By Rosalie Tirella

The El’s famous stuffed grape leaves. photos courtesy of the Worcester Historical Museum.

I loved the El – as in the now long gone El Morocco restaurant and jazz club up on Wall Street. Up on the hill, a bit past the Friendly House, the crown jewel of an East Side Worcester neighborhood that for years was home to Armenian, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants.

My late mom adored El owner Joe Aboody who was the sweetest guy in the world. Joe had the cutest little grey poodle that was clipped to pom pom perfection, and he’d bring his poodle into the dry cleaners where my mother worked and plop him down on the counter. The dog would “sit” and Ma would give Joe his drycleaning, all the while admiring his smart, regal little companion, who was a star in his own right.

The first El Morocco with a few Aboody family members.

At the restaurant/club Joe and his handsome brother Richie made the rounds as guests dined and wined. They’d visit every table making each and every guest – from actor Al Pacino to Cecelia Tirella of Lafayette Street – feel like a ✨star✨. The Aboody’s put 1950s glamor into gritty, “utility closet” Worcester and Woo wallowed in the opulence. There was gold painted on the walls, chandeliers that cried sparkling glass tear drops, camel decor on the outside of the building, sconces inside the restaurant that dramatically lit up the faces of patrons sitting at the bar or around dining tables, making everyone look beautiful …

How do some people do it? Attract EVERYBODY? Flash a smile and instantly gain a rapt audience? The Aboody brothers were the sultans of any room – they oozed charisma.

When older, in college, I’d go with my kid sister to the El. We’d take a cab to go listen to Scott Hamilton and other cool cats. Sometimes I’d see the assistant principal of Burncoat Senior High School, my alma mater, at the El! He’d be wearing dark shades and smoking a cigarette and acting very cool, blowing right past me! I loved it when after a jazz show Joe would invite me and my sister to the restaurant’s noisy, busy kitchen, seat us at a high, round table for two and serve us, on the house, plates of the El’s delicious hummus and baba ganoush with plenty of triangles of Syrian bread for dipping. Joe knew we were poor. He knew our mother was proud of us, her good girls going to college – she’d only finished the eighth grade. So he lavished us with his love – great food – and then he raced back out to the busy dining rooms packed with people. I mean hundreds of happy, gregarious, buzzed, dancing, flirtatious people, shoulder to shoulder … it was always a tight squeeze at the El …

A restaurant booth from the first El – the second El was much fancier!

Every Christmas the Green Island dry cleaners Ma worked at would have their annual Christmas party at the El. I remember going a few times with Ma and watching her beam at the whole scene, out for some much needed fun, a little drunk from her drinks, soaking up all that Rat Pack Old Hollywood atmosphere: the gorgeously dressed and coiffed men and women, the clinking of wine glasses as couples canoodled, the silver rings of cigarette smoke spiraling up up up … everyone so florid … so boisterous…so happy … the gold shimmering on the walls, the bar packed with guys and dolls flirting. Ma loved to dance and always sashayed around the dance floor with the owner of the dry cleaners who was her ally for decades … Ma wore her Elizabeth Arden red lipstick that night, effortlessly reapplying it during and after her meal, straight from the bullet, no mirror needed.

I miss the El. You can see some of it, photos, forget me nots …. an old restaurant booth from the original El … at the Worcester Historical Museum, 30 Elm St. Trust me, the historic artifacts don’t begin to capture the excitement.

By Rosalie Tirella

CORRECTION: LAST PARAGRAPH – it’s Gates Lane School.

Slow down!! photos: R.T.

Above: barreling through my old neighborhood, this cement mixer extraordinaire: loud, dangerous, oblivious. Last week, the Republic Dumpster driver was speeding, I mean tearing rubber!, down Providence Street. Vernon Hill School is located on Providence Street – lots of five-, six- and seven-year olds, plus their young parents, will converge on the school in a week or so, making it an important part of their lives for the coming school year. Will Republic Dumpster trucks or Dauphinais Cement behemoths defer to Worcester’s most vulnerable citizens – little children – when on the road? Will the tiny tykes cross the street without fear? I doubt it. Last spring I saw a dumpster truck barreling down Mill Street, practically mowing down a young mom and little kids after she had gotten her children off the school bus. It screeched to a halt. Thank God for good brakes!

Watch the yellow line! … Yes, they speed and run red lights in Worcester’s inner-city neighborhoods.

