BSO
Saturday, January 12, 2013
FIRE!
This investment firm on King Street used to be a big old rambling yellow dump of an apartment complex that was one of the most notorious party houses in Hamp around 1980. Oh if those walls could talk! They would tell of the building's less elegant but more fun filled days when Northampton used to be known as a rowdy, stoney, bohemia. It still is if you know where to look. That was before the bankers, the yuppies and the rich New Yorker's took over.
The Shelburne Falls coffee joint next door used to be the Jim Dandy chicken shack. Does the Jim Dandy chain even still exist? I don't think so. It was an unsuccessful offshoot of Friendly's and at one time there were outlets in Hamp, Westfield, Springfield and perhaps elsewhere.
My main memory of the Jim Dandy chicken franchise is during a particularly druggy period when I was living in Mason Square, which is the black ghetto in Springfield. One time I recall I was sitting and waiting to do a deal in the Jim Dandy located in the Square because my nearby apartment was under surveillance. With me was my partner in the transaction, a junkie with a five year old daughter. The girl was the cutest little thing and smart too, as she kept stealing the fried clams I was eating. She had never tried fried clams before but instantly loved them from her first bite, distracting me with her clever patter and cute smile and all the while swiping the clams. I remember thinking at the time, "Kid, you deserve better role models than us," and I felt sorry for her and let her eat all the clams. That was a few decades ago, and I wonder where that girl that charmed me out of my Jim Dandy fried clams is now?
Hope you're okay kid, wherever you are.
In the 1980's and 90's there were repeated scandals in Springfield over unproven claims that the Springfield Redevelopment Authority was allegedly burning down their own properties for the insurance money. It was nothing compared to the earlier scandals about unproven allegations over the allegedly set fires that leveled whole sections of Holyoke, but still bad enough for Valley Advocate reporter Al Giordano to rephrase Springfield's motto as "The City of Arsoned Homes." Of course when discussing political corruption in Western Mass the terms "unproven" and "alleged" are employed purely for legal reasons, not because anyone really wonders whether they are true.
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3 comments:
OX used to hang around with the Dairy Mart pine point gang with butch wildes, pete kibee and others...i remember his name spray painted on each side of the stairs on Balliet school..."o" on one side and "X" on the other
The Pine Pointer you are thinking of is Ox Shebolt, not McCarthy, although Shebolt was almost as crazy.
who knew..two nuts with the same nickname...Shebolt had quite a past too...good catch!! Long time ago...
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