From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-When Billy Bradley Held Forth In The Whole Rock And Roll World

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-When Billy Bradley Held Forth In The Whole Rock And Roll World

By Sam Lowell

One reader recently told me to cut the bullshit and get on with the story, or stories, about the legendary Billy Bradley who unlike some two-bit junior varsity thug who was doomed to fall down, fall down hard either in Q or out on the cop-infested highways like Ronnie Mooney or some stumblebum has-been journalist for publications now since vanished along with the so-call prizes like the Scribe hy had actually heard of, had heard on the radio, probably WNCB out of Providence, or from records back in the late 1950s with his moderate smash hit Me And The Rock And Roll Baby Sitter. Maybe a one hit johnnie but at least he was a recognized name then. That reader further accused me of apparently getting paid by the word which for a modern day journalist, a guild guy, a guy who has spent many years in the vineyards is a serious slap in the face since only free-lancers and people who work on spec get paid that way today and so bulk up the volume to see what falls out, how many dimes they can squeeze out of an assignment. (Every editor knows the gag and will automatically cut one thousand words on “principle” to keep under budget.)       

Okay so on with it although I think that straight as a gate reader must have been asleep during the 1950s since while Billy did record a moderate smash 45 RPM single it was not played on radio (too salacious) and had  passed muster in 1950s teen angst world via the old-fashioned way of having promoters (who could be the performers themselves) going around to the various record stores, hose that had listening cubicles and hustling their proteges material that way. If the song hit pay dirt everybody grabbed copies and word, the eternal teenage be-bop grapevine world would do the rest. Be that as it may I did not meet Billy that first day of school at the old Snug Harbor Elementary when I did meet the Scribe down across from the Adamsville Housing Authority projects where we all grew up and became Carter’s Variety Store corner boys for the simple fact that he had skipped school that day since it a yawner half day and he went to Adamsville Center to perfect his skills on “the clip” which was our poor boy financial lifeline when our parents said no dough for nothing every time we bothered to ask.   

Moreover and that sleepy-headed reader will probably take a fit when I mention this Billy, whatever authority he had later as corner boy leader and as a rock and roll singer, was not the leader then nor the guy who led the rock and roll doings around our way. That “junior varsity thug” Ronnie Mooney did. It was Ronnie who was so recklessly tough that he thought nothing of kicking a guy in the groin as some kind of initiation into corner boy life and who led the criminal enterprises like the classic “clip” devised by the Scribe without anybody questioning his authority to lead. For our purposes as well he was the king hell king of the doo wop night in the summer between fifth and sixth grade when his voice was pure magic and would draw the curious girls around him, us. It was only later after Ronnie decided hanging with serious tough guys, getting deep into that life was what he wanted, craved that Billy who was probably even tougher than Ronnie became the king hill king of the rock and roll night and leader of the corner boy crew.    

I think, and if I remember right the Scribe agreed with me at the time, that Billy also had a better voice than Ronnie when he finally came around to those summer doo wop sessions and would eventually share lead with Ronnie on say This Magic Moment. Everybody thought

Ronnie knew a ton of stuff about music but Billy through his older sisters knew more. In any case that doo wop attraction pit is what got Billy all hopped up about a singing career, about being the next Elvis or Buddy or Jerry Lee (it was different models at different times). That would sustain Billy through a couple of good years once Ronnie left and nobody challenged either his larcenous heart or that be-bop beat in his head.

The icing on the cake, the thing that drove Billy’s early career forward, was his big prize win at the all city rock and roll talent show held in the summer of 1958. In order to qualify you had to have won a talent show and been sponsored by some organization in the town (that meant either Adamsville proper or North Adamsville since both were part of the same city). As it turned out Billy would represent Our Lady Of The Flowers Catholic Church, the projects parish where he had won the annual teenage singing contest. The whole gag with the church was to keep the budding sexual stirrings of the young in check by providing a weekly outlet and keep a sharp eye out with a Friday night dance to keep things in check. During intermission at those dances there would be a short talent show with the winner getting a fifty-dollar U.S. Savings Bond as a prize (Ronnie would be the first to win that bond and quickly turned it into cash, some thirty some dollars which he could never figure except somebody was cheating him ping since you had to wait a million years for the bond to mature and get the whole fifty). One night Billy blew the lid off the place with his version of Sweet Little Rock and Roller with a classic Chuck duckwalk included. The girls went wild and Billy was headed for the stars (and I got at that point Billy’s stick girl rejects, no, got second choice after the Scribe in those days the guy who Billy thought was his best friend, at least the Scribe thought so).    

Still trying to keep the thing in check the head priest, mean old Father Lally, at Our Lady decided that the church would sponsor Billy at the all-city talent show (later they would be called talent searches but that is when the radio stations and record companies were desperate for new sounds). So with some front money Billy got some new clothes and was ready to make the all city talent show “jump” (his term). The expectation was that he would again do the Chuck Berry classic and that was that. What the crowded audience at the Adamsville High School auditorium got however was Billy’s own creation, Me and My Rock and Roll Baby-sitter. This song as already mentioned pretty salacious about a guy who is pissed off because his girlfriend has to babysit a bunch of brats one Friday night and who sneaks into the house the babysitter is at and after she blows the kids off to bed gets down and dirty with her rock and roll man with Jerry Lee in the background. Not much left to the imagination either. Needless to say despite winning the talent show hands down (based on audience applause not judges approval) Billy was persona non grata around Father Lally, around Our Lady in general.

That night though would start Billy on his short sweet ride to his fifteen minutes of fate.

    

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can--The “Skinny” On The Demise Of One Award-Winning Journalist Peter Paul Markin, The Scribe

By Sam Lowell

Recently at the office water cooler I was comparing notes with Seth Garth old fellow corner boy from the Acre in North Adamsville where we grew up back in the 1960s about responses to our respective series of pieces, his on the old-time California private detective Lew Archer who just passed away at 104 out in some skid row dive in L.A. of an overdose and me on my earlier corner boy experiences at Carter’s Variety Store. But really about how I met and got involved in Peter Paul Markin’s world, always called the Scribe from about eight grade on and I will use that moniker here. About how as well, and I am not alone in this, we still shed a tear for that long-gone daddy.

The common theme we noted about reader responses is the spike in comments and notes concerning the demise, how both men fell down, went from kings of the hills to dust or something like that. Beyond the common theme of some off-the-wall Greek tragedy noise neither man fell the same way. For Lew it was sex, or rather taking the toss from his wife from their abode which whatever philandering by Lew had led to that decision by her caused sexual impotency in Lew and he just flat out lost his edge thereafter. Dropped from a serious challenger to the P.I. elite to repo man and key-hole peeper to go-fer. Had won, I think, Rookie of the Year for the Galton case fresh out of World War II, then P.I. of the Year a couple of times for respectively the Harlan case and the Billings case. Grabbed a few honorable mentions too then the wife Martha toss and all fall down. Worse winding up doing who knows what skullduggery with junkie P.I. Kenny Millar (who in turn turned Lew into a junkie right to the fucking end when he was found head down in some skid row rooming house in the Bunker Hill section of L.A). But enough of Lew’s story you can read about his rise and fall via Seth’s pieces. What I am interested in today since readers have been pounding about it is the demise of the Scribe, how he fell down hard to what I have called his “wanting habits.”

I kind of sensed in my last piece on the Scribe where I put the very real positive spin of what the Scribe was about in good weathers, when the tide of the 1960s was rising that would not be enough to satisfy those who wanted to know how a guy who could have been practically anything wound up face down in some dirty ditch in some back alley in Sonora down in Mexico when some “strike it rich” easy street drug deal went south on him. I mentioned and this is a distinct part of his fall, the part where nothing bad could touch him, that he was the original Teflon man that he made a fateful, hey, let’s call it fatal, decision to drop out of Boston University in the spring of 1967 just as we were getting the first waves eastward of the new dispensation, what he endlessly called the new breeze in the land he would bore us with on lonely Friday nights.            

As already mentioned the Scribe was the pioneer heading west in the Summer of Love and all that meant to his prospects and dreams and after feeling the situation he came back East to drag us out there for varying lengths of time. He decided as did the some of the rest of us to stay out for a while, not go back to school, calling that Frisco experience all he needed for schooling. Except dropping out of school in 1967 during the height of the bloody massacres in Vietnam was not the smartest idea in the world since that meant the loss of the critical student deferment setting himself up for being drafted by his friends and neighbors at the local draft board as they liked to say then. That is where his hubris got him in a bind since by January of 1969 he received a draft notice to report for induction. Not having any reason, any principled reason despite his anti-war views and with no support or sympathy on the home front he “allowed” himself to be drafted. (I with less hubris then, once I got my draft notice in mid-1969 hustled my ass back to Tufts although that only deferred me until 1970 when the grim reaper called with my low draft number after that has changed the system). Other guys like Seth, Bart Webber, Allan Jackson, Frank Jackman also were inducted. Everybody except the heroic military resister Frank did their time and survived some of it rocky for guys like me who had a very hard time coming back to the “real world” from Vietnam times.               

