September 18, 2024 • 33 mins
What if the untold stories of the Baby Boomer generation could change the way you view history and modern society? Join us as we explore the gritty realities faced by working-class families born in the 1960s in Rust Belt northeastern cities. From economic struggles and factory shutdowns to the pervasive influence of drugs, this episode shines a light on the stark contrasts between Boomers who grew up in affluent suburbs and those from working-class neighborhoods. Hear personal reflections on the ethnic composition of America during the 60s and 70s, and gain insights on how these historical contexts shape views on modern immigration.
Listen to the compelling narrative of growing up in multicultural neighborhoods where genuine connections broke down racial barriers. Experience the journey of marrying a Black woman and embracing a diverse family, while also exploring the dynamics between different ethnic groups like Italians and Irish. We also touch on the presence of the Italian mafia during that era and the rich cultural differences in cooking and community life. As we wrap up, we contemplate the fluidity of cultural identity and express hope for a more inclusive and unified American identity, urging future generations to appreciate and integrate differences for a harmonious society.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, it's me.
I've been off the air for awhile.
It was a mistake because I lostmy credit card that paid for
the Buzz Sprout platform that Ipublish on Lost it cancelled.
It found it ten minutes after Icancelled it and every account
(00:23):
that I had automatic paymentsfor were discontinued, budsprout
being one of them, and I kindof lost it.
I was like, eh, I'm not thatinterested.
You know, some people arelistening.
I got a few hundred people, butsome people that I know friends
of mine wanted to hear more.
(00:45):
So I was like, okay, I've heardit three, four times, I'll put
one out there.
I got a list of stuff to talkabout.
But the thing is I listen to alot of Baby Boomer podcasts and
(01:05):
I watch YouTube and of BabyBoomer podcasts and I watch
YouTube and watch Baby Boomerstuff and it's mostly nostalgia,
memorabilia, partridge Family,the Monkees, banana Bikes,
drive-ins and that stuff's cool,it was great, it was memorable,
(01:27):
I did it all.
But there's a different side tothe 60s, 70s baby boomer
generation that really kind ofgets overlooked and not covered.
That really kind of getsoverlooked and not covered.
And if you've listened to mypast podcast, you hear that edge
(01:50):
of the baby boomers and I'm nottalking about baby boomers that
were born in the 50s.
They had their own set ofcharacteristics.
There's almost like twoseparate generation of baby
boomers at all Really came fromthe fathers and families that
(02:12):
fought in World War II and Korea, and I'm just part of that
later leg of baby boomers bornin 1960.
Of baby boomers born in 1960.
And it was a whole differentexperience.
If you lived in a Rust Beltnortheastern city and you didn't
(02:38):
participate in the massmigration to the suburbs and
your dad was a steel worker oran auto worker, you know it
didn't really have a lot to dowith TV shows and fads and
(03:03):
kabonkers, those balls that youwould clack together and yo-yos
and bicycles.
It had a lot more to do withdrugs.
It had a lot more to do withstruggling through a working
(03:31):
class economy.
It had a lot more to do withfactories being shut down and it
was different than the babyBoomers are portrayed.
So if I have any youngerlisteners that resent Baby
(03:55):
Boomers, this is not an apologyor a poor me or woe is me kind
of thing, but I think you allthink that we just grew up with
a Jaguar in a driveway and wereally didn't, man.
We hit a friggin war to fightor trying to avoid.
I was too young for Vietnam, butit was really present in my
(04:18):
life, in my neighborhood.
Many of my friends' fatherswere there.
Many guys that lived on theblock had to go there and in
between I guess I'm watching thePartridge family, you know.
But it wasn't all roses andbubblegum and Mary Poppins.
(04:43):
It was edgy but it was fun andI learned a lot For my baby
boomer friends, my age, mydemographic you're going to
recognize some of the stuff Imean.
If you listen to any of my pastpodcasts, you know what I'm
talking about.
I know a lot of you gettriggered by the names of the
(05:11):
drugs, the names of the bandsthat we listen to, rock concerts
and things like that thatreally don't get that much play
in the media when people talkabout baby boomers Okay boomer,
okay boomer.
I heard Bill Maher the otherday say okay, boomer is not a
(05:38):
full sentence.
You just can't depict babyboomers as one distinct group of
people at all.
So I look at today, I look atAmerica, I look at the ethnic
(05:59):
breakdown, the racial breakdown,and I want to tell my younger
listeners again if I have any atall.
I want to tell them look it,man, it was so different in the
60s and 70s.
Ethnic breakdown of Americaright now has more to do with
(06:21):
white, black, latino, whiteblack, latino, arabs, middle
Easterners, mexicans, and thatreally was not what we grew up
with.
We grew up with this as aresult of this wave of Western
(06:45):
European migration to Americathat happened around the turn of
the century, where waves andwaves and waves of people came
to America for a better life andtrying to have kids and raise
families and get decent jobs,much like you know the people
(07:09):
who come to America now.
