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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Image Source: Etsy

Triple deckers

I always tell people that I grew up in a triple decker, which is kinda-sorta true. I only lived there until I was six-and-a-half, when we moved to a modest one-family ranch on a street full of VA-loan new-builds on the street behind Winchester Avenue in Worcester. And that triple decker, with the gabled, pitched roof third floor, may technically be a two-and-a-half decker. 

In any case, it was definitely a three flat.

When I was a baby, we lived on the top floor, with the slanted ceilings in pretty much every thus-crampy room. Then the tenants on the second floor moved out, and we moved down. (Those tenants, the Deignans, now occupy a gravesite kitty-corner to where my parents, my grandmother, and my Uncle Charlie are buried.)

The third floor was never again occupied, but when I was a kid, it was a fun place to explore. As was the second floor flat, which remained empty after we moved out.

This was my grandmother's house, and although she could have used the rental income, once we decamped, Nanny and her boon companion, my feckless Uncle Charlie, stayed put on the first floor, the big old house otherwise empty. The story told was that Nanny didn't want the noise of tenants clomping around over her head, but I suspect it had more to do with the fact that my father did 100% of the maintenance, yardwork, snow shoveling, and everything else that needed to get done at 5 Winchester Avenue, including shoveling coal into the furnaces. Now he had a home and yard of his own to maintain, and could now do only 75% of the work at Nanny's that needed to get done and may not have been satisfied with whatever level attention Charlie was paying to keeping the place in shape.

Not that he had to do all that much. The heating was converted to oil, sparing Charlie for having to stir his lazy stumps and shovel coal. I believe that the only work around the house he did was mow the strip of grass that flanked the left side of the house, and scythe the clumps of grass on the steep front lawn. He must have shoveled, too. But my father dropped by to visit Nanny pretty much every day and took care of a lot of things for her.

The house I grew up in - at least until I was six-and-a-half (technically six-years-seven-months) - looked a lot different from the one in the Google Maps picture. 

For one thing, it was a dark chocolately brown with creamy yellow trim. The iron pipe railing going down the front steps looks the same, but that wrought iron design on the front porch is "new." As is the pachysandra or myrtle or whatever it is on the front lawn. We had grass tuffets, like the one that Little Miss Muffet sat on.

Whoever bought the house when my grandmother moved in with my aunt in 1974 made some "improvements" over the years. (The house, by then falling down around their ears - no surprise given that my father was dead and had been ill for many years before he died - was sold after Charlie died and Nanny no longer had his stellar companionship. Other than doing Nanny's grocery shopping - with her money - Charlie was pretty much useless. A freeloader. A low-end con man. A handsome, charming, sweet-talking rogue. But Nanny's golden boy to the end.)

For one thing, they painted the house white and pretty much dumped the trim. They replaced the retaining wall - which, in my memory was at least three feet high - with what looks like a one-footer. They closed in the two side porches (first and second floor), which were wondrous places to sit and watch the world go by. (These porches were known in Worcester parlance as "piazzas." As if.)

Somewhere along the line, we learned that, rather than do upkeep on plaster, the new owners dropped the ceilings. I suppose they replaced the toilets with new-fangled ones that didn't have the raised tank and the pull-chain flusher. I suppose they replaced that iron stove/oven, the size of a VW Beetle.

I hope they kept the pantries, the pocket doors, the hardwood floors. I hope they didn't paint over the magnificent mahogany banister in the front hallway - a hallway used once a year, on Christmas Day, when we walked down to Nanny's for dinner. Other than that, we were back entry/back stairs folks. 

I loved that house, and it holds pride of place in my Worcester memories.

But was it a true triple decker? Like this one? There were, in fact, plenty of triple deckers in my neighborhood. If you jigger with the Google Map, you can see a few of them just across Main Street from Nanny's. (As a side note: some claim that the triple decker was "invented" in Worcester by one Francis Gallagher. The claim has been disputed, but it certainly could be that some enterprising Irishman came up with the idea as a way to house his fellow Irishmen and women who were coming to Worcester in droves.)

I had friends who lived in triple deckers. I had more friends who, like me, had started out in triple deckers before their families graduated to single-family homes. I had a lot more friends whose parents had grown up in triple deckers, and whose grandparents still lived there.

My closest high school friend, Marie, live in a very nice but very small house, not all that far from the decker where her mother had grown up and where her grandfather still lived. Her mother's sister and her family lived above him. When she finished school, Marie's sister lived in a flat there.

This post on triple deckers was prompted by a recent article I saw in The Harvard Crimson. 

I don't regularly read The Crimson, although it's an excellent college paper and I do stumble across articles there every once in a while. This was one of those once in a whiles. 

The article focuses a bit on the iconic status of three deckers. Seriously, is there a movie made about working class, often criminal, Irish boyos that doesn't have triple deckers as a co-star. (C.f., as the Crimson story notes, “The Departed,” “Good Will Hunting,” and “Gone Baby Gone.”

And a bit on the history of deckers:

Historically, triple-deckers were built to house factory workers. Over time, they became a crucial form of upward mobility for working class families, especially immigrants who came to call Massachusetts home. But, as nativist sentiment in Boston grew between 1910 and 1930, the triple-decker became maligned for its association with these groups and it was slowly banned from zoning codes. (Source: The Crimson)

One of the issues wasn't just "nativist sentiment." A lot of those deckers were built quite flimsily and were fire traps. Anyway:

Today, many areas of Boston...are zoned for no more than two and a half stories. Building higher than that requires the same expensive special permission as an apartment building, making apartments a better investment for developers. 

Most of the Crimson story is about the role deckers can/will play in helping alleviate the housing crisis. They are, in fact, "poised for a comeback in many municipalities."

In 2024, the ex-urb city of Somerville okayed construction of three-unit buildings. Last year, Cambridge made four-story housing legal. Boston is debating whether to start permitting triple-deckers "— or even taller buildings —."

Will triple deckers solve the housing crisis? No, but sentimental old me welcomes their revival. There's just something about them...

But I'll end with this, the Crimson writer is named Jack Reardon. On a hunch, I gave him a google and found out that he grew up in the Boston area, and graduated from a well-known local boys Catholic high school. Now, for all I know, Jack Reardon's antecedents were lace-curtain grandees from the moment they arrived. But I'm a pretty good guesser, and I'm guessing that there's a triple decker or two in his background. 