       

Nobody had a harder time than the Scribe though who somehow though he was going to wind up a clerk somewhere writing bullshit on a stick for some officers. The reality: although he never talked about it much, a problem maybe, at least to us he saw some very hard fighting in the Central Highlands before he was done. What the hell did he expect after the huge attrition rates of KIAs and wounded at a time when the Army only wanted cannon fodder to replace the thinned ranks. Like I said he never talked about it much but if you had to put an ebb tide time for the Scribe’s 1960s that 1969 date would serve.

Those back in the “real world” day  were the days when he, we actually, were living out in Oakland with Josh Breslin a guy we met out in Frisco in 1967 from Maine and doing mostly dope, mostly some free-lance writing for the ton of alternative newspapers and journals that were feeding the counterculture toward the end and mostly trying to figure out what was what. Those were the days when the Scribe was heading out for days and weeks from Oakland to be with “brothers,” a particular kind of brother who like him could not deal with the realities of coming home and so set up alternative communities I guess you would call them today along the railroad tracks, under bridges, near arroyos with kindred. He wrote a series of articles for one of the alternative newspapers in the Bay area that either won or was nominated for a big prize since he concentrated on having each man tell his own story. That year or two was probably the high point of the Scribe’s post-military time.

I guess Josh Breslin was the first to notice it and then I picked up on it when we were living out in Oakland when the Scribe started talking more and more about material things, things he wanted that he never was able to have as a kid. What we called, or have called since then, the wanting habits. Josh and I were no strangers to that feeling, that nagging feeling since he up in the Atlantic section of Maine and I in the utterly lowest part of the Acre, the Bottoms, had shared that experience. That was the glue that held all the corner boys together from my utter poverty to Frankie Riley’s genteel poor as church mice circumstances. The Scribe fell somewhere in between probably closer to my end than Frankie’s. Even today when we talk about it there is always a slight nudge about the effect those wanting habits had on all of us.

Like I said it hit the Scribe hardest and maybe with less reason since he was a guy who had plenty of great prospects, at least before the Vietnam War bogie haunted his dreams. Sometime in 1974 though he started doing cousin, started doing cocaine which was then just becoming a drug of the month choice among those who were seriously into drugs but who had previously sustained themselves mainly on marijuana or mescaline, maybe speed. It was also the time of that south of the United States border drug cartels were gearing up the cousin market. Those two factors would bring the Scribe low. He started getting seriously into the rather expensive drug and selling small amounts around town to keep his habit up. That could only last so long before he really was a cousin junkie. Then he started “muling” for some Frisco drug dealers meaning he would go to Mexico, get the product and bring it over the border. Not so hard then unlike now when you were a straight looking gabacho gringo.

We don’t know all the details, we were basically warned away, but sometime in 1976 the Scribe fell down. He either snatched some big shipment he was muling for his own profit or he was trying to work some crazy independent deal and cross-up the wrong cartel people. In any case he wound up face down in a dusty back street in Sonora with two slugs in his head and was buried in some potter’s field grave down there. Like I said we were warned off by the Federales to forget about what happened to the Scribe. That has not meant that we still do not shed some tears over that fallen brother.

             

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-When The Scribe Called The New Breeze Coming To The Land-And We Didn’t Give A Rat’s Ass

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-When The Scribe Called The New Breeze Coming To The Land-And We Didn’t Give A Rat’s Ass

By Sam Lowell

Seth Garth from the old Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys from the Acre section of North Adamsville back in the early 1960s probably said it best about Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe (that name used by me in earlier pieces was not his moniker until Tonio times when Frankie Riley bestowed it on him after writer some press agent bullshit about him for the high school newspaper. One night after the Scribe had gone on and on about some “fag” (then “fag” in our neighborhood, maybe worse) poem by a guy named Allen Ginsberg called Howl* and then switched gears on the turn of a dime about the plan for that night’s “midnight creep” (read: burglary of some Mayfair swell house, or what passed for such in North Adamsville) Seth called him a “walking contradiction.” I think that fit the Scribe perfectly and I have already given a classic example of my own earlier experience with the Janus-like Scribe personality (Seth did not meet the Scribe until eight- grade in junior high after his family had moved across town. That was when he, secretly, very secretly trusting on me with the secret, worked with some Jewish guy from Adamsville Center to send books to black children in Alabama in the late 1950s when they were trying break vicious Mister James Crow down there (the Scribes term). All the while acting as Carter corner boy leader Ronnie Mooney’s shill doing the big “clip” operations that started our illegal careers in sixth grade and seventh grades.    

(* The breakthrough “beat” poem which made Ginsberg’s career and which, get this, the Scribe would later read sections of only lonely Friday nights in front of Toni’s when we had no dough. Did that until guys, guys including me, who could have given a rat’s ass about the “fag” poem threatened to throw him off the roof of the high school gratis if he did not stop. That would stop him for the night, but he would be back. Funny even now I go to YouTube every now and again when I need some poetic boost to listen to Ginsberg howling forth when the world was young, and we were warrior-kings.)  

I have given some play to later versions of that contradiction but this day my mind is on that good angel part of the Scribe, or at least the part that saw some way out of the hole we were in down in the mud, down in what I call now (what the heck would I have known of such a word then) the totally destructive Hobbesian world of all against all down at the base of society where social solidarity is seen as a sign of weakness, or simple prey for the predators.

I am not sure when he first said the expression probably in early 1960, might have been late 1959 in case when we were still in the projects (my family would to the Bottoms, which is just what it was of the Acres, a year after the Scribe’s at the beginning of ninth grade) but whenever I was blue, or he was, he would say that he sensed “ a new breeze blowing in the land,” that we might after all get out from under. He didn’t exactly explain it in specific terms but I believe that it animated the better angel of his nature for as long as that projected breeze had some promise when it did finally fully unfold in the mid-1960s. He would at least through high school carry that larcenous heart around but it was more like baggage from the past than anything else as long as he felt the uptick.

I think I wrote one time about a bet that the Scribe made with our Tonio’s  corner boy leader Frankie Riley about whether he, the Scribe, would have “the balls” (or some term like that) to go, as he intended, to the Boston Common in the fall of 1960, October I think before the elections which brought our own Jack Kennedy to the White House, to participate in a demonstration called by then famed baby doctor, Doctor Spock, and an organization called SANE to protest nuclear weapons proliferation. Frankie baited him mercilessly on that one since he saw guys like Spock, the Quakers and other bleeding hearts afraid to go toe to toe with the Russians as dupes, commies, and fairies. (That would be a fair estimate of the attitudes of the rest of us except I never took the Scribe as a dupe except maybe to those furious wanting habits that would lay him low over a decade later). The Scribe took the bait, took the bet, a five dollar bet big money in those tight Acre days, (had to take the bet in any case since to not do so meant you lost and had to pay anyway in the ethos of the corner days.) Frankie would have egg all over his face, the Scribe would have his five dollars (and money for a date) and would “win his spurs” in that event (one of the few times he would tell me later when he was really afraid that he would be wasted by a bunch of hoboes and rednecks from South Boston who were egging on the crowds to attack the small demonstration of Quakers, pacifists and other do-gooders in the world).   

That is just the clearest early example of what the Scribe got into. He would lead, try to lead some of us into the coffeehouse folk scene over in Cambridge when rock and roll had kind of gone into hiatus and folk seemed to give some evidence of that new breeze, and girls liked it too. There were other movements and such which the Scribe would bore us with on some desolate Friday night when we could have yet again given a rat’s ass about such things. The big turning point the biggest feather in the Scribe’s cap was his projection of the Summer of Love brewing out in the California sun in 1967 and him jumping into that craziness with all arms, all everything. More importantly dragged me, sensible me, rough and ready Frankie Riley and every other corner boy except Rick Rizzo and David White who had already laid down their heads in bloody Vietnam and now are remember in town square and black granite in Washington out to San Francisco when he came back to get us moving there to see what was what.  

The Scribe had gotten lots of scholarship help when he was accepted to Boston University after graduation in 1964 (I had too at Tufts and Frankie at Boston College). In the spring of junior year though he decided that he had to see what was going on out in Frisco and dropped out of school right after finals I think. That would later prove to be a fateful decision since in the heart of the Vietnam War when the generals were screaming for foot soldiers a student deferment kept you away from the wolves for a while and no deferment leave you at the mercies of your friends and neighbors at the draft board which would snag him in 1969, sent him to Vietnam and create a situation in his head that he never really recovered from. But in the spring of 1967 he was in full blossom to his dream breeze coming true and got so tied up in it that he made special trip back to the Acre to get reinforcements.

