Flashbacks

Freedom RIDErs

SEAN FLYNN — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:33:37 GMT

A new civil-rights movement emerges
This article originally appeared in the August 12, 1988 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the August 12, 1988 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

By 1:55, finally, they were all there. Crammed onto Boylston Street in front of the Boston Public Library, a dozen or so fed-up and pissed-off demonstrators were ready. Their armbands — color-coded to show which ones were willing to protest their way into the slammer — were secured, and Cindy Miller started giving instructions. Stay together, she said, single file, down Boylston Street to the Transportation Building. And yell. Let ’em know you’re coming, and let ‘em know you’re mad.

At two o’clock, the caravan started moving. Miller led the way, followed by Jim Brooks, a big man with a big voice and a bullhorn to make it even bigger. “Hey, hey, hey, ho,” he chanted, “discrimination’s got to go.” The marchers, a platoon of approximately 15 people with disabilities, who stretched out for almost a block behind Brooks, joined in, belting the words out into the sticky August heat. After five weeks of watching the MBTA’s RIDE service — their only reasonable public-transportation option — disintegrate around them, the words came easy. They were mad. And today, on Monday, August 8, they were going to be heard.

For years, disability-rights activists have struggled with a movement that’s never fully blossomed. Split by differences in philosophy, hampered by a perpetual isolation that makes organizing doubly difficult, disabled people have spent years waging sporadic battles that have won small victories but never the big war. But now, after coming dangerously close to losing one vital asset — reliable transportation — the movement may have hit a turning point. On August 8, the radicals and the establishment insiders of the disability-rights movement joined together to confront the MBTA and its general manager, James O’Leary. And the media, in a rare display of interest, turned out in force to chronicle an angry response to a shoddy service. The failure of the RIDE, activists say, may prove to be the catalyst that turns a fractured disability-rights movement into a full-fledged attack.

“There was something magical about it [the march],” says John Winske of the Massachusetts Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (MCCD). “It suddenly felt like something. It finally felt like the whole world was watching.”

Vigilantes and volunteers

SHARON BASCO — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:44:06 GMT

Crime patrols in Boston
This article originally appeared in the August 7, 1973 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the August 7, 1973 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

"You got to organize. You got to pressure the police force to patrol the area. Maybe you'll find you need to hire supplemental police forces or organize your own patrol," Rep. Royal Bollings Jr. (D-Mattapan) said, his thin frame sprawled across the top of a desk in his real estate office. The room was filled with Mattapan businessmen, who'd come to the July 16 evening meeting with one purpose in mind: find an answer to the crime problem, find out how to protect themselves against the kind of violence that had killed one of their number less than a week earlier.

The early morning gun duel that killed James B. Miller in his Fish and Chips Store in Mattapan was not the only impetus for the area businessmen. They'd been planning to find better protection for their stores before the shooting occurred. Miller was to have been among the group of businessmen who'd been planning to meet with police to demand better protection. His death spurred the community into action, and that was why they were meeting in Bollings's Blue Hill Avenue office that night. There were close to 50 store owners crowded into that room, some in a miscellaneous collection of chairs pulled in for the occasion, others standing near the door at the far corner of the room where the sign-in book was being passed around.

Bollings finished his speech advising his constituents of the possibilities of protection by police, by private patrols, and by vigilante-type groups. "I'll just tell you this one last thing," he said. "If you ask me what has to come first, I say organize! You gotta have an organization to get police to listen."

"I beg to differ with you, Brother," a tall, heavy-set man called out. "We had a businessmen's organization before."

"That's right," a woman said, and many others in the meeting murmured the same.

"We tried that before," the man continued, "in the past eight years we tried many times (to organize a volunteer citizen's night patrol) and we could get it going for one week, then everybody, they lax off. Only a week at a time, and only after something big happens."

Royal Bollings Jr., watching the man intently while he spoke, pushed himself up with his arms and off the desk. He rose to speak, but another member of the Mattapan business community beat him to it.

The combat zone

TOM SHEEHAN — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:52:33 GMT

Who's who and what's what
This article originally appeared in the July 24, 1973 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the July 24, 1973 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Joe Savino jumps up from behind his desk in an office at the old Pilgrim Theatre.

“You see my point?” he says, waving his cigar around. “I hadda give her $7,000 and a round-trip transportation from California and back, and you don’t even know who Tempest Storm is? You see my point?”

Amidst much hoopla, Joe Savino brought burlesque or burlesk back to the Hub last week, and the point he wanted to make was that no one understands it.

“Most people think burlesque is four, five, six strips,” he says. “Now we’ve got sex and plenty nudity, but yet we’re featuring our burlesque comics. The thing is like a Broadway show.”

Joe Savino put some forty odd people on the payroll for his show, and they treat him as if he were running all of Broadway. Three or four aides do his bidding, eighteen-year-old chorus girls hang around for a word from the boss, and stagehands nervously approach him to ask for advice about the stage lighting.

“If you want it, Joe,” says one, “We’ll do it.”

Savino seizes the opportunity.

“Anything that will perfect this show,” Savino says to them, “is worth any price.”

But Savino is more than a showman, he is one of the four powers behind Boston’s Combat Zone.

In addition to the Pilgrim, Savino’s current holdings include the Beantown Lounge (41, 45 Essex St.); Dinty Moore’s (8, 10 Haymarket Place); the Normandy Lounge (25, 31 Essex St.), (described by police as one of their prime “trouble spots”); and the hard-core State Theatres I and II, (617-629 Washington St.).