This is why I don't really havea problem with immigrants
coming here.
I think it's a good thing,because I'm really starkly aware
of my roots and how my familygot here and why they got here
and how much better it was forthem to be here.
(07:30):
So here's what it looked likeback in 1968, 69, 70.
Here's what neighborhoodslooked like.
There was rich neighborhoodsand they were mostly people who
(07:53):
were white and Protestant.
Like they came over on theMayflower and shit like that and
they ran companies and theywere lawyers, and they were big
Mayflower and shit like that andthey ran companies and they
were lawyers and they werebigwigs and stuff like that.
I got to tell you I didn't knowany of them.
I didn't even know about them.
(08:15):
I just knew that I wasn't oneof them.
So that's one group.
I didn't have much affiliationwith them.
Then there was my group, irishCatholic.
We grew up cloistered in ourown little neighborhoods.
We did not know anything aboutanybody.
(08:39):
We didn't know about Jews.
We heard about them, we thoughtthey were somebody from the
Bible.
We didn't know that they.
I didn't grow up in New YorkCity or anything like that.
So you know, I knew one Jewishkid in my life.
He went to a Catholic schoolbecause he was a problem child
and the parents wanted him toget roughed up by the priests.
And I've come to know many Jewsyou know in my life and they're
(09:07):
fine people.
And I've come to know many Jewsyou know in my life and they're
fine people.
And I've had one or two reallygood Jewish friends.
But as a kid I knew nothingabout Jews.
They were just nowhere near us.
As an Irish Catholic kid I grewup with Germans.
Their ethnic identity waspretty much washed out by that
time.
There was one or two Germanrestaurants in town but nobody
(09:31):
really knew much about Germans.
You know, the Germans came over.
They really didn't come overbecause they were poor.
They came over because they hadmoney and they could come here
and make more money.
For the most part we had polishkids.
There was a lot of polishpeople and again, I didn't give
(09:55):
a shit.
I knew that they talkeddifferent, they had a weird
accent and they lived in certainpockets of town and they ate
weird food Like blood tongue andsausage and shit like that.
And we Irish we didn't eatanything.
We had the worst food ofanybody we had in our
(10:21):
neighborhood.
Italians In our neighborhood.
Italians, the Italians and theIrish kind of mixed together a
lot because of the proximity andthe dates of their immigration
to America.
But when we were kids we didn'tknow shit from Irish-Italian.
(10:44):
You guess a football?
Yeah, let's play.
You got a bet.
Couple of minutes, let's play.
You know, we knew their nameswere different, our names were
different, but we didn't give ashit, right, we didn't care.
Puerto Ricans yeah, there was aPuerto Rican pocket in my
(11:06):
neighborhood.
Didn't know shit about them,didn't go down there, they
didn't come here to our place,we just didn't really care.
But of course, in this time, inthis day and age, back then it
didn't matter if you were in adifferent neighborhood or you
(11:28):
were a different ethnic makeupand you were in the wrong place.
You really had to, you know, goto war.
After, into your teenage years,there was African Americans,
(11:49):
but we were so isolated fromthem that I really can tell you
that I never knew a black dudeuntil I was maybe 15.
Where I lived, there was a inour neighborhood.
(12:15):
There was a bridge over therailroad tracks and on the north
side of the bridge is where welived, the Irish, and what we
called the back of the bridgewas black and we didn't go there
(12:36):
and they didn't come over thebridge.
You couldn't go over the bridge.
The schools were segregated.
They were two different cities,so the school system wasn't
connected, but you just didn'tdo that.
If you got into trouble withthe police over some bullshit
(13:00):
when you were a teenager, theywould, instead of arresting you
or taking you home, they woulddrop you, take you over and drop
you on the other side of thebridge and you would have to run
back over that bridge.
They do it to us, the whites,and they do it to the blacks and
it was funny.
It never happened to me, but Iknow a bunch of dudes that it
(13:21):
actually did happen to and youjust hope to get out of there
alive.
But when it comes to the blacksin the 60s and 70s there was a
lot of civil rights stuff goingon.
There was a lot of riots.
I remember hearing about stuffdown in the South.
(13:46):
I remember the Black Panthers.
I remember the riots in SouthCentral Detroit, I believe.
I remember the bombing inPhiladelphia of a black
(14:10):
neighborhood by police.
I remember Angela Davis.
I remember knowing of blackpeople, but then I'd be watching
Bill Cosby on TV, flip Wilsonon TV, right.
So I knew I was supposed to notlike black people, but I never
(14:30):
knew one, so I couldn't not likethem.
And I gotta tell you, man, I amgoing to be completely honest I
grew up in a neighborhood wherethe white people that I grew up
many, many, many of them werevery racist and I heard the
(14:57):
N-word all the time.
I'll tell you one place I neverheard the N-word was in my
house, never from my mother orfather, but I remember cousins
and friends and just being outand having some beers and
somehow it would always comearound to at some point during
(15:19):
the night.
