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Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Before
dawn in Erie, PA, a banner saying “Close Guantanamo” was
dropped over a highway. Several young people in orange jumpsuits stood outside
the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City with a sign “No Mas
Guantanamo.” In 
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Get Ready to
March
Together in the DORCHESTER DAY PARADE!
This
SUNDAY, June 1
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Dorchester People for
Peace
will be marching again this year in the Dorchester Day Parade on June
1 along with our friends
and allies.
We’ll also be collecting signatures
for RaiseUp Massachusetts. Please join us!
Together, we bring our
vision and our values to thousands of people along the four-mile route.
AFTER-PARADE BARBEQUE
AND CELEBRATION at Jeff Klein’s house,
123 Cushing Ave. from about 3:30pm. All invited, whether you can march or
not!
Bring a dish or something
to drink if you can. Marchers can drop things off at Jeff’s house before the
parade if they want – please call ahead – 617-288-4578.
RaiseUp
Massachusetts needs YOU to help collect registered voters’
signatures across Massachusetts to raise the minimum wage and require jobs to
provide sick time. Legislation has stalled at the State House. Now it’s time
for the people to decide! DPP is joining with other organizations to put the
question on the ballot.
You Can Also Help Get
Signatures for the
RAISE UP
MASSACHUSETTS Petition
Thousands of
people will line Dorchester Ave and watch the Dorchester Day Parade on June 1.
The parade starts at 1, and the hour before the parade -- when people are
setting up their lawn chairs, settling onto their front porches, and talking
with friends -- is a golden opportunity for signature collectors like
us.
Email mikeprokosch@verizon.net to collect signatures with
us on Dorchester Day.
The
plan:
-12 Noon: meet at the Fields Corner
MBTA station. Look for a guy with white hair and a white shoulder bag full of
clipboards and Raise Up Massachusetts signature sheets.
-Said guy will assign you your section of
Dorchester Ave, where you will travel by T and work the gathering crowd till the
parade arrives (map will be included).
-You can watch the parade and if you want,
you can jump in and join the Dorchester People for Peace contingent when it
comes by. If you're with another group that's in the parade, you can join them
instead.
-And please join Dorchester People for
Peace at a traditional Dorchester Day cookout afterward (map and directions will
be included).
Marchers will gather around Noon in Lower Mills (Richmond St.) with the parade kick-off about 1pm.
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Richmond
Street between Dorchester Ave and Adams Street
Look for the
Dorchester People for Peace van
You can’t
drive or park anywhere near there on Dorchester Day, so travel early and
travel by T (to Ashmont Station on the Red Line, Butler or Milton on the
Mattapan trolley) …. Or park a ways away and walk.
BRING: A
sun hat, comfortable walking shoes (it’s four miles), water. You
can bring a banner for your organization if you have the people to carry
it.
COOKOUT: After the parade at Jeff Klein’s, 123
Cushing Ave (near the end of the parade and near Savin Hill T station)
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Dorchester People for
Peace
works to end the wars; to build a multi-racial peace
movement against violence and militarism at home and abroad; to oppose budget
cuts, racism and political repression.
617-282-3783 * info@dotpeace.org
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Veterans for Peace honor fallen
Local chapter advocates for an end to fighting
Dina Rudick/Globe Staff
Paula Mendez, 15 (left), an ROTC student, was among those who attended the Veterans For Peace rally at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park in Boston on Memorial Day. Each one represented a Massachusetts man or woman who died fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, and their names were spoken aloud over a sound system so no one would forget.
On a day when most ceremonies honoring soldiers who perished while fighting for the United States involve drums, parades, and 21-gun salutes, the peace activists’ commemoration was stunningly quiet.
It was, organizers said, just as Memorial Day is supposed to be.
“Memorial Day is not a day to espouse militarism,” said Pat Scanlon, coordinator of the Smedley D. Butler Brigade of the Veterans for Peace. “Memorial Day is a day to remember.”
Veterans held white flags bearing the name of the peace organization under the image of a dove. The backs of their shirts said: “War is a racket. A few profit — the many pay.” Speakers read essays and poems about conflict for a crowd of about 50 in Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park.