Savino also owns the 183rd St. Burlesque Theatre in Miami.

And he admits it all, including his period as a “nudie” film financier. No, he says, he is not worried about the Supreme Court’s recent decision on pornography, because “you should see the film library I’ve built up.”

“I can switch between hard-core and soft core like that,” says Joe Savino. “We don’t anticipate trouble. This thing is a constant process of inquiry, you see. My lawyers and I, we keep asking ‘em what’s proper.”

Joe Savino will tell you all about his life: about how he sold candy at Werber’s burlesque theatre in Brooklyn as a kid, about how he came to Boston in 1939 and worked at theatre concession stands, how he brought his own stands in ’41. He will tell you how he bought a North End bar, a burlesque house in Newburyport, then the old LaSalle Hotel, then the theatres and lounges.

Yaddo and MacDowell: Works in Progress

D.C. DENISON — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:51:03 GMT

Alone again, artistically: A glimpse of what it’s like to be present at the creation
This article originally appeared in the July 18, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the July 18, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

In the East Room of the Yaddo mansion, Virginia Spencer Carr, a biographer, is relaxing in an overstuffed antique recliner, casually reading the drafts for her next book. She is sitting in a bay of large French windows overlooking a small pond surrounded by deep woods. The tops of the windows are stained glass, and the morning sunlight casts their colors over the Persian carpet and hardwood floors. On the other side of the study, next to a pile of finished work, a typewriter sits on a stand; the page in it is already covered with neatly typed prose.

Virginia Spencer Carr has the look of someone who hasn’t answered a phone or washed a dish in six weeks. In fact, she hasn’t. And today, for the 43rd day in a row, she knows she will not be disturbed: there is no telephone in the room, and the rules of the house forbid anyone from so much as knocking on the door unless he has been invited. She will not even have to break for her midday meal: a lunch basket (containing a tuna fish sandwich, carrot sticks, an apple, some cookies and a thermos of coffee) prepared by the cooks downstairs sits on an end table and will be there when she wants it. There are diversions of course, but not of the mundane variety. She could, for example, take a nap on the large 19th-century brass bed in the adjoining bedroom, or soak awhile in the oversized bathtub in the next room. Or she may decide on a late-morning stroll through the 400 wooded acres that surround the mansion.

But Virginia Spencer Carr is not in the mood for diversions; she is getting too much work done. Her current project is a biography of Carson McCullers. Not coincidentally, McCullers wrote in this very suite during her many summers at Yaddo in the 1940s. (She wrote The Ballad of the Sad Café here.) Presumably — as if the situation isn’t already inspiring enough — McCullers’s ghost is helping Virginia Spencer Carr with the biography.

William Lemmer: Coming home

JEFFREY STEIN — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:10:55 GMT

The further history of a Vietnam-era informer
This article originally appeared in the July 11, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the July 11, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

In the summer of 1972 — as McGovern was dropping Eagleton from the ticket, Jane Fonda was broadcasting over Radio Hanoi, the plumbers breaking into Watergate — eight leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War were indicted in Tallahassee, Florida, on charges that they planned to attack Miami with automatic weapons. The government’s star witness in the case would turn out to be William L. Lemmer, who — while serving as Arkansas-Oklahoma Regional Coordinator for the anti-war group — had begun to inform on his friends for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Now Lemmer is 30; he lives in Washington and works as a freelance graphic-arts specialist and cartoonist. During a two-hour chat on the back porch on the home he rents in a residential part of the city, Lemmer said life had been “really rough” since he was identified in the highly publicized trial as an FBI spy.

Eventually Scott Camil and the other seven veterans who were charged with conspiracy to disrupt the Republican National Convention (by sending “fire teams” armed with automatic weapons and explosives into Miami) were acquitted.

After the trial, Lemmer drifted through a series of jobs in Florida and Texas, eventually landing in Washington two years ago. At one point, he was penning a comic strip for a Dallas alternative newspaper, the Iconoclast, until his identity was discovered and he was asked to leave. And as recently as this past winter, he was offering free graphics advice to — of all things — a radical research group in Washington which specializes in government spying. When members of the group eventually recognized who Lemmer was, contact was quietly discontinued.

Lemmer says he hasn’t worked for the government since the trial of the Gainesville Eight; he doubts he ever would again. He is bitter about the Justice Department’s letting his name surface long before the trial began. “Justice let my name ride for 14 months, 14 months of publicity, 14 months of accusations .... Nobody knew the story, nobody knew who I was, what I was doing, the exact story. I wasn’t allowed to tell that story, obviously. Pretrial publicity would have blown that case right out of the water. So for 14 months, the Department let the defense chase me.”

Lemmer was only one of the FBI informants in the VVAW uncovered during the trial. Another was Emerson Poe, ostensibly a close friend of Scott Camil, who remained under cover as a defendant until the day he was called as a government witness.

Energetic Engineering

MICHAEL MATZA — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:11:38 GMT

The man behind a far-out idea for providing solar power
This article originally appeared in the June 27, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the June 27, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Before you can be ushered into the bare, blackboard-and-conference-table office of Dr. Peter Glaser, the Czechoslovakian-born mechanical engineer and vice-president of engineering sciences at Arthur D. Little, his colleagues take pains to prepare you for a close encounter with genius. “When I’m in his presence I often feel as if I am standing close to a figure who will go down in history, next to someone who I will tell my children and grandchildren that I knew,” says one admirer.

