For my last year and a half of college, I worked at Caradona’s Liquor store in the Cobbs Corner shopping Plaza in Canton, Massachusetts. It had moved from its original location in the downtown district to its new, larger location to expand its size and selection, and would be where three towns met. It sold Beverages ranging from those wanted by people who drank out of need or on a regular basis, to those for people with more discriminating tastes, and sold more high end product that any other “Packie” in the area.
Packie, for those unfamiliar with it, is derived from the term “package store” used for liquor stores in places like Massachusetts because liquor purchased in stores must be packaged in sealed bottles or other containers unlike that sold in bars and restaurants.
The store’s devoted customers had stayed loyal, mainly because prices were low and there was a hang out atmosphere that had been created in the original, smaller location, and was carried over to the new. When they would come in, many customers visited with the owner and management, as well as employees and other customers, sometimes staying to enjoy a smoke when smoking indoors was still allowed before, during, and after purchasing their beverages, and many had their own routines that included having their supplies ready as they came in on a regular schedule, and in one case having the case of beer left outside the rear delivery door where the customer would retrieve it, slipping the payment under the door because he had a position in town that he feared might be looked at negatively if people knew he enjoyed beer.
Every Thursday an employee from a nearby electrical component factory would pull up front, and while he visited with the people at the store, one employee would carry a case of Dawson Ale out to his car, the door was left unlocked, because his wound from World War II had made walking while carrying heavy objects difficult.
If it was Thursday and 4:00 p.m., someone went to the walk-in cooler, got the case, and brought it up front.
These regular customers all had stories, and eventually I heard all of them.
After a year and a half, I said good-bye to Caradona’s and went out West to take a full time substitute teaching position in Richmond, California, a move that started a career teaching on both coasts and in the middle for the length of my career until retirement brought me back to Massachusetts and my present home in New Bedford.
I moved to New Bedford because it as affordable. Living on Social Security and the small retirement I had been granted as a result of winning a court case against the administrators of the Oklahoma City Public Schools District would have allowed a comfortable living had I stayed in Oklahoma with its lower cost of living, but in Massachusetts with its higher cost of living, that was not the case.
New Bedford is on the South Coast of the state, an area that is too often treated like the State’s bastard child as Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, located in the center of the state with the turnpike running through them as it crosses the length of the state, get more attention. Although New Bedford and Fall River existed when I was growing up, there had been no real reason for me, or most people I knew, to go there. So my choice of location was a more monetary one than one based on desire.
It turned out to be a good choice.
I found a nice apartment in a building near the downtown district, surrounded by history.
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To become more familiar with my new city, besides volunteering at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, I downloaded a book on the history of New Bedford written by Daniel Ricketson, more because it was a free download as opposed a carefully analyzed choice.
As I was to find out, the Ricketsons were a prominent family in 19th Century New Bedford who counted among their friends and visitors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom I had covered during my teaching career when I had American Literature classes, as well as prominent abolitionists, among them Frederick Douglass. The history was based more on reminiscence than research with the author speaking about persons, places, and things he had known and encountered in a city whose growth and change he witnessed firsthand.
Because of my being connected on social media with people with an interest in comparing the old city with the new, posting pictures of historic buildings, comparing what they looked like in their heyday with how they look today, or what now stood where they had once been, I was able to see a picture from 1893 of the house that had once stood where my building stands now.
At the time of the picture the home had been owned by that Daniel Ricketson whose book I had read when I first came to the city while sitting in my apartment in the building that sits on the plot where that house had stood.
An odd, unknown, and, one could say, eerie connection.
Not long after this layer of the onion was peeled away, I emailed the picture to the owners of the building who, as it turned out, were not aware of that particular bit of history, and who had never seen a picture of the structure their building had replaced somewhere around 1920. When I mentioned the odd connection between myself and the author of the history of the city to some multi-generational locals, and after describing the building and its location, I was informed that the building actually had a name familiar to them, The Dawson.
It was enough that now, when asked where my apartment is, I can simply give a name rather than describing the building and the nearest cross streets, but another layer of the onion was peeled off when mentioning my “discovery” to the building manager, he informed me that it had been called that because the owner of a local, now defunct brewery, Dawson Brewing Company, had built it as available housing for his employees, and that the original sign was sitting in the storage area of the basement.
In my retirement I live in the building that had originally been built by the owners of a brewing company for their employees who would have brewed and bottled the ale that I had brought out to the customer’s car until my teaching career began, if Prohibition had not forced that plan to be abandoned as the brewery closed until repeal which necessitated the building’s sale, and in which I had read, as my introduction to the history of New Bedford, a book by the owner of the house which was torn down to build it.
The Dawson Brewery was reopened in 1933 after the repeal of Prohibition, was sold in 1967 to Rheingold which continued the brand, and closed in 1977, with the largely empty building burning down in 1999.
Since coming to town I have been frequenting a local bar on a regular basis, and when I mentioned all these connections in a casual conversation recently, the retired firefighter I have spoken to often told me about having been on one of the crews that fought that fire.
So a circle has been completed beginning with a minor weekly task related to a small brewery’s not so great local product, and coming around, after a 40 year adventure of teaching, politics, and a small measure of history making involving many people, both famous and not so famous, to me unknowingly choosing an apartment connected to that small task.