Mill Street is a 30-mile an hour stretch of street, but unless the WPD cops are there, on the look out, the vehicles go 40 miles an hour and much faster than that. Mill Swan elementary school is located on Mill Street – their special needs kids are of no concern to Worcester motorists. Often you’ll read in the paper of DRIVERS, DRIVING ONE-TON CARS, COMPLAINING, WHINING!, that the mowed-down pedestrian wasn’t walking in the crosswalk, so he got his! … The neighborhood where Feeney Brothers construction is located (Lincoln Street) has signs posted: NO TRUCKS IN THIS NEIGHBORHOOD. A residential street, more Burncoat than Lincoln, lets its true feelings out: these middle-class folks don’t want the Feeney Brothers’ erratic driving in their neighborhood. Nor do they want their huge trucks’ pollution, noise, crap on their little street. They know the Feeney Brothers have no qualms about shattering neighborhood bliss, maybe even enjoying the mayhem they create …

Probably politically connected – which emboldens their speedster drivers!

The WPD can’t police every Worcester main drag. School’s back in session next week: SLOW DOWN!! And remember: PEDESTRIANS, IN AND OUT OF CROSSWALKS, RICH OR POOR, SOBER OR HIGH, SUBURBAN OR INNER-CITY, ALWAYS HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY.

As Worcester grows, builds, reinvests, develops like there’s no tomorrow … reinvents itself into something totally different from my Green Island girlhood to become a city that is way more diverse but also a hundred times faster, greedier, expensive, harder than many of us old timers ever experienced in our beloved ol’ Wormtown, we should all hang our heads in sorrow as Dauphinais, Republic and all the other trucking, garbage, cement and dumping companies lead the way in reminding us that families aren’t there for us the way they used to be, we’re a less cohesive community, the poor will get crumbs but no more, a permanent underclass is here to stay, and the happy, shiny transplants from the east have taken away some of our grace.

The new Worcester?

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REMEMBER …

Students at Belmont Community School enjoy reading in their library … CECELIA file photo.

PLEASE BE KIND TO OUR STUDENTS! … LET’S NEVER FORGET THE LITTLE GIRL WHO WAS MOWED DOWN ON STAFFORD STREET THIS PAST SPRING – run over, rushed to the hospital, suffering, in shock, dying, her mom and family devastated FOREVER. Gates Lane School is across from the Shaw’s Webster Square shopping plaza, on Main Street …

Gates Lane School

But many parents pick up their children after school ON THE STAFFORD STREET SIDE of the shopping plaza:

Parents and kids often meet on this side of the plaza, the Stafford Street Side. Many parents go to the Main Street side to meet their kids.

I’ve taken photos for CECELIA newspaper of parents picking up their little children after school on the Stafford Street side of the plaza – many walk their kids to their cars, parked in the plaza, and they drive home.

But the little girl who was killed by the car and her mom were pedestrians. THEY WERE CROSSING STAFFORD STREET AFTER THE SCHOOL DAY – TO GET HOME. The happiest part of their day – reuniting to talk of, maybe laugh at, their experiences in school, or work, or home turned bloody, horrific, life-shattering.

THE CITY OF WORCESTER MUST BUILD A MEMORIAL TO THE LITTLE GIRL, to a WPS student who died on an out of control Worcester street. We need a statue, reminding all Worcester drivers that SCHOOL CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS CROSS STAFFORD STREET when the school day is done. And to drive with THEIR kids in mind …

The other side of the plaza: Stafford Street.

Stafford Street is often the Webster Square area race track, speed demons galore. About 26 years ago, Rose worked with a woman whose son was hit by a car as he was crossing Stafford Street. He didn’t die but was severely injured. His mom, a CNA, was so grateful he survived that she took all his injuries in stride, never feeling bitter or angry.

By Rosalie Tirella

Owner Gerardi, pictured, and helper “Laughing Mike,” right: despicable. pics: R.T.

Gerardi’s Auto Service Center at Tatnuck Square (Pleasant Street), Worcester: What cheats! What scammers! What RIP-OFF ARTISTS. NO RESPECT FOR WOMEN! … My car got a rejection sticker from them a month or so back. I made the fixes on my car: got and installed a new tie rod and the tire was replaced. My car drives like a charm now – a CECELIA customer/mechanic did the job. Wonderful work! I didn’t give the job to Girardi’s but to a friend/CECELIA customer who’s supported my feisty lil’ rag and website for almost two decades.

A WEST SIDE staple?

So today baldy fathead father owner Girardi and Laughing Mike (Mike can’t stop laughing at me) give me another rejection sticker. They say: New tire isn’t perfect. Not good enough! Oh and there’s other stuff…I SAID: Hold your horses, a*sholes! IT’S ILLEGAL TO GIVE A CAR A REJECTION STICKER FOR TWO THINGS AND THEN, after its owner goes to another garage for the repairs, you guys come up with more stuff to fix! As punishment!

Another report for Mass Attorney General’s Office

Who are these Girardi garbage guys? Why do they work on Tatnuck Square? Can’t believe the ladies of WORCESTER’S WEST SIDE let them get away with the cheating and double dipping!