“We’re going through the same situation where we’re grieving the loss of loved ones back in Iraq and here in the US,” said Carlos Arredondo, a member of Veterans for Peace who lost one son to battle and another to suicide in the grief-wracked aftermath that sometimes follows casualties of war.
Arredondo gained international prominence as a hero of the Boston Marathon bombing, a race he had attended to hand out flags to soldiers who were running.
Monday’s commemoration honored not only soldiers who died overseas, but also those who returned home suffering from stress disorders and battle wounds.
“We cannot truly honor these men and women until we burst the bubble of truth that remains hidden, until we shout the truth and hear the truth that most of these wars are enacted not to protect our freedom and our safety, but to put money into the profits of the military-industrial complex,” said Dan Perkins, a member of Veterans for Peace.
Poet Faye George recited a piece she wrote after visiting the Civil War museum in Chancellorsville, Va., describing the uniform of a Confederate soldier who died in the battle there and asking, “How many others fed the flowers? Across the woods and hills, white dogwood wears the wounds of May.”
Eric Wasileski, a Gulf War veteran, built off the aphorism: “Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.”
“We say, ‘The best way to remember the dead is to save the living,’ ” he added. “Honor the dead by ending war, honor the living by making peace.”
@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @ZackSampson.
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***Billie’s
Fifteen Minutes of Fame-Bill Haley And The Comet’s Rock Around The Clock
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
I, seemingly, have endlessly gone
back to my early musical roots in reviewing a commercially- produced classic
rock series over the past few years. And while time and ear have eroded the
sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years,
say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the
generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.
And we, we small time punk in the
old-fashioned sense of that word, we hardly wet behind the ears elementary
school kids, and that is all we were for those who are now claiming otherwise,
listened our ears off. Those were strange times indeed in that be-bop 1950s
night when stuff happened, kids’ stuff, but still stuff like a friend of mine,
not Billie who I will talk about later, who claimed, with a straight face to
the girls, that he was Elvis’ long lost son. Did the girls do the math on that
one? Or, maybe, they like us more brazen boys were hoping, hoping and praying,
that it was true despite the numbers, so they too could be washed by that
flamed-out night.
Well, this I know, boy and girl
alike tuned in on our transistor radios (small battery- operated radios that we
could put in our pockets, and hide from snooping parental ears at will) to
listen to music that from about day one, at least in my household was not
considered “refined” enough for young, young pious you’ll never get to heaven
listening to that devil music and you had better say about eight zillion Hail
Marys to get right Catholic, ears. Yeah right, Ma, like Patti Page or Bob Crosby
and The Bobcats (not Bing, not the Bing of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
anyway) were supposed to satisfy our jail break cravings.
In many ways 1956 was the key year,
at least to my recollection. And here is why. Elvis may have been burning up
the stages, making all the teenage girls down South sweat, making slightly
older women sweat and throw undergarments too, and every guy over about eight
years old start growing sideburns before then but that was the year that I
actually saw him on television and started be-bopping off his records. Whoa.
And the same with Bill Haley and the Comets, even though in the rock pantheon
they were old, almost has-been guys, by then. And Chuck Berry. And for the
purposes of this particular flash back, James Brown, ah, sweet, please, please,
please James Brown (and the Flames, of course) with that different black, black
as the night, beat that my mother (and others too) would not even let in the
house, and maybe not even in our whole white working- class neighborhood. But
remember that transistor radio and remember when rock rocked.
Of course all of this remembrance is
just so much lead up to a Billie story. You know Billie, Billie from “the
projects” hills. William James Bradley to be exact. I told you about him once
when I was reviewing a 30th anniversary of rock film concert segment by Bo
Diddley. I told the story of how he, and we, learned first-hand down at the
base, the nasty face of white racism in this society. No even music, and maybe
particularly not even music, was excepted then from that dead of night racial
divide, North or South if you really want to know. Yes, that Billie, who also
happened to be my best friend, or maybe almost best friend we never did get it
straight, in elementary school. Billie was crazy for the music, crazy to
impress the tender young girls that he was very aware of, much more aware of
than I was and earlier, with his knowledge, his love, and his respect for the
music (which is where the innocent Bo Diddley imitation thing just mentioned
came from although that story was later than the story I want to tell you now).
