A Not So Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

In early May of last year, I was watching the news when a familiar-looking neighborhood appeared. The story - which was about local residents standing up to ICE when they came after one of their neighbors - was from Worcester, so of course it looked kinda-sorta familiar in the way that most blue collar 'hoods in old New England industrial cities kinda-sorta look alike. But there was something more than that. This 'hood looked pretty close to home. To me, it looked like Henshaw or Grand View or Eureka. Streets near where I grew up.

Then the camera showed the Clark Manor Nursing Home. And my grandmother's house on Winchester Ave, just off Main. 

Eureka! This was indeed Eureka Street. 

My bestie in grammar school lived on the corner of Main and Eureka. I knew other kids on Eureka. I played on Eureka.

And then they mentioned that it was Eureka.

Although I've lived in Boston for a lot longer than I lived in Worcester, Worcester is where I grew up. And where my roots are deep. So news stories that take place in Worcester always capture more of my attention than if they took place in any number of old New England industrial cities. Especially when they take place in my old neighborhood. Main South. Webster Square. OLA. (That's Our Lady of the Angels to those not familiar with the old New England industrial city tradition of name checking your parish when someone asks you where in your city you grew up.)

So I have been all caught up in a terrible story currently in the news. 

A veteran Worcester police officer was killed in his home. Stabbed? Throat slit? Some of the details are a bit sketchy, but the presumed killer is the policeman's wife, who seemingly disappeared into thin air.

This story completely caught my attention when I read that the policeman and his family lived on Wildwood, that he'd grown up there. Wildwood Ave. I spent my first seven years in the second floor flat of my grandmother's aforementioned decker, after which we moved to a single family home closeby. On a street off of Wildwood. I was on Wildwood pretty much every day of my post-move childhood. 

So, Wildwood Ave. I know Wildwood.

Someone's Ring camera caught the wife - wearing flipflops, shorts, and a tee - heading towards Westcott. This was way up the hill. (This is Worcester, so almost everyone lives on a hill.) In a section called Forkey's Pasture. There was a girl in my grammar school class who lived on Westcott. 

Another security camera saw her near Coes Pond, where Worcester PD has been searching for her body, on the theory that the wife killed herself. 

Dead bodies in Coes? As if anyone needed another reason not to swim there.

While Coes Pond had the "beach" nearest to where I lived, I only went there once growing up. Coes was thought to be polluted. (This was before anyone monitored things like industrial pollution.) There was a factory - Coes Knife - not far from the rocky, narrow, thinly-sanded Coes Pond Beach we didn't swim at. Coes Knife made knives. And monkey wrenches. The one time I swam there, with my siser Kath and some friends, Kath ended up with an ear infection. 

When we went swimming it was somewhere else. Somewhere that required a car to get to, while Coes was walkable. Just not swimmable by our family.

So, Coes Pond.

My brother texted me. Jimmy S, a kid we'd grown up with, was quoted in a Boston Globe article on the murder.

Jimmy used to live in the house across the street from my grandmother, and his mother Jane was a good friend of my mother. A young widow with two boys, Jane had her driver's license and a beat up two-toned green car that looked like it had been given an amateur paint job. A couple of times a summer we'd all pile into Jane's beater and drive to some pond or other for a swim and an ice cream cone.

I first saw brightly colored aluminum tumblers at Jane's, and nothing tasted better than a glass of cold water from one of those tumblers. I am now the owner of my very own set of aluminum tumblers, and think of Jane whenever I drink out of one of mine. Still nothing like cold water from an aluminum tumbler.

I vaguely recall Mr. S, who I believed died of polio when Jane's two sons were still pretty little. (They were a couple of years young than I.) But i clearly recall Jane's mother, who must have lived with Jane and the boys at some point. 

On my sixth birthday, my mother came home from the hospital with my new baby brother, Richard. (Still the best birthday present ever.) There was no time for her to bake a birthday cake (not to mention how exhausted she must have been) and it wouldn't have occurred to my grandmother who lived downstairs to do so. Jane's mother made cupcakes and sent them over. She even frosted a couple of them blue, which I greatly appreciated.

He lives on Wildwood, and knew the policeman who was killed.

So, Jimmy S. I knew Jimmy S. 

Then they announced that the policeman's body was removed by O'Connor Brothers Funeral Parlor. Which has been my family's go to since 1924, when my grandfather died. He had a home wake, and the gruesome story out of the grim day of his death is that one of the O'Connor brothers came to the house (the one on Winchester, on the corner of main) to drain all of my grandfather's blood out to prep his body for the viewing. 

The bathroom was right off the kitchen, and while my father (who was eleven) and his sibs sat at the kitchen table, one of the O'Connor brothers repeatedly walked past the kids carrying a basin full of their father's blood to dump down the toilet. (Ah, the good old days.)

So, O'Connor Brothers. Where my parents, my grandmother, my Uncle Charlie, and plenty of other people I knew were waked. And site of my very first wake. 

The police officer's funeral (and wake, I guess to manage the crowds) is being held tomorrow at Our Lady of the Angels. The parish I grew up in. The parish where the police officer grew up. From his obituary, I learned he'd gone to Gates Lane grammar school and South High. As did my father, a million years ago. ("We" went to OLA, which didn't exist when my father was a kid, but we all went to kindergarten at Gates Lane.)

So, OLA. Boy, do I know OLA.

I'm twenty years older, so I didn't know him, and his family wasn't proximate enough to be neighbors with a nodding acquaintance. (If his parents were active in the church, my mother would have known them.) The police fficer was ten years younger than my sister Trish. Maybe he trick-or-treated at our house. Maybe Trish put a Snickers Bar in his candy bag.

We don't yet know what went down in that house on Wildwood Ave where Kurt Solomon was brutally killed. We may never know the full story. But just all-round terrible, especially for the family, which includes two grown sons. (The wife, Karen Solomon, ran a well-known organization devoted to mental health for police officers and other first responders.) 

Karen Solomon's body was found, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, on Monday in a wooded area behind the Fairlawn Rehab. Fairlawn Rehab used to be Fairlawn Hospital.

I was born in Fairlawn Hospital.

So, Fairlawn Hospital.

Unlike politics, all crime isn't local. But this one sure happened pretty damned close to what used to be home.

A not so beautiful day in the neighborhood, that's for sure. 

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