We would all go for varying times (I stayed out there until 1970 when that devil draft board began to call my sweet number and I hightailed it back to Tufts, fast) and while series of adventures up and down the West Coast which Seth, Jack Callahan, hell, even straight-laced Frankie Riley have written about a while back when Alex James had his youngest brother Zack write and produce a small tribute booklet to the Scribe on the 50^th anniversary of that Summer of Love. I went through many ups and downs with the Scribe (and on my own as well0 before he fell down in the end but I will always think kindly of the times we spent out West deep in that new breeze he saw coming way before the rest of us did (or gave a rat’s ass about, okay)

The constant reader already knows that I have been teasing the readers of this series with a promise to speak of one Billy Bradley who along with the now well-reported Ronnie Mooney led the Carter’s Variety Store corner boys for good or evil but I have to tell a few stories about the Scribe, about Peter Paul Markin. A guy who off and on for the next twenty years before he fell down, went down hard in Mexico trying to “cure” his eternal wanting habits with a quick score was my best friend, and on good days would acknowledge that on his part, whom I met on the first day of class at Snug Harbor Elementary School in Miss Sullivan’s fourth grade class after we had moved to Adamsville from Riverdale. The Markin stories will help set up the link to Billy Bradley, in fact I would argue that you cannot understand Billy without knowing more about the Scribe (and the tangled three-way relationship between us not always good).

Not so strangely the Scribe was a nerdish combination of mad hatter plans to get out from under the projects life which he was far more sensitive about than the rest of us (although I still feel marked heavily by those formative experiences) and bookish, serious bookish babble of ideas like some ill-regarded prophet related to nothing at all that was crushing our spirits in the projects. I learned that about him the very first day of school by my observing the Scribe the next row over reading a book on American revolutionary Samuel Adams which I said looked interesting. That set the frame rolling as we talked until battered down by old biddy Sullivan’s wrath. That cost us a first day, first day of school if you can believe it, after school detention, the first of many. The Scribe would blow that detention business off (and I would a little toward the end of the year) as some kind of overhead to finding interesting things to talk about in school since nothing like that existed in his household (nor mine either fore that matter. Over the years he would make many calculated decisions in the same holy goof manner (thanks Jack Kerouac) from which way the cultural winds were blowing to how to work the plan for the latest “midnight creep.”    

As unbelievable as I thought it was at the time because I was somewhat shy and a little socially backward that first day the Scribe mentioned that he hung out with a bunch of guys, projects guys all, fourth and fifth grade guys, at Carter’s Variety Store which then (and if you can believe this now as well) was the only place in the whole area to shop for those without cars or who needed a quick item or two.

[My family had moved in a few weeks before school opened in September, so I knew what Carter’s was, had been there getting milk and stuff my mother but I think I only saw the corner boys hanging out maybe once as I scurried home. They looked about my age but I knew from a roughed up experience with the 12^th Street corner boys in Riverdale when I tried to engage a couple of them that you do not talk to corner boys, do not join up on your own but need to be “sponsored” and so I kept my distance.]   


That first day of school was the day I met Ronnie Mooney who I have spilled ink about in five previous installments of this series and who was at the time was becoming the recognized leader of the Carter corner boys. In some funny ways, the Scribe, and me a little less so, didn’t seem to fit the mold of these guys, thugs like Rodger the Dodger, Lenny who would later lay down his head in Vietnam, George, Tiny John and a revolving cast of guys for he was way too “intellectual” for what these guys were about or so I thought. The other side of the Scribe, the screwy gene side, the missing link side, was a truly larcenous heart. Using plenty of his “intellectual” energy to plan and plot, along with Ronnie, various capers, mostly small time but all illegal.

Even that first day the reason the Scribe was so hopped up to meet his corner boys was because he needed a look-out for a clip he was planning at Kaye’s Jewelry near Bert’s Market to grab some stuff and get it converted to cash (fencing it I guess we would call it today). Like I say small time stuff, small down at the base of society where there is never enough of anything and family-sized “no, we can’t afford it” coexist with some furious wanting habits.    

He always had a million schemes going and always a mix between his good instincts like when he proposed to sent books to Alabama so some black children could read* and planning a “midnight creep” to rob some house of its worldly possessions, sell them and live on what he called, we called, easy street for a while.    

(*The Scribe actually acted on that book proposal a little latter on the quiet since the white bread projects were a hotbed of racial animosity for the simple reason, no maybe not so simple reason, that no matter how bad things were in a place like the projects at least the denizens were white and the kids, us, imbibed that idea for the most part even if we did not understand it. Another situation where the Scribe committed me to silence although I have mentioned that episode many times over the years explaining the Scribe’s motions. Guys like Ronnie, Billy too would have crucified him if they had known probably about that project run him out of the projects.

The way the thing worked was that he actually put a small ad in the local newspaper asking for books (he also asked the local branch of the public library, but they turned him down cold). He got a response from a Jewish kid, also a no-no grouping in the projects life where anti-Semitism was more visceral than the black experience since a number of Jewish people lived in the new single-family houses up the road. That kid has some connections, so some books made their way south.)

At the same time, although I don’t remember if that was true with his working the books idea, he would be setting up a scheme to rob a house. Cool as a cucumber. This is where Adamsville Beach comes in again. The first time he proposed the idea to me (I was something like a sounding board for all he listened to me when he was hellbent on an idea) we were sitting at the seawall on the beach, what he called his office. It was in sixth grade, probably the spring, early summer when people would be away, would be away from those newly built single-family homes up the road.

This section, then anyway, was not well-policed (although the Scribe had the police patrol routine worked out) had some distance between houses ( a selling point for crammed in urban dwellers) and each as in all such developments in those days had similar set-ups, including bulkhead entry into the cellars and a breezeway between house and garage that was a joke to break into. The Scribe’s idea was to try the breezeway first, usually the easiest entry since as with many such quickly built structures the thing was flimsy (and probably no developer thought about corner boy midnight creep robbers. If that failed then the bulkhead was the target, an easy target since he had figured out a way to unlatch the doors with a device wedged between the doors, easy stuff really.               

Here it is best to give another contradiction of the Scribe. He was a nerd, was clueless about how to organize such a plan, the working parts. Once he presented the idea to Ronnie and Billy, and then the rest of the guys and suggested he would lead the first raid they balked, were ready to hang his ass in the grass. Christ, he could hardly keep his hands steady doing the “clip” (as I was so we both were lookouts in that juvenile caper). So Ronnie, and then when Ronnie grew away from the crowd Billy, later at Doc’s Harry Devine and at Tonio’s Frankie Riley would be the operational chiefs of such projects.

The one time the Scribe had the bright idea to do a creep on his own he almost got us all arrested when he both miscalculated the police patrol schedule and that the house selected was not empty but had somebody baby-sitting a child inside. Jesus, but when he was “on” his ideas were on point.  Hey, we never got caught for nothing he set up. Maybe it was that beach air that drove him on.   

  

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-When The Scribe Ruled The Known World From His “Office”

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-When The Scribe Ruled The Known World From His “Office”

By Sam Lowell

The constant reader already knows that I have been teasing the readers of this series with a promise to speak of one Billy Bradley who along with the now well-reported Ronnie Mooney led the Carter’s Variety Store corner boys for good or evil but I have to tell a few stories about the Scribe, about Peter Paul Markin. A guy who off and on for the next twenty years before he fell down, went down hard in Mexico trying to “cure” his eternal wanting habits with a quick score was my best friend, and on good days would acknowledge that on his part, whom I met on the first day of class at Snug Harbor Elementary School in Miss Sullivan’s fourth grade class after we had moved to Adamsville from Riverdale. The Markin stories will help set up the link to Billy Bradley, in fact I would argue that you cannot understand Billy without knowing more about the Scribe (and the tangled three-way relationship between us not always good).

Not so strangely the Scribe was a nerdish combination of mad hatter plans to get out from under the projects life which he was far more sensitive about than the rest of us (although I still feel marked heavily by those formative experiences) and bookish, serious bookish babble of ideas like some ill-regarded prophet related to nothing at all that was crushing our spirits in the projects. I learned that about him the very first day of school by my observing the Scribe the next row over reading a book on American revolutionary Samuel Adams which I said looked interesting. That set the frame rolling as we talked until battered down by old biddy Sullivan’s wrath. That cost us a first day, first day of school if you can believe it, after school detention, the first of many. The Scribe would blow that detention business off (and I would a little toward the end of the year) as some kind of overhead to finding interesting things to talk about in school since nothing like that existed in his household (nor mine either fore that matter. Over the years he would make many calculated decisions in the same holy goof manner (thanks Jack Kerouac) from which way the cultural winds were blowing to how to work the plan for the latest “midnight creep.”    

As unbelievable as I thought it was at the time because I was somewhat shy and a little socially backward that first day the Scribe mentioned that he hung out with a bunch of guys, projects guys all, fourth and fifth grade guys, at Carter’s Variety Store which then (and if you can believe this now as well) was the only place in the whole area to shop for those without cars or who needed a quick item or two.

[My family had moved in a few weeks before school opened in September, so I knew what Carter’s was, had been there getting milk and stuff my mother but I think I only saw the corner boys hanging out maybe once as I scurried home. They looked about my age but I knew from a roughed up experience with the 12^th Street corner boys in Riverdale when I tried to engage a couple of them that you do not talk to corner boys, do not join up on your own but need to be “sponsored” and so I kept my distance.]   