To be sure, there is an other-worldly quality to encounters with Glaser, created as much by his soft, visionary voice as by the ideas in which he is immersed. Since 1968, his views on solving the global energy shortage by using huge, orbiting solar-power stations have captured the imagination of aerospace scientists and drawn the criticism of those who dismiss his project as an intriguing yet nonetheless unworkable Buck Rogers fantasy. When Glaser in 1973 patented his model for satellite solar power, critics began snickering a little less loudly. Now that the full House of Representatives has voted to approve $25 million for NASA and Department of Energy research into the feasibility of satellite solar power, the long-embattled Glaser is basking in vindication.

“At the time I first began talking about this, the kindest word anybody ever used about the solar alternative was that it was ‘exotic.’ What they meant was that it was ‘irrelevant,’ Glaser recalls. “People didn’t find out that the sun was shining until 1973.”

Like other scientists working on the long-term energy needs of the planet, Glaser cites the Arab oil embargo of 1973 as the catalyst for exploring alternatives. Unlike other proponents of renewable solar power, those who would capture the sun’s energy through decentralized, ground-based collectors, Glaser advocates centralized power production on a scale that is truly staggering. His scheme calls for numerous 20,000-ton satellites to be placed in synchronous orbit 22,000 miles above the earth. Solar panels on them would collect the sun’s energy, convert it to microwaves and beam it to earth. Huge, six-mile-diameter receiving antennas located on earth would catch the microwaves and reconvert them to electricity. The resulting energy would be distributed to regional utility power pools and sold to consumers. At the orbital height envisioned by Glaser, the satellites would be exposed to sunlight for 24 hours nearly every day of the year (minor eclipses twice a year would be the only interruptions). Because the satellites required would be larger (72 miles square) than any we could hope to launch from earth, they would have to be constructed in space by a team of at least 400 trained astronaut-laborers. It’s here that the project begins to sound like science fiction. According to one plan kicking about, the required materials for the satellites would come from mining the moon.

The friends of Jack Kelly

DAVE O'BRIAN AND TOM SHEEHAN — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:40:10 GMT

In the end, the adventure killed him
This article originally appeared in the July 4, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the July 4, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

“I suppose my role with those people (organized-crime figures) is a dual role in a sense. I went into the relationship looking for stories. If you want a story on a gangster, go to a cop. If you want a story on a cop, go to a gangster. I went into that situation for that reason, and I suppose I came away with more.” — Jack Kelly, then a Channel 7 investigative reporter, in a Phoenix interview in November, 1976

At eight o’clock last Wednesday morning, the Boston police radio band began to crackle. In the sub-basement of Blackfriars, a bar and discotheque on Summer Street near South Station, a janitor had made a grisly discovery.

“How many you got there?” asked the police dispatcher.

“Five,” came the response.

“How many ambulances will you need?”

“Never mind the ambulances; they’re all gone.”

Within minutes, Police Commissioner Joseph Jordan and a veritable army of his underlings — more cops than a veteran newsman at the scene could recall ever seeing in one spot — had converged in front of the bar. At the Blue Cross-Blue Shield office tower across the street, arriving workers filled the windows; in the street below, a sizable crowd began to gather.

In his Boston apartment, WBZ-TV reporter Maurice Lewis heard the early reports of what would come to be known as the Summer Street Massacre. Lewis took a special interest: an old chum from his ‘BZ radio days, he knew, was currently working as night manager at the bar. Hoping to learn more about the shooting, he put in a call to Jack Kelly at his Framingham home. Kelly wasn’t there. His wife, Michelle, who had heard the same sketchy reports of the shooting on her car radio, was worried. Jack hadn’t come home the night before, she told Lewis, and she feared the worst. Lewis said he’d find out what he could and began phoning police sources. Getting no immediate results, he drove to the Channel 4 studios, on Soldier’s Field Road. There, finally, he confirmed what he and Michelle had all but concluded earlier.

Caving: Into the heart of darkness

PHIL BERTONI — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:10:17 GMT

Inching our way though caverns measurable to man
This article originally appeared in the June 20, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the June 20, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Outside it’s a sweltering 95 degrees. Muggy, too. Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city. Back of people’s necks getting dirty and gritty.

But not for you. No, because it’s a good 40 degrees cooler where you’re situated, alongside a clear, cool rippling stream, watching tiny lights dance over a gorgeous 30-foot waterfall, admiring the sumptuous decor, antique yet somehow modern. Why, God bless you, it’s the lobby of the Hyatt hotel!

Don’t delude yourself. The way you look, they wouldn’t let you pot the palms at the Hyatt, much less loiter there. Every apprehensible inch of you is coated with aromatic, nitrate-rich mud, some of it bloody. And shapeless J.C. Penney cover-alls do not a Cardin jumpsuit make, particularly when they’re laden with ten or 12 hours’ worth of unevaporated sweat. No, don’t trouble to scrape off the mud. Please.

And, look, you ninny, if you were in a Hyatt hotel, would most of your body be wedged in a hole only marginally wider than your thorax while one arm and a head dangle inches from cold running water? Not in the lobby, certainly. And would your hardhat, which carries your only source of light, and whose chin strap you refrained from buckling in a fit of jaunty bravado, be even now falling from your head with a gentle splash to plunge you into total, absolute, impenetrable, “that’s all right, scream your head off my dear, no one will hear you” darkness? Not likely.