Just sayin'.

By the way, good, well-written article, Jack.

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Image 1 Source: Google Maps
Image 2 Source: Wikipedia 

Oh, what have they done to the smiley face?

One of my home town of Worcester's many contributions to the greater good is the smiley face. 

It was "invented" by one Harvey Ball, a graphic artist who designed it as a morale-booster for the State Mutual Life Assurance Company in 1963. Ball, who never trademarked his creation, was paid $45 for his freelance work, which took him about 10 minutes to come up with. (I just saw on Wikipedia that Harvey Ball was a graduate of South High School, where my father - who was a few years older than Ball - also went to school. Yay, South High!)

Anyway, I started high school - not at South - in 1963, and somewhere during my high school years, the smiley face started becoming a thing. A classmate who likely had a parent who worked at State Mutual got a hold of a bunch of the little tin smiley face pins and gave me one. Which I often wore tacked onto my hunter-green uniform jumper. 

An aside on State Mutual: A decade later, home from my long European travel adventure and not yet moved back into Boston, I had a Kelly Girl job there. My task was to sit at a rotary typewriter and type the letter B on a multi-carbon form. All day, everyday. I worked with a handful of other "girls" in a little pod that was separated out with file cabinets from the huge open-concept office floor, one of a number of similar pods, chocked full of "girls," that here and there broke up the giant floor. The only men on the floor worked in offices off to the side.

Anyway, on Christmas Eve, our boss announced that we were in for a treat. Mr. Big - the company president - and a few of his minions, were going to be stopping by.

When she spotted them nearing, she hissed "Sit up straight, girls." 

Mr. Big stuck his head into our little pod and, without making eye contact, waved his hand vaguely our way and said "Merry Christmas, girls."

After he left our boss sighed and said, "Wasn't that wonderful? He doesn't have to do that for us."

In case you were wondering why morale at State Mutual Life Assurance needed any boosting. 

We were not, however, issued smiley face buttons. He may have left us some of those nasty red and green sprinkled sugar cookies. 

Over the years, the smiley face has become ubiquitous.

I was neither a lover nor a hater. It did make me smile, so more of a love, I guess. And I was tickled that it came from Worcester. And really tickled when, a few years ago, the city's new AAA Red Sox team, the Woo Sox, adopted Smiley as a mascot. (Of course I have a smiley-face Woo Sox cap.)

And, of course, once the smiley face (in all of its manifestations) became an emoji thing to add emphasis and color to your texts, I became a pretty regular user, frequently punctuating my texts with some smiley face variant. 

Turns out the OG image doesn't necessarily spread tidings of comfort and joy. Not to everyone out there, anyway. When it comes to the young folks, Gen Z:

Instead of conveying happiness, the grinning yellow face is now seen as dismissive, passive-aggressive, or straight-up sarcastic.

And if you’re sending it to younger colleagues or friends, it could be rubbing them the wrong way.

Hafeezat Bishi, a 21-year-old intern, recently told the Wall Street Journal that she was taken aback when her older co-workers used the smiley emoji in emails and texts.

“I had to remember they are older, because I use it sarcastically,” Bishi said, explaining that she often views the emoji as conveying a “side-eye smile” rather than genuine enthusiasm. (Source: NY Post)

Who knew? Not I. 

When it comes to communications, every generation does its own thing. And Gen Z is certainly welcome to theirs. (Oh, you kids!) But I kinda sorta feel a bit sad that they're changing the meaning of Worcester's own smiley face. 

Personally, I will continue to use it to convey happiness. Let others interpret it as they may.

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Image source: Wikipedia.

The Pencil Mine

I see that among the other daffy things he wants to do, the current occupant of the Oval Office wants to bring back coal mining. Which is interesting, because there haven't been all that many coal miners since, like, forever. It's almost like wanting to bring back buggy-whip makers, overlooking the fact that buggy-whip makers don't die of lung disease or get crushed in cave-ins. And buggies and whips don't cause all sorts of nasty old pollution, so there's that.

Anyway, at its peak a bit over 100 years ago, there were nearly 900,000 coal minors in the US. As natural gas and oil became more prevalent, and as mining became more efficient, there were fewer and fewer coal miners. By 1950, there were fewer than 500,000; these days, there aren't even 50,000. 

I understand that coal dying out as the fuel of choice did mean the loss of good paying jobs (albeit miserable and dangerous ones) and the hollowing out of communities. But bringing back coal mining and the handful of jobs that come with - however you position coal as "clean" - isn't the answer to restoring economic health to struggling areas.

But reading about Trump's desire for more manly, tough-guy coal-mining jobs got me thinking about other forms of mining. 

And while I was thinking about other forms of mining, what to my wondering eyes did appear but a story about a graphite mine in my home turf of Worcester County, in the town of Sturbridge. 

The mine has all sorts of history embedded in it. 

Originaly, the Nipmuc tribe had used graphite to make paints. But in 1644, John Winthrop Junior, son of Massachusetts's first governor, bought the mine. I guess this made him the first nepo baby in American history, but, alas, Junior didn't quite make the fortune he anticipated - "the mine's supply dwindled," and in 1784 the Winthrop family sold their stake. 

It's not clear who took the mine off of the House of Winthrop's hands, but in 1928, Frederick Tudor of Boston bought the mine. And here's where it gets a bit more interesting.

A fellow named Joseph Dixon worked for Tudor at the time. Dixon went on to found the J.D. Crucible Company. Maybe the word "crucible" was not great branding - who knows what a "crucible" is? So J.D. changed the company's name to Dixon Ticonderoga. As in the Dixon Ticonderoga yellow pencil, an item which we've all had in our possession at some point of another, what with college boards and Sudoku. 

Dixon's timing was good:

With the start of the Civil War, the pencil quickly began replacing ink and quills on the battlefield, as soldiers wrote to their family and friends at home. By the end of the war Dixon's company was making some 86,000 pencils a day. (Source: Worcester Telegram)

The mine in Sturbridge was not yet played out, but it's not clear how much graphite they contributed to the lead in the Dixon Ticonderogas. But there are ties to Dixon and the mine through Tudor. 

Tudor, by the way, employed men who "were direct descendants from slaves and Indigenous peoples," including the mine's foreman, Guy Scott. Not the main part of the story, but worth penciling in. 

