How I learned to stop worrying and Love Worcester

by Walter Crockett

Worcester is even uglier today than it was 41 years ago, when my family rolled in from Kansas in a '55 Mercury wagon, over roads stained with road salt and lined with grit-encrusted outcroppings of frozen slush.

There was no I-290 in 1957, so we rode Route 12 through Auburn and down ghastly Southbridge Street. Grim though the city was, thousands more trees lined its streets then, in the years before the city clear-cut its parks and forestry budget.

We took up residence on the top floor of a two-decker towering over Brantwood Road, on the Jewish side of Pleasant Street, in the Tatnuck area, where the first question my fifth grade classmates asked was: "Are you Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish?" We were Protestant, I soon found out, but we'd never used the word because nearly everyone in Kansas is Protestant.

Midwestern schools are better than Massachusetts schools: the Midwest doesn't mind paying for education. So I leapfrogged to the head of the class, topped only by Stephen Ostrow, a serious little guy who wore a suit and tie to school every day and once said "Damn!" when his briefcase spilled open in the hall.

Downstairs from us lived our landlords, the Kandianis family, led by Spiro, who drove a Table Talk truck, and his wife, Pat, who ruled their three kids with a voice that could strike fear into an oak tree. She introduced us to baklava. You don't meet many Greeks in Kansas.

Pretty soon my parents were eating baklava at 3 a.m. in the old El Morocco on Wall Street and dancing to Emil Haddad and the Notables at the 371 Club on Park Avenue. I was playing stickball in the street with the Cohen twins and capture-the-flag in the woods behind Rochelle Rutman's house.

Mark Kandianis was a year younger than I. He didn't do well in school no matter how he tried. In the late '50s we'd listen to Buddy Holly on the Open House Party on all-request WORC. They'd announce the Top Three songs every day at six. Radio programmers all over the country paid attention to what Worcester rock-and-roll fans were listening to. Worcester could make or break a song nationally.

In the early '60s, Mark and I argued over who was better, the Beatles or the Dave Clark 5. I picked the Beatles.

After high school I went to college in Ohio, flunked out, made the pilgrimage to San Francisco, and returned to Clark in time to beat the draft. Mark moved to Cape Cod and hung out at Jasper's Surf Shop.

Then he started fishing for a living. One night the outboard motor died in the little boat he shared with three older guys. They drifted out to sea in a heavy fog. Rescue planes couldn't find them. Three days out, eating seaweed to survive, with his older companions lost in depression, Mark took the motor apart, found the problem, and put the engine back together -- in terror all the time that he might drop a part into the water. He started it up and headed east until they reached a lighthouse in Maine.

Those three days were Mark's college education and his initiation into manhood. Soon afterwards he went from fisherman to ship captain. Last I heard, he was in charge of several big boats plying the Alaskan waters out of Kodiak Island where he makes his home.

I still make my home in Worcester. I've tried Cambridge and San Francisco, but fate and rock and roll brought me back here in the early '70s. People kept me here. Worcester has good people.

There aren't enough Protestants in Worcester to maintain the gene pool. You've just got to intermarry. My first wife was Lebanese Catholic, my second is Philadelphia Jewish. I've been to more bar mitzvahs than most of the kids at Temple Sinai. I can spot an Irishman across a smoky bar without my reading glasses (and I know from experience that any writer who uses "Irish" and "bar" in the same sentence is begging for angry letters to the editor). I can spell half a dozen French-Canadian names ending in "eault," and I know that people named Shortsleeve used to be named Chapdelaine.

I have discovered that Near Eastern grandmothers trust me because I have a big nose and dark eyes. I know that Lithuanians tend to be blond loners, that Puerto Ricans don't spend enough time in their kids' schools, that Finns have lots of l's and k's in their names, that Worcester's Swedes are much more straight-laced than the Swedes that appear on the Internet at places like "sucksex.com." I know that the Italians of Shrewsbury Street still swear the city gives them a raw deal -- even though the mayor, the district councilor, the DPW chief, and a state senator are Italian and theirs is the only street that's thriving.

I know that all the above stereotypes can be shot full of holes.

And I know that the people who run this city -- the professional "planners" and the big commercial interests and the Hungarian émigré who writes the vitriolic editorials for the daily paper -- will run it right into bankruptcy if they have their misguided way. They'll keep dumping on the parks, shortchanging the schools, letting the trees wither, the litter flourish, and the library die on the vine, while they pour millions upon millions of borrowed dollars into the downtown sinkhole and the fogged-in airport.

Downtown Worcester is a mausoleum. A dust-gathering monument to the times when there were buses and people took them, when there were jobs and people worked them, when there were stores and people shopped them. Before all the cities got malled and all the manufacturing went south.

The big money's gone to Westborough. Of the 100 top-paid private executives in Central Massachusetts, maybe five work in Worcester -- more than 25 work in Westborough.

They've got the money, and we've got the buildings. They've got the three-piece suits, and we've got the teen-age mothers, the gang-bangers, the petty drug dealers, the lion's share of vagrant drunken bums -- excuse me, I mean homeless alcohol-abusers.

They've got the soccer moms in SUVs, and we've got the burgeoning illiterate underclass in Nikes, fluent in neither Spanish nor English, thoroughly unable to postpone the least whiff of immediate gratification, no matter how immediately degrading and ultimately devastating it may be.

It's a bleak picture. And it's bleaker yet if you live, as I do, just a block or so west of the Main South kingdom of absentee landlords, the principality of blind greed, where disruptive tenants are rarely called to account. Where the property values decline year after year and one by one your old-time neighbors -- even the blacks and Hispanics -- flee for whiter pastures.

So why don't I fix my house up, sell it, and move to Rutland or Barre before it's too late? Because I love Worcester, and I believe in it. Because you can run but you just can't hide.

Every other American city faces the same problems: disinvestment, a growing underclass, crime, middle-class flight, barely competent city administrators trotting out discredited solutions to save dying downtowns.

But Worcester has a lot more going for it than many other cities. We've got a passel of colleges that has never been woven into the cultural fabric. That's an opportunity. Clark University is leading the way in turning its neighborhood around. Holy Cross and WPI can't hold out forever.

We've got an education lobby unequaled anywhere in the state. Not that our schools shouldn't be 100 percent better than they are. But the Alliance for Education, the West Side good-government types, the School Committee, some savvy real-estate interests, and Supt. James Garvey have finally created a reform juggernaut that even the Telegram & Gazette finds hard to belittle. Even Republicans know that good schools are the key to keeping the middle class in Worcester -- and without the middle class, we'll have no class at all.

Most important, we've got a grassroots neighborhood movement unprecedented in the city's history. From Green Hill to Airport Hill, from Main South to Great Brook Valley, just-plain-citizens are showing up their elected leaders and taking the lead on the issues that really matter -- crime, education, parks, and quality of life. Last fall, Worcester's Hispanics finally turned out in force on the campaign trail.

Worcester has a chance. Most cities don't. For the first time anyone can remember, Worcester can really make history: we can build a city that works -- for all the people. That why I'm sticking around instead of searching for fish off Alaska or parking spaces in Cambridge. And that's why I'm writing this column for the Worcester Phoenix.

We've got a chance.