No, I’d say you’re in a cave, some hundreds of feet beneath the warm bright surface of the earth, your only hope of assistance two or three comrades inconveniently located behind you, in the tube in which you perform so effectively and admirably the function of stopper. Things could be worse. There could be a flash flood roaring like a locomotive around the bend upstream. Or you could have emerged from the hole above a canyon onto a rotten ledge which crumbled under your weight, to plummet you headfirst into a fissure, with the force of impact driving you like a piton into the crack. See, you’re not so bad off. As to your present fix, I’m sure you’ll think of something before hypothermia sets in. I’ll check back later.

Smoking the terrain with a heavily radical nose-wheelie

D.C. Denison — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:53:56 GMT

In which we try to understand the skateboarding subculture
This article originally appeared in the May 30, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the May 30, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Most of us have at least some idea of what this new skateboarding craze is all about: once again, some force from California is yanking teenagers off baseball diamonds and basketball courts and putting them on boards that roll almost noiselessly two inches above the ground. It seems to be a harmless enough fad (though certain of the safety-minded periodically raise a fuss over the number of sprained ankles and broken bones), and its return, like the Frisbee’s a few years ago, has not gone undocumented: lately, skateboarding has been worth at least a few minutes at the end of the six o’clock news, or at the beginning of the Evening show.

So it’s only natural that the practice should also become popular on college campuses. Take Franklin Pierce College (FPC) in Rindge, New Hampshire, where the narrow concrete pathways that wind across the campus’s rolling hills offer the skateboarder long, weaving rides. In fact, the sport’s popularity rose to such a pitch during the warm months last fall that a few of the more dedicated skateboarders had an idea: a contest, “The First New Hampshire Skateboard Spectacular.” They would arrange to get the field house for a day, have some trophies made up – little bronze-looking numbers with skateboarders on top – and all the devotees on campus and in the neighboring towns could get together and have a good time. And maybe some FPC students would bring home some trophies, put them on top of their speakers and have a few laughs. It was a good idea, and the campus hot-shots were excited.

However, when the announcements went out and the organizers began to receive phone calls and letters from excited skaters from all over New England as well as New York, New Jersey and Delaware, they had a feeling they were really onto something. And when they heard that skateboard teams were planning to attend, they began to suspect that this might be bigger than they had first imagined, that maybe they were over their heads.

Campaign spying is an old, old game

MARTIN LOMANSEY JR. — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:38:40 GMT

Ward 8
This article originally appeared in the May 22, 1973 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the May 22, 1973 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

I have a friend who finds the Watergate scandal only mildly amusing. This friend — call him “Thomas” — has been around Massachusetts for a couple of decades and has seen this all before. Thomas is a campaign spy; a homegrown version of E. Howard Hunt, Donald Segretti and Gordon Liddy.

“The trouble with those guys,” says Thomas, “is that they got caught. You’d think they teach them better at the CIA, wouldn’t you?” Thomas, who now works in state government as a reward for good and faithful service to a prominent elected official during a recent election, finds the failure of the Gemstone team the most repugnant aspect of the Watergate affair. He simply cannot believe that the men who planned and executed the break-in and related espionage could be as stupid as they were.

“I was only almost caught once,” he recalls. “Back in 1971 I broke into a campaign trailer of Louise Day Hicks for ---------. Someone saw me and I almost got nailed. Even then I managed to get away with some good stuff and still make it look like a burglary not anything political.” It was a break-in that received some coverage from the local press — a mayoral campaign sidebar at most. No one attributed anything political to it. And it is doubtful that Hicks ever suspected who did it. Thomas remained a top campaign aide to the very end.

Campaigning spying and related skullduggery is an old tradition in Massachusetts politics. James Michael Curley used to vote the graveyards in his candidacies and the Combat Zone/Boston Common winoes could feast on the dough they received to vote for various candidates around election time. In more recent elections, campaign spying has become a better paying, more complex sort of affair. Nearly every hotly contested Boston mayoral, gubernational and congressional race of the past decade has featured undercover agents, double agents, faked documents, erroneous rumors, set-up scandals, and leaks to the press.

Sometimes these actions can drive a candidate right out of the race. In 1970, Governor Frank Sargent was all set to put State Representative Martin Linsky of Brookline on his ticket as the nominee for lieutenant governor. Mysteriously a report surfaced that Linsky had once been caught with a Combat Zone prostitute by the Boston police. There was a police report to back it up. It appears the whole affair was rigged by a Boston pol with good connections in prostitute circles and the Boston police department. To help his good friend, State Senator John Quinlan of Norwood who was also seeking the spot on Sargent’s ticket, this pol nailed Linsky.

Can't you practice someplace else?

PAUL RAEBURN — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:47:12 GMT

Notes on the plight of the tenant-musician
This article originally appeared in the May 16, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the May 16, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

So you think you’ve got problems trying to find an apartment? No doubt about it, finding a decent place to hang your hat in Boston, the most expensive city in the continental US, isn’t easy. Of course, it’s not that you’re being unreasonable. All you want is a place like that $750-a-month pad you spied down on the Waterfront, except that you want to pay only $125. Okay, so it doesn’t have to be on the Waterfront; something a short walk from Harvard Square would be just fine. Well, if you’ve been looking in vain for weeks and are about to move back to Cleveland, here’s one bit of consolation. There is somebody who’s worse off than you.

