Memories of North
Adamsville-With The 250th Anniversary Of The Birth Of John Quincy
Adams In Mind (2017)
By Jack Callahan
WTF. Normally I could
give, as we used to say in the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville, a
rat’s ass about the birth of a long gone President of the United States (POTUS
in the new newspeak of early 21st century America just to show I am
not out of the loop on some things). Even a President, John Quincy Adams,
number six, who the town where I grew up was named after, or at least he was a
member of the family the town was named after. Maybe it was his father also a
President, John, number two or some other damn Puritan brethren even before
him. I could care less about old time Puritans who gave my forebears, the Irish
who came over on the “famine ships” a hard time when they moved from Boston, South
Boston really, to the Acre as a way of creating their upwardly mobile version
of the pot of gold after they landed here back in the day.
Like I said if left to
my own devises I would have ignored as I have for my whole existence I think the
celebration JQ’s 250th birthday except for one reason, for one
thing, for one person if you need to know. That person my old long gone friend
and a guy who I first met in Miss (Ms.) Sullivan’s third grade class Pete
Markin (whose mother always called him Peter Paul which he hated and who was
known from junior high school on as “the Scribe” after our acknowledged leader
Frankie Riley dubbed him that one night after he had written a glowing article
in the school newspaper, The Magnet, laying it on about some Frankie exploit).
The Scribe you see was a
history nut, or maybe better to call him a guy who needed, and I mean this,
needed to know about then thousand facts or he could not operate in the world.
He was crazy to know about guys like JQ, about his father and about his mother
Abigail. One time in sixth grade I think it was he told me that he needed to
know all that information in case some girl wanted to know something and that
would give him his lead-in but I think it was deeper than that silly idea. I
think he really was a curious guy, was really full of wonder about where the
next fact might lead him.
The Scribe was a funny
mix in a way. He was almost a chemically pure corner boy, a guy like me and
Frankie and a bunch of other guys who were too poor to do much else except hang
around Harry’s Variety Store and plot ways to get dough any way we could up to
and including various forms of larceny. The Scribe was the guy who would think
up the schemes but after one night when we almost got thrown in the slammer because
Pete didn’t remember to put a look-out in front of the house Frankie Riley ran
the operations.
But the Scribe was also
a book crazy guy as you could imagine of a guy who needed to have plenty of
facts in his arsenal and spent a lot of time at the library. The summer between
sixth and seventh grade we didn’t see much of the Scribe because he had decided
after getting into all kinds of trouble at school and having a couple of bouts
in juvenile court that he would lay low. That is when he started reading if you
can believe this biographies about various members of the Adams family. And at
night when we were hanging out later in the school year he would bore us to
tears with all kinds of stuff especially I remember about mother Abigail
(John’s wife) who he thought was the smartest and most interesting one of the
lot. From now on though whenever I think about my old lost comrade I will also
think about one John Quincy Adams and how the Scribe loved to talk about him
and his crowd as well. Happy birthday JQ.
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