Back in the 1960's our neighborhood was like that. We actually knew very little aobut each other's private livesin any intimate sense, but the families knew who had what skills.

There was a period when the cities began burning out the neighborhoods. Only the race riots got historically recorded. All the other burnings such as the burning of North Village in Webster, Massachusetts alongside the burning of Bondsville and followed by the burning of Holyoke and many others across the country were not recorded, but we were at war for survival.

I grew up in North Village. It was such a purely Catholic village that my mother did not have to set an alarm clock for holy days since she knew she would hear the neighbors leaving for the Irish church whose services were earlier than our French, and the others in the neighborhood were either in our parish, the Irish, or the Polish.

New Year's morning, about 3 am, she thought she heard the neighbors and began to wake up to get us all up for Mass, but discovered that it was not the banging of a door, but the explosions of buildings that she heard.

We woke and the neighbors gathered as we watched the mills near our houses go up in flames, and the men organized a watch on our roofs with garden-hoses while the women gathered with the rosary in our livingroom.  There were three or four rosary circles in the various tenements while the men got up on the roofs, and the fire department came through to tell us they would not try to save our houses and we must leave.

I remember my father's back blocking the door as he argued with them. I could not believe my 11-yr-old ears and I understood what the adults were saying when they turned and said "we won't leave" and the prayer ring was set up while mother and brother and I gathered some things in preparation in case we do leave.  I remember picking up a statuette of John-John saluting and packing it while my little brother cried because he could not fit his racing-car set into the bag mother gave him.

The fire raged out of control for a week. Barricades were put up around our neighborhood, and we thought they were just to keep sight-seers out but when my father drove my little brother and me to Mass, leaving my mother and big brother to hold the house, and all the men were emphatic we were going to Mass although I don't remember that they met to speak, only to show each family's face...

When we were going home the police sauntered out to the middle of the street of the barricade and stopped my father and said we would not be allowed in. He showed his license and said "my wife and son are there, let me get them" and the police said "no" and my father was a gentle quiet man but I saw a look of angry disbelief on his face as he repeated and the cop laughed and repeated, and then my dad leaned around and told my brother and me to get down behind the seat and he backed up, then he sped forward through the barricade that was on North Main Street, and I poked my head over the windowsill enough to see the surprised cop jump sidways, and thought we would grab my mother and brother and keep driving, but when we got home dad said we are staying.

There were lots of meetings that week and us kids sent upstairs whenever new adults showed up, and dad and neighbors he never socialized with were standing in the yards talking like brothers, and one time after a lot of yelling with some men and my dad yelling about no violence, he then came up stairs with a shot-gun and shoved it to the back of the closet and turned to my brother and me and said "don't touch that, don't speak of it, we will not keep it long and we will not have to use it!"

My little brother and I were enrolled in new riflery classes set up in the basement of the boys' club and I got a marksmanship certificate. I don't remember when the shot-gun disappeared from the closet, but we never did use it and one day it was not there, and we never spoke of the question of why it was suddenly ok to use the rifles provided by the boys' club, because we were a pacifist family, things just seemed to be happening on their own momentum.

We survived. OUr parish made it through a bare handful more years before the betrayal of the parishes by our own church did what the flames and threats failed to do to destroy our community, but I know that you are right Matthew, today people are not prepared, yet how prepared were we, back then? We were taken completely by surprise when our own gov't began to burn down our towns.

Too many of us have held our silence about this history of surviving an all-out war against us, letting the media spin its mythology while we always believed that somehow our old world would re-appear, as waking from a bad dream.

Amazing story!  
 :read-paper:

If you go into old archives of newspapers, in libraries that carry microfiche collections, you should find the reports. "The Webster Times" and the "Worcester Telegram/Gazette" as well as the "Boston Globe" would be places to look: January 1969.  There may be old television footage, too.

The National Guard used the ruins of the neighborhood for training exercises after that. My brother and I watched from the back yard while some of the less over-protected kids went down and played the role of insurgents for the guardsmen.  There are probably records of that available from local military historians.

You won't find much online. Most of that type of docuмentation doesn't seem to get included when old papers are digitized..... But if you dig you will find personal histories, collections among old-news hobbyists, etc.

The fires seemed to be co-incidental with the establishment of HUD, and the "Urban Renewal" programs, because the owners of the mills all got insurance money and the natural villages that had grown around active (and unionized) factories were replaced with housing projects and some new factories, but nothing like what was destroyed.

The owners were moving the textile industry briefly into the old slave states of the South and from there quickly went overseas, leaving the new welfare culture behind them in both regions.

We need to continuously meet as individuals and side-step the political puppetmasters who want to drive us to-and-fro that way. The pupppet-masters, which includes Catholic charity groups, want us to look at categories of peole as "voiceless" and let the self-anointed leaders tell people where to live.

They are disenfranchising most of the population in the process.

One of the interesting things about the suburb mentality is that they are suffering hugely now because of their ethic of preventing bus and pedestrian-friendly development. They are growing older, finding it hard to drive, keep up with expenses, their local towns have to keep roads up, etc and I just laugh at their complaints in my heart. I don't laugh at their hardship, but I laugh at the fact that they asked for it. And the tax-ploy of "gentrification" is biting them in the butt now that they are all going to be as poor as the rest of us!

I am so glad I did not grow up in the suburbs.

Dr. E. Michael Jones discusses this exact thing in his book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.
http://www.culturewars.com/books.htm

I don't really recommend much else from him as his Catholic understanding is out of whack but the above is a solid piece of scholarship.

Andy

why do you say he is out-of-whack?

(the Catholic church has disenfranchised ALL spanish-surnamed people with its insistence on identifying them ALL as immigrants! FYI: Like us French Catholics, they were here BEFORE the Irish and Anglo slave-keepers, after all!).

he :applause:re here

The reason that he softened his stance against trad catholics is because they are now the only ones who will listen to him, buy his books, and have him do speaking engagements. The novus ordo establishment that he used to defend so vigorously will have nothing to do with him. Heh!