They're gonna start talkingabout blacks and I'd be like I
don't get it.
You know, I'm no pope or saintor anything, I'm just logical.
I'm like you don't even know ablack dude.
What's the friggin' problem?
I just kept my mouth shut andlater in my life I really got to
(15:44):
know.
I opened a medical practice inan inner city neighborhood and
got to know black people in areally wonderful way and I'm so
glad I had that experiencebecause I got to see how
(16:06):
interesting they are, howdifferent they are, what their
values are and how, as a whiteguy, doctor, privileged they
thought I was privileged.
They thought I had been born adoctor or something and I wasn't
that like that.
(16:26):
But they would think that aboutme and then they would catch my
edginess and myI-don't-take-shit-ness and they
really liked it about me.
Eventually I wound up marryinga black woman and to this day
(16:51):
we're married a black woman andto this day we're married and I
have black grandkids and a wholeblack family and I love it and
we get along great.
So black and white like it istoday was really a major thing
and you just didn't go there.
You just kept away.
(17:15):
But you know I'm no hero.
But I just remember when Iworked at the steel plant I met
black dudes.
I was you know like, you're allright or you know what you're
an an asshole.
But I could meet an Irish guy.
That was an asshole.
It didn't really matter to me,it was just the foundation that
(17:40):
my parents gave me where theywould not allow anything like
that to go on in our house andit Anyway, anyway, I want to get
(18:05):
down to the bones of it.
The Italians and the Irish.
We lived together In thebeginning.
We didn't know from nothingItalian Irish.
We didn't know from nothingItalian.
We didn't care.
We went to the same church.
If I brought home an Italiangirl, my mother was not happy
that she was not Irish, but ifshe was Catholic and Italian she
(18:29):
could kind of be alright withit.
I actually married an Italianwoman many, many years ago and
she was a wonderful woman and mymother and father took her into
our family.
But my point is nowadays it'slike you know, the Arabs, the
(18:55):
Russians, this and the we'realways gonna frigging, delineate
different groups and the groupthat got here first is gonna
piss on the group that got hereafter them and it's just corny
bullshit.
So we got the Italians, we'rewith them, but we don't really
(19:21):
know it until we get into, likejunior high Now, the Italian
dudes.
I'm going to tell you right now,I'm going to speak the truth.
I know Italian guys that aredoctors, lawyers, judges, but I
(19:43):
knew a lot of Italian dudes thatwere half mafia, a lot of them.
And so, as a baby boomer and Ihope that a lot of the boomers
that are listening remember thisas a baby boomer, we grew up
(20:08):
with the presence of this entityknown as the Italian mafia, and
it might not have affected youpersonally, but it was out there
and everybody knew somebodythat knew somebody that could
get this done, and it was there.
And where I lived, there was aconcentration of Italian blacks
(20:34):
neighborhoods One was called theHill, one was called the Court.
I got bussed into theneighborhood called the Hill,
where I was one of the onlynon-Italian people there and I
(20:54):
love Italian girls.
They were beautiful, I was asmart ass, I made a lot of
Italian friends, but the olderwe got, the more Italian they
got, and the more Italian theygot and the more American we got
(21:20):
, as the Irish Italian guys usedto run in groups.
They would dress in a certainway, we used to call it the
uniform.
They would dress in a certainway, we used to call it the
uniform, and this would be inschools and in the bars and
clubs and things like that.
And Irish guys really weren'tclicky like that.
(21:42):
We were clicky but we didn'treally identify that much as
Irish.
I heard a guy on a podcast theother day and he told a little
metaphor.
He said a fish is swimming byanother fish and the one fish
(22:03):
says to the other the water isnice today.
And the other fish said what'swater?
That's kind of how the Irishwere.
What's water?
That's kind of how the Irishwere.
We didn't know anything aboutanything other than us.
(22:23):
But I knew one thing Italianscould cook and I got to tell you
the Irish can't cook.
I'm just going to tell you theIrish can't cook.
I'm just going to tell youPotatoes, cabbage stew.
We had to eat fish every Fridayand it was Mrs Paul's fish
(22:47):
sticks and it wasn't real fish.
But the Italians, man, theycould cook.
There was a kid that lived downhere.
He was a good friend of mine,lived a few doors away from me.
His grandparents werefull-blood Italian, didn't speak
English and they lived in adouble up and down and the
grandmother would cook every dayand the grandfather grew grapes
(23:10):
and would make wine.
And the grandfather grew grapesand would make wine and I would
just hang out, starting around4, 4.30 at that house, wait to
smell that sauce, and I wouldget myself invited to dinner
because Italians are veryhospitable, very welcoming, and
I would sit and they would speakin Italian and I would just eat
(23:31):
and I knew they would betalking, speak in Italian and I
would just eat and I knew theywould be talking about me.
He's so skinny, why don't youeat?
Mangia, mangia, mangia.
