From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-Déjà vu All Over Again-The Rise And Fall Of Singer Billy Bradley

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-Déjà vu All Over Again-The Rise And Fall Of Singer Billy Bradley  

By Sam Lowell  
           
I have said it before but it bears repeating-as desperately poor and woe begotten the Carter corner boys were and that was pretty desperate in the projects in the days before the extension of certain social welfare benefits left those down in the dig pretty barren that these guys, us, had skills, had some talents. I have already mentioned a while back the case of Ronnie Mooney, early leader of the Carter corner boys and the one who started on our doo wop summer nights. That work a prep for his attempts to break out of the projects ethos when talent searches were in bloom. In his case, and as we shall see in Billy’s demise failure early on, failure compounded by “the fix” being in led him to make the Pretty James Preston-inspired armed robbery life look like a romantic alternative, or at least a place to grab some big dough if you had the guts to go after it with guns in every arm. As already mentioned Ronnie fell down hard after a shoot-out in Ohio with a bunch of Lima coppers.    

(By the way thinking about how desperate my own family situation was at the time, car-less most of the time when a car was needed to break out of the isolated projects located in the middle of nowhere, mother always short on the weekly envelopes to hold off the bill-collectors and the like we lived in fear of even a worse fate. The county farm, the place where you went when you knew all hope was abandoned. Needless to say, that good Irish Catholic mother hard-pressed on the weekly white envelopes used the idea of us winding up there as a whipping tool to keep us in line. In my own family’s case it never got much better even when we moved across town to the Bottoms section of the Acre, read-lowest of the low.)       

Maybe Billy’s case on top of Ronnie’s (remember these two were the leaders, were tough guys whatever else who I would when they turned pro not have wanted to meet up with in a dark alley, hell, maybe at noon on the Boston Common either) speaks to something grimy in life down at the bottom of the heap. Maybe full of hubris and hot air project boys, corner boys were less accepting on getting kicked to the ground, and yet getting up and dusting off your knees. Maybe that social gene was never strong even for guys like me, Seth, and for a while the Scribe to not feel “the fix was in” for somebody else and the cards were seriously stacked against us.

I have already mentioned in the last published piece that Billy was hot to trot to win a local talent search sponsored by radio station WMEX in Boston and the famous Darius Records. By his lights, by mine as well, he did an excellent job but lost, and I believe now rightfully so, to the doo wop-influenced Painter Sisters who are still holding forth in Vegas and the lounge at the Newark  Airport. We all know because it came out later that the fix had really been in when Ronnie Mooney made his leaf for fame but Billy couldn’t take that some silly “girl” act would beat him and so he had the same reaction as Ronnie-the deal was fixed.           

   

That realization would not immediately lead to his turn to the bright lights of armed robbery. Billy would through a little more pluck than Ronnie, a lot more skill and better voice than him in any case would cut a record on his own Me and My Rock and Roll Baby-Sitter promote it endlessly, get radio stations to play it and have it turn into one of those minor one-hit Johnnie classics. He expected pay dirt, pay day and easy street when that thrilled the girls one summer. Expected some record company would beg him to come to their stable. Nada, no go, forget it. That is when he made the turn, started talking big about how he would avenge Pretty James Preston’s death at the hands of some dumb coppers. (I was not around then, having moved over to the Bottoms but got this at the time from Go-Go Flynn).     
Billy Bradley was tough, was smart too, smarter and tougher than Ronnie so when he made the turn, when he became the ghost-avenger of Pretty James Preston (which hit us all hard at the time of his death since we worshipped him something like a living god) he lasted far longer than Ronnie. According to Go-Go spent some time in the county and state pens as well. Held together for something like twenty years doing “the trade.” But armed robbery is a tough trade, eats up its denizens and is filled with bad end stories. Bad end stories because you have to be fast in the trade or be swallowed up. That happened to Billy after he got out of Shawshank the last time. Headed south to new territory-with old ways-decided who knows why- to rob a fucking White Hen store in North Carolina for walking around money I guess. Didn’t figure that those wet highways that high robbery night would cause any trouble for him but they did. The coppers nailed him, nailed him good since he like any other good Carter’s corner boy swore he would not be taken alive, and in the end he was not.