But see we were “projects kids,” and
that meant, and meant seriously, no dough kids. No dough to make one look, a
little anyway, like one of the hot male teen rock stars such as Elvis or Jerry
Lee Lewis. Now this “projects” idea started out okay, I guess, the idea being
that returning veterans from World War II, at least some vets like my father,
needed a leg up in order to provide for their families. And low- rent public
housing was the answer. Even if that answer was four-family unit apartment
buildings really fit for one family, one growing three boy family anyway, and
no space, no space at all for private, quiet dreams. Of course by 1955, ‘56
during the “golden age” of working- class getting ahead (or at least to many it
must seem so now) there was a certain separation between those who had moved on
to the great suburban ranch house dream land and those who were seemingly fated
to end up as “the projects” fixtures, and who developed along the way a very
identifiable projects ethos, a dog-eat-dog ethos if you want to know the truth.
It ain’t pretty down at the base, down at the place where the thugs, drifters,
grifters, and midnight sifters feed off the rough-edged working poor.
That didn’t stop Billie, or me for
that matter, from having our like everybody else dreams, quiet spaced or not.
In fact, Billie had during his long time there probably developed the finest
honed-edge of “projects” ethos of anyone I knew, but that came later. For now,
for the rock minute I want to speak of, Billie was distractedly, no beyond
distraction as you will see, trying to make his big break through as a rock
performer. See Billie knew, probably knew in his soul, but anyway from some fan
magazine that he was forever reading that old Elvis and Jerry Lee (and many of
the rockers of the day, black and white alike) were dirt poor just like us.
Rough dirt poor too. Farm land, country, rural, shack, white trash, dirt poor
which we with our “high style” city ways could barely comprehend.
And there was Elvis, for one, up in
big lights. With all the cars, and not junkie old fin-tailed Plymouths or
chromed Fords but Cadillacs, and half the girls in the world, and all of them
“hot” (although we did not use that word then), or so it seemed. Billie was
hooked and hooked hard on that rock star performer fantasy. It consumed his young
passions. And for what purpose? If you answered to impress the girls, “the
projects” girls right in front of him, hey, now you are starting to get it. And
this is what this little story is about.
This was late 1956, maybe early
1957, anyway it’s winter, a cold hard winter in the projects, meaning all extra
dough was needed for heat, or some serious stuff like that. But see here old
Billie and I (as his assistant, or manager, it was never clear which but I was
to be riding his star, no question) had no time for cold, for snow or for the
no dough to get those things because what was inflaming our minds was that a
teen caravan was coming to town in a few weeks. No, not to the projects, Christ
no, but downtown at the high school auditorium. And what this teen caravan
thing was (even though we were not officially teens and would not be so for a
while) was a talent show, a big time talent show, like a junior American
Bandstand television show, looking for guys and girls who could be the next
teen heartthrobs. There were a lot of them in those days, those kinds of
backwater talent shows and maybe now too.
This news is where two Billie things
came into play so you get an idea of the kind of guy he was back then. First,
one night, one dark, snowy night Billie had the bright idea than he and I
should go around town and take down all the teen caravan announcement
advertisements from the telephone poles and other spots where they were posted.
We did, and I need say no more on the matter. Oh, except that a couple of days
later, and for a week or so after that, there was a big full-page ad in the
local newspaper and ads on the local radio. That’s one Billie thing and the
other, well, let me back up.
When Billie got wind of the contest
he went into one of his rants, a don’t mess with Billie or his idea of the
moment rant and usually it was better if you didn’t, and that rant was directed
first to no one else but his mother. He needed dough to get an outfit worthy of
a “prince of rock” so that he could stand out for the judges. Moreover the song
he was going to do was Bill Haley and The Comet’s Rock Around The Clock.