… As I was getting into my car to drive out of their dump – they kept my car in their bay extra long just to be jerks – on my way to write this mini-column, baldy owner Gerardi yells to Laughing Mike – “She’ll have to pay us for the next sticker!”

Like hell I will.

Mike wouldn’t give me my car out of their work bay. Just kept laughing!

By Rosalie Tirella

Pointy tent-tops. photos: R.T.

I drove by Our Lady of Loretto Church just now and saw the last, gargantuan, big top tent … empty, covering nothing, but still erected on the church parking lot. With its “points” glistening in the sun and seemingly poking into the clouds, it looked a lot like those pointy “material girl” bras Madonna wore in the 1990s during her concerts and in her MTV music videos. But today I was thinking of a different Madonna – the patron saint of the little Italian-American church on the city’s East Side. It had just capped off its full-to-capacity, four-day Italian Festival.

Our Lady of Loretto Church

I drove by the fest each day, and it was really hopping the final two days and nights, with people coming in cars, baby carriages, wheel chairs and on foot, from all over Worcester. The old, the middle-aged and the young converged on this joyful gathering. Everyone got along, people were smiling and laughing – all together again! A community event that was on hiatus for two years due to the global pandemic roared back to life this past weekend as we humans expressed the most social sides of ourselves. TOGETHERNESS! Heaven!

Memories made under the big top

So, sitting here, as I listen to the tent’s thick ropes and cords banging up against the tent’s poles (there’s a summer breeze), I am grateful for the old Worcester. The old Catholic traditions – the church fests, the fall novenas, the pre-autumn visit to local shrines to pray to obscure saints, then … to socialize and knosh – on everything from doughnuts to calzone, courtesy of the good church folks – or vendors! The cousins get to run wild on the church lawn, playing hide and seek among the outdoor Stations of the Cross again – as we did decades ago every August at the St. Ann’s shrine in Leicester. My mom and aunt always took my two kid sisters and me to the church’s end-of-summer outdoor Novena, held in their beautiful chapel (made of stones, cupped by a little forest of trees) where we always met up with our Uncle Mark, Aunt Ann and their kids, our favorite cousins. At the end of Mass the nuns would let each of us attendees walk up to the altar and take a long pink or white or yellow gladiola from the big vases they had set up before the altar. You’d kneel on the kneel rest and say a brief prayer before grabbing your glady – but that was part of the fun, my favorite part of the evening, after the doughnuts that were set out by the boy orphans that lived in the dormitory behind the church. They also had a school on the grounds. The boys seemed kind of serious and some of them looked too big for their shirts, but I was 10 years old and focused on flowers and candy …

Kids need religion and religious traditions like the Our Lady of Loretto festival even if, like me, they grow up and leave the physical church to ponder, for decades: WHAT IS GOD? The festivities, church processions, catechism classes, First Holy Communions, outdoor masses and novenas give children a foundation: through Catholicism, they learn to be kind to animals, love the poor, respect your parents, don’t steal … sing!!

So this past weekend it was, I believe, not so much the great Italian-American eats that drew the huge crowd to the Our Lady of Loretto Church Italian Festival. It was a hunger for traditions, especially after COVID times. We all missed community … shared music, shared crafts, shared food … and happiness.

By Rosalie Tirella

2022 Cracker Jack … pics: R.T.

I picked up a 3-pack of CRACKER JACK at the dollar store the other day. I was curious: had this snack classic, at the height of its wow-ness during World War II, changed since we Green Island kids scarfed it down on Lafayette Street, always a bit stale, having sat on the shelf of Eddy’s Penny Candy Store for a couple of months, but still pretty terrific. From popsicles, to Nutty Buddy ice cream cones, to cream-sickles (my mom’s favorite treat) to huge ropes of purple bubble gum that turned our lips a lurid indigo, Eddie had all the goodies – plus a few loaves of bread and bottles of Moxie, if you needed a meal. Moxie was/is a dark brown soda pop with zing to it that I liked a lot as a kid. Rose had MOXIE! My mother did, too, as she loved the soda pop and always had a bottle of it in our old refrigerator.

