over the names, roll call. Fifteen names but only fourteen bodies. One has sent word that he is arriving late. Now this school I'm at is a tip-top, college preparatory one. Boston of course has foreign embassies and a lot of foreign executives working here and their families are here with them. So we have a lot of foreign students. I read off the name and kibitz with each kid, where are you from, Southie, Eastie, JP, stuff like that. Then I come to a French kid. Well everyone knows a little French so I practice my 'un peu' and the kids get a kick out of that. Then a kid from Spain, and I go through the same routine only a little longer because I have a toehold in Spanish. Now don’t forget I'm their German teacher too. Then comes a kid from Buda Pest. In the P.O. I unloaded freight trains years ago with a mad Hungarian. The trains came into the P.O. under the platform in a cold, dark, damp place called the pit. It was this Hungarian's practice to bring a gallon of wine into the freight car and the men would tug a way at that all night. He taught me some Hungarian to pass the time, mostly swears but when we raised a glass it was always with the Hungarian for 'to your health'. So I lay that on this Hungarian kid and my stock goes way up. There's one more kid and he's from Finland. It's almost Christmas time so I use the only Finnish expression I know on him: 'Merry Christmas!' The kids check with him to see what I said and they are amazed. Now there is still one kid missing and when I ask about him they tell me he will be here any minute but they assure me that I will never be able to speak his language. The kid finally comes in the door. He's from Prague. This turned out to be a great class and I took them to Germany the next summer.
Back in the P.O. on the fourth floor you cannot help notice that some of the Vietnam veterans had serious problems. That guy in the racks who committed suicide was a Vietnam veteran. There was a guy in the primary, who had been back from Vietnam for two years but was still in tough shape. One night before he came to work, he finally went over the top. He murdered his wife and then drove to a small airport near Boston. He had learned to fly in Vietnam. He climbed into a light, single engine plane and took off. It was about 10pm. He flew to Boston and buzzed the tallest building, the Prudential Center. He scared the hell out the people who were dinning and drinking in the restaurant on the top floor. Next he cruised along the Charles River and flew under the double-tiered bridge that connects Boston with the North Shore, the Mystic River Bridge. This is no small feat but nothing compared to his next stunt. He flew about ten feet above the waters of the Fort Point Channel opposite the P.O. and while steering the plane with one hand, he sprayed the SPA and especially the platform area with barrage of machine gun fire. This was around 11pm and the night crew was coming into the building and Paul Maguire was on his way out across the platform. Paul recognized the sound of bullets and ordered everyone around him to hit the floor. No one knew if the plane was coming back for another attack. The plane did not return to attack but landed over at Logan International Airport where the pilot was arrested and led away forever.
Speaking of planes reminds me of the pictures my weighing room buddy, Barney, showed us. The pictures were sharp, clear; there are no clouds at those high altitudes. The image of the plane next to him, wing breaking off and nose pointing down, is burned into my visual memory. The pictures Barney had taken showed a half a dozen bombers in tight formation. He took them of course from his plane and you realized how close together they were all flying. You could see the face of the pilot in the closest plane. Barney knew him by name. But what are you really looking at here? A Boeing Aircraft Company product. A bomber. For Barney it was a B24. For his friend Pat McCan it was a B17. Nouns numb our sensitivities. Take the name Boeing; a manufacturer of airplanes; Krupp, a manufacturer of heavy machinery; Messerschmitt, Mitsubishi, manufacturers of motors. Now if you have an atomic bomb, then you want the most reliable vehicle available to deliver it. That would be Boeing's, B29. A noun is a name and that particular B29 has a name: "Enola Gay". That happened to be the pilot's mother's name. Now hold on, don't go away! This is not going to deteriorate into a pacifist litany of complaints. This is just the semantics of the phenomenon. Let's call it semantic relativity. You know, Einstein's point about the position of the observer. Now you could look at Barney's buddy from Jamaica Plain on his way to bomb the town of Lauf, near Nuremberg, and see this: a B17, nice aerodynamic lines, 75 feet long, 100 foot wingspan, It could go 300 miles an hour and had a range of 3000 miles. It could carry 17,000 pounds of bombs. An engineering marvel for its time. This was the type bomber that dropped over 500,000 tons of bombs to cripple the Nazi war machine. One B 17 even became such a celebrity that it had a name: "Memphis Belle".
