Common Ground (30 page)

But Charlestown’s most characteristic pastime had long been the reckless sport of “looping.” The young “looper” played by a rigid set of rules. First, he stole a car in downtown Boston. Then he roared into Charlestown, accelerating as he reached City Square, where the District 15 police station stood in a welter of bars, nightclubs, and pool halls. Often he had to take a turn around the square before the first policeman dashed for his patrol car or motorcycle. Then the chase was on: down Chelsea Street to Hayes Square, up the long slope of Bunker Hill Street to St. Francis de Sales’ Church at the crest, then down again, picking up speed, often to 70 or 80 miles per hour, until a screeching left into Sullivan Square took him onto Main Street, where, dodging the stanchions of the El, he roared into City Square again, completing the “loop.” All that remained was to ditch the car before the police caught up.

Looping was an initiation rite, proof that a Townie had come of age. But it was something else as well: a challenge flung at authority, a middle finger raised to the powers that be. Before long, looping became a kind of civic spectacle, pitting the Town’s young heroes against the forces of law and order. Plans for a loop circulated well in advance. At the appointed hour, hundreds of men, women, and children gathered along Bunker Hill Street, awaiting the gladiators. When the stolen car came in sight, racing up the long hill, a cheer would rise from the spectators, followed by jeers for the pursuing policemen.

The first recorded “loop” was performed in 1925 by a sixteen-year-old daredevil named Jimmy “Speed King” Murphy, but most renowned of all was “Shiner” Sheehan, the teenage son of a federal alcohol agent, whose exploits so electrified the Town that he drew round him a group of young acolytes. Membership in their “Speeders Club” was limited to those who could produce newspaper clippings showing they had bested the police.

For some the sport proved fatal. In November 1932, two eighteen-year-olds were killed when their car, careering down Bunker Hill Street, smashed into a steel stanchion. Innocent bystanders also suffered. A twenty-two-year-old woman was killed when a car hit her as she waited for a trolley. A young attorney died while trying to cross the street.

By the early thirties, Boston’s press began taunting the police for failure to capture the “young hoodlums.” Stung, the police devised new “anti-looping” measures. Motorcycle cops were instructed to conceal themselves by St. Francis de Sales’ Church and cut the loopers off as they crested the hill. But the drivers quickly caught on, heaving bricks or firing pistols at the cops. Then plainclothesmen were ordered to mingle with the crowds, sidle to the curb, and “shoot to kill” as the loopers passed; undeceived by the policemen’s disguises, the crowds proved so hostile that this plan too had to be abandoned.

Finally, the police devised the “Magic Carpet,” a forty-foot leather strip studded with 1,400 spikes. When police got word of a loop, they spread the carpet across the roadway. On several occasions it worked, but on June 5, 1934, as Patrolman James Malloy, dressed in plain clothes, unrolled the carpet
across Bunker Hill Street, the car swerved directly toward him and dragged his lifeless body 125 feet. Two young Townies were charged with Malloy’s murder. One confessed he had been seeking revenge on the cop for the death of two loopers in 1932.

By 1937, Charlestown’s civic leaders were fed up with the practice, which had blighted the Town’s reputation. A committee demanded that the Police Commissioner end looping “at all costs.” Late that year, authorities announced that any captured looper would be publicly flogged on a platform in City Square. The plan was never implemented, but increased police surveillance led to the arrest of seventy-seven loopers in 1937 alone. The next March, Mayor Maurice Tobin ordered Bunker Hill Street dug up at three locations to create “bottlenecks” slightly wider than an automobile wheel base and filled with low concrete pyramids. If these traps weren’t negotiated at low speeds the pyramids would rupture the car’s undercarriage.

But all through the forties, as the Kirks grew up on Monument Avenue, an occasional looper still blazed his defiant path across the Town. As late as March 1949, police fired four shots while they pursued a twenty-two-year-old along Main Street. As the car screeched into City Square it overturned three times, pinning the looper beneath the wreckage. The Kirks and their neighbors watched as the police cut the miscreant out with a blowtorch and dragged him off to jail.

The Kirk boys were raised to shun such confrontations with the law. “Remember who you are,” their mother warned. “You’re the Kirks from Monument Avenue!” Each hung out with a street gang—Jim with the Jokers, Bobby with an unnamed outfit on Monument Square—but their activities were relatively innocuous: playing football, baseball, and halfball in the summer, coasting the icy hills in the winter, playing pinball at Vic’s Place, occasionally jousting with rivals from an adjacent corner.