“Eddy’s” was located across the Lafayette Street three decker in which we lived and was the penny candy mecca of our neighborhood. Eddy had one side of his store dedicated to just penny candy. Hundreds of sour balls, malted balls, gum balls, candy canes, licorice twists, lollipops, little wax figurines filled with colored sugar water … all individually wrapped sitting in their own cubby waiting for you to say to Eddy: I’ll take that one, Eddy, and that kind, Eddy, and that one, Eddy! You never touched. You just pointed at the candy you wanted. The cubbies were built onto a huge brown table/stand, so as a little kid you looked over this sea of candy, each kind, in its own nook, and Eddy stood over you holding a little brown paper bag and picked out the candy you pointed to and dropped it into your wee paper bag. He did this not out of sanitary or health concerns but because he didn’t want us kids – most poor, many bold (boys and girls both) – to steal even one gum drop from him. I tried once – when I thought Eddy wasn’t looking. I thought I very smoothly placed my chubby little paw over a wrapped butter scotch … PUT THAT BACK! Eddy screamed at me, in front of all the other kids waiting their turn for candy. I looked up at his red twisted face and felt ashamed. Chastened. A sinner. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL was the Seventh Commandment! Would Eddy tell my mother I tried to STEAL the next time he saw her? I skulked out of Eddy’s and never tried to pilfer his penny candy again.

Eddy – an epileptic who often had his seizures in the back room of his store, which signaled to us kids: come back later to buy penny candy – wasn’t a kid person or even a candy and snack person. His little store at the bottom level of his mother’s three decker (he lived with his mother above the store) was a way to bring in some money – and set off store fire crackers in the middle of Lafayette Street, creating little pyrotechnics shows for himself and us kids. Eddy loved the pop sizzle pop of the fire crackers, and he always drew a crowd of us because we kids liked the smoke and noise and unpredictability of firecrackers and secretly hoped Eddy would have one of his “fits” in front of us while setting off his fireworks. Now that would be a terrific show!!

Rose and kid sisters at Rocky Point – Rocky Point clam fritters better than Eddy’s stale Cracker Jacks!

Sometimes I’d go to Eddy’s and buy not firecrackers but a roll of “caps” and just bang out the red strip of caps with a stone, right in front of our house. With the dots of black fire cracker powder in the middle of the strip I knew exactly where to slam my stone and loved the smell of the cap powder once released. I had a cap gun that my mom bought for me at the Mart…a real Western John Wayne cowboy lookalike gun that you could feed a roll of caps into. You felt like a real cow girl shooting at the TV set or your kid sister! My cousin Ann had cowgirl boots, a cowgirl vest, a cowgirl hat and two cap guns to stick in her brown plastic holster that she wore around her fat waist. Ann was my Uncle Mark’s daughter and was spoiled. She wasn’t poor like me and my kid sisters – she was the daughter of a school principal and always got any toy she wanted. Uncle Mark called her his “Polish Princess” and never disappointed her …

My mother, a baseball fanatic, didn’t have the money to buy me cow girl outfits or even two cap guns, but she did teach me how to sing TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME, an old baseball tune that immortalized CRACKER JACK with its lyrics: “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack/I don’t care if I never get back!/It’s just root toot toot for the whole team … It’s a shame if they lose but It’s one! two! Three strikes you’re out!! at the old ball game!” This is the song my mom would whistle around our tenement when she was washing clothes over the big concrete basins in our kitchen – holdovers from the 1920s when the wife washed the laundry by hand in one bath tub and rinsed it in the adjacent one. Both concrete and ugly. When not in use there was a slab of concrete that went over it. I think my mom covered it with yellow daisy contact paper she bought at White’s Five and Ten on Millbury Street to make this industrial hunk look pretty. During birthday parties Ma would set out her buffet on this concrete slab with a pretty paper table cloth draped over the dark stone. I remember watching in trepidation as Ma fed pieces of wet laundry – tee shirt, apron, dress – in between the two big black hard rubber rollers that rolled and rolled …this squeezed out all the water in the articles of clothing, leaving Ma with flat-as-pancakes clothes for her to hang on our third floor clothes line, square and hanging from a metal pole from our back porch. I always worried she’d get her careworn fingers stuck between the big rollers and they’d get caught between the rollers and they’d be a horrible accident. But my mother was always sharp and ready for anything – except my father, who strode into our kitchen when he was in town to call my sweet mother, doing our laundry, “a dumb jackass” for working so hard. Didn’t she know they had invented the washer and dryer?! Didn’t she read the Sears and Roebuck catalog?!!

Didn’t Daddy know we were poor?

And so Ma whistled the CRACKER JACK song when she washed our clothes, tuning our peripatetic father out of the picture. A cozy, domestic picture my mother lovingly created for her three girls and Polish immigrant mother, Bapy.

Rose, 10, standing before our washing basins in our Lafayette Street kitchen. The basins are covered up and ready for a CECELIA birthday party!