You could also see in this B 17 the plane that dropped the bombs on my wife's home when she was eight years old, visiting her grandmother. You could look at Barney's pictures and say those were the B 24's that dropped the bombs on the whorehouse in China that killed all those Japanese officers. You could also see this: the plane carrying Mrs. Barney's son, Adolph, the one who got arrested for stealing a car a couple of years ago. Barney is sitting atop 8 tons of explosives, going over 200 miles an hour at 35,000 feet. It's good Ma does not know. Nouns are designations of things, not really explanations. War is a noun. Desegregation and bussing are nouns too. They designate a situation that is the result of a court order. There is more to it than kids riding buses. More to it than disruption of community. Listen to this:
By September of 1979 forced bussing in Boston was five years old but still a source of dissension across the city. But not so bad as it was in 1974 when my Puerto Rican buddy, Chico, got dragged out of his car over on A Street. Then on September 28, 1979 a black high school football player from Jamaica Plain High School, named Darryl Williams, was shot at a football game in Charlestown. He was a sophomore and he had just caught his first pass for his team. The bullet hit him in the neck and although he lived, it left him a quadriplegic. At best, ran the prognosis, he would be in a wheel chair for the rest of his life. Three white teenagers were arrested and two of them were eventually sentenced to ten years in prison for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. The Boston Public Schools were in an uproar. Students walked out of several high schools claiming they were unsafe. There were street demonstrations demanding justice for Darryl Williams.
Coincidentally, about this time, Pope John Paul II was due in Boston and no one knew how to calm things down. At this point Darryl's mother stepped into the limelight and called for a nonviolent response. The leadership of the black community joined with her and order was restored to the city and to the schools. At that time I had a lot of black students and all of us just did what was expected of us without any editorial comments and things worked out. That generation of students had its own primer on hate laid out before it. To be teaching black kids in Boston at that time and to be working with black guys in the P.O. like Stretch Perineau and Charley Q and a lot of other black guys, what was it like? I mean you talk to these people every day. Well, first of all you hold your breath. What will Roxbury do? Are there going to be more shootings? Will my students march out of class, out of the school? Things worked out on all fronts. There was even room for some humor after a while. We were waiting at the time clock to hit out and go home when the radio announcer came on with the news that there was a bill being drawn up in the legislature proposing that Dr. Martin Luther King would be honored with a national holiday in his name. Now there were about twelve of us technicians, half a dozen were Black. Sully was there and, as I said, he was highly respected by the Blacks, men and women, for his outspoken anti racist attitude, among other things. "Well that's only right," Sully says. " Now the Blacks have two holidays of their own." " How do you mean?" some one pipes up. Sully: "Martin Luther King Day and the day the new cadilacs come out." Leo: "Let's hit off the clock and get out of here! Good night all, come on Sully!"
Desegregation quickly became a body count. Body counts were published daily in the newspapers; 250 Viet Cong bodies found after artillery barrage in the Mekong Delta, 575 Cong bodies counted in yesterday's air strike near Saigon. Body counts like that mean we are winning the war. So when body counts are published by the school department, people can get a handle on the situation. Boston's prestigious college preparatory school now has an enrollment of 20% Blacks, 10% Hispanics and 10 % other minorities, which means, for example in the case of Blacks, that there are now 80 black, seventh graders sitting in the classrooms there. Statistics like these mean the schools are desegregated. Figures don't lie but liars figure. Forced bussing was a heavy-handed solution to the problem. In the 1960's the Chinese were solving their problems with a heavy hand too. In China the solution was called "The Cultural Revolution". Move bodies around. The Chinese put surgeons in charge of cleaning public toilets if their attitude was not the way it should be. China has a totalitarian government, so what do you expect? America has universities from coast to coast, some of them over 300 years in the business of producing enlightened people. America has a government elected by the people. Where the hell do our enlightened elite go when tough decisions are to be made?