And I would eat and eat and mymother would be looking for me
yelling out the door where areyou?
Where are you?
It's dinner time.
I'm like, yeah, I'm not goingto eat frigging Wonder Bread and
(23:51):
Velveeta cheese.
I got a frigging homemadeItalian dinner with sauce and
noodles and antipasto and wine,and you know I'm eating there.
So when it came down to it, theItalian boys ganged up.
(24:15):
They were mini-mafia.
They would start with littlestreet gangs.
Their fathers were in the mafiaand the sons would start gangs,
little gangs, in hopes that formany of them in hopes that they
(24:36):
would, you know, become mafiaguys, and many of them hoped to
become doctors and optometristsand plumbers and lawyers.
But they did run in gangs Inthe Irish.
We weren't like that, we wererogue, we didn't know we were
(24:59):
Irish, like I said, but we kindof knew we weren't Italian,
because those boys would come atyou with four or five guys and
there'd always be this tough,loner, motherfucking Irish guy
who was dangerous, a man-childin junior high and freshman in
(25:25):
high school.
But we didn't gather aroundlike, hey, we're Irish.
It wasn't like that.
They were gathered together andwhen they saw a tough kid, an
Irish kid, they would go afterhim in gangs.
(25:47):
Now, I wasn't a tough kid, I wasa skinny little kid, but you
know he fought a lot, he had tofight and had a big mouth.
So you know, I hid my scraps,but nothing too serious.
But I kind of liked Italianwomen.
They were sexy, they weredifferent, they were exotic, and
(26:12):
so I would have to.
If I met an Italian girl Iwould have to go down into the
hill or the court, ride my bikedown there.
Well, it so happened, I datedone girl, went down to her
(26:33):
neighborhood, saw her in herhouse and at a certain time we
were in her garage and a certaintime she came to me and she
said you have to go now.
I said, well, it's still, it'sonly o'clock, what's going on?
(26:54):
And she said you got to go now.
And I look out the door and Isee a group of these dudes and
one of the dudes is herboyfriend and he is in the gang.
(27:17):
So I got on my bike my one bikeI ever had that got stolen and
I tore my ass out of that garageand got all the way back to my
house and still, you know,wanted to see her.
But she was the girlfriend ofthis guy and I'm going to tell
(27:40):
you I've looked this guy up onFacebook and this guy wound up
being a major MF-er in Vegas andis long gone for life.
So next day I got to go toschool and I go to school with
(28:03):
all these guys and, like I said,the Irish, we didn't run in
gangs, we just made friends withwhoever.
And I was walking down astairwell with my books in
between classes and, about, I'llsay, four guys, four Italian
(28:28):
dudes, caught me in a stairwelland they started pushing me,
yelling at me, talking about thegirl, and I know I'm dead.
(28:49):
I'm a dead man.
These guys are going to fuck meup, they're going to kick the
shit out of me.
So I'm screwed.
But here's a funny part of thisstory.
Remember the show Happy Dayswith Richie Cunningham and the
Fonz and all that stuff?
A couple of nights before thisincident happened in the
stairwell, happy Days was on andRichie Cunningham, ron Howard,
(29:18):
he's not a fighter, he's a nerdykind of kid and he gets into a
situation where a bunch of guysare going to beat him up and he
knows he can't fight.
And I remember the scene.
He just went fucking berserk,he like ripped his shirt open,
(29:41):
he he started throwing shit, hestarted yelling and he just went
like psycho.
And I'm looking at these dudesand I'm like, my God, I'm Richie
Cunningham, it's my only wayout.
So I'm standing there with mybooks in my hands and I take the
(30:04):
books and I smash them againstthe wall, I rip my shirt open, I
start going fucking crazy howI'm going to kill you, I'm going
to fucking stab you, I am goingto, yeah.
And I just keep going.
And I see these guys arefucking scared.
They think I'm nuts, I'msweating, I'm spitting, I'm
(30:27):
cursing, I'm pacing, I'mgoingitting, I'm cursing, I'm
pacing, I'm going to killsomebody.
And they all backed down.
They all backed down.
Actually, in the end a coupleof dudes came up to me, a couple
of Italian guys, and said look,man, I got no problem with you.
I just want you to know it wasJoey's girl, not my girl.
(30:49):
I don't have nothing to do withit.
And I thought that was so funny.
I really never saw her againbecause I was too scared to go
down there, but never had anymore problems with the Italian
(31:11):
guys.
Most of them went on to becomerespectable citizens, as they
probably always were, just beingkids, and I guess my point is
this is that back then there wasdivisions in our culture and
(31:37):
our society, as there are now,but when the young kids look at
it, they see a different world.
They see divisions among gaysand straights and transgenders
and illegal immigrants.
(32:00):
We saw the world as Irish,italian, polish, black, white,
rich, middle-class, poor.
But in the end, in mygeneration, we all came together
(32:25):
and we're just all American now.
We all came together and we'rejust all American now.