After hanging out with the Crusaders for several years, Alice Kirk transferred her allegiance to the Eagles, a gang which occupied a stretch of Bunker Hill Street dubbed “Stony Beach” because Townies took the sun there in canvas chairs as if it were an ocean beach. It was there, in the fall of 1953, that Alice met Danny McGoff.

Like the Kirks, the McGoffs were third-generation Irish-Americans, but their route to Charlestown had been more circuitous: a long stint as New Hampshire farmers followed by a stay in South Boston. Not until early 1941 did Mike McGoff, a supermarket accountant, bring his wife and six children to Charlestown to take a much-sought-after place in the brand-new Bunker Hill housing project.

The notion that government ought to play some role in providing decent housing for its citizens was not much older than the Charlestown project itself. It took the Depression—with its mass foreclosures, blighted housing industry, and runaway unemployment—to make most Americans see what Franklin Roosevelt called “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” In 1934, a limited housing program began under the Public Works Administration,
but not until the Housing Act of 1937 did Congress accept the idea that the federal government should aid local authorities in providing housing for the poor at rents they could afford.

The program awakened large expectations. When Mayor James Michael Curley dedicated one of Boston’s first public housing colonies, he boldly asserted, “With this project we will forever have solved the problem of housing in Boston.” From the start, such projects were political prizes, strenuously sought by Boston’s needy neighborhoods. The city’s first—among the first in the nation—went to South Boston, whose congressman, John McCormack, was Democratic floor leader in the House of Representatives. Later came projects in the South End, Roxbury, and Charlestown.

Charlestown’s twenty-four-acre site encompassed most of the “Point” section along the Mystic River, where Irish immigrants had first settled in the 1850s. The neighborhood had changed little, its narrow streets still lined with soot-stained clapboard dwellings, most of them without hot water, bathtubs, or central heating. Charlestown’s civic leaders were dismayed by the Point’s “odious condition,” but to many of its elderly residents it was the only home they’d known. Long after the deadline for evacuation had passed, dozens of families held out in their houses, vowing to resist if deputy sheriffs tried to remove them.

Families evicted from the area received preference on new apartments in the project, so long as they met income criteria; 36 percent ultimately resettled there. But thousands of other Bostonians clamored for one of the 1,149 apartments ballyhooed in the Boston press as “modern, efficient, inexpensive and neighborly … a colony where sunshine and happiness are available.” The forty-five three-story brick buildings, set around square courtyards, were almost painfully plain, with all embellishments—elevators, vestibules, even doorbells—omitted. But they boasted modern conveniences new to many tenants. When the first families moved in around Thanksgiving 1940, they were delighted by the white enamel sinks, gas stoves, refrigerators, and washable pastel walls. “I never thought I’d be able to afford anything as lovely as this,” said Mrs. John Shackleford, the wife of a parking attendant. Rents were heavily subsidized: three-room apartments went for fourteen dollars a month, utilities included.

In April 1941, the McGoffs of South Boston learned that their application for the Bunker Hill project had been accepted (perhaps with a little help from Mrs. McGoff’s brother, a policeman who knew James Michael Curley and John McCormack). They moved into a nineteen-dollar-a-month six-room apartment the following month, just in time to attend the project’s gala dedication, which coincided with the annual Bunker Hill Day parade.

Six years old when his family moved into the project, Danny McGoff grew up in its alleys and courtyards, went to St. Catherine’s parochial school, then on to Cathedral High in the South End. When his father died in 1952, Danny quit school, taking a job at the Schrafft’s candy factory to help support the family. After work each day he joined the Eagles on Stony Beach across from
the project. One afternoon, at Scalli’s Coffee Shop, he met Alice Kirk. Soon the two teenagers were seeing each other regularly.

Without Mike McGoff’s salary, his widow couldn’t meet the project’s modest rent, so in 1953 she and her six children moved in with her family in South Boston. The next summer Danny went into the Army, but when his mother died a few weeks later, he received a “compassionate discharge” to care for the younger children. With only a year of high school, he found it difficult to get much of a job. For a time he did street work in Charlestown. Later he worked at a Star Market in Chestnut Hill. In the wintertime he sold Christmas trees. Then he and his friend “Dizzo” opened a fish market in Charlestown’s Hayes Square.

In September 1957—after dating steadily for four years—Danny and Alice were married by Father Fogarty at St. Mary’s. It was a small, unpretentious ceremony; they didn’t have the money for a splashy reception or a honeymoon. That autumn they moved into a five-room cold-water flat on Polk Street near the housing project and promptly started having babies. Over the next five years the children came with relentless predictability: Danny Jr. in March 1958, Billy in February 1959, Lisa in February 1960, Kevin in March 1961, Tommy in April 1962, and twins—Bobby and Robin—in October 1963.