China survived and so did Boston. The Blacks had already survived 200 years of slavery so they could get through bus rides OK, even if people were throwing stones at the bus and calling them 'nigger bastards'. The immigrants had known famine, serfdom and religious persecution too. That's where they come from, so they could survive moving again after their community gets wrangled. People are survivors, even it you march them from Tennessee to Oklahoma in the winter. Most of them, anyways. But it did not have to be their destiny. It is laughable to compare China's Cultural Revolution to forced bussing. But for a moment let's go back to that semantic relativity. What if you are a seven-year old kid on a 45 minute bus ride through parts of the city where people smash windows on your bus and shout swears at you? A public toilet in Peking would be more peaceful. For a federal judge living in his dream house in white city, the meaning of that court order he signed would have a totally different implication for him than for a homeowner in East Boston. This guy in Eastie made the biggest financial deal of his lifetime in buying that house. It was the community he bought into. Community for him means the schools his kids go to. Now he will sell and move, if that sense of community is strong enough.
The nuns taught us to parse a sentence. That means to analyze the words so to describe them grammatically. You can do that with nouns too. Boeing's B 17 – a success; Mitsubishi's Zero – not so successful; China's Cultural Revolution – a wasteful failure; forced bussing – ditto.
Again, this thing was not the 'march of tears'. But let me give you a couple of snap shots of how it played out. Every six weeks the students at my school are issued report cards. Now I am in charge of 30 seventh graders as far as administrative stuff goes, like attendance, report cards and stuff like that. I see them every morning before they head off to the subject teachers. When the first report cards come out in October, I distribute them to the kids. They are all very excited. Their parents are expecting good results. As soon as they read their grades they run up to me to show me their successes. And they form a line. They say things out loud like: "I got all A's," or " only got one C", and so on and on. Some complain that if the math teacher didn't give them a C, they would have been on the honor roll. Matthew is a black kid and somehow he and I have become buddies. Well, he says hello to me every morning and sometimes he tells me a 'knock-knock' joke. I try to have one for him too. Some people are a mensch even at an early age. 'The child is father of the man.' Matthew is a skinny kid with thick glasses. When he gets to my desk, he quietly lays his report card on my desk. He has six F's. F stands for failure. He doesn't talk about his grades, but instead he shows me his glasses. One of the holders, the things that go from the frame to the ear, has come loose. What do I think? Do I know how he could fix it. Me: "You know what, Matthew? The same thing happens to me once in a while and I could never find a tiny little screw or screw driver that could be used to fix it. But a pal of mine gave me this little kit for repairing eyeglasses. It comes with a tiny screw driver and six of the right size screws." Matthew holds the glasses and I screw the holder back on. Me: "Now I want you to hold on to this kit because I always misplace things like this and if one of your friends has this kind of problem you can come to the rescue. I notice that girl who sits beside you wears glasses. You never know, she may need your help some time. Now will you do that for me? You know hold on to it and keep it in a safe place? Matthew: "You bet, sure thing. Glad to help you out." This 12 year old is here to balance the books. He is part of that 20% figure. He's in the wrong school. It is never going to get any better for him here.
There is a nucleus of hard working, conscientious, knowledgeable employees working in the P.O. on every floor. Guys like me, McGrimley, Dretler, Feinman, et ali., are guys who couldn't get out their own way when in their 20's, but determined to turn things around in their 30's. Turning things around meant getting a job that was a 'bigger deal' than the P.O. job. But this cadre of dedicated employees keeps the P.O. on track, functioning well and putting your mail in your mailbox every day.
Larry Martin was hampered by the political hacks who had been appointed supervisors by the political machines. Roger, my buddy who became supervisor in the maintenance craft, started out as an elevator operator, but from day one he was the opposite of Tony the thief, the one who got grabbed by the inspectors. From my early days working as a mail handler, I knew it was tough working with guys like Nick, who disappeared half way into a job to go and fix the push cart that they used for selling vegetables in Faneuil Hall Market the next day. And how do you run an operation efficiently when you have a guy like me with his nose in a book all the time? Let me tell you about one guy who may serve as an example of what I’m trying to get across.