You know Other than St Patrick'sDay, or you know the Sopranos.
We're just all consideredAmerican and my hope is that
(32:54):
this generation now that drawsthese distinct lines between
different ages of people,different backgrounds of people,
different sexual identities ofpeople, they all just cool down,
take it easy, because, you know, 30 years we're all going to be
Americans again and there'll bea new wave of who knows what
(33:16):
and we'll all piss on them for awhile and then they'll become
Americans too.
That's my hope.
My name's John.
I hope you liked it and have agreat day.
See you next time.
Hey, it's me.
I've been off the air for awhile.
It was a mistake because I lostmy credit card that paid for
the Buzz Sprout platform that Ipublish on Lost it cancelled.
It found it ten minutes after Icancelled it and every account
(00:23):
that I had automatic paymentsfor were discontinued, budsprout
being one of them, and I kindof lost it.
I was like, eh, I'm not thatinterested.
You know, some people arelistening.
I got a few hundred people, butsome people that I know friends
of mine wanted to hear more.
(00:45):
So I was like, okay, I've heardit three, four times, I'll put
one out there.
I got a list of stuff to talkabout.
But the thing is I listen to alot of Baby Boomer podcasts and
(01:05):
I watch YouTube and of BabyBoomer podcasts and I watch
YouTube and watch Baby Boomerstuff and it's mostly nostalgia,
memorabilia, partridge Family,the Monkees, banana Bikes,
drive-ins and that stuff's cool,it was great, it was memorable,
(01:27):
I did it all.
But there's a different side tothe 60s, 70s baby boomer
generation that really kind ofgets overlooked and not covered.
That really kind of getsoverlooked and not covered.
And if you've listened to mypast podcast, you hear that edge
(01:50):
of the baby boomers and I'm nottalking about baby boomers that
were born in the 50s.
They had their own set ofcharacteristics.
There's almost like twoseparate generation of baby
boomers at all Really came fromthe fathers and families that
(02:12):
fought in World War II and Korea, and I'm just part of that
later leg of baby boomers bornin 1960.
Of baby boomers born in 1960.
And it was a whole differentexperience.
If you lived in a Rust Beltnortheastern city and you didn't
(02:38):
participate in the massmigration to the suburbs and
your dad was a steel worker oran auto worker, you know it
didn't really have a lot to dowith TV shows and fads and
(03:03):
kabonkers, those balls that youwould clack together and yo-yos
and bicycles.
It had a lot more to do withdrugs.
It had a lot more to do withstruggling through a working
(03:31):
class economy.
It had a lot more to do withfactories being shut down and it
was different than the babyBoomers are portrayed.
So if I have any youngerlisteners that resent Baby
(03:55):
Boomers, this is not an apologyor a poor me or woe is me kind
of thing, but I think you allthink that we just grew up with
a Jaguar in a driveway and wereally didn't, man.
We hit a friggin war to fightor trying to avoid.
I was too young for Vietnam, butit was really present in my
(04:18):
life, in my neighborhood.
Many of my friends' fatherswere there.
Many guys that lived on theblock had to go there and in
between I guess I'm watching thePartridge family, you know.
But it wasn't all roses andbubblegum and Mary Poppins.
(04:43):
It was edgy but it was fun andI learned a lot For my baby
boomer friends, my age, mydemographic you're going to
recognize some of the stuff Imean.
If you listen to any of my pastpodcasts, you know what I'm
talking about.
I know a lot of you gettriggered by the names of the
(05:11):
drugs, the names of the bandsthat we listen to, rock concerts
and things like that thatreally don't get that much play
in the media when people talkabout baby boomers Okay boomer,
okay boomer.
I heard Bill Maher the otherday say okay, boomer is not a
(05:38):
full sentence.
You just can't depict babyboomers as one distinct group of
people at all.
So I look at today, I look atAmerica, I look at the ethnic
(05:59):
breakdown, the racial breakdown,and I want to tell my younger
listeners again if I have any atall.
I want to tell them look it,man, it was so different in the
60s and 70s.
Ethnic breakdown of Americaright now has more to do with
(06:21):
white, black, latino, whiteblack, latino, arabs, middle
Easterners, mexicans, and thatreally was not what we grew up
with.
We grew up with this as aresult of this wave of Western
(06:45):
European migration to Americathat happened around the turn of
the century, where waves andwaves and waves of people came
to America for a better life andtrying to have kids and raise
families and get decent jobs,much like you know the people
(07:09):
who come to America now.
This is why I don't really havea problem with immigrants
coming here.
I think it's a good thing,because I'm really starkly aware
of my roots and how my familygot here and why they got here
and how much better it was forthem to be here.
(07:30):
So here's what it looked likeback in 1968, 69, 70.
Here's what neighborhoodslooked like.
There was rich neighborhoodsand they were mostly people who
(07:53):
were white and Protestant.
Like they came over on theMayflower and shit like that and
they ran companies and theywere lawyers, and they were big
Mayflower and shit like that andthey ran companies and they
were lawyers and they werebigwigs and stuff like that.