That first day of school was the day I met Ronnie Mooney who I have spilled ink about in five previous installments of this series and who was at the time was becoming the recognized leader of the Carter corner boys. In some funny ways, the Scribe, and me a little less so, didn’t seem to fit the mold of these guys, thugs like Rodger the Dodger, Lenny who would later lay down his head in Vietnam, George, Tiny John and a revolving cast of guys for he was way too “intellectual” for what these guys were about or so I thought. The other side of the Scribe, the screwy gene side, the missing link side, was a truly larcenous heart. Using plenty of his “intellectual” energy to plan and plot, along with Ronnie, various capers, mostly small time but all illegal.

Even that first day the reason the Scribe was so hopped up to meet his corner boys was because he needed a look-out for a clip he was planning at Kaye’s Jewelry near Bert’s Market to grab some stuff and get it converted to cash (fencing it I guess we would call it today). Like I say small time stuff, small down at the base of society where there is never enough of anything and family-sized “no, we can’t afford it” coexist with some furious wanting habits.    

He always had a million schemes going and always a mix between his good instincts like when he proposed to sent books to Alabama so some black children could read* and planning a “midnight creep” to rob some house of its worldly possessions, sell them and live on what he called, we called, easy street for a while.    

(*The Scribe actually acted on that book proposal a little latter on the quiet since the white bread projects were a hotbed of racial animosity for the simple reason, no maybe not so simple reason, that no matter how bad things were in a place like the projects at least the denizens were white and the kids, us, imbibed that idea for the most part even if we did not understand it. Another situation where the Scribe committed me to silence although I have mentioned that episode many times over the years explaining the Scribe’s motions. Guys like Ronnie, Billy too would have crucified him if they had known probably about that project run him out of the projects.

The way the thing worked was that he actually put a small ad in the local newspaper asking for books (he also asked the local branch of the public library, but they turned him down cold). He got a response from a Jewish kid, also a no-no grouping in the projects life where anti-Semitism was more visceral than the black experience since a number of Jewish people lived in the new single-family houses up the road. That kid has some connections, so some books made their way south.)

At the same time, although I don’t remember if that was true with his working the books idea, he would be setting up a scheme to rob a house. Cool as a cucumber. This is where Adamsville Beach comes in again. The first time he proposed the idea to me (I was something like a sounding board for all he listened to me when he was hellbent on an idea) we were sitting at the seawall on the beach, what he called his office. It was in sixth grade, probably the spring, early summer when people would be away, would be away from those newly built single-family homes up the road.

This section, then anyway, was not well-policed (although the Scribe had the police patrol routine worked out) had some distance between houses ( a selling point for crammed in urban dwellers) and each as in all such developments in those days had similar set-ups, including bulkhead entry into the cellars and a breezeway between house and garage that was a joke to break into. The Scribe’s idea was to try the breezeway first, usually the easiest entry since as with many such quickly built structures the thing was flimsy (and probably no developer thought about corner boy midnight creep robbers. If that failed then the bulkhead was the target, an easy target since he had figured out a way to unlatch the doors with a device wedged between the doors, easy stuff really.               

Here it is best to give another contradiction of the Scribe. He was a nerd, was clueless about how to organize such a plan, the working parts. Once he presented the idea to Ronnie and Billy, and then the rest of the guys and suggested he would lead the first raid they balked, were ready to hang his ass in the grass. Christ, he could hardly keep his hands steady doing the “clip” (as I was so we both were lookouts in that juvenile caper). So Ronnie, and then when Ronnie grew away from the crowd Billy, later at Doc’s Harry Devine and at Tonio’s Frankie Riley would be the operational chiefs of such projects.

The one time the Scribe had the bright idea to do a creep on his own he almost got us all arrested when he both miscalculated the police patrol schedule and that the house selected was not empty but had somebody baby-sitting a child inside. Jesus, but when he was “on” his ideas were on point.  Hey, we never got caught for nothing he set up. Maybe it was that beach air that drove him on.     

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-When The Scribe Ruled The Known World From His “Office”

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-When The Scribe Ruled The Known World From His “Office”  

  

By Sam Lowell

The constant reader already knows that I have been teasing the readers of this series with a promise to speak of one Billy Bradley who along with the now well-reported Ronnie Mooney led the Carter’s Variety Store corner boys for good or evil but I have to tell a few stories about the Scribe, about Peter Paul Markin. A guy who off and on for the next twenty years before he fell down, went down hard in Mexico trying to “cure” his eternal wanting habits with a quick score was my best friend, and on good days would acknowledge that on his part, whom I met on the first day of class at Snug Harbor Elementary School in Miss Sullivan’s fourth grade class after we had moved to Adamsville from Riverdale. The Markin stories will help set up the link to Billy Bradley, in fact I would argue that you cannot understand Billy without knowing more about the Scribe (and the tangled three-way relationship between us not always good).

Not so strangely the Scribe was a nerdish combination of mad hatter plans to get out from under the projects life which he was far more sensitive about than the rest of us (although I still feel marked heavily by those formative experiences) and bookish, serious bookish babble of ideas like some ill-regarded prophet related to nothing at all that was crushing our spirits in the projects. I learned that about him the very first day of school by my observing the Scribe the next row over reading a book on American revolutionary Samuel Adams which I said looked interesting. That set the frame rolling as we talked until battered down by old biddy Sullivan’s wrath. That cost us a first day, first day of school if you can believe it, after school detention, the first of many. The Scribe would blow that detention business off (and I would a little toward the end of the year) as some kind of overhead to finding interesting things to talk about in school since nothing like that existed in his household (nor mine either fore that matter. Over the years he would make many calculated decisions in the same holy goof manner (thanks Jack Kerouac) from which way the cultural winds were blowing to how to work the plan for the latest “midnight creep.”    

As unbelievable as I thought it was at the time because I was somewhat shy and a little socially backward that first day the Scribe mentioned that he hung out with a bunch of guys, projects guys all, fourth and fifth grade guys, at Carter’s Variety Store which then (and if you can believe this now as well) was the only place in the whole area to shop for those without cars or who needed a quick item or two.

[My family had moved in a few weeks before school opened in September, so I knew what Carter’s was, had been there getting milk and stuff my mother but I think I only saw the corner boys hanging out maybe once as I scurried home. They looked about my age but I knew from a roughed up experience with the 12^th Street corner boys in Riverdale when I tried to engage a couple of them that you do not talk to corner boys, do not join up on your own but need to be “sponsored” and so I kept my distance.]   


That first day of school was the day I met Ronnie Mooney who I have spilled ink about in five previous installments of this series and who was at the time was becoming the recognized leader of the Carter corner boys. In some funny ways, the Scribe, and me a little less so, didn’t seem to fit the mold of these guys, thugs like Rodger the Dodger, Lenny who would later lay down his head in Vietnam, George, Tiny John and a revolving cast of guys for he was way too “intellectual” for what these guys were about or so I thought. The other side of the Scribe, the screwy gene side, the missing link side, was a truly larcenous heart. Using plenty of his “intellectual” energy to plan and plot, along with Ronnie, various capers, mostly small time but all illegal.

Even that first day the reason the Scribe was so hopped up to meet his corner boys was because he needed a look-out for a clip he was planning at Kaye’s Jewelry near Bert’s Market to grab some stuff and get it converted to cash (fencing it I guess we would call it today). Like I say small time stuff, small down at the base of society where there is never enough of anything and family-sized “no, we can’t afford it” coexist with some furious wanting habits.    

He always had a million schemes going and always a mix between his good instincts like when he proposed to sent books to Alabama so some black children could read* and planning a “midnight creep” to rob some house of its worldly possessions, sell them and live on what he called, we called, easy street for a while.    

(*The Scribe actually acted on that book proposal a little latter on the quiet since the white bread projects were a hotbed of racial animosity for the simple reason, no maybe not so simple reason, that no matter how bad things were in a place like the projects at least the denizens were white and the kids, us, imbibed that idea for the most part even if we did not understand it. Another situation where the Scribe committed me to silence although I have mentioned that episode many times over the years explaining the Scribe’s motions. Guys like Ronnie, Billy too would have crucified him if they had known probably about that project run him out of the projects.

The way the thing worked was that he actually put a small ad in the local newspaper asking for books (he also asked the local branch of the public library, but they turned him down cold). He got a response from a Jewish kid, also a no-no grouping in the projects life where anti-Semitism was more visceral than the black experience since a number of Jewish people lived in the new single-family houses up the road. That kid has some connections, so some books made their way south.)

At the same time, although I don’t remember if that was true with his working the books idea, he would be setting up a scheme to rob a house. Cool as a cucumber. This is where Adamsville Beach comes in again. The first time he proposed the idea to me (I was something like a sounding board for all he listened to me when he was hellbent on an idea) we were sitting at the seawall on the beach, what he called his office. It was in sixth grade, probably the spring, early summer when people would be away, would be away from those newly built single-family homes up the road.