Al Troiani was a jitney driver on the platform. A jitney is a battery operated machine that pulls heavy carts of mail around and gondolas loaded with mail sacks and parcels out through the South Station to the train platforms, to the proper loading places. I've known him for years, always give him a 'Hi, Al!' and that's it. He answers : "How's our roving ambassador tonight?" Well, if you head out to the Club Car or the Hotel Essex, then you pass through his work area. I have no idea what he does specifically. And I don't care. I'm headed for 'bigger things.'
Now one Friday night I realize that I have forgotten to mail an important letter. It is an application to attend a foreign language seminar at Bowdoin College in the State of Maine. This is an important item in my professional resume but it is too far for me to drive up there at this late hour. The application is due by Saturday noon, the next day. Dropping it in the mailbox tonight won't work. Now, I am at postal headquarters for New England here at the SPA. Is there any way I can get that letter to the college in Maine by Saturday morning? It is 10:45 pm. I find Big Moe. "Get a hold of Al Troiani before he puts his jitney away! It's your only chance, Baby. If Al can't do it for you, no one can." Al is always where he is supposed to be, not at Brown's or the Club Car or anyplace else but on his machine. I explain my problem to him. Al: " You take that letter to the HPO (Highway Post Office) driver at 11:20 pm. His name is Tom Freeley. His truck is parked in bay 89 right now. Tom will give it to one of his boys and they will put it in the Bowdoin College pouch. The college gets a lot of mail so they have their own pouch. These guys will have all the mail sorted by the time the truck reaches Portland. I used to work that route. The truck goes through Brunswick on its way to Bangor and that's where this place Bowdoin is, in Brunswick .They get there at 3 am and there will be a mounted carrier there to pick up pouches for the entire district. The pouch for Bowdoin will be dropped off at the college before 7 am. The truck has a few more stops before it get to Bangor and then it goes on to meet the ferry to Nova Scotia. It's not a bad job working the HPO. You're your own boss and there was always a good crew on that run. I transferred in here after I got married because my wife didn't like me being away all the time." Me: "Thanks a lot Al." Al: "Nothing to it."
It was like that on every floor of the SPA; guys who knew their job, knew how the place ran, and took a satisfaction in doing a job right. When those raises came through under president Nixon, they were long overdue and could not have come to a more deserving group of men and women, coast to coast.
The last day
Today is May 3rd my birthday and I am 55, in this year of our Lord 1991 and I am retiring from the P.O. It's my last day in the P.O., man! Here is how it unfolds: I take the commuter rail to school and at 2pm the MTA to the South Station. I come into the concourse from Dewey Square and head right up to the Red Cross blood donor office up on the fourth floor. Thirty years ago I arrived on the fourth floor as a gag by Johnny Buckley when he marched us into Larry Martin's office. Today I have a little gag of my own to play. The P.O. allows every employee 4 hours of administrative leave if they donate blood to the Red Cross. If you donate as a postal employee you become a member of the Post Office Blood Bank. This entitles you or any member of your family to have access to blood supplies free of charge if you have a medical emergency. The procedure is this: you make out a request for 4 hours of administrative leave and 4 hours of sick leave, submit it to your supervisor the day before you donate and voila, you have another day off. If you do not want to use sick leave, you can just work 4 hours and go home early. There is an unwritten rule that you may only give blood twice a year. Until the past four years there was no record kept in the P.O. of how many times you donated. Most employees did not care to donate. Those who did, generally did so only twice a year. The Red Cross set up a donor station once a month in the SPA medical unit. This is my plan today: donate blood, work 4 hours and go home, forever. Now there is a tradition in the P.O. that on your last day of work you are automatically given 4 hours of sick leave and your last four hours on the clock are spent saying goodbye to your pals. I enter the Red Cross office and give them my donor card, with my name, social security number and blood type on it. The Red Cross has a new computer system into which they have fed the name of everybody who has ever given blood in the SPA. When you give blood, they put your name into the computer, press a button and a machine rumbles and out comes a little metal pin in the shape of a drop of blood. It is a very small shaped drop for a pint, twice as large for a quart and a good-sized pin for a gallon. The nurse explains that the computer will automatically signal the new machine to generate the correct number of pins for me. She smiles and says that if this is my eighth donation I will get a gallon-sized pin in addition to a pint sized one for today's donation. She presses the button. You know what's coming. Pints, quarts, gallon-sized drops of blood come spurting out of the machine. "My God!" she says, "You've given 112 pints! That's 14 gallons!" Well, I just scoop up my booty and tell her I have been at this business for thirty years and head for the data site. The gang there has a little party for me. They have some women there now so there are napkins and cake and stuff like that. Dan Barry is there and wishes me luck. Then I spend two hours looking up my old platform buddies and saying goodbye. George Hilliard is easy to find in Perry Weinberg's old office. Bobby Knoll is there and we have a parting glass and that's it, out the door to the South Station concourse and into the club car to wait twenty minutes for my train home. Billy Swan sees me coming in and has a Jim Bean waiting for me. Before I leave Billy says: "Steve, I could use a big score. Got a good number for me?" "Sure, Billy. 4-7-1-1. Box the first three and put a deuce on all four exact." That's it. I head out across the concourse with its magnificent, marble floor to my train. My P.O. career is over. And you know what? Quarter o'One's mother had it right. Working in the P.O. was just as she put it: "a nice sa joba".
