Breakfast With Polito

Off the record.

This morning I had breakfast at good ol' Jake's in downtown Northampton.



Jake's has been around as long as I can remember. I used to eat there with my co-partiers every morning after all night stoner film festivals at the Calvin Theater next door. Usually I was coming down on psychedelics, which was fine as long as I didn't look at the food too closely, lest I see paisly designs on the pancakes and squiggly things in the orange juice. It was the reverse of what William S. Burroughs called a naked lunch, where "everyone can see what's on the end of every fork." And of course he wasn't really talking about food.

My breakfast companion this morning was Jim Polito, the former WGGB-TV 40 investigative reporter. For somebody who's unemployed, he's in good spirits.



Polito still has his Channel 40 jacket, although he's revised it by replacing the WGGB logo with a Harley-Davidson one. He still has the motorcycle cop insignia given to him by the Springfield police.



Unfortunately, the best stuff we talked about over breakfast had to be off the record, at least for the time being. Of course there's a time and a place for everything, and what comes around goes around.

While we were eating, Northampton Mayor M. Clare Higgins stopped in. She saw me and waved, but failed to recognise Polito, although she ended up sitting right behind him.



Later, Polito gave me a ride to UMass, as he was heading north anyway to visit his parents in Worcester. Although I was going to the library, Polito dropped me off at the Fine Arts Center because cars are not allowed on the campus itself. Polito said when he used to do stories at UMass, he would drive on the campus using a special news reporter sign he would put in the window. Having no futher use for it, he gave it to me as a collectors item.



Perhaps I will think of some mischievous use for it. In fact, you know I will.

Finally, I had lunch recently with an old friend who brought up the former Hotel Charles in downtown Springfield. I recalled that I once acted in a gay porn film there back in the 1980's. I got paid one hundred dollars and in two kinds of buds:




That led to a conversation about the Springfield Redevelopment Authority of that era, what happened to a lot of their properties, and whether that was based on an example set by Holyoke. So many things that I know to be true but that I can't talk about in public because I can't prove them. One thing that can be said about the SRA and its director Dom Sarno (relative of the current mayor) is that millions were found to be missing and it could never be determined where it had went. The State Auditor said he had never seen such bookkeeping in his entire career!

But it was something else that only insiders would fully understand that inspires me to dedicate the following song to the Springfield Redevelopment Authority and the many unofficial ways it may have helped to transform Springfield.