I got to tell you I didn't knowany of them.
I didn't even know about them.
(08:15):
I just knew that I wasn't oneof them.
So that's one group.
I didn't have much affiliationwith them.
Then there was my group, irishCatholic.
We grew up cloistered in ourown little neighborhoods.
We did not know anything aboutanybody.
(08:39):
We didn't know about Jews.
We heard about them, we thoughtthey were somebody from the
Bible.
We didn't know that they.
I didn't grow up in New YorkCity or anything like that.
So you know, I knew one Jewishkid in my life.
He went to a Catholic schoolbecause he was a problem child
and the parents wanted him toget roughed up by the priests.
And I've come to know many Jewsyou know in my life and they're
(09:07):
fine people.
And I've come to know many Jewsyou know in my life and they're
fine people.
And I've had one or two reallygood Jewish friends.
But as a kid I knew nothingabout Jews.
They were just nowhere near us.
As an Irish Catholic kid I grewup with Germans.
Their ethnic identity waspretty much washed out by that
time.
There was one or two Germanrestaurants in town but nobody
(09:31):
really knew much about Germans.
You know, the Germans came over.
They really didn't come overbecause they were poor.
They came over because they hadmoney and they could come here
and make more money.
For the most part we had polishkids.
There was a lot of polishpeople and again, I didn't give
(09:55):
a shit.
I knew that they talkeddifferent, they had a weird
accent and they lived in certainpockets of town and they ate
weird food Like blood tongue andsausage and shit like that.
And we Irish we didn't eatanything.
We had the worst food ofanybody we had in our
(10:21):
neighborhood.
Italians In our neighborhood.
Italians, the Italians and theIrish kind of mixed together a
lot because of the proximity andthe dates of their immigration
to America.
But when we were kids we didn'tknow shit from Irish-Italian.
(10:44):
You guess a football?
Yeah, let's play.
You got a bet.
Couple of minutes, let's play.
You know, we knew their nameswere different, our names were
different, but we didn't give ashit, right, we didn't care.
Puerto Ricans yeah, there was aPuerto Rican pocket in my
(11:06):
neighborhood.
Didn't know shit about them,didn't go down there, they
didn't come here to our place,we just didn't really care.
But of course, in this time, inthis day and age, back then it
didn't matter if you were in adifferent neighborhood or you
(11:28):
were a different ethnic makeupand you were in the wrong place.
You really had to, you know, goto war.
After, into your teenage years,there was African Americans,
(11:49):
but we were so isolated fromthem that I really can tell you
that I never knew a black dudeuntil I was maybe 15.
Where I lived, there was a inour neighborhood.
(12:15):
There was a bridge over therailroad tracks and on the north
side of the bridge is where welived, the Irish, and what we
called the back of the bridgewas black and we didn't go there
(12:36):
and they didn't come over thebridge.
You couldn't go over the bridge.
The schools were segregated.
They were two different cities,so the school system wasn't
connected, but you just didn'tdo that.
If you got into trouble withthe police over some bullshit
(13:00):
when you were a teenager, theywould, instead of arresting you
or taking you home, they woulddrop you, take you over and drop
you on the other side of thebridge and you would have to run
back over that bridge.
They do it to us, the whites,and they do it to the blacks and
it was funny.
It never happened to me, but Iknow a bunch of dudes that it
(13:21):
actually did happen to and youjust hope to get out of there
alive.
But when it comes to the blacksin the 60s and 70s there was a
lot of civil rights stuff goingon.
There was a lot of riots.
I remember hearing about stuffdown in the South.
(13:46):
I remember the Black Panthers.
I remember the riots in SouthCentral Detroit, I believe.
I remember the bombing inPhiladelphia of a black
(14:10):
neighborhood by police.
I remember Angela Davis.
I remember knowing of blackpeople, but then I'd be watching
Bill Cosby on TV, flip Wilsonon TV, right.
So I knew I was supposed to notlike black people, but I never
(14:30):
knew one, so I couldn't not likethem.
And I gotta tell you, man, I amgoing to be completely honest I
grew up in a neighborhood wherethe white people that I grew up
many, many, many of them werevery racist and I heard the
(14:57):
N-word all the time.
I'll tell you one place I neverheard the N-word was in my
house, never from my mother orfather, but I remember cousins
and friends and just being outand having some beers and
somehow it would always comearound to at some point during
(15:19):
the night.
They're gonna start talkingabout blacks and I'd be like I
don't get it.
You know, I'm no pope or saintor anything, I'm just logical.
I'm like you don't even know ablack dude.
What's the friggin' problem?
I just kept my mouth shut andlater in my life I really got to
(15:44):
know.
I opened a medical practice inan inner city neighborhood and
got to know black people in areally wonderful way and I'm so
glad I had that experiencebecause I got to see how
(16:06):
interesting they are, howdifferent they are, what their
values are and how, as a whiteguy, doctor, privileged they
thought I was privileged.