I will say he knew that song cold, and the way I could tell was that at school
one day he sang it and the girls went crazy. And some of the guys too. Hell,
girls started following old Billie around. He was in heaven (honest, I on the
other hand, was indifferent to them, or their charms just then). So the thought
that he might win the contest was driving him mad (that same energy would be
used later with less purpose but that story is for another day)
Hell, denim jeans, sneakers, and
some old hand-down ragamuffin shirt from an older brother ain’t going to get
anyone noticed, except maybe to be laughed at. Now, like I said, we were no
dough projects boys. And in 1956 that meant serious problems, serious problems
even without a damn cold winter. See, like I said before the projects were for
those who were on the down escalator in the golden age of post-World War II
affluence. In short, as much as he begged, bothered and bewildered his mother
there was no dough, no dough at all for the kind of sparkly suit (or at least
jacket) that Billie was desperate for. Hell, he even badgered his dad, old
Billie, Senior, and if you badgered old Billie then you had better be ready for
some hard knocks and learn how to pick yourself up off the ground, sometimes
more than once. Except this time, this time something hit Old Billie, something
more than that bottle of booze or six, hard stinky-smelling booze, that he used
to keep his courage and television-watching up. He told Mrs. Billie (real name,
Iris) that he would spring for the cloth if she would make the suit. Whoopee!
We are saved and even Billie, my Billie, had a kind word for his father on this
one.
I won’t bore you with the details of
Mrs. Billie’s (there you have me calling her that, I always called her Mrs.
Bradley, or ma’am) efforts on behalf of Billie’s career. Of course the material
for the suit came from the Bargain Center located downtown near the bus
terminal. You don’t know the Bargain Center? Sure you do, except it had a
different name where you lived maybe and it has names like Wal-Mart and K-Mart,
etc. now. Haven’t you been paying attention? Where do you think the material
came from? Brooks Brothers? Please. Now this Bargain Center was the early low-
rent place where I, and about half the project kids got their first day of
school and Easter outfits (the mandatory twice yearly periods for new outfits
in those days). You know the white shirts with odd-colored pin-stripes, a size
or two too large, the black chinos with cuffs, christ with cuffs like some
hayseed, and other items that nobody wanted someplace else and got a second
life at the “Bargie.” At least you didn’t have to worry about hand-me-downs
because most of the time the stuff didn’t wear that long.
I will say that Mrs. B. did pretty
good with what she had to work with and that when the coat was ready it looked
good, even if it was done only an hour before the show. Christ, Billie almost
flipped me out with his ranting that day. And I had seen some bad scenes
before. In any case it was ready. Billie went to change clothes upstairs and
when he came down everybody, even me, hell, even Old Billie was ooh-ing and
ah-ing. Now Billie, to be truthful, didn’t look anything like Bill Haley. I
think he actually looked more like Jerry Lee. Kind of thin and wiry, lanky
maybe, with brown hair and blue eyes and a pretty good chin and face. I would
say now a face that girls would go for; although I am not sure they would all
swoon over him, except maybe the giggly ones.
So off we go on the never on time
bus, a bus worthy of its own stories, to downtown and the auditorium, even my
mother and father who thought Billie was the cat’s meow when I brought him
around. Billie’s father, Old Billie of the small dreams, took a pass on going.
He had a Friday night boxing match that he couldn’t miss and the couch beckoned
(an argument could be made that Old Billie was a man before his time in the
couch potato department). However all is forgiven him this night for his big
idea, and his savior dough. We got to the school auditorium okay and Billie
left us for stardom as we got in our rooting section seats. A few minutes later
Billie ran up to us to tell us that he was fifth on the list so don’t go
anywhere, like out for a cigarette or something.
We sat through the first four acts,
a couple of guys doing Elvis stuff (so-so) and a couple of girls (or rather
trios of girls) who did some serious be-bop stuff and had great harmonies.
Billie, I sensed, was going to have his work cut out for him this night.
Finally Billie came out, prompted the four-piece backup band to his song, and
he started for the mike. He started out pretty good, in good voice and a couple
of nice juke moves, but then about half way through; as he was wiggling and
swiggling through his Rock Around The Clock all of a sudden one of the
arms of his jacket fell off and landed in the front row. Billie didn’t miss a
beat. This guy was a showman. Then the other jacket arm fell off and also went
into the first row. Except this time a couple of swoony girls, girls from our
school were tussling, seriously tussling, each other for it. See, they thought
it was part of Billie’s act. And what they didn’t know as Billie finished up
was that Mrs. Billie (I will be kind to her and not call her what Billie called
her) in her rush to finish up didn’t sew the arms onto the body of the jacket
securely so they were just held together by some temporary stitches.
