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get upset when I think of what one person did to a community such as South Boston. The judge’s grand experiment failed, and who was left to pay the price? You could not understand what it was like unless you lived there and saw a proud town condemned by busing. If I have strong feelings on certain issues, I have a right to. I was there and lived through those times. I have seen the results of forced busingand more recently, forced housing. Where did they want to start these programs? With the poor people, of course, forcing the poor people to move out and let the minorities move in. The neighborhood went downhill and nobody got along anymore. The people of South Boston had the will of others forced upon them. Because of the actions of others, they were the ones who had to leave their schools and their houses. A true South Bostonian is someone whose family has been there for two, three, or four generations; anyone else is an interloper. Today, sadly, South Boston is just a shell of its former self. And that is all a result of busing, the grand experiment that destroyed a once grand community.
    Things were rough all over Southie during those years. In 1974, a cop got beat up at the Rabbit Inn in South Boston and the TPF determined the patrons in the Inn had done it. TPF went into the bar in full riot gear, with their badges covered, and proceeded to use their sap gloves to whale on everyone there. When they started to whale on Eddie Crow, a regular at the Rabbit Inn who had braces on both legs, Flash Flaherty, another regular at the bar, dove on top of Eddie to protect him and ended up getting whaled on mercilessly. That was what was going on in South Boston, not just in the schools, but in the bars and on the streets.
    Even though there was never a day at the high school without at least one fight, it wasn’t a tough job for me. I could handle the fights and liked being around my friends. And besides, I could watch out for Pam. After the incident with Mikey Faith, they put metal detectors at the front door. But the black kids would take one or two teeth out of their Afro picks, put the picks between their fingers, and use them to punch kids. Unlike the black kids, the white kids weren’t using weapons. They just used their hands. They would walk up to a black kid and crack him and start fighting. But the black kids were scared for their lives, and doing what they could to protect themselves.
    It was a tough year for all the kids. You had white kids who were madbecause no education was going on and their school and college plans were being destroyed. Attendance was way down every day. Kids were boycotting the teams, so all sports were canceled for the year. The parents who could afford it sent their kids to private schools, while some kids just quit and hung out, doing nothing during the day. Even though senior year was ruined for most kids, somehow they did manage to have a graduation. No more than twelve black kids came to graduation, but when one black kid went up to get his diploma, a white kid took off his mortarboard cap and whipped it at his head like a Frisbee.
    During that year, my brother Johnny kept speaking to John Marquandt, the dean of admissions at Harvard, about my attending Harvard. I guess the folks at Harvard thought it would be special if three brothers from the projects went there, so the dean arranged it so I would spend a year at prep school. If my grades were good enough, I’d get a full scholarship to Harvard in September 1976. I got a scholarship to the Commonwealth School, an academically demanding private school for grades 9 to 12 in Boston, and left my job at South Boston High to start at the prep school in September 1975. I moved out of the apartment with my friends and back to Pilsudski Way.
    But things didn’t work out so great for me at the coed prep school. First of all, I was nineteen then, and the kids in my classes were sixteen or seventeen, and had been there since the