Prelude
In Europe I noticed Americans do not speak foreign languages, while Europeans are pretty good linguists. If no one understands what an American tourist is saying, well, he just turns up the volume. The European picks a target language and sticks with it until till he can use it to suit his purposes. This then was my goal when I got out of the army: to get a teaching job where I could turn out twenty Americans every year who could understand what they heard in their foreign language, say what they wanted, write what they said and read anything from the newspapers to the classics of the literature of their chosen language.
That goal was always before me in my P.O. years. And I achieved it to a limited degree. I am now in a position to go forward with that program and to see if it cannot be sustained by my disciples. In my thirty years in the P.O. there were years when I taught a full German Language program, complete with foreign exchange studies. The students I was involved with were turned on by the program and these I consider my disciples. By the way, there is no mistake in undertaking something that cannot possibly be completed in one lifetime.
And yet, as I pursued and achieved one degree, and then the second and then the required certificates, I became a traveler through the realm of the blue collars, the political activists, the aspiring bureaucrats. I witnessed the way death and wounds hound us all. Evil was the exception, goodness the rule. Teaching seems like the life of the monk, where the lessons were to be learned by study. Working in the P.O. was like learning what life is all about by sitting down with the bleeding, and celebrating with the joyful. I covered both aspects since the day I said goodbye to my army buddies. In the P.O., following the style of my mentors; whether it was bending the protocol to save a guy a day's pay or avoid a devastating suspension; or whether it was listening to and retelling the war stories of men who did it all for us, including getting us the GI Bill, or simply bringing a belly dancer to help a guy celebrate the end of his life as a worker; in my own right I became a legend for the time a generation of workers holds one in their memory. As for school, well, there too I became a legend, but the memory lingers longer and stronger in the souls of students who have been inspired.
It was all just a prelude. My instincts were right. Here I go, not into that poet's night, but into the cadenza before the last curtain. And of course getting to where I am now was not a solo performance. Taking that last bow with me will be Big Moe, Joe D, McGrimley, Stretch Perineau, the outside crew, Sully and Leo, Quarter o'One, and a bunch of other guys. Those applauding would be my students.
Afterword
When you look back on thirty years of your life, it would be nice to think that you made of lot of correct decisions, that you knew all along what you were about. In my case the words of the poet Goethe ring true:
" Wie von unsichtbaren Geistern gepeitscht, gehen die Sonnenpferde der Zeit mit unsers Schicksals leichtem Wagen durch,
und es bleibt uns nichts als mutig gefaßt, die Zügel festzuhalten und bald rechts, bald links, vom Steine hier von Sturze da, die Räder wegzulenken.
Wohin es geht, wer weiß es? Erinnert es sich doch kaum, woher es kam."
It is as if the fragile wagon of our fate is driven by invisible spirits and to us is left only the task of bravely gripping the horses' reins and trying to avoid a stone here or a pit fall there. Where is it taking us to, who knows? We hardly remember where we came from."
Goethe, from Dichtung und Wahrheit