History as Inheritance

Boston history runs in my blood. One side of my family made its start in the city a century ago and settled on Zeigler Street in Roxbury. The other half began in South Boston and Dorchester around the same time. They were all Irish immigrants. And they lived through the political power shift led by figures from James Michael Curley to John B. Hynes and finally Raymond Flynn. It brought the Irish from underdogs to top dogs at the local and state level.

I inherited that legacy, both the good and the bad. My own generation lived through the last of those years as the city continued to evolve. There were new cultural shifts and more immigrants from different parts of the world.

Our Common Ground: The T

One thing familiar to anyone who’s lived in the city over the last 100 years is the T. It’s the network of trains, trolleys and bus lines connecting the different neighborhoods. It spreads like a system of veins and arteries that flow underground, overhead and beneath Boston Harbor. It’s also been described as a hub with spokes. The different routes are color-coded in red, blue, green and orange.

The T was used by my grandparents and parents to commute every day to work, and to visit relatives and friends. When I was about ten, my friends and I started finding ways to sneak into subway stations without paying. We’d explore the city that way, and sometimes get into some interesting trouble. As a teenager, I rode the Red Line from Ashmont Station in Dorchester to Boston Latin five days a week. After school, it was the Green Line that delivered me to a part-time job in Allston and to baseball practice near Cleveland Circle. In fall, the Orange Line took me to cross-country practice at Franklin Park.

Another thread running through the fabric of Boston history and my family history is sports. My dad played in an amateur baseball league until he was twenty. In one game at Fields Corner, he was jogging across the infield when he spotted Babe Ruth sitting in the stands. The retired Sultan of Swat was wearing his trademark raccoon coat to ward off the blustery winds of an early-spring day.

Sports in Boston History

My dad took the Red Line to work at 6:15 every morning, and I boarded a half hour later for school. Sometimes though, we’d travel the T together. We’d go to baseball games at Fenway, hockey games at the old Boston Arena, the Boston Garden and BC’s McHugh Forum. The first time we rode it to BU’s brand new Walter Brown Arena, he pointed across the street to Nickerson Field. It’s where Boston Latin played Boston English every November in the traditional Thanksgiving Day football game. “That’s used to be a baseball field where I watched the Boston Braves.”

Every neighborhood of the city had its own character. That’s what I learned after I finished college and moved out of Dorchester. Through my twenties, I shared apartments in the Back Bay, Roslindale, Somerville and Brighton. To pay the rent, I was a sandblaster, painter, chimney sweep, and a residential and industrial roofer. I waited tables at a Northern Avenue restaurant called Jimbos, worked at a downtown company called Pilot Executive Software, and memorized the tangled layout of Boston streets while driving a taxi.

The Many Takes From Street Level

When you work as a cabdriver in a city, you know a lot, more than just the best routes to the airport during rush hour. You learn everything going on in the different neighborhoods, down to specific streets. You become a scholar of the whole culture and its many subcultures.

Waiting at a cab stand for my next fare, I liked to scan that day’s Boston Globe. I’d read about the latest political drama playing out on Beacon Hill or at City Hall. Billy Bulger was often the main character in those stories. His brother Whitey would sometimes compete for the same space on page one with his latest underworld schemes. The media liked to refer to Whitey as the head of the Irish mob. It was maybe too grand of a title, but he certainly was a major player in the New England drug trade and other rackets.

Through the Lens of a Writer

That was around the same time I began to consider a future as a writer. Not that my writing consisted of much more than some journaling and a few attempts at short stories. But I could imagine a grand storytelling canvas on which Boston’s local dramas could play out.

Those dramas included school desegregation in the 70s. I write more about that in a post titled Boston and Its Busing Problem. It was a time when South Boston politicians like Billy Bulger, Louise Day Hicks and Jim Kelly were resisting change and stirring up animosity. There were some, like Ray Flynn, who opposed busing but spoke out against racial rhetoric and violence. For refusing to join the more militant group, Flynn’s car was firebombed and his family received death threats.

I followed the lives of those major figures when I moved to Seattle in the 90s. It continued when I returned east to attend the MFA program at Columbia University in New York City. In my thesis workshop, I sketched a narrative landscape that would become my first novel—The Chieftains of South Boston.

Pulling From Many Sources of Boston History

After coming up with a general plot structure, I began the heavy research. Next to the building that housed Columbia’s Graduate School of the Arts was the School of Journalism. My ID gave me access to their library and its LexisNexis research system. I dug up every detail I could about historical events during the 70s and 80s. After printing stacks of pages, I highlighted, hole-punched and organized them into 3-ring binders.

I did the same with newspaper stories available on microfilm at the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan, and later at the State House Library in Boston.

In addition, I pored over several books, including the following.
Common Ground
The Boston Irish: A Political History
The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
South Boston: My Home Town
Black Mass
All Souls: A Family Story From Southie
Valhalla’s Wake
The Brothers Bulger
While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics
The Bulger Mystique
How the Irish Became White

Some of the scenes were informed by the memories of people in my family, like my dad. He once told me about the time in his his teens when he worked at the Boston Public Library. Cardinal O’Connell would stop by occasionally. According to my dad, O’Connell would be dressed in formal ceremonial garb with purple robes flowing, and he would stride through the place as if on parade.

That was in contrast to Cardinal Cushing, who succeeded O’Connell. Cushing was much preferred by Boston’s working class community. They considered him the salt of the earth in contrast to O’Connell, who was caught up in the trappings of his office. I found a couple of places to slip those figures into the novel.

The Bulger Brothers as Inspiration

I pulled other relevant piece of Boston history into the narrative, and every major Boston player. Beyond the Bulger brothers and other South Boston players, there were leading figures across the city. Among them were the Angiulos, who ran the Italian Mafia out of the North End. Also John Connolly, Whitey’s childhood friend and handler at the Boston FBI field office. And politicians like Ray Flynn, mayor of Boston and Billy Bulger’s sometimes ally, sometimes opponent. They competed for the title of South Boston’s most influential leader.

Certain historical events were easily adapted to the Jimmy Mahoney character. There was Billy Bulger’s unexpected rise to Senate president, his press-conference-turned-debate with Mayor Raymond Flynn in front of the State House, and the way Bulger twisted the arm of Governor Dukakis, who was running for the White House, to end Boston’s garbage disposal crisis on terms favorable to Bulger.

I did the same when building the character of Francis Mahoney. I pulled in details and plot lines from the world of Whitey. One was the triangle trade of drug dealing and the shipping of arms to the IRA. Then there were the various murders attributed to Whitey, his complicated relationships with the Italian Mafia and the FBI, and the destruction of lives in South Boston when Whitey unleashed a flood of drugs into the neighborhood, all the while pretending to be its protector.

My Personal Boston History

My first-hand experiences enter into the story in different places, like witnessing the chaos and racial strife of school desegregation, and attending games and concerts at Boston Garden. There’s also the character Buzzy Driscoll, who earns a living as a Boston cab driver. Those details are drawn directly from my time behind the wheel.

Then there were occasional visits to South Boston itself. In one scene, Matthew Mahoney recalls watching the Saint Patrick’s Day parade from the roof of Flanagan’s Supermarket on Broadway. That was what I did at the age of fourteen with a handful of buddies. We shimmied up a pole at the back of the building, then watched the parade from our comfortable perch.

There are plenty of other places in the novel where my memories inform the book—too many to list, really. Overlaying those details is my intimate knowledge of the Irish American working class culture in that particular place, during that particular time.

I finished The Chieftains of South Boston fifteen years ago. When I look back at the details of the story now, it’s not always easy for me to distinguish between the actual history of the place and my fictional rendering of it.