That somebody is the poor soul who, through an accident of birth, happens to be a musician. Yes, folks, we musicians are sorely discriminated against when it comes to finding apartments. Nonsense, you say, musicians are rich and famous, and they’ve all got houses on Martha’s Vineyard. I’ll admit some make a decent wage, but there are more than a few of us out here who aren’t quite able to move next door to James Taylor. If you, dear reader, are a musician who hasn’t yet made the big time, or even if your musical endeavors merely consist of squeezing a few notes out of the old horn you played in the high school band, take heart —We Are Not Alone.

I’ve hauled my equipment—an electric piano, an amplifier, and assorted paraphernalia—in and out of seven apartments in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge during the last five years. I’ve survived the pitfalls and dangers, including being robbed three times and hearing an older woman in the apartment below mine shout up the stairs that my practicing sounds like a herd of elephants walking on her living room ceiling. Not exactly the critical adulation I’d hoped for.

One of the first places I lived in Boston was a room in a house full of vegetarians and other aficionados of the organic. The preferred means of musical expression were guitars and recorders. Pure, natural-sounding instruments. The noisy, electrified sounds that sometimes came from my piano didn’t mix very well with the peaceful contemplations of my housemates. And it didn’t help that I regularly retreated to the local hamburger emporium for consolation. Our musical/philosophical disagreements were threatening to ruin my life, so I quietly moved out.

Throttling Throat

JANET MASLIN — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:54:35 GMT

What's on Trial with Deep Throat
This article originally appeared in the May 8, 1973 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the May 8, 1973 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

D eep in the land of the sun
E ach day like each other one
E very sexual encounter was lacking
P erhaps it is her that is slacking
T o the doctor she went
H er whole problem she spent
R eached a climax—of course
O nly one thing…the source
A ll of you will agree…Throat!
T hat Deep Throat should happen to me!”

—A Poem; from the official Deep Throat press booklet

By the time the second day’s worth of somber, clinical courtroom haggling over the fate of Deep Throat had rolled around, psychosexual wear and tear was beginning to take its toll on the attorney for the Prosecution. Fred Kellogg, the young but ultraserious jurist in question, was cross-examining a defense witness, Reverend Ron Mazur, a sex educator at U. Mass (and author of something called Common Sense Sex), when Kellogg began inquiring as to just what Rev. Mazur thought the “main thrust” of the film had been. The Reverend seemed a trifle surprised, but after musing on the thrust issue for a while he offered some observations about the educational value of the film as a whole. He said he found its chief merit to be that of allowing audiences “to laugh about the forbidden.” Attorney Kellogg, not about to settle for that, brought up a specific instance in the film wherein two women invite countless men over for pure purposes of a good time. “Now, what about that!” Kellogg snapped triumphantly, “Would a normal girl ever do that?”

The Reverend, not purporting to know very much about normal girls, merely looked surprised. He did say that he felt certain scenes in the film had sexist overtones; but Attorney Kellogg, looking unsatisfied, pressed still further onward. “What scenes can you cite,” he inquired, “that do not have the negative values of brutality, sexism, and sex without love, instead of possible educational value?” Reverend Mazur just looked weary and said, for the umpteenth time in response to essentially the same question, that the film “allows us to laugh at ourselves.” But didn’t Mazur think, persisted Kellogg, that the film was then guilty of foisting sexism and sexist ideas upon the public? This time Mazur sighed audibly before mustering his energies for a reply: “Since the public is rampant with sexism already, I believe not.”

Building better bodyguards

MICHAEL MATZA — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:32:56 GMT

Inside a Connecticutt "anti-terrorist driving school"
This article originally ran in the May 2, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix .

This article originally ran in the May 2, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

The car is traveling at 40 miles per hour when the left boot comes down hard—with almost enough force to penetrate the firewall—on the specially rigged emergency brake. The locked rear wheels squeal like pigs bound for bacon, and a coat of rubber lubricates the resulting skid. The steering wheel gets twisted violently to the left and a ton and a half of late-model automobile pirouettes across the track, swapping ends before startled eyes can adjust to the 180-degree change. Dressed in a quilted vest, camouflage cap and huge wrap-around sunglasses, a tough-looking guy who, for reasons of security, identifies himself simply as Joe, steps from the passenger seat, drops to his knees, throws back his head and shouts, “Love it, I love it.”

At Thompson Speedways in Connecticut, where Tony Scotti’s “anti-terrorist” driving class—grown men, aged 20 to 60—is practicing the “bootlegger turn,” it’s tempting to write the exercise off as adolescence gone mad. For Scotti, his two assistants, and the students who pay $750 for the five-day “Executive Protection” course, however, the business of bootlegger turns, J-turns, off-road recoveries, and assorted evasive driving maneuvers is deadly serious.

The recent wave of kidnappings and assassinations in Germany and Italy has produced in the American business community a demand for levels of security once reserved for James Bond and the man from U.N.C.L.E. Despite such notable exceptions as the SLA abduction of Patty Hearst and the Weather Underground bombing of the Capitol, the United States generally has not experienced the kind of political terrorism that dominates the news abroad. Nevertheless, American businessman—particularly those with holdings in South America, the Mideast and volatile European countries—are enlisting the professional services of hostage negotiators, kidnap-insurance underwriters, bodyguards trained in anti-guerilla tactics, and chauffeurs who can put a fancy limousine through the paces of a halfback on a broken-field run.