As is the fact that the revival of the Dexter series - Dexter: New Blood - was filmed in part around and about the Sturbridge lead mine. 

The mine makes several appearances in the 10-episode series, including as a potential place to dispose of a body and home to a hibernating bear, unhappy to have been woken from slumber.

Quite a history for a little Worcester County mine. Wonder if they'll start trying to revive the lead mining industry here. Sure, we're a blue state, so Trump's not that interested in reviving squat for our ilk, but most of the lead in Dixon Ticonderoga pencils comes from Sri Lanka. Can't let those guys keep showing us up! Let's slap a 200% tariff on them and see how we can get back in the penicl mining game. 

A not so beautiful day in the neighborhood

When I looked at the news from Worcester, my first reaction was that the neighborhood they w ere showing in the pictures looked like the neighborhood I grew up in. Main South, more specifically Webster Square or Our Lady of the Angels. (Because Worcester then and, for all I know now, was a city of Catholics, of parishes.) 

The pictures showed a blue collar neighborhood of neat houses - triple deckers, modest one- and two-family homes. The plots are small, the houses close together. There are a couple of American flags and, although I don't see one, I'm pretty sure there's a frontyard bathtub madonna somewhere on that street.

Really, the pictures I saw could have been shot in any number of Worcester neighborhoods. But without directly recognizing anything I was looking at, my spidey sense told me Main South, more specifically Webster Square or Our Lady of the Angels. Even more specifically, I thought 'that looks like Grandview Ave.' 

Well, close enough. 

It was Eureka Street, one parallel block over.

I should have known. In one of the pictures, you can see a part of Clark Manor Nursing Home, which is on Main Street, directly across from the top of Eureka. (That's the light brick building shown in this picture.)

When I say this is my neighborhood, I'm not talking about the larger neighborhood, the parish. 

This is exactly where I grew up.

Bernadette, my closest friend in grammar school, lived on the corner of Eureka and Main. I knew lots of kids who lived on Eureka.

I spent the first six-and-a-half years of my life in a flat in my grandmother's triple decker on Winchester Avenue, just off Main. Clark Manor Nursing Home is just next door to Nanny's house.

When we lived at Nanny's, there was no Clark Manor Nursing Home. Next to Nanny's was a large field where we played war games and everything else we could think of. And in front of Nanny's was a lot that, when we still lived there, was turned into a Sunoco gas station. I still remember how exciting it was when they put the gas tanks in. ("We" did not filler up there. For some reason, Sunoco was not considered as good a brand as Texaco, which is where my father bought his gas, at Walter Marchessault's station, just down the hill. Walter wore a snappy uniform that made him look like General Eisenhower, and at Christmas, there was always a Texaco related toy for boys to be had there.)

Across from the Sunoco, on the other corner of Main and Winchester, was Trimble Motors, a small used car lot - maybe 6 or 8 cars - that's been there since 1930. 

Back to Clark Manor Nursing Home. 

It went up when I was in high school.

By that point, the rest of the large field next to Nanny's had been developed into a neighborhood of modest one-families, and it's there we moved in 1956.

The bus stopped at Clark Manor, and throughout high school, I'd get off the bus, skirt the side of Clark Manor, past Nanny's, past the Ladners', through the Ciras' yard to get home from where the bus left me off. Then Clark Manor put up a fence - bastards! - that made scooting a bit more difficult. When I was in college, heading to my summer job as a Big Boy waitress down in Webster Square, I jumped the fence and ended up bruising a bone on the top of my foot, missing a few days of work. Bastards!

On the corner of Main and Eureka, opposite Bernadette's house, was - at first - Kaplan's Grocers. We didn't shop there. We shopped at Morris (Burack) Market, a block down from Kaplan's. I have no idea why. Maybe because the folks who owned and ran Burack's - Mr. and Mrs. Old School Litvak Jews - and their American daughter Sylvia and her husband Paul Bornstein (plus their sons, when they got old enough to put cans on shelves or man the cash register) were so pleasant and friendly. Whenever she visited Worcester, my German Chicago grandmother would make a beeline to Morris Market and chat up a storm with Mr. and Mrs. B in her German and the Buracks' Yiddish. I have no idea what they talked about, but my grandfather had been a butcher who owned a grocery store, so it may have been that.

Anyway, although it was about 90 seconds closer, we didn't shop at Kaplan's, which moved out before we left Nanny's decker for digs of our own. (The Kaplans had two daughters, roughly the ages of my sister Kath and me. They had long curly black hair and pierced ears. I thought they were Gypsies.)

Kaplan's was replaced by Pat's Laundromat. At one point, when the washing machine at Bernadette's house was on the fritz, she was sent over to Pat's to do the laundry. I went with. We screwed things up, forgetting to put detergent in the front loader, opening the door after the cycle had begun, and getting water all over the floor. I can't recall whether there was an attendant, or we went back to Bernadette's to get her much older brother to bail us out.

What else was in the neighborhood: Vic the barber, the Paree Beauty Salon, the Maincrest Pharmacy, and Empire Granite, which sold cemetery monuments from their front yard. 

So, my neighborhood: CHECK! (Blue collar: CHECK!)

And what was going on in my little blue-collar neighborhood on a beautiful spring day last week?

An ICE raid in which all sorts of feds - ICE, ATF, Customs and Border Patrol, whoever/whatever (many, on a warm and sunny day, wearing black neck warmers pulled up to their noses to help disguise themselves) -  converged on a home on Eureka Street to, warrantless, and explaining nothing to anyone, seized a woman and roughly hustled her into an unmarked van to be spirited away to wherever, for however long. 

Activists had gotten a head's up on the raid and had gathered to try to protect the woman. The federales felt threatened, so they whistled in the Worcester police to protect them. (Lots of controversy about how enthusiastically WPD participated in this incident.)

Predictably, mayhem ensued, along with the predictable rough handling of the woman being arrested, and her sixteen year old daughter, who in trying to protect her mother, was thrown face down to the ground. She was arrested, as were a Worcester City Councillor and a woman running for School Committee.

Ain't nobody, including us bleeding hearts, who wants to keep hardened criminals, drug-dealers, "bad hombres," bad mujeres, and anyone else who's in the US illegally AND crime-spreeing to stay here. 

But plenty of us are scared shitless of how common these unwarranted procedures are happening, often with an unwarranted degree of force and cruelty. 

