The Source of the Neponset

The Neponset River was a widest river in your life.
No one knew its source.
None of us asked about its headwaters.
They weren’t located on the South Shore.
May that river run deep forever

Quentin Sprague

This poet hails from Maine. I spent my earliest years on Falmouth Foresides across the harbor from Portland. Quinton presently resides on Peakes Island farther out in Casco Bay. In his fishing years he regularly commuted from Maine to New Bedford. He probably crossed the twenty-nine mile long Neponset on I-95 south of Boston. Never knowing the source of the river. I thought it was the Great Cedar swamp in Walpole. Wrong. Its headwaters have been drowned by a reservoir in Foxborough in the 19th Century. Another mysytery of its waters,

15 Ways to Know That You're Old School South Shore

1.) You dove off Shipwreck at the Quincy Quarries and lived to tell the tale without getting a car antenna in your arm.

2.) What about the SS Mayflower at Nantasket Beach?

I had a head-on crash there in 1969.

VW versus a Delta 88 was no contest, but my four passengers and I had walked away from the total wreck.

The driver of the Delta 88 had tried to reach the Mayflower. She had friends in the bar. Someone later told me that it had been a transvestite club. None of them had come out to help us.

3.) The Surf Nantasket was a great dance hall.

Jay and the Techniks were the house band along with the Pilgrims.

5.) The Rocking Ramrods were the best band in Boston.

Watch this URL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJLYq0tHAPk

6.) Ridge Arena was a great hockey rink, but sucked as a concert hall.

I saw Teddy and the Pandas with the Loving Spoonfuls there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQk7p2Ybx50

7.) You can't wait for winter to be over, so Tony's on Wollaston Beach will open so you can feast on fried clams.

8.) Big Blue Hill was the highest elevation in your childhood.

9.) You watched a ship launched on the Fore River.

10.) You've driven down to Hull to enjoy the majesty of the hurricane battering the sea wall.

11.) You made it from Wollaston to Nantasket in 15 minutes.

On 3A.

12.) HoJos served your favorite ice cream.

13.) Your hometown was founded by Pilgrims.

Their last names are not yours.

They don't call the South Shore 'the Irish Riviera' for nothing.

14.) You recognize Tim Wakefield as the most famous person to ever come from the South Shore.

15.) The Neponset River was a wildest river in your life.

No one knew its source.

None of us asked about its headwaters.

They weren't located on the South Shore.

May that river run deep forever.

PAPER BOY by Peter Nolan Smith

Boston published three morning newspapers in 1960; the Boston Globe, the Record American, and the Herald Traveler. My family moved from Falmouth Foresides, Maine to a a suburb south of Boston. The Neponset River separated the city from the town. Our neighborhood had been constructed on an abandoned army base. Several hundred newly-constructed split-level houses crowded half-are plots along of seven streets. Our ranch house was on Harborview Road. If I climbed the tallest tree in the woods behind our backyard, I could see Boston Harbor. No ships were visible from this distance.

The nearest store was two miles away and my father saw an opportunity to teach the work ethic to his oldest sons. The Maine native called the local news distributor to set up a newspaper route for us. The three papers arrived at 6am. My brother and I folded the newspapers to stuff into the canvas carry bags.

Each morning of the week my father cooked us breakfast. Fried eggs and toast. I had the closest route. My brother had the farthest. We rode around the quiet neighborhood on our Raleigh 3-speeds.

Rain, sleet or snow.

We were more dependable than the Post Office.

The newspapers arrived at the front door for the man of the house to read about Vietnam, the Red Sox, and JFK. My brother and I were the best informed students at Our Lady of the Foothills.

We supported the Globe.

The Record American was not a broadsheet.

The Herald-Traveler supported Goldwater.

Their politics sold papers and I earned about $10 a week. A movie ticket cost a half a dollar. Albums were around $3. Levis at Walker’s Western Gear in Boston sold at $6. Delivering papers was easy money.

The older women in the neighborhood sometimes answered the door in their lingerie. A few of the men naked. Their exhibitionism led to big tips and I learned to keep my mouth shut about their cheap thrills.

My desire was to hold hands with Kyla Rolla. The brunette was the prettiest girl on the route. She was my age.

12.

Her mother was a divorcee.

Kyla was the smartest girl at Our Lady of the Foothills. I was her rival and she traced figure-8s on my back during spelling bees. The letters stuck in my mouth. She knew that I had a stutter, but I accepted her cheating with expectation and dreamed about becoming a news reporter.

