Fiction
Pearl Schiff
We list this book first because it was the first novel to be focused on the denizens of Scollay Square. Ms. Schiff was also extraordinarily kind to a new writer looking for insights into the appeal of the Square. Ms. Schiff was a resident of Beacon Hill who told me that she was forbidden by her mother from visiting the Square when growing up, but after her marriage she and her husband would frequent the bars and restaurants as part of her first-person research into what would be a New York Times bestseller in 1953! I treasure my signed copy of Scollay Square (New York: Rinehart, 1952) .
Richard McKenna, The Sand Pebbles, 1963
McKenna gives us a superb example of Scollay Square as portrayed in fiction. Before it was a movie, the Sand Pebbles was first a best-selling book, published in 1963. We pick up the story from Chapter 32 just as a man joins the Sand Pebbles (the sailors from the gunboat San Pablo) at their table in a Far East bar....
The man draped his white scarf on the back of the chair and sat down. He unbuttoned his overcoat and put a full bottle of White Horse on the table.
"It's whiskey weather tonight, fellers," he said. "I'm Don Fahey. Call me Don. What the hell, I'm South Boston Irish and I belong in this kind of place."
"Arf! Arf! Red Dog said. "Scollay Square!"
"Revere Beach! You're a Mick yerself!"
"Red Dog Bite 'em-in-the-ass Shanahan at your service!"
Erich Segal, The Class (New York: Bantam 1985)
The "Love Story" author returned to Harvard to tell the fictional story of the class of 1958. Unfortunately - and I hate to keep pointing out mistakes - but, as you can read in the excerpt here (a screen grab from Google Books) Segal has his protagonist going to the Old Howard in 1954, over a year after the venerable theater was closed by the city. Nice that he used "Irma the Body" as the performer in his fictional show, especially since it was her bump and grind that was captured on film by the Vice Squad in 1953, leading to the theater's shuttering.
Keach Hagey
A reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Hagey has written a fascinating biography of one of Boston's most successful sons. That Sumer Redstone's beginnings intersected with some of Scollay Sqaure's most... interesting denizens (notably dentist/bookie "Doc" Sagansky) puts this book on our list.
With apologies to Sheldon Copper
The fate of poor Charlie on the MTA is well known, thanks to the Kingston Trio and their hit version of a song originally written for a Boston mayoral candidate in 1947. In his 2000 book, The Eureka Effect: The Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking (W.W. Norton & Company) David Perkins presents paradoxes in physics. One of them involves an old friend from Scollay Square.
We finish up this survey with something fun, found by a friend.
When the authors of the American Heritage College Dictionary needed a photo to accompany the entry for "demolition," look what they chose!
Poetry
The following came from a grad student in American & New England Studies at Univ. of Southern Maine
I'm about to propose research to the Houghton Library at Harvard to get access to e.e. cummings' papers. I have been a cummings fan since I was a high school junior, and have done 2 papers about him, have read all of his poetry, some of his fiction and non-fiction prose, and have looked at his paintings. I know that cummings "hung out" at The Old Howard as well as other Scollay Sq bars.
my humorous ghost precisely will
stray from the others on the hill
if only to hear someone say
exactly what someone has said.
Straying as softly as a puma,
it will come to Boston
and sit in the Howard Atheneum
up under the non si fuma,
(up in the ceiling with the old men.
With the wrinkles and eyes and tumours.)
Precisely straying like a leopard
or a music, will my ghost
visit queerly the naked girls who
wiggle at the end of second avenue
in the Burlesque ...
Here is another cummings tome, titled "humanity i love you"
Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you