Whatever this woman on Eureka Street was up to - unless she was housing an arsenal, running a meth lab, or human trafficking - does the government really need such a thuggish show of force to take her in?

A few months ago, a Tufts grad student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was kidnapped off the streets and spirited away - without being told where she was going or why, without being able to contact a lawyer before she was shipped off - when it appears that her only offense was co-signing an editorial in the Tufts student newspaper, asking for better treatment of those in Gaza. (Late last week, a federal judge ordered her release, and the Trump forces of darkness surprisingly complied.)

And Goebbels think, look, and act alike Stephen Miller, is calling for suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. A writ allows people who are being detained to go before a judge to figure out whether their detention is lawful. The writ of habeas corpus doesn't just work for members of MS-13. It works for those who've been shipped off to a concentration camp in El Salvador who aren't gang members. And for the woman on Eureka Street. And, oh yes, for those of us who are US citizens. Or it should. 

It's all so frightening. 

There was an excellent (depressing but excellent) essay in The New York Times last week entitled "How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?" In it, Steven LevitskyLucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt write:

Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing field against the opposition. It is how autocrats rule in contemporary Hungary, India, Serbia and Turkey and how Hugo Chávez ruled in Venezuela.

The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule. More than a decade into Mr. Chávez’s rule, most Venezuelans still believed they lived in a democracy.

How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition — that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections — is a foundational principle of democracy.

Under authoritarianism, by contrast, opposition comes with a price. Citizens and organizations that run afoul of the government become targets of a range of punitive measures: Politicians may be investigated and prosecuted on baseless or petty charges, media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civic institutions may lose essential funding or tax-exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters.

When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.

By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration’s weaponization of government agencies and flurry of punitive actions against critics has raised the cost of opposition for a wide range of Americans.

A few weeks ago, I went to make a donation to the legal fund for pro-Palestinian activist, and Columbia grad student, Mahmoud Khalil. As I was about to press the button, I thought, hey, this could get me on an enemy of the state list. The donation was fifty bucks. I'm a nobody. But it's not unimaginable to think that the government could start hassling people they decide are a bit too mouthy when it comes to their feelings about the current regime. They'll start with the big guys, of course: cancel their Global Entry card; hassle them at the border to see if they have a meme on their phone that depicts Trump as the rotter that he is; set up specious investigations that go nowhere but cost the victim a ton of time and money. But eventually they'll run out of the big guys and start coming after the little folks, too.

I'm a nobody.

And I honestly don't know what I'll do if and when the stakes get higher. If and when they start hassling, arresting, brutalizing the nobodies. 

For now, I'm shooting my mouth off, sending small donations where needed, supporting democracy, and heading out with my 12" x 16" whiteboard to the demonstrations that are occurring with not enough frequency to my liking. (I got a whiteboard so I could keep up with the outrages in real time.)

Democracy is under attack! What do we do? Stand up, fight back!

They say that if you wonder what you would have been doing in the early stages of Hitler's regime, it's what you're doing now. 

I'm not going to flatter myself for being some big, brave super hero. I have a lot more time on my hands than others to do a little standing up, a little fighting back. And I actually don't believe that we're going to get to Hitlerian Holocaust levels here. But Argentina in the 1970's? Orban's Hungary? Yeah, I can see it. 

And if it actually came to putting my life on the line, I'd probably sit down, shut up.

Hopefully it never comes to that...

----------------------------------------------------------------

Article by Luke O'Neil of Welcome to Hell World on the Eureka Street incident. 

Image Source: This week in Worcester.

Candlepins for Cash!

I'm not much of a bowler. 

Not that I ever tried to be much of a bowler. I'm 75. Have I been bowling two dozen, maybe three dozen times, in my life? All I know is that I wasn't very good at it. Not that my game is an absolute disgrace. Playing tenpin, i.e., "big ball bowling," I have managed to get my score up in triple digits. And when I use the kiddie bumpers - which eliminate the possibility of gutter balls - I'm reasonably, mediocrely okay-ish.

But candlepin bowling? Yikes, that game is just brutal. One time, I actually "achieved" a small ball score of 13. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

Candlepin bowling is one of those New England things. Like calling soda "tonic," and corner stores "spas" (as if), and the porches on three deckers "piazzas" (as if). And like many wonderful items, candlepin bowling (tiny, fits-in- your hand ball; skinny cylindrical pins) was invented in Worcester. (Other wonderful Worcestessr inventions: the mass-produced Valentine, the monkey wrench, and the smiley face.)

But Valentines, monkey wrenches, and smiley faces are easy. Candlepin bowling is hard.

The ball is little, so it's harder to get much mojo on it. And the ball doesn't weigh any more than a pin. Sure, it's got momentum going for it as it hurtles down the alley - as long as you keep it out of the gutter - but in big ball, the ball outweighs a pin. By a lot. 

Unlike with tenpin bowling, no one has ever scored a perfect candlepin game. And a lot of folks, even regulars, never bowl a strike. Unlike with ten pin, where even a lousy bowler scores an occasional strike. (C.f., me.)

But Worcester's a tough, gritty town, and the degree of difficulty doesn't phase Worcester-ites. (Unless you're me when it comes to candlepins.) We don't shy away from challenges. Candlepins 'r' us.

In fact, Worcester is celebrating candlepin bowling at the Worcester Historical Museum, with an exhibit that runs through March. 

“History museums don’t always have to be Civil War, World War II kind of dusty stories,” said Vanessa Bumpus, an exhibit coordinator at the Worcester Historical Museum. “Candlepin’s an important part of our story.”

The exhibit features everything from old candlepin bowling balls and rulebooks to pictures of the game’s inventors and legendary figures it became popular among ... *cough cough* Babe Ruth. (Source: WGBH)

I don't know what's up with that *cough cough* Babe Ruth thing. Babe was an avid bowler, both tenpin and candlepin. There's even a picture of him, wearing him some pretty snappy bowling shoes, and picking just the right small ball to send down the alley. (The picture has to be authentic. Seriously, who would go to the bother of Photoshopping the Babe picking out a bowling ball?)

I, of course, never saw Babe Ruth bowl. Or play baseball, for that matter. He died the year before I was born.

But as a kid, there were a couple of candlepin bowling TV shows on Saturdays, the most noted of which was Candlepins for Cash. (There weren't all that many TV choices back in the day, and if you were stuck inside on a blustery Saturday, you had to make do with bowling or pro wrestling with the likes of Haystack Calhoun.)