Just like Clark Kent for the Daily Planet.

He loved Lois Lane more than Superman.

Same as my love for Kyla.

In 1964 the news distributor changed the pay-out per paper. My salary dropped down a little, but worst was that two new boys were throwing the bundles of papers out of the truck.

Mark Tully and his friend Joe Scanlon were the town bullies. Each had been kept back a year for a combination of bad grades and worst behavior.

After school they waited for me in the Town Field.

Crossing it was the shortest way home.

"Hey, paper boy."

At least once a week they beat me up in front of my schoolmates and best friend. At least Kyla never saw my disgrace. She had afternoon dancing lessons in Mattapan Square. Everyone else watched my humiliation as if it were a TV show. No one ever interfered to stop the two bullies.

Better me than them was the thinking.

My days started out with Mark chucking my newspapers in puddles and the garbage. My older brother complained to the distributor, who fired Mark from his job. The beatings worsened with his dismissal.

In the Spring of 1965 I grew a few inches. Mark and Joe had the odds of two against one. My fighting skills were basic. I suffered in silence. Finks or snitches were hated by the young.

One day Mark and Joe shanghaied me to row a boat under a bridge over the Neponset River. Right next to the Walter Baker Chocolate Factory. It was spring. The river was running high. The air was drenched in sweetness. Mark and Joe had kidnapped Kyla and her friend. The two bullies told the girls to take off their shirts. We were all 13.

No longer kids.

Cars rolled overhead on the steel bridge. The girls’ fingers fumbled with the buttons. I told them to stop. Mark and Joe ordered me to shut up. I hit Mark in the head with an oar. He went overboard. Joe got it in the stomach. The water wasn’t deep, but they couldn’t swim. I didn’t care if they lived or died, as I rowed to safety.

Kyla and her friend were grateful. She kissed me on the cheek. We became boyfriend and girlfriend later that year. Mark and Joe were arrested for stealing a car. They entered it in a demolition derby. The police arrested them after they totaled the station wagon. A judge sentenced them to two years at Billerica Reform School. I delivered newspapers until I was 14. Kyla and I broke up in senior year of high school. To this day I don’t know why.

I never became a reporter.

Mostly because I realized that no one can be Superman.

Not even Clark Kent.

Then again he was never a paper boy.

The Silence Of The Neponset River

The Neponset River runs from the Foxborough marshes and the stream drops over two-hundred feet over the first twelve miles through the towns of Walpole, Sharon, Norwood, Canton, Westwood and Dedham before reaching Mattapan, which the First People called 'a good place to sit'.

Blue Hill Avenue crosses the river over a stone bridge before its descent to Boston harbor.

In the 1960s teenagers flocked to the Mattapan Oriental Theater.

Not for the movies.

The upper balcony was considered a Babylon by the nuns and priests of my hometown parish.

We didn't care what they thought.

Boys and girls believed in love, but not everyone.

After the matinee of DARLING three boys kidnapped two girls and took them under the bridge.

They had them stripped naked.

None of them were arrested by the Boston Police.

It was just boys being boys.

Years later I was speaking to a woman friend of mine at a holiday gathering.

We were at dinner.

She and I had dated in high school.

She confessed that she had been one of the girls taken under the bridge.

"A priest had told us to be quiet. He didn't want us to ruined the boys' lives. No one thought about my life."

"Why didn't you tell me?" I put down my wine.

She said a name. He had been my best friend, until he asked me to dress up in his sister's lingerie.

"I was afraid you might kill him and it was better you didn't do that."

"I'm sorry." My hand trembled to hurt him.

"I know." She touched me and said, "I never have forgotten that afternoon."

"I wish I had known."

"It was better that you didn't."

"You're right."

There was nothing else to say. We looked into each other's eyes. She lifted her wine glass. We silently toasted each other and I said, "I love you."

"And the same for me."

Because every river runs to the sea in New England.

And anyone who believes 'boys will be boys' should be planted in the wetlands of the Neponset.

Sorry, but that is the way some of us feel on the South Shore.

RIP bad boys.

You're a disgrace to the Green.

ON THE SOUTH SHORE: From Neponset to Nantasket - Kindle Edition

I was lucky enough to live through the 1960s as a teenager on the South Shore of Boston.

Home was still home to us.