They thought I had been born adoctor or something and I wasn't
that like that.
(16:26):
But they would think that aboutme and then they would catch my
edginess and myI-don't-take-shit-ness and they
really liked it about me.
Eventually I wound up marryinga black woman and to this day
(16:51):
we're married a black woman andto this day we're married and I
have black grandkids and a wholeblack family and I love it and
we get along great.
So black and white like it istoday was really a major thing
and you just didn't go there.
You just kept away.
(17:15):
But you know I'm no hero.
But I just remember when Iworked at the steel plant I met
black dudes.
I was you know like, you're allright or you know what you're
an an asshole.
But I could meet an Irish guy.
That was an asshole.
It didn't really matter to me,it was just the foundation that
(17:40):
my parents gave me where theywould not allow anything like
that to go on in our house andit Anyway, anyway, I want to get
(18:05):
down to the bones of it.
The Italians and the Irish.
We lived together In thebeginning.
We didn't know from nothingItalian Irish.
We didn't know from nothingItalian.
We didn't care.
We went to the same church.
If I brought home an Italiangirl, my mother was not happy
that she was not Irish, but ifshe was Catholic and Italian she
(18:29):
could kind of be alright withit.
I actually married an Italianwoman many, many years ago and
she was a wonderful woman and mymother and father took her into
our family.
But my point is nowadays it'slike you know, the Arabs, the
(18:55):
Russians, this and the we'realways gonna frigging, delineate
different groups and the groupthat got here first is gonna
piss on the group that got hereafter them and it's just corny
bullshit.
So we got the Italians, we'rewith them, but we don't really
(19:21):
know it until we get into, likejunior high Now, the Italian
dudes.
I'm going to tell you right now,I'm going to speak the truth.
I know Italian guys that aredoctors, lawyers, judges, but I
(19:43):
knew a lot of Italian dudes thatwere half mafia, a lot of them.
And so, as a baby boomer and Ihope that a lot of the boomers
that are listening remember thisas a baby boomer, we grew up
(20:08):
with the presence of this entityknown as the Italian mafia, and
it might not have affected youpersonally, but it was out there
and everybody knew somebodythat knew somebody that could
get this done, and it was there.
And where I lived, there was aconcentration of Italian blacks
(20:34):
neighborhoods One was called theHill, one was called the Court.
I got bussed into theneighborhood called the Hill,
where I was one of the onlynon-Italian people there and I
(20:54):
love Italian girls.
They were beautiful, I was asmart ass, I made a lot of
Italian friends, but the olderwe got, the more Italian they
got, and the more Italian theygot and the more American we got
(21:20):
, as the Irish Italian guys usedto run in groups.
They would dress in a certainway, we used to call it the
uniform.
They would dress in a certainway, we used to call it the
uniform, and this would be inschools and in the bars and
clubs and things like that.
And Irish guys really weren'tclicky like that.
(21:42):
We were clicky but we didn'treally identify that much as
Irish.
I heard a guy on a podcast theother day and he told a little
metaphor.
He said a fish is swimming byanother fish and the one fish
(22:03):
says to the other the water isnice today.
And the other fish said what'swater?
That's kind of how the Irishwere.
What's water?
That's kind of how the Irishwere.
We didn't know anything aboutanything other than us.
(22:23):
But I knew one thing Italianscould cook and I got to tell you
the Irish can't cook.
I'm just going to tell you theIrish can't cook.
I'm just going to tell youPotatoes, cabbage stew.
We had to eat fish every Fridayand it was Mrs Paul's fish
(22:47):
sticks and it wasn't real fish.
But the Italians, man, theycould cook.
There was a kid that lived downhere.
He was a good friend of mine,lived a few doors away from me.
His grandparents werefull-blood Italian, didn't speak
English and they lived in adouble up and down and the
grandmother would cook every dayand the grandfather grew grapes
(23:10):
and would make wine.
And the grandfather grew grapesand would make wine and I would
just hang out, starting around4, 4.30 at that house, wait to
smell that sauce, and I wouldget myself invited to dinner
because Italians are veryhospitable, very welcoming, and
I would sit and they would speakin Italian and I would just eat
(23:31):
and I knew they would betalking, speak in Italian and I
would just eat and I knew theywould be talking about me.
He's so skinny, why don't youeat?
Mangia, mangia, mangia.
And I would eat and eat and mymother would be looking for me
yelling out the door where areyou?
Where are you?
It's dinner time.
I'm like, yeah, I'm not goingto eat frigging Wonder Bread and
(23:51):
Velveeta cheese.
I got a frigging homemadeItalian dinner with sauce and
noodles and antipasto and wine,and you know I'm eating there.
So when it came down to it, theItalian boys ganged up.
(24:15):
They were mini-mafia.
They would start with littlestreet gangs.