While Alice was giving birth, Danny struggled to feed his growing brood. Not long after they were married, his fish market went broke. For a time, he took pickup jobs as a day laborer, and finally began tending bar at several of the taverns which clustered along lower Bunker Hill Street hard by the Navy Yard.

For years, Charlestown was said to have more bars than any other square mile in the world. When Charlestown’s three commercial piers operated at full throttle during the forties, they employed about a thousand longshoremen. Another 3,500 laborers and skilled technicians worked at the adjacent Navy Yard. And when the Navy’s great gray cruisers and destroyers stood into the Yard for repairs, their crews were set loose on the Town, sea pay rattling in their pockets. All three groups were prodigious drinkers. In the three short blocks of Chelsea Street between the Navy Yard and City Square, ten bars lit up the night with neon signs. There was the Morning Glory Cafe, popularly known as “the Glories,” a favorite Navy hangout. Next door was Donovan’s Tavern, a longshoreman’s haunt. Then came Jack’s Lighthouse, Ma Glassen’s, Doherty’s Tavern, Charlie’s Delicatessen and Cafe, Tom Casey’s, Glynn’s Tavern, O’Neill’s Cafe, and the Eight Bells. Nearby were Dot’s Diner (a notorious battleground where a Panamanian sailor was once heaved through the plate-glass window), Rip McAvoy’s, Speed and Scotty’s, the D & H (whose initials stood for Driscoll and Hurley but were generally said to mean Drunk and Happy), the Big Spud (later called the Big Potato), the Pilsener Gardens (known simply as “the German’s”), and a famed after-hours spot called the Stork Club. Most renowned of all was the Blue Mirror, known universally as “the Blue Zoo” because of the nature of its patrons. Fights at the zoo went on until the first blood speckled the sawdust. “No blood, no cops,” the proprietor
liked to say. But that was a hard rule to enforce. For many longshoremen still carried their general cargo hook, a lethal foot of curved steel used to lift bales of cotton or bags of cement. When a longshoreman went into a tavern he would twist his hook through the belt loops of his pants and generally it stayed there all night. Occasionally, if sufficiently drunk or backed into a corner, a man would use it as a weapon. One night, during a brawl at the D & H, a docker drove his hook through his opponent’s lip and out the middle of his chin. The injured man staggered to the bar and knocked back a shot of whiskey, which dribbled out through the hole in his chin.

The Point and the Oldtimers, where Danny McGoff tended bar, rarely attracted that kind of clientele. A quarter mile away in Hayes Square, they catered to laborers from the Navy Yard during the day and neighborhood guys at night. The Point had been a speakeasy during Prohibition. Later it became a classic Charlestown tavern, with a long bar down one side, a jukebox, a cigarette machine, and a bookie permanently hunched over a whiskey in a back booth. Its tavern license required it to sell no food, serve no women, and close at 11:00 p.m.

The Oldtimers had a cafe license, allowing it to provide food, serve women, and stay open until 1:00 a.m. But its manager, “Bungeye” Donahue, ran it more like a tavern. So named because of his twisted left eye, Bungeye could be induced to serve a stale baloney sandwich to Navy Yard guys at noon, but otherwise he didn’t want to hear about food. And he abhorred the very notion of women in his bar. On the rare occasion when some unsuspecting dame wandered into the place and ordered a beer, he would ostentatiously spit in a glass, draw a draft, and slide it across the bar. Few women ordered a second drink.

Danny started at the Point in 1959, but soon was working the Oldtimers as well, shuttling back and forth as the demand required. He generally worked from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., when the night man came on. But the busiest time of day by far was the Navy Yard’s “lunch hour,” barely twenty minutes for the “Yardies” to down a sandwich and knock back three drinks. Charlestown’s standard order was “a ball and a beer”—a shot of Old Thompson’s rye washed down by a draft of Croft ale. At 11:15 each weekday morning Danny placed thirty shot glasses on the bar, filled them with rye, then drew thirty drafts, lining them up like a reserve battalion next to the shots. Promptly at 11:30, the door swung open and the Yardies demolished Danny’s handiwork. Occasionally a Townie varied the order, asking for a “musty,” half ale and half beer, or sending for a pitcher of beer, which was known as “rushing the growler.” But bartending at the Point and the Oldtimers required no great imagination. The most exotic drinks Danny had to serve were a Tom Collins or a vodka-and-orange in the summertime.