Boston Patriot Mom
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James Oliver Smith, Jr.
As the 46th Superbowl game between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants approaches there is one person who comes to mind: a woman in Chelsea, Massachusetts who was the mother of twin teenaged girls I grew close to in the early seventies. Now, to be honest, I haven't really paid all that much attention to American football in my life, but this was one time that football did worm its way into my consciousness. The twin's mother was an avid fan of football and a strong supporter of the Boston Patriots in particular. I was still a teenager, not long out of high school myself. I was alone in a big city, 3000 miles away from Richland, Washington where I graduated from high school in 1969. For a brief period, I found myself in the midst of a family like I had never seen before. I was mesmerized.
This was a time when you could count the number of Superbowls on the fingers of one hand. The home town team was the Boston Patriots of the American Football League, which didn't even have a stadium that they could call their own. They used Harvard's stadium, which wasn't maintained for the Patriots. I can remember pictures in the Boston Herald-Tribune of fans congregating at Harvard stadium before a game to sweep the snow off of the bleachers. Football was having difficulty getting established in the Boston sports market. It was a distant presence that languished in the shadow of the perennially winning Boston Celtics, The 1967 "Impossible Dream" Boston Red Sox, and the 1970 Stanley Cup champion Bruins.
My initial awareness of the Boston Patriots was in the sports apparel department of the Jordan Marsh and Co. store downtown, where I worked as a "checker", counting ("checking") the contents of boxes as they came in off the truck dock. It was my first job and my first union: Teamsters Local 25. I wasn't particularly drawn to the Patriot logo, which at the time was the image of an American Revolutionary Patriot crouching over a football and staring ahead with a clenched face (http://www.sportslogos.net/logo.php?id=mai5x890dxwev24s3zoiofv7s). It was just there, like the Patriots themselves. But because I considered myself a Bostonian at the time (and still do, in many respects), I was proud of all sports teams associated with the city. However, the Patriots seemed to be hanging on by a thread.
As with most sports markets, if a team is not doing well, or does not have a "home" to play in, there is always the threat that the franchise could leave. This is where the Boston Patriot Mom comes in, the twin's mother. They lived in Chelsea, a town just across the "Mystic Bridge" from Boston, nestled in between Charlestown, Revere and East Boston. This woman's energy and passions far exceeded what was needed to raise two girls. She was a political fireball taking on a local projects in and around Chelsea, as well as challenges throughout the Boston metroplex.
Close to home she was embroiled in a continuous conflict with the discount store behind their house. The exact location of the boundary between her backyard and the discount store was in dispute and she was going to take the struggle to whatever level was needed. She was tenacious and definitely gave me the impression that she enjoyed the challenge. She was proud of her family, her house, her city (Chelsea) and the Boston metropolitan area and she expended a great deal of effort and intensity on all causes that she felt justified her indignation and support. As a football fan, she was intent on ensuring that the Patriots would remain in the Boston area, so when there were protests, fund raisers and other opportunities to express her support, she was there in full force.
This unbounded energy was fascinating to me and I witnessed it first hand numerous times. I spent a number of evenings at the twin's house enjoying the Polish stuffed cabbage (golabki, "gawWHOMkee") that she enjoyed making. After supper, she would pull out her accordian and start playing polkas, with every bit as much zest as she poured into her various missions to bring justice and pride to her family, city and state.
This was all new to me, this fierce loyalty to family and community. My life growing up was a continuous stream of moves and isolation. The concept of "family" and "community" were abstract places on a map I had never seen. The road was my home and Boston was the first place I had lived where people actually seemed to be proud of their connection with a place, across multiple generations. I was a teenager like the twins. They were still in high school and I was just out of high school. I was from the far west, away from home and working in downtown Boston. The twins were at home, close to their mother and not quite ready to take on a relationship. Nonetheless, their mother seemed to welcome me warmly into her home and I experienced the joy of a family comfortable in its place, not simply anxious to move on to the next place.
On those evenings I heard the stories of legal wrangling with the nearby by discount store over the backyard boundary and I listened to empassioned reasoning on why the Boston Patriots needed to stay in the Boston area. I was swept up in the world of the twins and their mother and it made me feel, if only for a moment, that I belonged somewhere. Ultimately, the gulf between almost graduated from high school for the twins and having just graduated from high school was too large for me to bridge. Regardless of how exotic I may have been to the mother, I was a man, away from home, with a job and place of my own. I was in a strange no man's land where I was too old and too young at the same time. My youthful ignorance, inexperience and circumstances took me away from the twins and their mother and I ended up leaving Boston, never to return again to live.
I did visit Chelsea fifteen years later when I attended a technical course in Boston. I reconnected with the twins and their mother. We exchanged stories of marriages, children, relationships, careers and feelings, but most of all we talked about that time we all shared together in the upstairs kitchen, eating golabki, dancing the polka and listening to the mother's adventures in saving the house, fighting city hall and keeping the Patriot's in Boston. It was an important piece of myself growing up. Although I wasn't there long enough to make up for the childhood lost, I was able to get a glimpse of something I needed, even fifteen years later. Those images and stories of the Boston Patriots will always represent the substance and warmth of that Chelsea mother on fire with purpose and pride.
I have since connected with the twins on Facebook and I can see the same determined pride in Chelsea that I saw in their mother. Watching the news of the New England Patriots once again finding their way to the Superbowl is a testimony to the efforts of that mother and I am convinced that I witnessed the planting of the seeds of a team that would grow into the force that it is today. The twin's mother died back in the '90s, before the first Patriots Superbowl win, but Superbowl XLVI will carry with it that presence of the Boston Patriots Mom I watched in action so many years before.
... il matto ...
josjr (2012 0204)
