Buddy Boys

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Book: Read Buddy Boys for Free Online
Authors: Mike McAlary
hippies. There was an incongruity in his lifestyle. Henry seemed as comfortable smoking a line drive single to center on the baseball diamond as he did partying after the games. Henry batted cleanup on the baseball team and played shortstop. He hit close to .600 in his junior year and spent a lot of time listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young records as a senior. He especially liked a protest song entitled “Chicago”—a song that commemorated the 1968 riots involving young people and Chicago police in a park outside the Democratic National Convention.
    â€œWe can chaaange the world,” Henry would sing, an eight-track tape blasting in his car. “Chi—ca—go. If you bee—lieeve in justice. Chi—ca—go. If you bee—lieeve in free—dom. Chi—ca—go. It’s start—ing …”
    But the thing that Henry Winter loved most about high school was love itself. As a fourteen-year-old sophomore, he met a seventeen-year-old senior named Betsy Bassett at a New Year’s Eve party in his parent’s basement. Henry’s older brother, Bruce, on leave from the Air Force, had invited Betsy and one of her girlfriends to the party. Henry and Betsy milled around a polished pine bar in the basement, chatting quietly over beers while Bruce got drunk with Betsy’s girlfriend upstairs.
    When the party ended, Henry offered to walk Betsy home. But he ran out of sidewalk—she only lived three blocks away—and conversation.
    â€œI was interested,” Henry recalled. “But she was three years older. She seemed bored by the whole idea of me.”
    Three weeks later Betsy invited Henry to a high school sorority dance. Sometime during the night, she suggested that Henry join a fraternity. At first he balked at the idea—he didn’t see much sense in hanging out with other guys when he could be dating girls—but he later joined a frat in order to pacify his new girlfriend.
    Winter, who even years later rarely hung out with other cops while off-duty, came to be regarded by the brothers of Alpha Omega Theta as one of their sorriest pledges. He refused to be hit with a paddle, never shined anyone’s shoes, and rarely brought seniors their coffee and bagels in the morning. One time the brothers succeeded in holding Winter down and paddling him for refusing to get a haircut. A week later, when the brothers threatened to paddle their long-haired pledge again, Winter quit the fraternity.
    â€œIt was either my ass or my hair,” he recalled. “I decided to keep both.”
    In the process, Henry lost Betsy Bassett. She graduated that summer, leaving Flower Power Hank to patrol the high school parking lot by himself.
    With Vietnam pounding in the distance, seventeen-year-old Henry Winter decided in 1968 that he would join the Army along with several high school buddies who had been drafted. The family threw a going-away party for him, bestowing on him a knapsack-load of address books, razors, and shaving cream. At 7 A.M . the next morning, Henry’s mother dropped him off at the Army recruiting station in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn. Henry was met by fourteen other scared-looking inductees and a muscle-bound sergeant with a square jaw.
    â€œWe are your mothers now, and anyone who doesn’t want to stay here can leave,” the sergeant roared, pointing towards the door.
    Henry turned and made eye contact with a black recruit standing next to him.
    â€œI don’t want to be here,” the black teenager said.
    â€œI’ve got to stay,” Henry whispered. “They had a party for me and everything.”
    The two teenagers smiled, then walked out the front door, taking their address books, razors, and shaving cream home, missing the Vietnam War. Henry hitchhiked back to Valley Stream and threw himself a welcome-home party.
    An Army recruiter continued to call his home for the next few days, but neither Henry nor his parents, who

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