In its heyday, there were 250 candlepin alleys in New England. Now there are just 75. Alas, the last candlepin bowling alley in Worcester closed a few years back. 

Q. Will I get out to Worcester to see the candlepin bowling exhibit?

A. Probably not.

But I love the very idea of it, and my heart is always gladdened when things Worcester are honored.

Let's hear it for Worcester's very own candlepin bowling!

_______________________________________

When he was a kid, one of the many odd jobs my father had was pinsetter in a bowling alley. No way to know whether it was tenpin or candlepin, but I'm betting candlepin.

Way to wreck your college career - and maybe even beyond - Greyhounds!

Didn't a college prank used to be a panty raid or stealing a traffic cone? One Christmas, at my all women's Catholic college in the late 1960's - early 1970's, someone in my dorm took the statue of the Christ Child out of the manger scene and left a packet of birth control pills. A friend and I once kidnapped a 3 foot statue of the Blessed Virgin and installed it in her dorm room, surrounded by peacock feathers and with glow-in-the-dark rosary beads wrapped around her piously folded hands. (When a security guard stopped us and asked what we were carrying - which just looked like a mid-sized object wrapped in a madras rainjacket - we answered "art project." So he let us go.)

The ante has apparently been upped and some of today's TikTok and group-think inspired pranks are borderline criminal. And sometimes they even go way over the border.

As happened last October at Worcester's Assumption Univeristy, a Catholic college just down Salisbury Street from my high school. So I'm pretty familiar with Assumption. In fact Assumption's then-president spoke at my graduation. (Assumption's mascot is Pierre the Greyhound, pictured here. When I was a girl, Assumption was for the most part the "French college," where Worcester's French Canadians went; Holy Cross was where the Irish boys went.)

Well, having read about the recent antics at Assumption - which ended up with five students charged with kidnaping and conspiracy, and a couple of them facing additional charges (for one, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon; for another, lying to investigators) - all I can say is that Father Georges Bissonette is spinning in his grave. 

The incident that resulted in the charges (which were filed in early December) occurred on October 1st. From their ages, it looks as if all/most of the students charged were freshmen. So, on campus at that point for a month and change.

On that fateful day, a female student (age 18), on Tinder, had set up a meet and greet, on the Assumption campus, with a young male (age 18) who was in Worcester for his grandmother's funeral. 

The man said he and [his Tinder date] were sitting together for just a couple minutes when a group of people “came out of nowhere” and began calling him a pedophile and accusing him of wanting sex with 17-year-old girls, according to the report filed by Assumption police Sergeant Christopher J. Shea. (Source: Boston Globe)

For starters, the young woman's Tinder profile said that she was 18. For the starter before the starters, the age of consent in Massachusetts is 16. (Note that the Boston Globe article I used as the source for all the quoted info didn't state the man's age; MassLive says he's 18. But whether he's 18 or 48, having consensual sex with an 18 or even a 17 year old is NOT a crime in this state, and the man is NOT a predator.)

The man told police the group surrounded him and held him back, preventing him from leaving. At one point, he said, he was chased by more than two dozen people to his car, where he was punched in the back of the head and had his car door slammed on him as he tried to escape, police said.

While the young man was being chased, the crowd of student faux vigilantes doing the chasing:

...all had their cell phones out in an apparent attempt to record the chase. Additional footage showed the group coming back into the building, laughing and high-fiving each other, the report said.

Fortunately, the man was able to make his escape from campus and call the police. 

So what were these kids up to? 

The students were mimicking a phenomenon that’s become popular on TikTok, police said.

“The goal of the Tinder invite was to simulate the TikTok fad of luring a sexual predator to a location and subsequently physically assaulting him or calling the police,” police said.

One of the stuents charged:

... told police the plot was also inspired by the former reality TV show “To Catch a Predator,” a program hosted by Chris Hansen that showed men arriving at stings expecting sex with minors and instead getting arrested. [He said the mob scene] "was like the Chris Hansen videos where you ‘catch a predator and either call police or kick their ass,’” police said. “[He] reported that catch a predator is a big thing on TikTok currently but that this got out of hand and went bad.”

By "went bad," means that texts went out encouraging fellow students to come on down because there was a predator preying on an underage woman on campus. 

It's as yet not clear that any of the students charged, let alone their fellow mob-sters, has been expelled or suspended, but Assumption (of course) issued a press release stating that the students' behavior was "abhorrent and antithetical to Assumption University's mission and values." The statement also called out the role of social media in stirring up dangerous and irresponsible behavior.

What a bunch of prime knuckleheads. 

Stupid, thoughtless, reckless, silly, dumb, dumb, dumb. And susceptible to stupidly, thoughtlessly, recklessly, etc.-ly jumping into an out-of-control mob.

Whether they do any jail time or just end up with probation and a healthy does of community service, the names of The Assumption Five are all out there. I don't imagine that they'll be allowed to complete their freshman year at Assumption, and may well be expelled. Other colleges, job recruiters, hiring managers will be reading about this "prank" and most/all will be taking a pass. There may well be a civil lawsuit - the parents must be thrilled. And these idiots have pretty much wrecked what they must have imagined when they showed up on the Assumption campus would be a happy college career, only to find themselves in the Internet's educational, social, and professional forever hellscape for miscreants. 

Sure, over time, the news articles end up being a few pages in - especially if The Assumption Five hire reputation managers. But in the Age of AI, it's going to get harder and harder to bury bad deeds. ("Find me everything on Pierre the Greyhoud.")

When I was growing up, Assumption was pretty big basketball school, and their teams got a lot of coverage in the local paper. The cartoon mascot, if I recall correctly, was frequently quoted as saying "sacre bleu" when the ball didn't bounce their way. 

I'm betting that Father Bissonnette isn't just spinning in his grave. I'm betting he's letting out a few "sacre bleus," too.

Way to go, you stupid young Greyhounds!

Sacre bleu, alright. 

A couple of new editions

I completely appreciate that the timing for Christmas is just terrific, distracting us from our struggle to get through the gloomy dark days of December. But as a holiday, I could take it or leave it. 

I have family over for Christmas Eve, and that I love. (Been doing it now for over 30 years!) And I love Christmas music. Not to mention cookies.