I always liked the free prize in my box of stale CRACKER JACK that I had bought at Eddy’s. Eddy couldn’t ruin the prize no matter how long the box stood on his rickety store shelf. Every box of Cracker Jack came with its own secret prize, usually at the bottom of your box of Cracker Jack. It was often a terrific glow-in-the-dark plastic ring, or a red whistle that really sang, or a little plastic magnifying glass that worked!, or a strip baseball tattoos – bat, mitt, ball – that I used to rub onto my forearm and wash off with warm, soapy water before I went to bed …There could also be a maze, with little silver balls that you tried to roll into an enclosed picture. The balls were the eyes of a cat, or a baseball in mid-flight over the pale green outfield of your little picture. Lots of kids bought their box of Cracker Jack just for the toy inside! And the box was colorful, festive, fun. You felt great carrying a box of Cracker Jack. You sparkled.

So here I am 60 years old, with my boxes of Cracker Jack. Ma is dead, so is White’s Five and Ten…the dollar store has stuff made in China, including their bags of penny candy. I open my dollar store Cracker Jack box tentatively. What a bust – for me – for any kid! The box is small and cheap looking. The CRACKER JACK history is touted for all to read …

– but it’s not respected by its current manufacturer.

The Cracker Jack is BIOENGINEERED …

Ick!

I taste it… tastes Ok. Not enough peanuts. The free toy is a small flat square piece of paper, no bigger than a postage stamp. Really nothing I want to explore. Same piece of crap free toy in all three CRACKER JACK boxes! No variety, no zip, courtesy of Frito Lay, a multi-billion dollar $$$ global corporation that could definitely afford to sell big beautiful boxes of yummy Cracker Jack, with glow-in-the-dark rings that boys and girls love to wear to bed, or red whistles that you can string on some red yarn and blow into them and pretend you’re a police officer busting in to catch the criminals: Frito Lay. Global capitalism.

By Rosalie Tirella

Worcester’s, America’s First Responders see, experience so much trauma. How do they “process”? photo: R.T.

I know, it’s FOX, but I want to talk about a photo – a video frame, frozen in time, courtesy of Fox News TV. It’s on my Face Book page. It’s after the Highland, Illinois, mass murder. At the left, in the photo, you see the local police officer, walking away, his hands covering his face. An American First Responder in agony. A human with an all too human response – his hands covering the agony – his human “response” to immense suffering, sorrow and death. This cop is not wielding his gun. He’s not channeling Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, chest out, running into flames and gun smoke, all macho man. He’s just a guy. A youngish man not wanting to share his feelings with the TV cameras or TV pundits or news crews … not wanting to talk at all, to anybody.

What did this Illinois First Responder, first on the crime scene, first in this latest American war zone, see? What did he hear? What did he touch? What did he smell? … Maybe this first responder is a man with his own little boy or girl, a child who was at the parade or who was watching the festivities on the local cable station before all hell broke loose in this wealthy Illinois suburb, an IT-COULD-NEVER-HAPPEN-HERE, LEAVE-IT-TO-BEAVER kind of American suburb. He’s a man, just a man, exiting his local war zone! …where he saw – maybe he was the first to see – the dead child with legs blown off; a father, dead, too, his body thrown over his little toddler as he, in his last moments of life, wanted to save his boy, give the gift of LIFE in a war zone. Nearby, his wife dead. … Did the First Responder see all this…the bloodbath, the father’s heroism?

The child will face this day for seemingly eternity: as a grade schooler, as a teenager heading to the prom, as a college student graduating from college, as a young adult just starting out … as an old person close to dying.

Did the police officer think of this as he “responded” to the murderer?

First Responders – our local police officers, state police and EMT kids (they’re often in their 20s!) – see all the horrific, unfathomable carnage. They hear the final moans, maybe prayers to God or some saint … or a loved one. They must wonder, like me, WHEN WILL THIS MADNESS END?

How do these First Responders, our local men and women, out on the job every day, sometimes not getting the respect they deserve, “process” this kind of crime scene? A scene our soldiers saw during WW II or the Ukranians experience daily as Putin pounds their country to dust? How do regular local guys and gals, our neighbors, go home … and go on living? They’re not superficial, chatty TV personalities maybe making a career out of a murder, blabbing the same cliches over and over again into mics. They’re just our local cops and “staties” – they’re not “word people.” They’re America’s first responders!

A housekeeper at a Connecticut motel spoke to me a while ago – three or four American mass murderers ago! … She was older, overworked and underpaid. She was sad over this last mass shooting in our country, shaking her head over her big rolling cart of towels, hand soap, bathroom tissue … She said she was friends with a local state trooper who was the first to respond to a local murder scene – a real nice guy – who “killed himself.” She said all the trauma was too much for him, it’s cumulative for these guys and gals. Her heart ached for her First Responder friend who chose not to “respond” any more.

Here’s a Fourth of July column I wrote years ago, tweaked this morning:

FOURTH OF JULY, GREEN ISLAND STYLE!

By Rosalie Tirella

Happy Fourth of July, Worcester! photo: R.T.

