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Just Hangin' Out, Ma
Thank God for the street corners of Lawrence, Massachusetts and being able to hang out.
I started writing stories about the old gang and hangin’ out when I was about eighteen years old. Then life came along and got in my way. But now I’m back. And as far as I am concerned, I’m stronger and better equipped to do justice to the old gang and the street corners that made our hangin’ out so memorable.
This is my first book on this subject and it covers more than just the variety stores, drugstores and street corners of my youth. It branches out into barrooms, nightclubs, poolrooms, bowling alleys and the complete Full Monty of the “I’m just hangin’ out, Ma” experience.
I hope you all enjoy this adventure, feel the love, get the jokes and have some laughs.
The movie The Full Monty reminded me of my hometown of Lawrence. An old industrial mill town filled with blue collar workers, “regular” type people and semi-abandoned, mile long, redbrick, textile mills everywhere.
I would like to say we were middle class but after the mills left town for greener pastures and cheaper labor and the unemployment proliferated, we were poor. We thought of ourselves as middle class though. If we weren’t, we sure wanted to be.
I never thought of my town as a ghetto. That would be too radical. We were tenement dwellers for the most part and strongly Roman Catholic. That translated into lots and lots of kids “hangin’ out” at every corner variety store and any available street corner, driving the neighbors nuts and keeping the cops busy.
We were ethnic. Lawrence to this day calls itself “the Immigrant City.” We claimed over 40 different nationalities, mostly eastern and western European. All of us had grandparents who garbled some kind of foreign mumbo-jumbo or chanted with an accent so thick none of us kids knew what the heck they were talking about. Our generation had been Americanized even if our parents or grandparents were still fantasizing about “the Old World.”
Times were tough in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s when I was growing up. The streets and the “gang” were our refuge from the constant bickering back home in the apartment. The gang was a part of my family. My fondest memories of growing up are of my street corner buddies.
“Where you goin’, son?”
“Up the corner, Ma.”
“And what ya gonna do up the corner, son?”
“We’re just hangin’ out, Ma. That’s all, just hangin’ out.”
I started writing stories about the old gang and hangin’ out when I was about eighteen years old. Then life came along and got in my way. But now I’m back. And as far as I am concerned, I’m stronger and better equipped to do justice to the old gang and the street corners that made our hangin’ out so memorable.
This is my first book on this subject and it covers more than just the variety stores, drugstores and street corners of my youth. It branches out into barrooms, nightclubs, poolrooms, bowling alleys and the complete Full Monty of the “I’m just hangin’ out, Ma” experience.
I hope you all enjoy this adventure, feel the love, get the jokes and have some laughs.
The movie The Full Monty reminded me of my hometown of Lawrence. An old industrial mill town filled with blue collar workers, “regular” type people and semi-abandoned, mile long, redbrick, textile mills everywhere.
I would like to say we were middle class but after the mills left town for greener pastures and cheaper labor and the unemployment proliferated, we were poor. We thought of ourselves as middle class though. If we weren’t, we sure wanted to be.
I never thought of my town as a ghetto. That would be too radical. We were tenement dwellers for the most part and strongly Roman Catholic. That translated into lots and lots of kids “hangin’ out” at every corner variety store and any available street corner, driving the neighbors nuts and keeping the cops busy.
We were ethnic. Lawrence to this day calls itself “the Immigrant City.” We claimed over 40 different nationalities, mostly eastern and western European. All of us had grandparents who garbled some kind of foreign mumbo-jumbo or chanted with an accent so thick none of us kids knew what the heck they were talking about. Our generation had been Americanized even if our parents or grandparents were still fantasizing about “the Old World.”
Times were tough in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s when I was growing up. The streets and the “gang” were our refuge from the constant bickering back home in the apartment. The gang was a part of my family. My fondest memories of growing up are of my street corner buddies.
“Where you goin’, son?”
“Up the corner, Ma.”
“And what ya gonna do up the corner, son?”
“We’re just hangin’ out, Ma. That’s all, just hangin’ out.”
198 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 28, 2011
2 people want to read
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