But mostly, I'm relatively meh on the season to be jolly.

Other than having a Christmas tree, which I love decorating. 

I have a smaller tree than I used to - a foot shorter (6 feet vs. 7 feet), which makes quite a difference - so this year I finally downsized my ornament collection. Any ornament that hadn't made it onto the tree since I my trees got smaller, any ornament that did  not give me joy, I put aside. I brought them to the Christmas in the City signup, and we offered them to those registering for toys for their kiddos. Most of my discards were snapped up - they were all pretty nice; I just had too many of them - and the couple that were left behind were used to deck the halls of the dingy donated storefront we run our toy giveaway, Jake's Toy Mania, out of.

I really love putting my ornaments. I don't have one of those perfecto matchy-tatchy trees. I have ornaments of all sorts. A few from my parents' first Christmas tree. Counted crossstitch ones my mother made. Ones that were gifts. Ones the commemorate late, lamented pets. 

Most of my ornaments hold some meaning, if only that they are really pretty.

But there's plenty of meaning in the all the Worcester-related ornaments, and in the ones I picked up on my travels.

My cousin Barbara started me off on the Worcester-themed ornaments. They come from Sharfman's, a Worcester jewelry store, which each year for nearly 40 years, has put out a Worcester ornament. Some are of specific buildings - the Antiquarian Society, the old Municipal Auditorium, the historic Salisbury House, Polar Park where the WooSox play -  and some are of Worcester things - a three decker, a diner. I have about a dozen of them now, and I really get a kick out of putting them on my tree. 

This year's is an especially good one. It's of Spag's, a discount store before there were discount stores, that sold all sorts of stuff: small appliances, tools, workboots, work clothes, jeans, toiletries, "art" work, hardware, food, plants - all haphazardly laid out. You'd just wander around, picking up whatever caught your eye and putting it in your.... Hmmm. Spag's didn't have shopping basket or carts, so what you'd do was find an almost empty carton of, say, shampoo and dump the contents. Voila! You're very own shopping basket. When you went to pay, Spag's didn't have shopping bags, either. You just left with your arms and pockets full, or took the carton with you. 

There was no such thing as a fall return to college without a stop at Spag's to stock up on shampoo, deodorant, soap, toothpaste, whatever. And a pair of Wranglers or two. It was as if you were going to college in Timbuktu, rather than in Boston where there actually were stores that sold shampoo, etc.

Spag's has been gone for a couple of decades now, and I still miss it. And I can guarantee that there is no one anyone near my age who grew up in the Worcester area who doesn't have memories of Spag's.

My other new edition to the tree this year came from my wonderful blitz trip with my sister Trish and nieces to Stockholm last spring for the Taylor Swift concert. 

I have ornament from Ireland, France, Italy, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and probably a few other countries. (Not to mention NYC, where I have one with the Chrysler Building on it.) And now I have one from Sweden.

Merry Christmas in Worcester-ese is Merry Christmas. In Swedish, it's God Jul.

So Merry Christmas and God Jul to all.

In keeping with tradition, Pink Slip is taking some time off. I'll be back on January 6th. (Ugh!)

I couldn't have done this

When I was in college, I spent my summers waitressing. After college, but before "real life" clicked in, I waitressed for a couple of years to finance travel. Over the years, when frustrated by my "real life" career, I'd often joke that I could always go back to waitressing. But in "real life," I couldn't have. There was much I enjoyed about waiting on tables, but I don't think it would have aged very well. I wouldn't have wanted to be on my feet running around for ten hours. I wouldn't have wanted to come home every night with the smell of roast meat and fried fish in my hair. Sure, everyone has to put up with demanding customers, nasty bosses, and idiotic colleagues, but for me it was probably easier to deal with an idiotic, nasty VP of sales than it would have been to deal with an idiotic, nasty line cook. 

So although I sometimes still joke about waiting tables, I know that I couldn't have. The closest I come is working a lunch or breakfast shift dishing out food at "my" homeless shelter, which is more like being a lunch lady than it is like being a waitress. 

But not Elaine Gingras, a Worcester woman my age who's been working at the IHOP on Route 9 in Shrewsbury for 50 years. 

Over the course of her career, Gingras spent a number of years as the head waitress, but stepped down after a decade or so to leave the thankless managerial stuff, like scheduling, and back to what she loved doing: waiting on tables and mentoring newbies. 

Interacting with customers is what gives Gingras the most joy. For years, she has served individuals and families who are regulars at the IHOP, asking them about their day, where they are from, if they are traveling someplace and even helping them if they were working on a puzzle.

“Some of them have passed on,” Gingras said. “I see families come in with their kids in infancy, and now I see their kids with their kids. I’ve seen generations.” (Source: MassLive)

Mostly, Elaine waited on regular folks, but she did wait on Neil Diamond, who came in with a bodyguard. 

“He had bacon and eggs, toast and coffee,” she said. “Then he told me to be quiet about it.”

My only celebrity serve - other than local pols - was waiting on the members of Blood, Sweat and Tears while I was working at Durgin Park. I don't remember what they ate, but part of the tip was two tickets to their performance at Paul's Mall (the Boston club at the time). The seats were great - front row; the performance was okay.  

I don't know Elaine Gingras, but I bet within two minutes we'd figure out that there's only one or two degrees of separation between us. She trained as a teacher - early on, she waitressed while teaching - and I'm betting she went to Worcester State or Anna Maria. Which means I would have known plenty of girls in her class. In any case, she sounds like a very nice person, and I would have been delighted if I had learned that, at some point early on, our waitressing paths had crossed. Maybe they did. Maybe we worked together at Ted's Big Boy in Webster Square. Or maybe I waited on her. She had waitressing jobs prior to IHOP, so maybe between those gigs and her long tenure at IHOP, she waited on me way back in the day.

So congratulations, Elaine, on your Golden IHOP Anniversary. Fifty years a waitress? Much as I like to kid about it, I never could have done it. Good on ye, Elaine. What a Worcester girl!

I read the news today, oh boy

He died last April, but the news just came out this week. The delay was weirdly reminiscent of the delay between when the My Lai Massacre occurred (March of 1968) and when, thanks to the reporting of Semour Hersh, the news broke (November 1969).

William Calley - Lieutenant William Calley - has died.