Tony Scotti’s anti-terrorist driving school is one of four in this country, and the effusive, 37-year-old Somerville resident and one-time race car driver boasts a list of graduates—mostly chauffeurs, although some executives have themselves requested “hands-on” training—from the top 15 corporations of the Fortune 500. Scotti says he restricts enrollment to those clients with “a valid need to know,” which, it turns out, means being listed with the Washington, DC-based American Society of Industrial Security. To date, his students have come from oil companies, banks, utilities, and multi-national corporations who consider themselves the likely targets of attack.

The addicted city

RIC KAHN — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:37:26 GMT

Why is it that one out of 125 Gloucester residents is a junkie?
This article originally appeared in the April 1, 1988 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the April 1, 1988 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Gloucester — Sir Smack blew in from Boston back in ’68, chauffeured to Fishtown in a pearly white Lincoln Continental. You could find him down on the mainline, flirting with the young lords and ladies at the teenage gathering spot, the mom-and-pop ice cream shop on Washington Street, one of the gateways into Gloucester.

He was electric, charming the pants off both the guys and girlies. They’d lie and steal just to spend some time with him, their demigod, for he could stifle their pain. The outnumbered cops tried to bust up the all-night party, kick him out of their seafaring city. But he was hard to keep down. In waterfront barrooms, down on the boulevard near the famous bronze Man at the Wheel, in the bathrooms and basements of turn-of-the-century-double-deckers—he was being introduced all over town. Buddy to buddy, cousin to cousin, husband and wife, brother to sister, generation to generation, his influence spread from Gloucester and its industrial-strength family ties. The former big-city stranger became a downright Gloucester guy, a regular Jones.

The vain man. He flaunted his power, keeping a warped scorecard of those he had seduced: in a city of 24,964, 200 to 250 are now counted in his cutting crew. Plus those he’s reduced to ashes: more than 35 over the past 10 years.

Many of the proud people of this insular 27-square-mile peninsula, where it is said a message can travel faster by word of mouth than by telephone wire, must have seen or heard him—nodding head, glassy eyes, pinhole pupils, scratching left and right — on his way to toil in the killing fields. But most found it too painful to look him squarely in the peepers, burying their heads instead in the Good Harbor Beach sand.

A year ago, the mysterious Sir Smack — Herr Heroin — was exposed by the city’s daily newspaper as a marauding monkey man in Gloucester’s salt-watery midst. The paper’s four-part series on heroin, says Ron Morin, executive director of the only drug-counseling program in town, NUVA (which stands for New Life), ripped the veil of denial off the faces of the good people of Gloucester. One year later Gloucester finds itself not only a place where one out of every 125 residents is a heroin addict, making the quiet seaport the per capita heroin capital of the Commonwealth — from the scions of Eastern Point to the lumpers of St. Peter’s Square — almost totally touched, somehow, some way, by the needle and the damage done.

Beyond rhythm: A new contraception

MICHAEL CASTLEMAN — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:13:09 GMT

A woman's body tells her what she needs to know
This article originally appeared in the March 28, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the March 28, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Every morning, San Francisco medical student Anne Carlyle, 25, takes her temperature, examines her vagina, records her findings on a chart and mentions them to her husband. This simple routine is how Carlyle practices birth control. She uses the “fertility awareness” method, a modernized rhythm system that enables women to identify fertile days each month by examining their cervical mucus.

“I’ve used pills, condoms, a diaphragm—and prayer,” says Carlyle, who has relied on fertility awareness for a year. “We still use a condom or diaphragm when I’m fertile, but when I’m not, there’s no need to use anything. Every birth control method causes some hassle. Why use one if you don’t have to?”

Fertility awareness and traditional rhythm methods both attempt to identify a woman’s fertile days, the week to 10 days each month around the time she ovulates. The key difference between the two is that in the latter, a woman pays attention to the calendar. To practice fertility awareness, she pays attention to her body.

“Fertility awareness teaches women to communicate with their bodies directly,” says Karen Faire-Hammond, a consultant to the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare in California.

“The body clearly announces its fertile time each month if a woman is trained to recognize the signals.” Faire-Hammond, who has used the method herself for five years and has taught it for two, says that calendars are unreliable fertility indicators. Traditional rhythm, she explains, assumes that women ovulate regularly, but few women do. And the menstrual cycles of those women who do ovulate regularly can change unexpectedly when they travel, get sick or suffer emotional stress.

Studies to date indicate that fertility awareness works as well as other birth control methods, Faire-Hammond adds. A five-country study of 2000 couples in 1975, by Dr. Claude Lanctot at Fairfield University, showed the method to be up to 98 percent effective. And fertility awareness is “more than just a method for preventing conception,” says Deborah Rogow, a health educator who teaches the method for the San Francisco Health Department. “It can help couples who want to conceive a child by pinpointing the fertile days.”

The National Institutes of Health is now testing the effectiveness of fertility awareness at Cedar-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Results are expected next year. Experts caution that women should take courses in the method before attempting to classify their mucus, since individual women have different mucus cycles. “It takes some time to learn,” says Rogow, “but it becomes like second nature, like driving a car.”