This section, then anyway, was not well-policed (although the Scribe had the police patrol routine worked out) had some distance between houses ( a selling point for crammed in urban dwellers) and each as in all such developments in those days had similar set-ups, including bulkhead entry into the cellars and a breezeway between house and garage that was a joke to break into. The Scribe’s idea was to try the breezeway first, usually the easiest entry since as with many such quickly built structures the thing was flimsy (and probably no developer thought about corner boy midnight creep robbers. If that failed then the bulkhead was the target, an easy target since he had figured out a way to unlatch the doors with a device wedged between the doors, easy stuff really.               

Here it is best to give another contradiction of the Scribe. He was a nerd, was clueless about how to organize such a plan, the working parts. Once he presented the idea to Ronnie and Billy, and then the rest of the guys and suggested he would lead the first raid they balked, were ready to hang his ass in the grass. Christ, he could hardly keep his hands steady doing the “clip” (as I was so we both were lookouts in that juvenile caper). So Ronnie, and then when Ronnie grew away from the crowd Billy, later at Doc’s Harry Devine and at Tonio’s Frankie Riley would be the operational chiefs of such projects.

The one time the Scribe had the bright idea to do a creep on his own he almost got us all arrested when he both miscalculated the police patrol schedule and that the house selected was not empty but had somebody baby-sitting a child inside. Jesus, but when he was “on” his ideas were on point.  Hey, we never got caught for nothing he set up. Maybe it was that beach air that drove him on.     

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-Except Swim The Damn Ocean

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-Except Swim The Damn Ocean  

  

By Sam Lowell

I know, I know I have been teasing the reader of this series with a promise to speak of one Billy Bradley who along with the now well-reported Ronnie Mooney led the Carter’s Variety Store corner boys for good or evil but I have to tell a few stories about the Scribe, about Peter Paul Markin, whom I met on the first day of class at Snug Harbor Elementary School in Miss Sullivan’s fourth grade class after we had moved to Adamsville from Riverdale. That school served the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments, the projects for those who are not faint-hearted or timid as well as the new development of ranch-style houses up the road build in the 1950s. The Markin stories will help set up the link to Billy Bradley, in fact I would argue that you cannot understand Billy without knowing more about the Scribe (and the tangled three- way relationship between us not always good). They have interest of their own since those few of us veterans of the various stages of corner boy life from Carter’s to Doc’s Drugstore to Tonio’s Pizza Parlor still standing shed many a lost youth tear for a our fallen brother.         

That first day of school was something else once I made the cardinal sin, no, two cardinal sins on the very first day- talking without permission in the old biddy Sullivan’s class brought on by my observing the Scribe the next row over reading a book on Samuel Adams which I said looked interesting. That set the frame rolling as we talked until battered down by Sullivan’s wrath. That cost us a first day, first day of school can you believe it, after school detention, the first of many. Once we escaped with our lives the Scribe mentioned that he hung out with a bunch of guys, projects guys all, fourth and fifth grade guys, at Carter’s Variety Store which then (and if you can believe this now as well) was the only place in the whole area to shop for those without cars or who needed a quick item or two. Otherwise you had to go two, maybe three miles to Bert’s Market (the hangout for junior high guys later including me and the Scribe before his family moved cross-town to his grandmother’s house in the Acre section of North Adamsville). From all I could see Mr. Carter, a good guy who we didn’t rob or hassle, didn’t mind us hanging out as long as we behaved which we did, there.  

[My family had moved in a few weeks before school opened in September so I knew what Carter’s was, had been there getting milk and stuff my mother but I think I only saw the corner boys hanging out maybe once as I scurried home. They looked about my age but I knew from a roughed up experience with the 12^th Street corner boys in Riverdale when I tried to engage a couple of them that you do not talk to corner boys, do not join up on your own but need to be “sponsored” and so I kept my distance.]   


That first day of school was the day I met Ronnie Mooney who I have spilled ink about in five previous installments of this series and who was at the time becoming the recognized leader of the Carter corner boys. In some funny ways, the Scribe, and me a little less so, didn’t seem to fit the mold of these guys, thugs like Rodger the Dodger, Lenny who would later lay down his head in Vietnam, George, Tiny John and a revolving cast of guys for he was way too “intellectual” for what these guys were about or so I thought. The other side of the Scribe, the screwy gene side, the missing link side, was a truly larcenous heart. Using plenty of his “intellectual” energy to plan and plot, along with Ronnie, various capers, mostly small time but all illegal.

Even that first day the reason the Scribe was so hopped up to meet his corner boys was because he needed a look-out for a clip he was planning at Kaye’s Jewelry near Bert’s Market to grab some stuff and get it converted to cash (fencing it I guess we would call it today). Like I say small time stuff, small down at the base of society where there is never enough of anything and family-sized “no, we can’t afford it” coexist with some furious wanting habits.    

There will be plenty of time to develop Scribe stories but here is one to fill in the meaning of the headline of this piece. The Scribe loved the ocean (and I do as well), loved to sit down at a stone-etched dock along the channel to the seas and watch the ships go by, walk along Adamsville Beach when he was not corner boying it. Loved the ocean but like a lot of non-book stuff, or larcenous stuff when it came time to carry out operations he never learned to swim, could no swim a lick even though he took classes. Couldn’t keep afloat even with doggy paddling his ass around King Neptune’s estate.

In the hot, dry summer between fourth and fifth grade he decided he needed to get in the ocean, bay really, but salt-water in any case at all costs. I advised, having seen him practically go under a few feet from shore, him not to do it, to forget it. Somehow though when I went to get us some sodas at the ice cream truck which would be out there every afternoon he decided to go in, go in not under his own power but using a log that had been sighted by him floating a few feet from shore to get him out to sea. The tide was coming so he thought everything was fine, that the log would carry him along. That damn log was where he made his almost fatal error. Then he decided, this found out later, to forsake the log at a point when he was well over his head which was carrying him out to what he called the China seas and try to swim back to shore as best he could, doggy paddle I assume.

I could see him going under, see him yelling for help since he was in way over his head. I yelled to the life- guard, an older woman who had her daughter in tow but who leaped up, swan out and saved the silly bastard’s life. (As a different stroke of fate would have it I would meet that daughter fairly recently in connection with a 50^th anniversary reunion of our North Adamsville High class of 1964. She had lived across town although her mother had been assigned to Adamsville Beach. I did not know her in high school although I do remember thinking she was pretty when I saw her in the corridors. During that recent talk when we came to speak of our mutual love of the ocean I mentioned for some reason the episode with the Scribe when she mentioned her mother had been a lifeguard, the lifeguard who saved the Scribe’s ragged ass, at that beach during that period. Strange, indeed.)         

The Scribe thanked her although he generally was not the kind to thank anybody for anything even the kindness of saving his life as did I but here is where corner boy life rules. At this point we had known each other for almost a year, had become what I thought was best buddies and same pack corner boys which meant something then. He swore me to never tell anybody that he essentially panicked out there and was going down for the third time and not coming back. You have to understand that any outward sign of weakness was pounced upon by a guy like Ronnie, some of the others, a little less so Billy and being fearful for your life at twelve meant no quarter was given on being able to take it. And I never did until now.   

A recent view of the now desolate section of Adamsville described above.

   
   

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-Except When Everything Comes Tumbling Down

  

By Sam Lowell

[A number of readers have written asking what happened to Carter’s Variety Store corner boy leader Ronnie Mooney written about by me in a recent series of recollections. This reader response after I alluded to the not uncommon fate of corner boys, and not just from our corners, who wasted away in jails or found some unwanted solace in an early grave. As far as I can tell the fate sisters, those goddam bitches, deemed if necessary for corner boys to fall under the bus before their times and that they  would far outnumber the relatively few of us who survived to tell the tale, although that was a very close thing not only in my case but most of the corner boys I knew. (I will be doing a few pieces related to our in-house intellectual the Scribe who despite a lot of good luck and intelligent fell under the bus too, causing many tears even now when I think about the crazy bastard.)     

The fact of the matter is that I am not sure what happened to Ronnie, or better that I only know stuff about his fate second-hand. Partially because as I mention in brackets at the end of each piece I would join the Scribe in moving out of the projects by the ninth grade and only heard about Ronnie from our mutual friend Billy Bradley (who would himself fall down as well) about his later exploits.

Here is what I know, really remember, sometime after Ronnie lost the area-wide talent show sponsored by primo rock and roll radio station WMEX in the summer of eighth grade something snapped in him, or maybe a shrink or social worker would say something already inside of him snapped. That “defeat” will be outlined below since I was in the audience when that dime turned. In any case according to Billy who would take the leadership role after Ronnie moved away from small time larcenies he started hanging with a rougher crowd, older guys led by biker Red Riley who wielded whipsaw chains and were people you would not want to meet in any dark alley, anywhere (that from Billy one of the toughest guys I ever knew pound for pound even back then.) Word got around that he was involved in what we would at Tonio’s call the “midnight creep,” hitting well-to-do houses with owners out of town, or just out. Started skipping school, started to wear better clothes and have dough in his pocket, maybe dangling some saucy girl on his arm (don’t believe the lie that girls, good girls too,  didn’t have traffic with the bad boys, okay).