I’ve celebrated the Fourth of July on a blanket in Boston listening to the Boston Pops and guest vocalist Johnny Cash. I’ve celebrated the Fourth at East Park here in Worcester. Always a lovely time. Last night I was thinking about my Green Island Fourth of July’s – the years when I was a kid and lived with my mother, father, sisters and Polish immigrant grandmother in “the Island”…

I am a little kid – about 9 years old – and I am standing on our three decker’s back porch. Third floor. It is the afternoon and the sun is shining sweetly. I am looking at “Val,” the buxom, brassy, red-lip-stick-wearing middle-aged woman who lives across the way from our rickety three decker. Val’s in her rickety, six-unit tenement building, on the corner of Bigelow and Elsworth streets. She’s on her third-floor porch. A big, weed-choked, empty lot lies between our buildings but that is all. The wild weeds and vegetation haven’t kept Val from inserting herself into ours – everyone in the neighborhood’s – lives.

Val is wearing a hot red negligee today – for the Fourth of July. I can see it from my back porch, which I am standing on, bring a curious little kid. Val is on her back porch talking loudly, with curse words sprinkled liberally throughout her conversation to herself. I swear I can see her bright red lips from my third floor porch! In 10 years or so I will have learned the word “slatternly” from my reading the classics, and the word will remind me of my old neighbor, Val. But today I am a little kid so Val is just … Val.

Val is drunk on this national holiday – in a happy, friendly way. She can be a nasty drunk, but the Fourth of July makes her woozily playful. She is talking with anyone who walks by her building, her ta ta’s damn near falling out of her negligee as she leans over her porch railing to chat up passersby who always talk back – a few folks out of fear. They have seen Val fight on the street outside her building, they have heard her vitriol … They will kiss up.

I am standing on my porch, quiet as a mouse, smiling knowingly because I know Val can be scary sometimes. On a few occasions she has verbally battled with my 80-year-old Polish immigrant grandmother, Bapy. Val had called Bapy, also feisty, a DP. “Dumb Polack.” It was a common ethnic slur a half century ago, and Val had spewed it at Bapy during one of their shouting matches – held across their back porches for the whole neighborhood to hear. DP, my mom tells me, really stands for “Displaced Persons,” what they sometimes called Eastern European immigrants who chose to build lives in Worcester. Val is being mean when she yells DP at my granny, who doesn’t miss a beat and yells back to Val: KISS MY ASSY! KISS MY ASSY!! and Bapy turns her plump little dumpling shaped butt to Val – while standing on our back porch – and tap, tap, taps it. Her bum is covered in those sweet flannel nighties with little pink rose buds on them that Ma buys for Bapy at the Mart in downtown Worcester. Bapy wore those flannel nighties year ’round – even in the summer.

Rosalie, before her mother’s sandwich-making station. Yum … Wonder Bread!

Granny is not battling Val today. Granny is inside, sitting in her easy chair we have set up for her in our kitchen (Bapy lives with us). Bapy sits at the head of the kitchen table, a place from which she can drink her cup of coffee, eat her boiled egg sandwich and see and comment on all the household happenings. She has been sitting there my whole life! She drives me and my kid sisters crazy, but we love her with all our hearts!

But I digress. Val is out on her porch today in her red negligee because it is the Fourth of July, a special day for America – and for Val. Val has turned and walked back into her apartment, a flat that is also home to her quiet-as-a-mouse boyfriend, her gorgeous, blond 18 year old daughter, the child of another guy, and two huge attack dogs: a German Shepherd and Doberman pinscher. Both dogs are fierce. Both having chased me up a nearby fence more than a few times. Val doesn’t believe in walking her dogs to do poop or to pee. She just lets them out of her apartment. The huge dogs rush down the three flights of stairs like a couple of moose in heat and poop and pee in Val’s little front yard. Then they rush back upstairs. Val’s boyfriend picks up the poop later – Val has everybody trained to a tee.

Bapy lived with us. Here we all are, hanging on poor Bapy as she sits in her old easy chair at the head of our kitchen table.

Now Val has come back out of her apartment – this time she is carrying her beige portable record player and sets it on a folding chair and plugs it into an extension cord she’s run outside the apartment. I am watching her preparations from my back porch – not saying a word … just waiting. Val goes back into her house, then comes out with an lp, a vinyl record – a big one, the kind with many songs on it. I am guessing it is the same record Val played last year and the year before – the songs the whole neighborhood must listen to every Fourth of July: patriotic tunes. Souza. Irving Berlin. Some sung by Kate Smith. Some belted out by Ethel Merman. Most instrumentals – the kind of songs you can – like Val – march around to on your Green Island porch. Tubas and drums. And trumpets.

