Standing on the Corner We were always standing on some corner in the old neighborhood. I don't remember the actual date that we moved the gang to the Howard Playstead and settled on the corner of Lawrence Street and Birchwood Road but we were still little guys not even teenagers. We called that corner pictured on the cover of this volume "home" right up until we all were graduating from teenager hood. On some evenings during the summer months we could gather fifteen or twenty guys up there. I thought the song "Standing on the Corner" by the Four Lads was really written by a guy from my...
Standing on the Corner We were always standing on some corner in the old neighborhood. I don't remember the actual date that we moved the gang to the ...
"Down by the Old Mill Stream" was one of my dad's favorite songs. My dad would have a few beers and then turn up the radio. He and I would then begin to harmonize to the smiling yet cynical faces of the rest of the family. I suppose we weren't all that good. It sounded great to me, though. This memory goes back to my early childhood and the late 1940's. We didn't have a TV in those days. Before all we Americans became addicted to the TV, people had pianos in their living rooms and music emanating from a tube filled contraption that sat in the parlor somewhere in the vicinity of that old...
"Down by the Old Mill Stream" was one of my dad's favorite songs. My dad would have a few beers and then turn up the radio. He and I would then begin ...
I seem to have inadvertently accrued a rather extensive resume in ... food. I've harvested vegetables commercially as a laborer in the fields all over America. I've plucked fruit from the tress and filled thousands of bushels for sale and consumption by my fellow Americans. I worked as a farm laborer, a fruit picker, a sorter and a grader, a dishwasher, a cook, a sous chief, a gourmet chef, a kitchen manager, a restaurant manager, a restaurant owner and small business operator and a restaurant and small business entrepreneur. Tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans have...
I seem to have inadvertently accrued a rather extensive resume in ... food. I've harvested vegetables commercially as a laborer in the fields all over...
In Lawrence, my hometown we had "Lawton's by the Sea." Lawton's was typical of Lawrence and atypical of everywhere else in the world. First of all it had a fire hydrant in the lobby. It wasn't really a fire hydrant but it looked like a fire hydrant. It was some sort of on/off valve that had something to do with regulating the flow of water or water level of the canal that sat just behind Lawton's back door - hence the comic description, "Lawton's by the Sea." The canals that were constructed back in the 1800s to provide power to the textile machinery and were the reason for the initial...
In Lawrence, my hometown we had "Lawton's by the Sea." Lawton's was typical of Lawrence and atypical of everywhere else in the world. First of all it ...
In answer to this depressing question, "Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot," my answer should be quite obvious. This is number eight in my series about the old gang and me hangin' out on the various street corners, alleys, hallways and barrooms and watering holes of our hometown in good old Lawrence, Mass. I have two more volumes to construct and that should, without doubt, give me the world's record for the most short stories ever written about a city in New England that no one ever heard of and that many of the folks who have lived there are still trying to forget. It was twice voted the...
In answer to this depressing question, "Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot," my answer should be quite obvious. This is number eight in my series abou...