Let me bring in Pretty James Preston now who was something like a folk hero for corner boys in our town, although he wasn’t from the town but Carver some thirty miles away. Here is Pretty James’ M.O. (everybody called him Pretty James and to not do so was the kiss of death). For a while he robbed banks, large and small when you could just walk in and say stick them up and some terrified clerk would give you whatever the fuck you wanted just please don’t kill me. This is Pretty James’ beauty though, what made him bigger than life, he did his jobs solo (mostly, although later I heard he had some red-headed girlfriend act as look-out), did it as well on a British motorcycle, a Vincent Black Lightning very fast that the cops could not catch up with in his glory days. In the end he fell down, got caught in a crossfire when some stupid bank guard at the massive Granite National Bank, some fucking rent-a-cop thought the bank’s money was his and went bang-bang nicking Pretty James before he wasted the guy. That slowed him down enough so that the town’s coppers had him cornered right in the public square, a hellish shoot-out occurred and Pretty James fell down.

All this bad end was later though because Ronnie was caught up in the Pretty James myth and decided that was the career for him. At seventeen out of nowhere he decided to rob some dink gas station, maybe he had done others but the one that counts was a dink station, and he got caught. That started his life in the legal system, started him spending more time in stir than out. Maybe he should have stuck with the tough boys, or given the music another chance, who knows. I think maybe ten years, no, about fifteen since I was living up in Maine then after I graduated from high school Rodger the Dodger who still lived in the town told me when I went I went back to the projects to see a friend who was in trouble that Ronnie had fallen down a couple of years before robbing some 7-11, some store like that in a strip mall down in Ohio I think and that he had made the mistake of doing so while the Lima, I think, police were having their coffee and crullers outside away from the entrance. I remember one weird night’s talk back in maybe fifth grade Ronnie said to us when we were deep into the silly clip stuff that when the deal went down he would not be taken alive, and he wasn’t. RIP, Ronnie, RIP]

Here is my last story which will feature Ronnie Mooney as mentioned in the brackets fell down after losing his way and as usual I will do a summary of how and why these pieces came together:      

       

“By now it has become something of a cliché as I have noted that out of the deep recesses of my mind I have dredged up some memories of my earliest corner boy experiences from down in the mud, down in the base society where some Hobbesian all against all is at work even if the players are clueless about social dread which befalls them of the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments, let’s not kid each other “the projects” which strikes fear in the timid and respectable now, as it did then. Those dredgings running rampant form the basics of yet another piece. Part of what has stirred up those memory jogs revolved around getting together with the still standing members of my high school corner boy gang from Tonio’s Pizza Parlor for drinks and a little food at Jimmy Jack’s Lounge a few towns over from where we grew up, came of age, came of age as the story below will tell much too young. That in turn got me thinking about genesis and the guys I hung with early on well before high school doing the “best we could,” legally or legally. Here is what I had to say in the prior piece, actually cobbled together from the three prior pieces still germane to fill in some background as to why I have decided to take the trip to way back when, back to “from hunger” days mercifully passed if still embedded in my psyche:      

“Of all the corner boys (read: juvenile delinquents in some quarters a big term, a big concern in 1950s sociologist, criminologist, school administration, court and cop circles; sullen schoolboys serious in feeding their “wanting” habits in an age when all around them was plenty so maybe not so much sullen as angry in some other quarters; and,  misunderstood youth in yet others the bailiwick of concerned teachers, social workers, and library personnel- all three probably true in some senses) who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor while we were going to North Adamsville High in the early 1960s I am the only one still standing who started his corner boy career at Carter’s Variety Store across town in the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments (read: “the projects” and although I have already made the point a million times the unwanted fate of plenty down at the base of society, down in the mud where things and people are not pretty). That experience started when I was a student at the Snug Harbor Elementary School located just outside the projects.

“I am not quite sure how the Carter corner boys started since it was already formed when I started hanging out along with the Scribe. Let’s leave it that this store was the only one in the whole projects area (and sadly still is) where residents without cars, including my family many times, or in need of some quick item could shop. The urban legend folk lore if you will was that from about day one of the project’s opening some group of young men, boys really, somewhere about ten or eleven years old started hanging around there, to hang around which was alright with Mister Carter as long as we were respectful (which we always were-there). (I would not find out until later through my own progressions that Carter’s was step one in the corner boy stages in that part of town the denizens going to Bert’s Market on Sea Street in junior high school and Dexter’s Ice Cream Parlor in Adamsville Square in high school like in the Acre in North Adamsville the stages were Larry’s Variety, Doc’s Drugstore and Tonio’s.)   

“I met the Scribe the first day of school in fourth grade after my family had moved to the projects from another project in Riverdale west of Boston when my father’s company moved to the area and he needed the work. That was in Miss Sullivan’s class, an old biddy who trucked no nonsense and who made it her profession to keep us after school for detention-even that first day which was supposed to be easy stuff. The Scribe was looking at some book, forgotten now, and I commented that it looked interesting to start a conversation. That was all the Scribe needed as he wowed me with the contents.

“Later and elsewhere the Scribe, and to some extent me, would be the leaders of various corner boy combinations, would plan whatever needed to be planned, legal or illegal but then we were frankly naïve and really just foot soldiers. The deal was already set for leadership with Ronnie, George, Rodger, Lenny and a little later also the legendary Billy Bradley running the operations (all would later do various stretches of time in county and state prisons I think except Lenny who laid his head down in Vietnam during that war after having been given the “choice”-join the Army or do a nickel in some state jail). We had no problem with that since we were in thrall to the whole aura of the thing.”

In my first piece, important to set a certain tone for the bad karma fate of most corner boys and not just from my gang who wound up serving long jail time, or falling down to sullen and unwanted early deaths usually after some cop shoot-out, I mentioned how one pissed off Ronnie, Ronnie Mooney to give a last name since he is long dead from some failed armed robbery, gathered us together to seek revenge for some slight some teacher had given him, and he was going to burn down the school. Although the attempt, a very real attempt, failed we went along with his rage, with his plans since he was a fellow corner boy half-strange as that reason sounds today. (And as strange as I have mentioned previously how even today that does not seem irrational under the circumstances.)   


I have mentioned on a number of occasions and this is central to understanding Ronnie, later Billy and maybe even the Scribe in the end that they say, maybe they said is better, that juvenile delinquents are born not made. Have some genetic kink missing which throws everything off. That was true of Ronnie I believe for he had a really devious and sadistic bent but as a I noted in a subsequent piece about his musical abilities that was not all of what Ronnie was about then, if the bad side, the dark side came out more and more later. He, and we did too especially the Scribe and Billy Bradley, loved the emerging rock and roll that would define our generation’s main musical thrusts. Ronnie had a natural feel, a natural beat for the music and a very good voice. Ronnie lived to play the latest tunes for us by Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and what is important here the rise of doo-wop be-bop music.

I have already told the story of how Ronnie (and later with Billy) would in the summer after Carter’s closed and we were looking for something to do would gather us behind the school (that almost burned down school) and we would sing whatever he knew from rock and roll which was extensive and at one point when doo-wop surfaced that genre. At a critical point and maybe by the sheer force of his voice girls would come around, a couple at first then a whole bevy. In the distance at first but before long right up with us clapping and tapping to the new age beat.

Of course the doo-wop sessions led to boy-girl stuff but also led then ambitious Ronnie (and later Billy but the reader will have to wait for that) to realize that maybe he had enough talent to go big, become a rock and roll star. That certainly drove him for a while. Ronnie seemed to think that doo-wop would be his way out of the mud, the way out of the rotten projects. And he, rightly I think, and probably said so then focused on that kind of future. Certainly he had the swoony girls swaying in the breezes part down. One night he won a school dance during intermission talent show doing Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven and netted a fifty- dollar savings bond as the prize. That set a course for him for a while.  

Although that might keep Ronnie’s eye on the prize for a while, he, and here he can stand in for every corner boy, every Carter’s corner boy always had a nagging sense that he was left out, had “wanting habits” that given his family’s standard of living meant that “no” was the answer when he asked either parent for anything beyond milk money for lunch (most of the times I never even got that). This where the wicked kink, the rotten DNA I guess came in whatever was happening. Ronnie won some of his leadership role by being smart, I would say now street smart, but also because he was both fearless in what he wanted to do and like the Scribe latter was always working up some plan, usually illegal or something like that.