Calley was the only American convicted of the crimes committed at My Lai, when Charlie Company, the unit he was leading, slaughtered over 500 unresisting Vietnamese civilians - mostly women, children, and elderly men.  Bayoneted while they begged for their lives, the lives of their children. Blown to smithereen by grenades tossed by GI's who a few months before were tossing baseballs around back home. Mowed down by the M16's the soldiers carried - and those M16's might well have been manufacturred in my hometown of Worcester. Many of the women and girls were gang raped.

Calley - whose defense that he was just following orders (where have we hear that before?) - was sentenced to life, but only spent a few days in prison. With the intervention of Richard Nixon, Calley spent a few years under house arrest, and went on to live an uneventful, unremarkable life as a small town jeweler and real estate agent in Georgia. 

In 2009, speaking at a Kiwanis Club meeting near Fort Benning, Georgia., Calley apologized. 

"There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," Calley said, according to an account of the meeting reported by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry." (Source: NPR)

Calley was, of course, the fall guy. A hapless, undertrained soldier boy just a notch up from the lowliest grunt, carrying out the wishes from the top (where madmen whose sons weren't going to 'Nam made the high level decisions) down through a chain of command where, the closer things got the front lines, the more apparent it was the no one had a clue what was going on, other than knowing that this was a war that we weren't winning. SNAFU. FUBAR. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

By the time the My Lai story broke, I was already against the war, and didn't need further convincing. 

I was a news junkie from childhood on, and by late high school, natural lefty that I am, I was leaning against our involvement in Vietnam. My first trip to NYC (April 1967) coincided with a major anti-war demonstration. I observed, but didn't participate. Most of what I remember was the a lot of the demonstrators carried daffodils. And that, when I got home, I wrote a poem about what I'd seen - possibly the only poem in the history of the English language that used the word "shibboleth."

But during the fall of 1967, now in college, my anti-war consciousness started to get raised (as we used to say). I heard Noam Chomsky speak. I read Howard Zinn. 

I didn't look at both sides. I wasn't listening to William Westmoreland, to Henry Kissinger. 

I started participating in anti-war conferences, teach-ins, marches.

In November 1969 - right about the time we were learning about My Lai - I rode to DC on an unheated, uncomfortable school bus to attend (along with half a million others) the Moratorium March, where Pete Seeger led us in singing "Give Peace a Chance."

Even to those of us who hated the war, who thought it was beyond terrible, were shocked by My Lai.

Sure, we all knew that war was always beyond terrible, that it caused people to do the unthinkable, the unspeakable, didn't think of "our boys" as capable of the unthinkable, the unspeakable. Atrocities were for the Japanese Imperial Army in Nanking. For the Germans in Oradour (France), in Lidice (Czechoslovakia), in Babi Yar (Ukraine). Surely not the boys next door.

Because, make no mistake about, the men/boys who went to Vietnam were the boys next door, especially if you lived in a blue collar Irish Catholic neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts.

I didn't know anybody in Charlie Company. I didn't know William Calley. But I could have.

The Time's Calley covered asked the question "Who Shares the Guilt?"

The answer may not be "all of us," because that's way too glib. And if everyone's guilty, no one is. But the answer is and should be lots of people. 

Peter, Paul, and Mary were at that November 1969 Moratorium March. 

Did we sing Pete Seeger's own anti-war anthem, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

I don't remember, but I'd bet that we did.

When will they ever learn, oh, when will they ever learn?

Worcester Man

Joel Kaimakani Libed is an entertainer - singer, dancer, actor. And like a lot of entertainers - the ones who are plenty talented but we've never heard of - he pulls together a life in the arts by going on the road - touring with musicals, appearing in local dinner theaters, entertaining on cruises. (And, naturally, augmenting his living in the arts by working as a waiter.)

Although Joel Kaimakani Libed is a native of Hawaii, somewhere along his way, he made his way from the Island Paradise to the Heart of the Commonwealth, and now makes his home in Worcester, Massachusetts (a paradise in its own right, of course).

Recently, Libed was on tour with a troupe called A Taste of Ireland, which I take is akin to River Dance and/or Celtic Thunder. 

One of their stops was in Austin, Minnesota, home of Hormel Foods - makers, among other things, of SPAM.

As a kid, I loved SPAM. I'm embarrassed to admit that my sibs and I would clamor for it. Alas, my mother would only make it when my father wasn't around. As a WWII Navy vet, he'd had it with SPAM, thank you. But we all loved it, and I can still conjure up the burning, chemical tastes of SPAM on the tip of my tongue. And that's after decades, as it's been a good long time since I tasted SPAM, and I have zero interest in changing that.

But that's just me.

Joel Kaimakani Libed, on the other hand, is a big fan.

So when his Taste of Ireland tour landed in Austin, Minnesota and he figured out just where he was, he was all in on taking advantage:

When he looked up the area before the visit, Libed noted that the SPAM Museum — an institution fully devoted to the precooked meat products made by Hormel Foods — was near the venue where they would be performing. During a 30-minute break, he invited the dancers to join him.

“I’m from Hawaii, it’s a big deal,” he explained. (Source: Boston Globe)

And apparently SPAM is a big deal in Hawaii. When my father was gagging over Not SPAM Again meals in the WWII Navy chowline, Hawaiians were being introduced to this, ahem, delicacy, by the colossal military presence in the Pacific. And the islanders embraced SPAM, turning it into a pillar of their local cuisine. Lately, it's become quite on trend. 

Anyway, Libed loaded up on SPAM merch at the museum, and:

After the troupe returned, arms full of SPAM merchandise, Libed began talking about his love for the food with a woman who was working on their costumes. She briefly left the theater, and when she got back handed Libed a SPAM variety pack, including a couple of a limited Hawaiian Collectors Edition. He carried the hefty gift with him throughout the tour — in addition to the shirt, mug, and magnet he purchased — and it was only while packing to come home that he realized the cans would have to go in his carry-on.

Bacon? Teriyaki? Maple flavored SPAM. Be still my stomach. 

For some reason, the presence of all that SPAM - 15 pounds of canned goodness - triggered a TSA inspection when Libed got into the security line at the airport in Minneapolis. And when the TSA agent started pulling the cans out of his carryon bag, Libed (what else?) video'd the inspection. 

 “I instantly just started thinking of everything bad that could happen. How do I explain myself? This is going to look super suspicious. They’re going to probably think I’m really weird,” said Libed, 32...He later posted the video on TikTok [where else?], where it has now been viewed more than 5 million times — and even caught the attention of the SPAM brand.