Lord of the thighs

DOUG SIMMONS — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:36:45 GMT

Aerosmith should throw in the towel
This article originally appeared in the March 15, 1983 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the March 15, 1983 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

To get into the Aerosmith concert at Cape Cod Coliseum last week you had to worm through a battalion of helmeted police, a few of them with German shepherds. One officer standing next to a trash barrel was popping the tops off confiscated six-packs. The rest milled around the doors, eyeballing the crowd, warding off gatecrashers, and demanding immediate apologies for wisecracks. As I neared the door a rowdy young man was arrested and led away. Not a minute had passed when a different scuffle began and another geek was handcuffed and taken to the nearby paddy wagon. Inside, hundreds of cantankerous, bleary-eyed louts thronged the halls and greeted each other with a punch in the arm, a slug in the kidney, or my favorite, a surprise hammerlock. Most of these guys, ranging in age from their mid-teens to early 20’s, wore a variation of the following: leather jacket, denim jacket, hooded sweatshirt, T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, workboots, (many of these were intentionally laceless, forcing the wearer into a distinctively graceless gait), and the occasional bandanna or crucifix (à la Ozzy Osbourne). The quarter or less of the crowd that was female looked the same. The clothing was faded and tattered, sometimes held together only by sewn-on patches boasting favorite bands. Judging from these patches, and the hand-painted vests or jackets (JIM MORRISON LIVES!) or T-shirts (on sale here with Aerosmith’s logo at $10 per, $14 for the long-sleeved), the following are among the revered acts of the Aerosmith crowd: Rush, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Foreigner, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Doors, Led Zeppelin…and Marvin Gaye (just kidding).

Aerosmith worked their way into this rank 10 years ago in the Midwest, the first area beyond New England the band cracked. Out there, the group’s bargain-basement Stones show delighted guys like me and my friends. We aped the band’s delinquent image, albeit with less mascara, and marveled at Joe Perry’s kerchunkachunka guitar and Steven Tyler’s gypsy sleaze and ripped-larynx singing. Looking back I have no regrets, but looking across Cape Cod Coliseum’s iceless hockey rink, my nostalgia soured. Were my friends and I this surly? Probably. When I found an empty wrapper on the floor that said Big Bomb Super Firecrackers I began to wonder. Were we this stupid? Most certainly. One of the first times I should have been arrested for drunken driving, Get Your Wings was in the tape deck. There was only one difference between the Cape crowd and my crew a decade ago: as a companion said of the 6500-strong mob, “If we nuked Iran tomorrow there aren’t three people in this place would care.” We would have cared, but only because when it came to war we had Vietnam to wise us up.

Jackson's sweet dream

SCOT LEHIGH — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:14:11 GMT

Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign
This article originally appeared in the March 4, 1988 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the March 4, 1988 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Hazard, KY—This town of 6000 clings to the side of the lode-rich Appalachian hills that have made coal king in Eastern Kentucky. Those hills remind Jesse Jackson of hills beyond, of the hills of South Africa. “There are the same economic forces at work,” he says. Mainly, it’s the force of poverty, for King Coal rules here with the ruthlessness of absolute monarchy. Just outside of town, the landscape is pockmarked with the ugly scars of stripmining. In town, the scars are of economic blight. Hazard traps you, oppresses you, presses down on you from its terraced rows of dingy dwellings, squat, grimy houses with cinderblock chimneys and roll roofing, or rows of nondescript triple-deckers bleeding paint.

Jesse Jackson has come here to “whiten the face of poverty.” That way, he says, America can no longer dismiss the privation. Inside the dimly lit high-school gymnasium, a capacity crowd of 1000, dotted with only an occasional black face, erupts into cheers as Jackson enters. “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse,” comes the familiar chant. “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse.” Jackson strides to a small restraining wall that separates the basketball court from the bleachers, and the crowd surges forward. Kids vault the wall, and surround him, and soon the grownups, too, are spilling out onto the musty canvas that covers the basketball floor. Jackson moves along the wall, pressing the flesh, hoisting and hugging kids, a presidential pied piper leading a mesmerized line of children. But this crowd is not content to follow; they want to touch. As he moves by, the group behind him splits like a drop of quicksilver and rolls around him to reach out again. “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse.”

“I am always distressed when I see such poverty in a nation so wealthy,” Jackson says quietly, when he has taken the podium. “But because I grew up in poverty, I am not traumatized. I am determined that we, the people, can come together. If we, the people, maintain our self-respect, maintain our dignity, no mountains are too high. We, the people, can have jobs, health care, and justice—right here in these mountains. But we, the people, must lead. We must turn to each other, and we, the people, can win. You have struggled against great odds, and your struggle shall not be in vain…We, the people, are going to outlast Reagan. Just hold on.” The crowd responds with a deafening, overwhelming roll. “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse.”

Learning not to kill

SARAH MCNAUGHT — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:08:01 GMT

New techniques mean that medical students can learn without killing animals. So why won't BU get with the program?
This article originally appeared in the February 27, 1998 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the February 27, 1998 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

At Boston University, spring is the time for first-year medical students to put their textbook learning to the test. Each week, students break up into groups of three and attend three-hour labs in which a professor straps a rabbit to a table, anesthetizes it, cuts it open, and shows the students how various medicinal injections affect the animal’s heart rate and blood pressure. When the lab is over, the animals are killed.

This type of lab has been offered at BU since 1970; this year, 120 of the 200 first-year students participated in the optional experiments. What the students are supposed to walk away with is a clearer perception of the way a human’s organs might function under the influence of medications like dopamine and epinephrine. “It’s all for the sake of science,” says Dr. Benjamin Kaminer, chairman of the medical school’s physiology department.

But some students leave the room feeling that they have done a cruel and unnecessary thing. And although the labs are not required (those who opt out can “learn what they need to know from books and drawings,” says Kaminer), some students say that their peers and professors seem to expect them to take part.

