Ed Maccormack - a Life Well Lived

By Edward MacCormack

Ed MacCormack - A Life Well Lived

A Life Well Lived is a factual odyssey of a person born during the Depression years as a first generation immigrant and the type of lifes experience in those days. His early schooling at a parochial grammar and high school the devastating 1938 Hurricane, early sports, the disastrous Cocoanut Grove fire, the difficulties of WW II rationing, service during the Korean War, entrance into the State Police with numerous situations of sometimes hilarious incidents in the law enforcement profession as well as Marriage and raising a family, purchasing and updating the first home, furthering education goals, and ensuring the childrens education. The author retired at age 46 to a second career as a Nuclear Security Specialist for Boston Edison Co., took up learning the bagpipe, and played with a pipe band. He also became a watercolorist. In 1991, he filed suit against the Company for age discrimination. He retired again in 1994, and is enjoying life at eighty years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 28, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453596289

Edward MacCormack

Edward MacCormack was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1930, as a first generation immigrant of Scottish-Canadian parents. He lived in a three family house during the Depression, attended parochial grammar and high school, served during the Korean War, and joined the State Police in 1954. He had a well-rounded career, and achieved the rank of Captain before his retirement. He married his childhood sweetheart and raised four children in a Cape Cod style home in Weymouth, Mass. He graduated from University of Massachusetts, with a Major in English in 1972, and achieved a Masters in Public Administration from Northeastern in 1974. He joined Boston Edison as a Nuclear Security Specialist in 1976 and retired in 1994. He and his wife sing in the church choir and enjoy the company of children and grandchildren in retirement.

Book preview

Chapter I

Growing Up on Meeting House Hill

All too often, the events and happenings of an age go unreported, and those siblings who follow in later generations have no understanding and knowledge of the effects of prior times on their forebears.

Every generation has a story to tell. Unfortunately, in most cases, this never happens. As one ages, there is a desire to recall happenings from an earlier time. In my case, I will relate situations and events that occurred in the past that have had a deep-seated effect on me. Some are serious, and some are humorous. The most difficult aspect is where to begin, especially before the memory dims, and the ability to recall is negated.

I was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston composed of multifamily dwellings that we called three-deckers. Each family lived on one level with internal front and back stairways and outside porches, and street-level access and egress doors. There was no such thing as social status. Almost every family seemed to be at the same level. It was during the Depression, which occurred as the result of the stock market collapse and the huge debts incurred by the country as a result of World War I. President Franklin Roosevelt was working hard in Washington to get the country back on its feet with the initiation of his New Deal policies.

The area where I was born was called Meeting House Hill, because of the Universalist white church that was a prominent fixture of the area. Also, at that time, and for quite a few years, areas were designated as parishes because of the heavy Catholic population and the number of churches. Our family was Catholic, and we were members of St. Peter’s Parish. The church was in a prominent location on Bowdoin Street at the top of Quincy Street. St. Peter’s also had a grammar school, priest house, large convent populated by Sisters of Charity of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a separate parish hall that contained the girls’ classrooms and a three-lane bowling alley in the basement.

My family consisted of my father Frank, my mother Mary Ellen, older brother John, and younger sisters Ann Marie and Jean Frances. My father Frank was lucky to have a job with the Boston Elevated Railway (known today as the MBTA [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority] ). My mother did not work. She was a wonderful mother and housekeeper, the best cook and baker I have ever had in my life. I never ate a slice of store-bought bread in my early life until I went into the service at the age of twenty-one.

When you think back about the area, you marvel at the number of people who lived there and the number of friends and acquaintances you knew. After all, with so many three-deckers comprising the area, three families in each, and no birth control devices at the time, each flat had between three and six children on an average. With the Depression, unemployment was rampant, and numerous families were struggling to keep their heads above water.

The majority of the families were first-generation Americans. The major ethnic group was Irish. Probably the second largest group was from Canada, with smaller groups of Italian, Polish, and a smattering of Armenians. Boston, for that matter, had enclaves in sections of the city. Italians in East Boston, and the North End, Irish in Mission Hill and South Boston, Polish and Lithuanians also in South Boston; Canadians, Jewish, and blacks in Roxbury.

When you think back, you can remember that there was quite a bit of enmity between the Irish and the Canadians. The main reason was the competition for the few jobs that were available. Sometimes the air was filled with the jargon initiated among different factions in competition. At times, phrases like Thick Harp, Herring Choker, Dago, and Pollack were heard in heated conversations. The entire problem corrected itself with the passage of time as jobs became more plentiful, and sons and daughters of each group married the siblings of other groups.

