Tenement Dwellers: Anecdotes and Tales from the Old Neighborhood, Lawrence - My Hometown

Publisher Marketing: Tenement Dwellers is the second volume of anecdotes from my series of books about the old neighborhood and growing up in a collapsing, forgotten industrial mill town along the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Lawrence, Massachusetts was my hometown. It was seven square miles of three-decker tenement houses, housing projects, kids and congestion. It was schoolyards, churches, smokestacks, pool halls, back alleys, barrooms and mile after mile of abandoned, redbrick mill buildings. Life was difficult trying to raise oneself in such an environment. As I said in my first volume, "Just Hangin' Out, Ma," thank God for the street corners of Lawrence, Mass. and hangin' out. My best times growing up in the 40's, 50's and 60's in Lawrence were those many hours spent with my childhood buddies hangin' out on the street corners, shooting hoops in the schoolyards and just idling here and there. Lawrence was a forgotten town and we were its offspring. We were not only forgotten; we were ignored and avoided. But in that abandonment we kids found companionship and camaraderie. We discovered the intricacies of friendship, breaking chops and having fun. I have no definition of the term love other than friendship. I learned it as a tenement dweller hanging on the periphery of a social disaster with my buddies. I learned it hiding from the cold in a stranger's hall way, sitting on the wall up at the Howard playstead, shooting hoops under a streetlight or going out of my way to walk a buddy halfway home in a snow storm on a late evening. I've had a good life, making friends wherever I've gone and I'm still at it. Enjoy this book, my friends. If you don't learn anything from it, I do hope you at least get a few laughs. Contributor Bio:  Noble, Richard Edward Richard Edward Noble was raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He attended St. Rita's grammar school in Lawrence, Central Catholic high school also in Lawrence, Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill and Merrimack College in North Andover. His mother and father and grandparents - on both sides of the family - were Lawrence textile workers. Richard lived in Lawrence until the age of twenty-seven and then migrated to Fort Lauderdale, Florida where he met his wife Carol. Richard and Carol have been a team for over forty years. Richard has been a truck driver, a butcher, a beef boner, a beef breakdown man, a dishwasher, an oysterman, a fruit picker, a restaurant manager, a chef, a small butcher shop owner, a Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman, a fry cook, a broiler man, an expediter, a restaurant line boss, a hole digger, a swill collector for a pig farm, a raw bar man, a sous-chef, a tomato sorter, a sander in a spray paint factory and the owner/operator of an ice cream parlor and sandwich shop in Carrabelle, Florida. These experiences and many more were published in Hobo-ing America - A workingman's tour of the U. S. A. and other works by this author. Richard is now retired and working as a writer. He writes fiction, non-fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry. He published a column in a local newspaper. In 2007 he received a first place award for humor from the Florida Press Association for this column. Richard has a variety of interests - philosophy, history, politics, the American and world labor movements, economics, poetry, music, biography, autobiography and the unique history of Lawrence, Massachusetts.