SPAM representatives have "sent him clothes, a slicer, and other varieties as thanks for his high-profile support.

“Seeing Joel’s TikTok just shows how incredible of a fan base there is for the SPAM brand, or as Joel calls it, our ‘SPAM fam,’” Jennesa Kinscher, senior brand manager for the SPAM brand, said by email.

“We especially loved his dedication to getting our products home with him to Worcester!” she said. “He is a true fan, and we are so lucky to have him in the family.”

So Libed is not just an entertainer. He's not just a part time, when-not-on-tour waiter. He's now a SPAM influencer. And he may even be influencing the restaurant where he works to add a SPAM item to their menu. It will be a Joel-inspired hamburger that comes with pineapple and teriyaki aioli that was already on his restaurant's menu, but will now come with a slab o' SPAM larded on. It may not take off. After all, even Worcester's own Joel Libed acknowledges that SPAM is not so popular in Massachusetts, as folks around here understandably associate it with WWII peasant food. (C.f., me.)

Meanwhile, Joel Kaimakani Libed is hearing from folks back in Hawaii that's he's now something a a "hometown hero." But he's a Worcester Man now, and the Heart of the Commonwealth can always use another hometown hero. Aloha, Joel. Aloha, SPAM. 

The Department Store (oh so long ago...)

When I was growing up in Worcester, the major department store was Denholm's (formally: Denholm & McKay). Denholm's was also known as The Boston Store, because Worcester was the state's second city and was perpetually in the shadow of Boston, from whence cometh all things fine and sophisticated. 

There were a couple of other department stores in Worcester - R.H. White's and Barnard's (which I think was a full department, not just a clothing store), as well as specialty shops for men (Shack's, Ware-Pratt, Lujon's) and women (Marcus, Ullian's, Richard Healy - where one Christmas, my father bought my mother a fur hat). There was also a good-sized Filene's, with a good-sized Filene's Basement in its basement. But Filene's didn't sell furniture and housewares, so, to me, it wasn't a true department store. 

When it came to department stores, Denholm was the It Store for Worcester. 

I loved going to Denholm's. Like all true department stores, it sold pretty much everything, including furniture and toys. It's where we went for our Stride-Rite shoes, our Easter dresses, our pictures with Santa (one per childhood: I'm in the b&w one with Kath and Tom, Rich and Trish had their own pic - in color). If I remember correctly, the toy department was near the shoe department, so after we got our Stride-Rites, we could look around the toy department. Ooh! Aah!

Denholm's closed in the mid-1970's, and one of my mother's last purchases there was a fablous covered casserole dish - dark brown bottom, pale robin's egg blue and brown leaf pattern lid - which she gave me as a "housewarming gift" when I moved permanently to Boston. I still use this gorgeous dish, and think of my mother (and Denholm's) every time I use it. 

When I moved to Boston, Filene's Basement was my main source for clothing, but Jordan's was my department store. I still have an upholstered arm chair I got there 40 years or so ago. Over the years, I've gotten towels, sheets, cookware, dishware, records, books and lots of other stuff (including some clothing) at Jordan Marsh. 

(I did a Christmas season retail stint at both Filene's and Jordan's. In both cases, I worked in the stationery department.)

Most cities had an iconic department store or two. In Providence it was Shepard's. For Hartford, it was G. Fox. Philadelphia? Wannamaker's. Detroit? Hudson. Boston? Jordan Marsh.

Chicago had two: Carson Pieri Scott and Marshall Field. 

New York City has two as well: Gimbel's and Macy's.

The only one of these department stores still standing as its own brand is Macy's which, along the way, has hoovered up many of the rest, including Jordan Marsh and Marshall Field.

When it comes to department stores, in plenty of places, Macy's is the last man standing. (And it's not as department-y in Boston as Jordan's was. There's no furniture department, no books and records, no stationery, toys in the Christmas season only. And, unlike Jordan's: no bakery where you could get blueberry muffins. Fortunately, the recipe lives on, and I've made it: delish.)

But it's not clear how much longer Macy's will hang on.

It's closed a lot of its stores over the last couple of years, and plans on shuttering nearly one-third of the remaining stores. (No word as of this writing which stores in Massachusetts are getting the axe.)

There are plenty of reasons why department stores are going the way of the dodo.

Big box retailers like Walmart and Target may have lower quality, but they do the job of selling a tremendous variety of stuff. And you can even buy a lot more food at them than blueberry muffins. 

Online shopping has, of course, cut bigly into department sales. And then there was the pandemic...

Another key problem: The retail industry has been split in two as inflation has taken its toll. That means brands like Walmart that are focused on inexpensive items are succeeding, as are luxury brands for people who still have means to afford finer items. But department stores, focused on America’s middle class, are fading. (Source: Yahoo)

Hmmmm. Big department store fade as metaphor for the hollowing out of the American middle class, anyone? 

Another issue with the Macy's of the world, according to retail analyst Neil Saunders, is that they weren't at all nimble when responding to the threats from big boxdom and online. 

But to retail analyst Neil Saunders of GlobalData, the key problem for Macy’s and many other troubled department store chains is more fundamental: Company management did little to update their offerings to compete with new rivals over the years.

“Quite frankly, a lot of them stopped caring. They stopped listening to customers,” he said. “Sure online has taken its share, sure big box has taken its share. But most of all, it’s a failure to evolve.”

And that "failure to evolve" has cost the department stores big time. 

Saunders’ stats show that department stores have fallen from 14.1% of US retail sales in 1993 to just 9.8% ten years later, to 5.7% in 2013, and to only 2.6% last year. Total sales by US department stores are expected to fall from $103 billion in 2018 to only $81 billion by 2026, according to projections from Coresight Research, an analytics firm that tracks the sector.

Wow! That is some precipitous fall. 

I'd hate to see department stores entirely disappear - especially the Macy's in downtown Boston. I don't shop there a lot, but when I want a set of sheets, that's where I head. 

“Decline is inevitable. But I don’t think extinction is inevitable,” Saunders said.

Phew...

Meanwhile, I'll do what us olds do: wallow in a bit of nostalgia, in this case for shopping at Denholm's and Jordan Marsh, those long ago  department stores. Glad I still have that casserole from Denholm's.