“I had a rabbit as a pet when I was young, and he didn’t look as healthy as the ones I see cut open and killed in the animal labs,” says one second-year medical student, who says he attended the labs last year because he saw professors become hostile to students who asked what the alternatives were.

Until about a decade and a half ago, this kind of experimentation on live, healthy animals — usually dogs, pigs, or rabbits — was just part of learning to be a doctor. But today, medical schools are finding ways to avoid these senseless deaths. Many students are learning in new ways: by observing real-life operations on humans, for example, and by using sophisticated interactive computer programs. In Massachusetts, according to the Washington-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), only one medical school has refused to adopt the new techniques: Boston University’s.

“Live-animal labs are a relic of the past that sends a message to medical students that lives are disposable,” says Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and president of PCRM. The group, a nonprofit organization founded in 1985, has sent Kaminer an instructional video on alternative teaching techniques and has taken out an ad in BU’s newspaper, the Daily Free Press, calling for “medical education without the pitter-patter of little feet.”

Why ban smoking?

EDITORIAL — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:09:26 GMT

An extreme proposal where the spirit of compromise already works
This editorial originally appeared in the February 20, 1998 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This editorial originally appeared in the February 20, 1998 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

It's ironic that Mayor Thomas Menino’s administration, which fought hard to win approval for a convention center in order to bolster Boston’s status as a major-league metropolis, has proven to be so inhospitable to the city’s hospitality business. There is, after all, more to this town than the Freedom Trail and the Citgo sign.

Every industry of any size likes to think of itself as indispensable to the city’s fabric. Over the past 30 years, the city’s restaurants, clubs, and bars have multiplied and matured, helping to transform Boston from a placid provincial hub into a vital, sophisticated, but still very livable city.

Talk to the people who orchestrate Boston’s nightlife, and many will say they feel anything but appreciated. Though self-interest may fuel their furor, they nevertheless make a compelling case that City Hall seems bent on squeezing the life out of Boston after dark. The complaints: inadequate parking coupled with a zealous brigade of parking police; cops and bureaucrats who enforce admittedly important operating and alcohol regulations with Kafkaesque intensity; and the threat of stricter regulations for 18-plus club shows, which are already too few in this college town.

No one doubts the mayor’s commitment to an orderly and safe city. But this is the stuff of tinhorn puritanism, not a world-class municipal administration. Now comes a sweeping proposal from the mayor himself: a plan requiring eating and drinking establishments to provide a physically separate area for smokers — or ban smoking altogether. As it now stands, the plan would literally require construction of a wall between patrons.

The initiative appears to come out of nowhere. City councilors were surprised, as were restaurant and bar owners. There has been no public clamor for a ban. But those close to Menino say that he is a committed nonsmoker who, together with his public health commissioner, David Mulligan, has been contemplating such a move for some time.

There is no compelling reason for this kind of far-reaching change. The ratio of smoking seats to nonsmoking ones already tilts heavily in favor of those who don’t smoke. Some establishments ban smoking entirely. And the few that do cater to more tobacco-loving crowds still obey government guidelines. Choices abound for diners. The market has done a good job of adjusting itself to the needs and wants of Bostonians.

Politicos Latinos

ALAN LUPO — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:51:18 GMT

The growing clout of the Hispanic community
This article originally appeared in the February 22, 1983 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the February 22, 1983 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

From Aguadilla and San Lorenzo, from Barranquitas and Arecibo, they made their way to San Juan and hopped a $75 flight to Boston. Or they took the subway from the Bronx to the New York Port Authority terminal in Manhattan and caught a bus to Boston for eight bucks. Like so many groups before them, they found fetid apartments in once stately row houses in the South End and settled in to wait. They waited in the barely furnished apartments with the stained ceilings and the cracked plaster, waited for opportunities that could not be found in Aguadilla and Arecibo. They waited under the anxious gaze of their kids, under the compassionate eyes of the painting of Jesus, under the compelling gaze of the photo of the other messiah, Kennedy.

A few died waiting. Some migrated elsewhere. Some gave up. Some made it. Carmelo Iglesias, a young social worker in the 1960s, walked up and down the creaky stairs to their apartments to console them. He drank with the young men in a Tremont Street bar. He talked with the kids and old-timers on the corners of a South End just beginning to gentrify. One night, with a reporter in tow, Iglesias looked up from the street to the Pru, all lit up with the promise of a night out on the town - if you had a fat wallet. What does a Puerto Rican kid think, he was asked, if he stands there, looking up at such a sight? “If he’s introspective,” Iglesias said, “he’d probably want to take a rifle and blow every damn light out.” It was 1966.

It is 1983. The other night, Carmelo Iglesias, still counseling the needy, met with 20 others, many of them Latinos, in a nice restaurant. Nobody in the room believed that life here and now for the Puerto Rican, the Costa Rican, the Colombian, the Dominican is easy and full with promise. But in the years since he looked up at the Pru, Iglesias has seen Spanish-speaking teachers hired in the schools, translators put on duty in hospital emergency rooms, bilingual education implemented for the kids. Creating such change was not easy, nor are the changes enough. But they are the beginning of what is, in part, a political story of a community scrapping for its place in this most intensely politicized state. The meeting the other night was to discuss building a sophisticated city-wide organization to run a Puerto Rican, Felix Arroyo, for the Boston School Committee.