Their fathers were in the mafiaand the sons would start gangs,
little gangs, in hopes that formany of them in hopes that they
(24:36):
would, you know, become mafiaguys, and many of them hoped to
become doctors and optometristsand plumbers and lawyers.
But they did run in gangs Inthe Irish.
We weren't like that, we wererogue, we didn't know we were
(24:59):
Irish, like I said, but we kindof knew we weren't Italian,
because those boys would come atyou with four or five guys and
there'd always be this tough,loner, motherfucking Irish guy
who was dangerous, a man-childin junior high and freshman in
(25:25):
high school.
But we didn't gather aroundlike, hey, we're Irish.
It wasn't like that.
They were gathered together andwhen they saw a tough kid, an
Irish kid, they would go afterhim in gangs.
(25:47):
Now, I wasn't a tough kid, I wasa skinny little kid, but you
know he fought a lot, he had tofight and had a big mouth.
So you know, I hid my scraps,but nothing too serious.
But I kind of liked Italianwomen.
They were sexy, they weredifferent, they were exotic, and
(26:12):
so I would have to.
If I met an Italian girl Iwould have to go down into the
hill or the court, ride my bikedown there.
Well, it so happened, I datedone girl, went down to her
(26:33):
neighborhood, saw her in herhouse and at a certain time we
were in her garage and a certaintime she came to me and she
said you have to go now.
I said, well, it's still, it'sonly o'clock, what's going on?
(26:54):
And she said you got to go now.
And I look out the door and Isee a group of these dudes and
one of the dudes is herboyfriend and he is in the gang.
(27:17):
So I got on my bike my one bikeI ever had that got stolen and
I tore my ass out of that garageand got all the way back to my
house and still, you know,wanted to see her.
But she was the girlfriend ofthis guy and I'm going to tell
(27:40):
you I've looked this guy up onFacebook and this guy wound up
being a major MF-er in Vegas andis long gone for life.
So next day I got to go toschool and I go to school with
(28:03):
all these guys and, like I said,the Irish, we didn't run in
gangs, we just made friends withwhoever.
And I was walking down astairwell with my books in
between classes and, about, I'llsay, four guys, four Italian
(28:28):
dudes, caught me in a stairwelland they started pushing me,
yelling at me, talking about thegirl, and I know I'm dead.
(28:49):
I'm a dead man.
These guys are going to fuck meup, they're going to kick the
shit out of me.
So I'm screwed.
But here's a funny part of thisstory.
Remember the show Happy Dayswith Richie Cunningham and the
Fonz and all that stuff?
A couple of nights before thisincident happened in the
stairwell, happy Days was on andRichie Cunningham, ron Howard,
(29:18):
he's not a fighter, he's a nerdykind of kid and he gets into a
situation where a bunch of guysare going to beat him up and he
knows he can't fight.
And I remember the scene.
He just went fucking berserk,he like ripped his shirt open,
(29:41):
he he started throwing shit, hestarted yelling and he just went
like psycho.
And I'm looking at these dudesand I'm like, my God, I'm Richie
Cunningham, it's my only wayout.
So I'm standing there with mybooks in my hands and I take the
(30:04):
books and I smash them againstthe wall, I rip my shirt open, I
start going fucking crazy howI'm going to kill you, I'm going
to fucking stab you, I am goingto, yeah.
And I just keep going.
And I see these guys arefucking scared.
They think I'm nuts, I'msweating, I'm spitting, I'm
(30:27):
cursing, I'm pacing, I'mgoingitting, I'm cursing, I'm
pacing, I'm going to killsomebody.
And they all backed down.
They all backed down.
Actually, in the end a coupleof dudes came up to me, a couple
of Italian guys, and said look,man, I got no problem with you.
I just want you to know it wasJoey's girl, not my girl.
(30:49):
I don't have nothing to do withit.
And I thought that was so funny.
I really never saw her againbecause I was too scared to go
down there, but never had anymore problems with the Italian
(31:11):
guys.
Most of them went on to becomerespectable citizens, as they
probably always were, just beingkids, and I guess my point is
this is that back then there wasdivisions in our culture and
(31:37):
our society, as there are now,but when the young kids look at
it, they see a different world.
They see divisions among gaysand straights and transgenders
and illegal immigrants.
(32:00):
We saw the world as Irish,italian, polish, black, white,
rich, middle-class, poor.
But in the end, in mygeneration, we all came together
(32:25):
and we're just all American now.
We all came together and we'rejust all American now.
You know Other than St Patrick'sDay, or you know the Sopranos.
We're just all consideredAmerican and my hope is that
(32:54):
this generation now that drawsthese distinct lines between
different ages of people,different backgrounds of people,
different sexual identities ofpeople, they all just cool down,
take it easy, because, you know, 30 years we're all going to be
Americans again and there'll bea new wave of who knows what
(33:16):
and we'll all piss on them for awhile and then they'll become
Americans too.
That's my hope.
My name's John.
I hope you liked it and have agreat day.
See you next time.
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