My friends and I led charmed lives at the Quincy Quarries, Surf Nantasket, and Wollaston Beach

ON THE SOUTH SHORE recounts those lives.

The time was short, but retelling these tales brings back those years, if only for a moment.

They were good ones on the South Shore.

EXCERPT from GAY BOY

That next fall my parents were happy and my mother gained weight like she was storing fat for a harsh winter. As her belly grew beyond belief I wondered if she was ever going to stop eating, since Frank and I usually received any leftover cake.

The leaves changed color in October and in November JFK beat Richard Nixon to become the first Catholic president. The cold weather arrived in December and Pearl Harbor Day 1960 dawned with a hoary frost topping the fields south of the Neponset River.

During lunch my 3rd Grade class stared out the windows at sullen northern clouds. We ate our sandwiches in silence. The nuns believed that Jesus barely spoke during his Agony on the Cross and their students were expected to follow his example in thought and deed.

A shrill bell signaled recess and the classes boiled from the school into the sub-freezing temperature. Standing still on the icy asphalt meant frozen feet, so the girls skipped tattered ropes, while the boys kicked misshapen balls around the rear parking lot.

Right before the end of the play period our station wagon rolled down the school’s driveway and Chuckie joked, “Here comes the jail truck from Billerica Reform School.”

Having endured endless ribbing about the metal bars across the windows of the station wagon from family and friends, neither my brother nor I laughed with our classmates. Funny was for other people, but my father got out of the car with a broad smile.

Mother Superior demanded with a sense of command backed by the Church, “What are you doing here?”

In her mind a man’s place at this hour was at his job, because at this hour we belonged to her.

“I want to speak to my boys.” He waved for us to come closer.

“Impossible” Mother Superior expected obedience from adults as well as children. “No.” My father had been brought up in Maine and he confirmed that his authority superseded the Church by telling us, “You mother had a baby boy.”

“We have a baby brother?” Frunk was confused and so was I.

“You didn’t know your mother was having a baby?”

“I thought Mom was getting fat.” Any woman would have gained weight from her recent feeding frenzy.

“She was fat with your baby brother. We’re going to see him.”

“You can’t disrupt the school day like this.” Steam fumed from Mother Superior’s dragon beak.

“They’ll make it up at Church this Sunday.”

As a convert to the faith he was immune to the nun’s wrath, but my brother asked timidly, “What about our books?”

“No one does homework on Baby Day.” My father waved to my sisters and they ran over to us.

“They’re going to the hospital to see their mother.”

“Is Mom okay?” I asked with concern.

“She’s fine. Let’s go.”

We piled in the car and he drove to Beth Israel Hospital, humming IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK ALOT LIKE CHRISTMAS.

“This is not a playground,” my father said entering the hospital. The lobby smelled cleaner than our house.

“Yes, sir.”

“I expect you to be on your best behavior.”

“Yes, sir.” Our submission to our elders was complete.

We filed one by one into the private room in Richardson House.

My mother lay on a bed with a small baby on her chest. My Nana held our now second youngest brother, Padraic. A white uniformed nurse sat on a chair reading the Record-American. We stood around the bed. Our new brother was very pink.

“He weighs seven pounds.” My father touched the small body and his little fingers squirmed like spring worms rising from the earth. We were a bigger family by one and each of us smiled with a shared happiness.

My parents named their sixth child after my grandmother’s uncle. The young priest had met the fourteen year-old girl off the boat from Ireland and placed Nana in a Salem household staff. My grandmother had danced with our grandfather at a church outing in Marblehead.

In my mother’s mind our next two generations owed their existence to Uncle Mike and she prayed that at least one of us might take up the Cloth to return the favor. I didn’t have the heart to confess my atheism.

Those first months Michael was a miracle and I rushed home from school to feed, bathe, and rock the tiny creature in a cradle from my grandmother’s house in Maine. After having six kids in eight years my mother was grateful for my assistance, however this peaceful period ended with his first bout of infantile teething.

My mother and I sang him GOLDMINE IN THE SKY a thousand times. His bawling destroyed our attempts at harmony. One day Michael fell asleep and we sat on the bed in relief. The support struts creaked under our weight and his unearthly howl filled the bedroom. He seemed shocked for a second, then smiled before drifting into a blessed slumber.

That was as bad as it got.

Michael was very special.

To read more of ON THE SOUTH SHORE, please go to Kindle Direct at this URL

www.amazon.com/dp/B00CA51TA8

A time machine to the past.