Val puts on her record and cranks up the volume of her portable record player! Da da de dum da! Dum de da da da da de da da! La da da da de da da! Boy, this music is good! Up beat! I love hearing Val’s concert every year. I am tapping my feet! I look across the way and see Val crack open another beer and take a sloppy swig. She begins to sing. Loudly. Then she marches around her old porch – then she dizzily lies down on her long beach chair, still drinking. I can see her through the slats on her porch through the slats on my porch …

The music is great! So LOUD AND PATRIOTIC! An hour later Val is up again and singing to the entire neighborhood once again. She’s turned the record over several times, playing both sides – A and B. The folks on Lafayette, Elsworth and Sigel streets are getting ramped up! They’re coming out of their three deckers. They are carrying rugs, tires, old wooden chairs, a beat up sofa… They’re throwing their chairs and sofa and old tires into a big pile in the empty lot a few lots down from Val’s place, diagonally across the way from our three decker. I go in doors and yell to my mother: GETTING READY FOR THE BIG BONFIRE, MA!

Hooray!!!

Iconic American film actor Jimmy Cagney dancing to YANKEE DOODLE DANDY! Val danced on her Green Island porch to this cheeky American tune every July 4th.

My mother, careworn, grimaces from the stack of soapy dishes in her kitchen sink. She’s washing dishes. She doesn’t say a word. Ma never voices her disapproval of Val, but I know she is not thrilled with her. Sometimes Ma is the one who calls the Worcester Fire department when the flames of the bonfire grow too huge and lap up the July night air and orange sparks fill our Green Island night. The fire has never spread because the neighborhood kids and adults have kept it in check with big poles that they use to poke it into submission. But the flames still worry my mother …

But the night has just begun! I so want to be a part of the celebration and throw some of Bapy’s rags onto the bonfire! My grandmother has so many rags that she wraps around her withered arms to ease her arthritis. Old country ways/cures die hard in Green Island!Bapy never really changes her clothes. Just gives herself sporadic sponge baths and peels off her old rags and puts on new ones. She always smells fecund.

Rose’s Polish immigrant grandfather, Jaju, and cousin Mary. Jaju rolled his own unfiltered cigarettes. He always smelled like Camels …

These days I miss my Bapy’s smell! If only we could re-conjure the odors of all the people and pets we have loved over the years. The men I have been with, sweaty and grunty; my late mom who held me to her big, perfumed breasts – Heaven Scent … my Bapy’s cabbage-y, eggy odor … my long-gone dog Bailey’s gamey scent.

Anyways, the bonfire was being readied for the big night, but my mom would never let me join in the terrific mayhem! It was all too wild for us good Conservative Catholic girls. My mom, the perfect mom who worked so hard at the dry cleaners and went to church with us every Sunday, wouldn’t allow it! My mom knew everyone in the neighborhood and was always polite and talked with folks – she was not a snob. But, she liked to us, she would never sit down and have a cup of coffee with the ladies of the ‘hood. Green Island women enjoyed visiting each other in each other’s tenements, gossiping, bitching about their husbands and boyfriends, smoking their cigs…Val smoked little cigars!

Our mother was busy raising her girls, making sure we went to school every day and did all our homework and got all As and went to bed early and ate well. She had no time to wallow in our poverty – or her husband’s wild ways. She – we – transcended the shit. We girls were all going to college some day!

So, there I was, stuck on our Lafayette Street tenement third-floor porch. Just an observer. My sisters would be home from Crompton Park soon. They loved this spectacle, too! Not as much as I did, but they would hang out on the porch, eating Freeze Pops, their lips ice blue from the sugared ice treat – and they’d watch Val and the bonfire.

My father, Daddy, would disappear for the day. Celebrate the Fourth of July in his own fashion, cheating on Ma. He was as crooked and violent as some of the guys in the ‘hood, but he played out his deviltry in other parts of Worcester. I suspect the East Side. What my mom and we kids didn’t know wouldn’t hurt us …

It was dark out now, and Val was still singing up a storm and marching around her porch. La di da di da!!! Bang bang!! went her steel pot covers – her cymbals! Someone had lit the bonfire and everyone was gathered around it! Except for me and my sisters. We were on our back porch eating our Freeze Pops, mesmerized by the flames. They must have been two stories high! The folks in the neighborhood had out done themselves this year! It was all like something you would see in an old Western movie on TV – perfect for roasting a buffalo or dancing around. People’s faces were orange from the glow of the flames.

“Come out here, Ma!” I yelled to my mother. “You gotta see the bonfire!”

