I was born in Cambridge at the former "Baby Hospital" - Cambridge City Hospital (many in Somerville were) and I spent the first few years of life in a two family on College Avenue over looking Tufts University in Somerville, MA before mi mum and dad followed Dwight D's new highway system to the burbs alongside Rt. 128 in the mid 60's (nice way of saying "white flight" out of the urban city)!!I lived in Wakefield, MA for most of mi "yout" but spent many a weekday and most weekend's visiting mi grandmothers...one who lived in Somerville and worked for the City of Somerville School Department and the other who lived in West Medford but worked at the ole Fannie Farmer candy store in Davis Square-Somerville, MA.
Somerville has changed so much from when I was a wee lad growing up and going to the Somerville Theatre in the 70's, to when I opened up my first real estate business in Davis Square in the mid 80's and then moved it's location to the top of Winter Hill in the early 90's, to the 2000's when it became a mecca for educated kid's, young couples, creative individual's, baby boomers & the PDS:>) looking for that urban stimulation that I mentioned about in a below post.
The Somerville/Charlestown gang wars of the 60's are way behind us..and most of the Wintah Hill boy's from the 70's, 80's & 90's are either dead or in prison..Howie Winter is stilll around but livin' quietly - their notoriety mostly just of Somerville folklore now with discussion about them pretty much confined to the various veteran's posts and townie bars that have become fewer and fewer in Somerville as the years pass!
I still remember Buddy McLean's (seen above) brother Mike drinking at Khoury's State Spa (home to my first eveah running event in 1992) every morning at the Spa with all the other ole timers who used to fill it every morning -old man Khoury long dead himself!.
Anyway, Somerville is no longer called Slummerville, Scummerville...in years past if you told a gal you met at a pub in Boston that you were from "The Ville"..you got the long cold steer..now if you say this they are on their cell phones quickly to tell mom that they met a "man" from "Somerville":>)
Somerville no longer has any "gang wars" it has breakfast wars:>) - it has become a gentrified enclave of Boston that is attracting many that in the past would never have called it home and in some sense it has lost a lot of it's shine that many of us miss:>) The Day's of past are just that past and as much as Somerville has become something to be proud of that most of us never would have imagined..something was lost that will never return and that is to bad!