Well, needless to say Billie didn’t
win (one of those girl trios did, and rightly so, although I didn’t tell Billie
that). But next day, and many next days after that, Billie had more girls
hanging off his arms than he could shake a stick at. And you know maybe Billie
was on to something after all because I started to notice those used-to-been
scrawny, spindly-legged, pigeon-toed giggling girls, their new found bumps and
curves, and their previously unremarkable winsome girlish charms, especially
when Billie would give me his “castoffs.” So maybe his losing was for the best.
My “for the best.”
***Of This And That In
The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In
Search Of…..Raging Grannies
From The Pen Of Frank
Jackman
Recently I have avidly been
perusing the personal profiles of various members of the North Adamsville Class
of 1964 website as fellow classmates have come on to the site and lost their
shyness about telling their life stories (or have increased their computer
technology capacities, not an unimportant consideration for the generation of
’68, a generation on the cusp of the computer revolution and so not necessarily
as savvy as the average eight-year old today). Of course not everybody who
graduated with me in that baby-boomer times class of over five hundred students
had a literary flare or could articulate their dreams in the most coherent way.
But they had dreams, and they have today when we have all been through about
seven thousand of life’s battles, good and bad, a vehicle to express whatever
they want.
As with any human event celebrating
the 50th anniversary of almost anything, any human experience, the
question of grandchildren, their doings and not doings, including a zillion photographs
of necessity raises its head. The probabilities of this occurring with a class
website of nearly two hundred people is almost one-hundred percent. I, personally,
have made it a habit to keep references to grandchildren to a minimum in my own
case but I did run across a personal profile page where the question of
grandchildren, lots of grandchildren, are the order of the day.
Of course as I have mentioned
before in other sketches I have spent not a little time lately touting the
virtues of the Internet in allowing me and the members of the North Adamsville
Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the remnant that has survived and is
findable with the new technologies to communicate with each other some fifty
years and many miles later on a class website recently set up to gather in
classmates for our 50th anniversary reunion. (Some will never be found by choice or by
being excluded from the “information super-highway” that they have not been
able to navigate.) Interestingly those who have joined the site have, more or
less, felt free to send me private e-mails telling me stories about what
happened back in the day in school or what has happened to them since their
jailbreak from the confines of the old town.
Some stuff is interesting to a
point, you know, including those endless tales about the doings and not doings
of the grandchildren mentioned above, odd hobbies and other ventures taken up
in retirement and so on although not worthy of me making a little off-hand
commentary on. Some stuff is either too sensitive or too risqué to publish on a
family-friendly site. Some stuff, some stuff about the old days and what did,
or did not, happened to, or between, fellow classmates, you know the boy-girl
thing (other now acceptable relationships were below the radar then) has naturally
perked my interest. Rose’s’ grandmother saga fits right in with that interesting
to a point idea and here is why. At least my private e-mail to her why:
[Rose
on her profile page had gone through all the usual details about post-high school
schooling, marriage, children and grandchildren. The children raised part
struck me as a man of the 1960s as high, nine. Rose had listed all the names
and ages and I had marveled that she could remember them all. That was nothing
compared to the twenty-six grandchildren, unlisted by name or age, but you
could sense that she was beaming when she put that number down. Also as a
result of a family experience with one child, a child with disabilities, she in
her 30s had gone back to school to become a special educator to work with
youngsters who had her son’s disabilities. Kudos, Rose.]
“Rose
-You cannot just leave us hanging in the air like this. You have two important stories
to tell us in more detail-First -Your decision to become a special educator
after your son Michael’s birth at a time when you would have been in your late
30s, had your hands full and probably had not been in involved with the rigors
of school for a while. Second-You must have at least a million funny stories to
tell about your platoon of grandchildren (do you have them line up ranks when
they come to visit?). Stuff like remember their names (at a time when frankly I
have trouble remembering where I put the car keys half the time), birthdays,
etc. That will be enough writing for you until the reunion. Oh yeah,
thankfully, very thankfully in your case, we may have just enough cyberspace on
our class site so that you can share photos of ALL your grandchildren.”
Enough
said.
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