The birth of rock and roll at least after it caught on big with Elvis and the proliferation of teenage-oriented dance shows like American Bandstand hit guys like Ronnie with a big bang. Gave them maybe a chance to break out of some lonely farm, avoid becoming a clerk in some hardware store, bagging groceries, or driving trucks, stuff like that. (We will ignore the corner boy fates of armed robbery and other felonies here). That is what drove Ronnie, for a while. From his start doing doo wop with his corner boys to a swaying girl audience in back of Snug Harbor Elementary to winning  a talent contest one night at the Saint James Catholic Church dance he plotted away his prospects (the reader always remembering that all things were financed by “the clip” to grab ready cash fast).

Rock and roll came on like gang-busters and so many radio stations, maybe television stations too, looking for new talent (looking for the next Elvis or Chuck, maybe Wanda Jackson) to feed the frenzy for new sounds, new voices were knee-deep in talent searches, were sponsoring such events in their listening areas. I would learn a lot more about the ins and outs of the record and film industries and their essentially exploitive ways much later when I because a free-lance music and film reviewer but back then I was as clueless as Ronnie about what was happening behind the scenes.  

In the spring of eighth grade before my family left the projects life for good (although it has left its mark on me to this day) the biggest radio station in Boston WMEX was staging a series of talent searches looking for that next best thing. The idea was that there were to be I think six such events in different areas held in some local facility like a high school auditorium with the winner of each section getting to go to Boston to audition for Delco Records, one of the biggest labels back then and the discoverers of Johnny Blaine and Cissy Lapin. The winner of the audition would get a contract for at least one heavily promoted record and see where that led.   

When Ronnie heard about the program on Arnie Ginsberg’s Hop Hour he went nuts, decided this was it-this was the way out although he probably didn’t put in it those words, words that the Scribe or me were more likely to use even then. (Ronnie would also go around town for days tearing down posters announcing the local event to as he would say later “cut down the competition”.) The event was to be held in a few weeks at the Adamsville High School auditorium on a Friday night. So Ronnie practiced like crazy, made us listen endlessly to Jerry Lee Lewis’ High School Confidential which he intended to cover. (I still love the song but can only stand one listen at a time.)       

On the big night Ronnie looked good, looked better even than the night he won the church talent show wearing an off-white shirt, still in style string tie, a borrowed sports coat and the inevitable holy black trousers without cuffs. I don’t know if WMEX limited the number of entrants but there were maybe twenty acts listed on the brochure. Ronnie was maybe number seven or eight so he had time. The way the scoring would go on this was that the judges carried maybe sixty percent of the vote and the audience applause the rest. Ronnie was on fire that night-Jerry Lee would have been proud of the cover. When it came audience applause time and even though you might call me prejudiced he won the biggest hand. But he did not win that night (and there would be no other such nights for him) the so-so Eva Sisters doing a cover of the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine did. They would go on to win the Boston record contract and have a fairly successful recording and concert career working Vegas and other high-end venues, get some play in rock and roll revival shows too.              

Here is the where the fate sisters, and you will see why I call them bitches now, did Ronnie dirty. The whole thing was a set-up. If Elvis had shown up that night the Eva Sisters would have beaten him. The fix was on, although I would not know the details of how it was done until years later. Too late, much too late for Ronnie who was smart enough to know a fix when he saw one. And acted another way on that premise.   

      

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The Children Of Rock And Roll Come Home To Roost-For Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Happen

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The Children Of Rock And Roll Come Home To Roost-For Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Happen       

By Sam Lowell

I my last piece I noted that out of the deep recesses of my mind I have dredged up some memories of my earliest corner boy experiences from down in the mud of the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments, let’s not kid each other “the projects” which strikes fear in the now, as it did then. Those dredgings so run rampant and form the basics of yet another piece. Part of what has stirred up those memory jogs those memory jogs revolved around getting together with the still standing members of my high school corner boy gang from Tonio’s Pizza Parlor for drinks and a little food at Jimmy Jack’s Lounge a few towns over from where we grew up, came of age. That in turn got me thinking about genesis and the guys I hung with early on doing the “best we could,” legally or legally. Here is what I had to say in the prior piece still germane to fill in some background as to why I have decided to take the trip to way back when:      

“Of all the corner boys (read: juvenile delinquents in some quarters a big term, a big concern in 1950s sociologist, criminologist, school administration, court and cop circles; sullen schoolboys serious in feeding their “wanting” habits in an age when all around them was plenty so maybe not so much sullen as angry in some other quarters; and,  misunderstood youth in yet others the bailiwick of concerned teachers, social workers, and library personnel- all three probably true in some senses) who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor while we were going to North Adamsville High in the early 1960s I am the only one still standing who started his corner boy career at Carter’s Variety Store across town in the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments (read: “the projects” and although I have already made the point a million times the unwanted fate of plenty down at the base of society, down in the mud where things and people are not pretty). That experience started when I was a student at the Snug Harbor Elementary School located just outside the projects.

“I mentioned that I am the only Carter’s boy still standing but I was not the only one. There was one other one Peter Paul Markin who at Tonio’s was always known as the Scribe and I will use that name here rather than that pretension-filled moniker his mother laid on him. Now much ink (and many tears, many tears still) has been spilled in this publication about his latter exploits and the craziness of the Scribe when he was in high dudgeon at Tonio’s and a little later but little has been noted about the early days, the early corner boy days in elementary school when most of the Tonio’s boys we knew were clueless about the value of desperately poor kids joining together, hanging out to do, well “to do the best they could.”             

“I am not quite sure how the Carter corner boys started since it was already formed when I started hanging out along with the Scribe. Let’s leave it that this store was the only one in the whole projects area (and sadly still is) where residents without cars, including my family many times, or in need of some quick item could shop. The urban legend folk lore if you will was that from about day one of the project’s opening some group of young men, boys really, somewhere about ten or eleven years started hanging around there, to hang around which was alright with Mister Carter as long as we were respectful (which we always were-there). (I would not find out until later through my own progressions that Carter’s was step one in the corner boy stages in that part of town going to Bert’s Market in junior high school and Dexter’s Ice Cream Parlor in high school like in the Acre in North Adamsville the stages were Larry’s Variety, Doc’s Drugstore and Tonio’s.)   

I met the Scribe the first day of school in fourth grade after my family had moved to the projects from another project in Riverdale west of Boston when my father’s company moved to the area and he needed the work. That was in Miss Sullivan’s class, an old biddy who trucked no nonsense and who made it her profession to keep us after school for detention-even that first day which was supposed to be easy stuff. The Scribe was looking at some book, forgotten now, and I commented that it looked interesting to start a conversation. That was all the Scribe needed as he wowed me with the contents. And didn’t wow Miss Sullivan who kept us after for the continuous talking. After that after school detention business we went to Carter’s to see what was up once he told me fourth and fifth grade guys hung out there and it was okay.

“Later and elsewhere the Scribe, and to some extent me, would be the leaders of various corner boy combinations, would plan whatever needed to be planned, legal or illegal but then we were frankly naïve and really just foot soldiers. The deal was already set for leadership with Ronnie, George, Rodger, Lenny and a little later also the legendary Billy Bradley running the operations (all would later do various stretches of time in county and state prisons I think except Lenny who laid his head down in Vietnam during that war). We had no problem with that since we were in thrall to the whole aura of the thing.”

In the first piece, important to set a certain tone for the bad karma fate of most corner boys who wound up serving long jail time, or met with early deaths usually after some cop shoot-out, I mentioned how one pissed off Ronnie, Ronnie Mooney to give a last name since he is long dead from some failed armed robbery, gathered us together to seek revenge for some slight some teacher had given him, and he was going to burn down the school. Although the attempt, a very real attempt failed we went along with his rage, with his plans since he was a fellow corner boy half-strange as that reason sounds today.  


I have mentioned on a number of occasions that they say, maybe they said is better, that juvenile delinquents are born not made. Have some genetic kink missing which throws everything off. That was true of Ronnie I believe for he had a really devious and sadistic bent but as a I noted in subsequent piece about his musical abilities that was not all of what Ronnie was about then, if the bad side, the dark side came out more later. He, and we did too especially the Scribe and Billy Bradley, loved the emerging rock and roll that would define our generation’s main musical thrusts. Ronnie had a natural feel, a natural beat for the music and a very good voice. The same was true of Billy but more on him some other time when I want to develop the bond between the seemingly unbreakable bond between Scribe and Billy (which caused me a serious amount of anguish as the Scribe started describing Bill as his best friend). Ronnie lived to play the latest tunes for us by Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and what is important here the rise of doo-wop be-bop music.

I have already told the story of how Ronnie (and later with Billy) would in the summer after Carter’s closed and we were looking for something to do  would gather us behind the school (that almost burned down school) and we would sing whatever he knew from rock and roll which was extensive and at one point when doo-wop surfaced that genre. At a critical point and maybe by the sheer force of his voice girls would come around, a couple at first then a whole bevy. In the distance at first but before long right up with us clapping and tapping to the new age beat. (That “critical point” reference above being nothing but our hormonal changes making last year’s bothersome stick girls now interesting, go figure and not some modal thing).

