8-17-2016
This story is about a few boys playing a prank on a Friday night.
I grew up in a small town on the south side of Boston. The town had a square which was the center of activity in a railroad town. The town was on the main railroad line from Boston to New York City
There were two major two story buildings with flat roofs in the square. There were business on the lower level and apartments on the top level. One side of the square included the A&P, the Meat Market, the Variety store, a Restaurant and a Soda Shoppe for teenagers to hang out in. On the other side of the square included the Drug Store, S.S. Pierce Foods, and the Local Tavern. These businesses all ran on weekly credit. Each family in my hometown had a weekly tab for food, drugs, and even a beer or liquor tab at the local Tavern.
Most adult men worked on the railroad and their workweek was forty-eight hours. During World War Two, the railroads were under government control for National Defense as part of the War effort. The men worked about sixty hours a week to keep the passenger and freight trains running for National Defense. Friday afternoon was payday, paid in cash, for the railroad workers and Friday evenings is when they would pay the local merchants for their weekly tabs.
One Friday afternoon, a few of my friends and I went to the A&P store and got a five pound bag of flour and some lunch bags. We planned to have a little fun with the Friday night local Tavern clients. We climb up the building staircase to the roof and prepared lunch paper bags of flour to be used later in the evening. The workers started to arrive at the Tavern about 4:30pm after work and started a new weekly tab for their drinks. Along, around 7:00pm, the Tavern would start to clear out as the workers would head home for the evening meal. Some, if not all, had a good buzz on. As the workers walked out, we would drop a bag of flour on them. Some of the flour bags would hit the workers on their backs and shoulders, and some hit the sidewalk. They started to look around to see what was going on, we would duck back on the roof and start laughing. We continued to pull this prank on the drunk workers until the sun started to go down. Then, we went down the stairs to street level and went home for the evening meal.