“Ma” and baby …

My mother was indoors getting our clothes ready for the Fourth of July cook out we would be having at our Uncle Mark and Aunt Mary’s house the next day. Our relatives, my mother’s sister, lived in a a cute pink ranch house in the Burncoat area – a nicer part of town. My mom liked this part of the Fourth of July holiday best of all. A day off from the Millbury Street dry cleaners! A day off when she could be with her favorite sister in her sister’s big back yard, my Uncle Mark grilling hamburgers and hot dogs on his big, three legged grill filled with those black coals. They made the hamburgers and hotdogs yummy! Earlier in the week my uncle had driven to the Nissan bakery by Crompton Park to buy hamburger buns and white bread and drove to Iandolli’s to buy potato chips, soda, Cheez-Its, the typical American BBQ junk food of the 1960s. Heaven!

Ma would have none of Val’s antics or the bonfire show. She was busy making sandwiches for the cook out at Uncle Mark and Aunt Mary’s. She wanted us in bed early for tomorrow.

We kids would have none of it. The bonfire’s flames were roaring! Some jerk threw too many old tires on the bonfire, so now the air smelled awful! Like burning rubber. The sky was thick with black smoke. We kids started coughing. Ma came out and took a look at the mess. Her mouth fell open. She looked at her three girls and frowned and snapped: GET IN THE HOUSE. I knew what was coming next. Ma was in the parlor, standing over our heavy olive green telephone and dialing 911.

In a matter of minutes the Worcester Fire Department firetruck had rolled in. The fireman were hosing down the bonfire with their big hoses…the water from hoses looked like waterfalls. The flames were doused out! Smoke everywhere.

BOO! BOO! BOO! shouted all the kids and adults at the firemen.

You could hear their laughs, too!

“Boo, Boo! Boo!!!” my sisters and I yelled from our back porch, laughing. “BOO! BOO!”

It had been, as usual, a fab Fourth of July! Green Island style!

Rosalie, middle, and her two cute kid sisters

By Rosalie Tirella

The old Table Talk factory at Kelley Square is razed. photos: R.T.

The Canal District is a trend that’s destroyed my Green Island and the nearby Oak Hill and Kelley Square neighborhoods. These inner-city, older, ethnic neighborhoods’ working poor folks, young, blue-collar kids, seniors and children have been thrown to the curb, thanks to gentrification. … Displaced. Evicted by new, greedy landlord/developers. Priced out

The Worcester City Council has not understood the suffering or done much to alleviate the suffering, mitigate the situation. Because they’re stupid – and because they’re middle class and cannot relate to our struggles.

In 10 years when the “cool kids” have abandoned the Canal District and moved on to the newest, trendiest trend in another Worcester neighborhood and more founding Canal District business owners grow older, move on/sell out, we’ll have a neighborhood bereft of family housing, racial diversity and socio-economic diversity. The damage will have been done. … Green Island and Kelley Square will evolve again. But how? In what direction?

Millbury Street: How are we supporting Green Island children today?

These days I drive down Green and Harding streets and already see fewer people at the Canal District “hot spot” bars and shops. Why? Visitors realize these shops are purveyors of dry cupcakes, overpriced skirts and dresses … average stuff/food that’s way overpriced. People try it all out, spend way too much of their hard-earned money in the Canal District – then move on to other neighborhoods in Worcester or other cute, touristy towns down the road, like Putnam, Connecticut. Even Westboro has a cool, trendy downtown area!

BUT WHAT HAPPENS TO THE OLD NEW GREEN ISLAND AND ENVIRONS? THE NEIGHBORHOODS’ WORKING FAMILIES, BLUE-COLLAR WORKERS, WORKING POOR, SENIORS AND CHILDREN? How do WE reclaim our beloved old neighborhoods?

One important thing: We Green Islanders and friends need to re-establish our long-gone Green Island CDC and Oak Hill CDC – our community development corporations that were squeezed out by gentrifier Allen Fletcher and fellow snakes. We need NEW iterations of our old CDCs, CDCs with new, diverse leaders, not our nice, well meaning but naive old timers: Lorraine Laurie, Sue Moynagh, Billy Breault, his pointless niece, etc … We need to avoid this crew, jettison the old and gather new CDC members who won’t screw up this time! Won’t turn corrupt! Won’t be flattered and then bamboozled by smooth talkers Fletcher, Bobby Largesse and the late, often sharp-elbowed 3G’s Johnny G.

WE NEED NEIGHBORHOOD PEOPLE TO TAKE OUR NEIGHBORHOODS BACK!

But we need to be smart this time around – not so trusting, not so willing to say “yes” just because someone invites us to a fancy “planning meeting” and shoves plates of finger foods under our noses. We’re dealing with gentrifiers … snakes! Money people! Their gentrification of our neighborhood has wreaked havoc on our housing prices, streets, relationships …

We need to be strong enough, organized enough, to HAVE A VOICE in new neighborhood developments, new happenings, whatever comes down the pike … the continuing evolution of one of Worcester’s oldest and best loved neighborhoods: my Green Island and beyond.

Table Talk … the old becomes trendy