My family lived on Clarkson Street in a house owned by my uncle, John D. MacDonald. He had married my father’s sister Mary (Aunt Mamie). His nickname was Big D because he stood about six feet five inches and must have weighed about 275 lbs. They lived on the top floor with their daughters Mary and Theresa. We lived on the middle floor, and my father’s brother Bernard was on the first floor with wife Annie, son William, and daughter Pauline. My father’s sister Sarah lived three houses away with husband Patrick MacKinnon and siblings John, Mary, Elizabeth, Bertha, and Charlie.

The MacDonald, MacKinnon, and MacCormack sires all came to Boston from Prince Edward Island, Canada. My mother and father met at the Intercolonial Club on Dudley Street in Roxbury. They did not know each other in PEI. It was common practice for immigrants in those days to intermingle and reside together in a new country. Uncles Bernard and John D. were carpenters and were able to eke out a living in those days. Uncle Pat was a Boston policeman but lost his job during the Boston Police Strike in 1919. I never knew what he did after that.

The Irish immigrants also had a meeting place at Hiberian Hall on Dudley Street in Roxbury where they held dances every Saturday evening. Just a few doors away, also on Dudley Street, stood Rose Croix Hall. It was a Knights of Columbus Council, but they also rented out the hall to the Canadian groups for their quadrille dances with fiddles, guitars, and a piano. As late teenagers, the entire group of our athletic team went there on Saturday nights for a rousing night of Herring Dancing.

In those days, the family made the recommendation for attendance at school. My mother and father were devout Catholics, and they determined that St. Peter’s was the best school to obtain an education. My mother was very well educated for the time. She had graduated from St. Francis Xavier College in Nova Scotia and taught school in PEI. When she came to Boston to work, she could only get a job as a domestic, along with her sisters Ann and Margaret, because she could not obtain certification as a teacher. She and her two sisters worked as domestics for the Woods family at their summer mansion in Crowe Point, Hingham. The Woods were wealthy minions of the wool business in Boston.

What a blessing her education was to all of us. She helped me so much in English and mathematics and did the same for the other children. My father had only attended up to the sixth grade and had departed school to load ships on the docks of Souris, PEI. He then had signed on with a lumber company and went to a camp in the deep Maine woods for a period of three years. I can remember his telling us that he came out of the Maine lumber camp with long hair and a beard. He went to a backwoods barbershop for a shave and haircut. He knew he was infested with lice and did not ever want to see that barber again.

Chapter II

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The 1938 Hurricane

St. Peter’s School and the 1938 Hurricane

When you are five and a half and have never been away from mother’s beck and call, the first day of school is a traumatic experience. I remember clinging to my mother’s leg outside the classroom as Sister Mary Adele tried to pry me away to attend my first day of her class. She was a tough little nun, and I knew enough at that early age to go with the flow. The only real memory I had of the first grade was standing in front of the hot radiator, drying out my knickers, while the rest of the class was out to recess in the schoolyard. The school had eight grades of boys, eight grades of girls, and eight grades of mixed. I was in the boys’ class for my entire eight years.

The second-grade teacher was Sister Maria George, and the third-grade nun was Sister Joseph Bernadette. They were both very pleasant, and I learned quite a bit. The fourth grade was a joy with Sister Joseph Claire. I think I fell in love with her that entire year. I can remember her sitting me on her lap in the school hall, while the entire school assembly watched Mickey McGuire movies. The nuns seemed so much older, but in reality, upon looking back in retrospect, many were in their early twenties and hadn’t even been college-trained.

One thing the nuns did for all of us in those days was to teach the Palmer Method of writing. This was probably a major part of the Sisters of Charity curriculum in all of their schools. It was a handwriting course that was tedious and required lots of practice to give a person a way of improving the capability of writing legibly with a scrolling flow of script that could be easily read and understood. It taught the proper way to hold the writing instrument with a free flow of movement from the wrist to the fingers. It involved numerous practice hours making slanted circles and lines in a free-flowing movement.

It is too bad that the schools of today don’t go back to the Palmer Method. Most of the school children, teenagers, and young adults don’t know how to hold a writing implement and can only print what they are trying to convey, and much of it is unintelligible. One bad thing the nuns tried to do was make lefties into righties with application of a ruler on the guilty hand. Eventually, they found it not to be the right thing to do.

A very unusual event occurred on September 21, 1938. We had been in school for a couple of weeks. I remember that it was fairly warm and the sun was shining brightly. We were departing school as we usually do. The classes lined up in military fashion and processed down the metal stairways to the piano accompaniment of tunes like The Monkey Wrapped His Tail around the Flagpole. When the groups exited the school, they lined up by travel in a certain direction and a nun would guide them along the street to a release point. In my case, it was the corner of Bowdoin and Quincy Streets where the Copley Drugstore was located. At that point, when the group was released, the sky darkened and the wind increased. I hurried home and quickly entered the house. By that time, the sky had become as black as night, the rain came down in sheets, and the wind became extremely forceful.