Of course the doo-wop sessions led to boy-girl stuff but also led then ambitious Ronnie (and later Billy but the reader will have to wait for that) to realize that maybe he had enough talent to go big, become a rock and roll star. That certainly drove him for a while. Ronnie seemed to think that doo-wop would be his way out of the mud, the way out of the rotten projects. And he, rightly I think, and probably said so to us then focused on that kind of future. Certainly he had the swoony girls swaying in the breezes part down.

The 1950s were the great age of school and church dances usually combined with some kind of talent show during intermissions. A big reason both by school and church authorities for sponsoring these events every week was to keep a lid on the sexually budding kids, keep them away from the ubiquitous petting parties where who knows what went on. Talent shows were open to all and so one night Ronnie signed up as much for the fifty-dollar U.S. Savings Bond prize as anything else. And maybe to check the girl reaction.

I will say Ronnie looked great that night with a white starched shirt, an in fashion then skinny tie, loose sports coat and black trousers without cuffs also then in fashion, the fashion of the rockers back then from Bill Halley to Chuck Berry. I think he was number five on the list after some no talent has-beens or no wases, dweebs really would could not sing for nothing and got nothing but the old raspberry from a sullen put upon crowd, many. Ronnie though got up slowly walking to the center of the stage, grabbed the mike and started doing a version of Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven complete with duck walk and other moves. The usually half sullen crowd anxious to get back to dancing went wild, started going crazy. Yeah, I would not be telling any tales out of school to let you know who won the bond that night. Hail Ronnie, even if later things went south on him I wonder if in that last dying breath on some benighted strip mall, alone, he thought about that night. Yeah, I still wonder.

      From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The Children Of Rock And Roll Come Home To Roost-For Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Happen       

By Sam Lowell

I my last piece I noted that out of the deep recesses of my mind I have dredged up some memories of my earliest corner boy experiences from down in the mud of the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments, let’s not kid each other “the projects” which strikes fear in the now, as it did then. Those dredgings so run rampant and form the basics of yet another piece. Part of what has stirred up those memory jogs those memory jogs revolved around getting together with the still standing members of my high school corner boy gang from Tonio’s Pizza Parlor for drinks and a little food at Jimmy Jack’s Lounge a few towns over from where we grew up, came of age. That in turn got me thinking about genesis and the guys I hung with early on doing the “best we could,” legally or legally. Here is what I had to say in the prior piece still germane to fill in some background as to why I have decided to take the trip to way back when:      

“Of all the corner boys (read: juvenile delinquents in some quarters a big term, a big concern in 1950s sociologist, criminologist, school administration, court and cop circles; sullen schoolboys serious in feeding their “wanting” habits in an age when all around them was plenty so maybe not so much sullen as angry in some other quarters; and,  misunderstood youth in yet others the bailiwick of concerned teachers, social workers, and library personnel- all three probably true in some senses) who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor while we were going to North Adamsville High in the early 1960s I am the only one still standing who started his corner boy career at Carter’s Variety Store across town in the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments (read: “the projects” and although I have already made the point a million times the unwanted fate of plenty down at the base of society, down in the mud where things and people are not pretty). That experience started when I was a student at the Snug Harbor Elementary School located just outside the projects.

“I mentioned that I am the only Carter’s boy still standing but I was not the only one. There was one other one Peter Paul Markin who at Tonio’s was always known as the Scribe and I will use that name here rather than that pretension-filled moniker his mother laid on him. Now much ink (and many tears, many tears still) has been spilled in this publication about his latter exploits and the craziness of the Scribe when he was in high dudgeon at Tonio’s and a little later but little has been noted about the early days, the early corner boy days in elementary school when most of the Tonio’s boys we knew were clueless about the value of desperately poor kids joining together, hanging out to do, well “to do the best they could.”             

“I am not quite sure how the Carter corner boys started since it was already formed when I started hanging out along with the Scribe. Let’s leave it that this store was the only one in the whole projects area (and sadly still is) where residents without cars, including my family many times, or in need of some quick item could shop. The urban legend folk lore if you will was that from about day one of the project’s opening some group of young men, boys really, somewhere about ten or eleven years started hanging around there, to hang around which was alright with Mister Carter as long as we were respectful (which we always were-there). (I would not find out until later through my own progressions that Carter’s was step one in the corner boy stages in that part of town going to Bert’s Market in junior high school and Dexter’s Ice Cream Parlor in high school like in the Acre in North Adamsville the stages were Larry’s Variety, Doc’s Drugstore and Tonio’s.)   

I met the Scribe the first day of school in fourth grade after my family had moved to the projects from another project in Riverdale west of Boston when my father’s company moved to the area and he needed the work. That was in Miss Sullivan’s class, an old biddy who trucked no nonsense and who made it her profession to keep us after school for detention-even that first day which was supposed to be easy stuff. The Scribe was looking at some book, forgotten now, and I commented that it looked interesting to start a conversation. That was all the Scribe needed as he wowed me with the contents. And didn’t wow Miss Sullivan who kept us after for the continuous talking. After that after school detention business we went to Carter’s to see what was up once he told me fourth and fifth grade guys hung out there and it was okay.

“Later and elsewhere the Scribe, and to some extent me, would be the leaders of various corner boy combinations, would plan whatever needed to be planned, legal or illegal but then we were frankly naïve and really just foot soldiers. The deal was already set for leadership with Ronnie, George, Rodger, Lenny and a little later also the legendary Billy Bradley running the operations (all would later do various stretches of time in county and state prisons I think except Lenny who laid his head down in Vietnam during that war). We had no problem with that since we were in thrall to the whole aura of the thing.”

In the first piece, important to set a certain tone for the bad karma fate of most corner boys who wound up serving long jail time, or met with early deaths usually after some cop shoot-out, I mentioned how one pissed off Ronnie, Ronnie Mooney to give a last name since he is long dead from some failed armed robbery, gathered us together to seek revenge for some slight some teacher had given him, and he was going to burn down the school. Although the attempt, a very real attempt failed we went along with his rage, with his plans since he was a fellow corner boy half-strange as that reason sounds today.  


I have mentioned on a number of occasions that they say, maybe they said is better, that juvenile delinquents are born not made. Have some genetic kink missing which throws everything off. That was true of Ronnie I believe for he had a really devious and sadistic bent but as a I noted in subsequent piece about his musical abilities that was not all of what Ronnie was about then, if the bad side, the dark side came out more later. He, and we did too especially the Scribe and Billy Bradley, loved the emerging rock and roll that would define our generation’s main musical thrusts. Ronnie had a natural feel, a natural beat for the music and a very good voice. The same was true of Billy but more on him some other time when I want to develop the bond between the seemingly unbreakable bond between Scribe and Billy (which caused me a serious amount of anguish as the Scribe started describing Bill as his best friend). Ronnie lived to play the latest tunes for us by Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and what is important here the rise of doo-wop be-bop music.

I have already told the story of how Ronnie (and later with Billy) would in the summer after Carter’s closed and we were looking for something to do  would gather us behind the school (that almost burned down school) and we would sing whatever he knew from rock and roll which was extensive and at one point when doo-wop surfaced that genre. At a critical point and maybe by the sheer force of his voice girls would come around, a couple at first then a whole bevy. In the distance at first but before long right up with us clapping and tapping to the new age beat. (That “critical point” reference above being nothing but our hormonal changes making last year’s bothersome stick girls now interesting, go figure and not some modal thing).

Of course the doo-wop sessions led to boy-girl stuff but also led then ambitious Ronnie (and later Billy but the reader will have to wait for that) to realize that maybe he had enough talent to go big, become a rock and roll star. That certainly drove him for a while. Ronnie seemed to think that doo-wop would be his way out of the mud, the way out of the rotten projects. And he, rightly I think, and probably said so to us then focused on that kind of future. Certainly he had the swoony girls swaying in the breezes part down.

The 1950s were the great age of school and church dances usually combined with some kind of talent show during intermissions. A big reason both by school and church authorities for sponsoring these events every week was to keep a lid on the sexually budding kids, keep them away from the ubiquitous petting parties where who knows what went on. Talent shows were open to all and so one night Ronnie signed up as much for the fifty-dollar U.S. Savings Bond prize as anything else. And maybe to check the girl reaction.

I will say Ronnie looked great that night with a white starched shirt, an in fashion then skinny tie, loose sports coat and black trousers without cuffs also then in fashion, the fashion of the rockers back then from Bill Halley to Chuck Berry. I think he was number five on the list after some no talent has-beens or no wases, dweebs really would could not sing for nothing and got nothing but the old raspberry from a sullen put upon crowd, many. Ronnie though got up slowly walking to the center of the stage, grabbed the mike and started doing a version of Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven complete with duck walk and other moves. The usually half sullen crowd anxious to get back to dancing went wild, started going crazy. Yeah, I would not be telling any tales out of school to let you know who won the bond that night. Hail Ronnie, even if later things went south on him I wonder if in that last dying breath on some benighted strip mall, alone, he thought about that night. Yeah, I still wonder.