Throughout the evening hours, the windowpanes rattled and the driven rain seeped into the house where putty was sparse or missing on the windows. Power went out about 8:00 p.m. and the gas jets on the wall were illuminated to provide light in the apartment. My mother, who was a very holy and spiritual woman, paced the floor spraying holy water while praying her rosary beads. Suddenly there was a knock on the front door. It was my uncle John D. MacDonald looking for my father. He asked my father’s help to kick off some of his front porch railing rungs, which were loose on the top floor porch deck. He said he was afraid that they would blow off and injure somebody who may have been outside at the time. I couldn’t rationalize anybody being outside in this storm since we had just witnessed two large trees becoming uprooted and falling across Clarkson Street. I suppose it was a negative side of being a tenant and relative, since my father ended up venturing out the third floor porch door to kick away the loose rungs. My uncle tied a rope around my father’s waist and held onto him as he kicked away the loose rungs. I guess he figured that my father would never be able to hold him since he was so much bigger and heavier. We were so fearful, and my mother and the girls cried until the job was done and Dad was safe.

The next morning, after we all slept fitfully, we went to the windows and stared out to a horrendous scene. The sun was shining and the sky was a beautiful clear blue. The street, however, looked like a jungle of downed trees and massive amounts of tangled foliage. Power was out, and we had no communication whatsoever. Some of our friends on the street yelled up to us that school was canceled. We were happy about that and had to plead with Mom and Dad to let us go out to play with our friends. After breakfast, with a number of danger admonishments, they let my brother and I go out. The girls were kept inside.

When we arrived outside, we couldn’t believe our eyes. There were some neighborhood men with large saws attempting to clear the street that was impassable from one end to the other. There had to be five or six huge trees crosswise and lengthwise on the street. In those days, not too many families owned automobiles, but the streets had to be cleared for vital needs such as milk and egg deliveries, garbage and rubbish pick up, and ambulance calls.

As kids, all we could think about was a new element of adventure, climbing and swinging through our new African jungle like Tarzan the Ape Man. Our first thought was to cover the area to examine what nature had wrought. We went first to Cat Alley. This was a dirt alleyway that ran from Quincy Street to Hamilton Street between Clarkson and Coleman Street. The backyards of the three-deckers on both streets emptied into Cat Alley. This was also where the utility poles were located for the power lines and telephone lines. It was also an access lane for garbage and rubbish trucks and the area Rag man’s horse wagon soliciting for rags, old newspapers, bottles, and the like. They always called out, Rags and bottles, sometimes very musically, so residents could bring out their excess material to barter with the Rag man for the few cents he allowed.

On this particular day, Cat Alley was a shambles. Fences that formed yard boundaries were flattened in disarray, and power poles were down from one end to the other. We heard some voices and worked our way through the jumbled mess to find out who was there. It was three older boys, our cousin Charlie MacKinnon, Joe Cleary, and Donnie Brosnan. All were buddies who hung around with each other. They were all eleven years old and had been very busy all morning in Cat Alley. They were coiling wire, both power lines and telephone wire that they had cut from all the poles in the alley. All my brother John and I could think of was the danger of electrocution with the power lines. They laughed and said they had checked it out before they cut the wires.

We followed them into Joe Cleary’s backyard. He procured some dry wood under the first floor porch, and they started a fire in the middle of the yard. They then proceeded to burn the insulation from the power and telephone wires, exposing very thick copper wire. Later that day, we heard that they had sold the wire to a Rag man traveling on Quincy Street for the grand price of $35. That was a huge sum of money for three preteenagers. I never heard what they did with the money. I also wondered, through the years, how surprised the utility workers must have been when they arrived and found all the lines gone. All the kids had a marvelous time for the next two weeks playing in the Clarkson Street jungle until the city workers got things back to their normal state. The ’38 Hurricane was a devastating storm for the New England area. The losses were in the millions of dollars, which in today’s valuations would probably be in the billions, and tragically, 688 people lost their lives.

The next year, I was a member of Sister Louise Clara’s class in the fifth grade. Sister was a good woman, but discipline was not one of her stronger points. She was known as Coupon Clara because she collected all types of coupons that were redeemable for prizes of one type or another. In the thirties, soap and soup manufacturers put coupons on their product labels. One was Kirkman’s soap, another was Campbell’s soup, which is still doing it after all these years. New students coming to her class from the fourth grade were asked on the first day, Now Dearie, does your mother have any Kirkman soap or Campbell’s soup coupons? I can remember giving her some Kirkman’s soap coupons because my mother used it when washing clothes. (As an aside, during World War II, soap became unattainable, and my mother made it with bacon grease, lye, and a few other ingredients that I