Tom Brokaw by The Greatest Generation Page B

meetings of the ROMEO Club, held in various diners at the edges of Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. John Caulfield, a burly former high school principal, started ROMEO. “Retired old men eating out,” he explains. Not just any old men. The guys from Kerry Corner, the Irish working-class neighborhood not far from the leafy sanctuary of Harvard Yard.
    In the thirties, Kerry Corner made up about ten square blocks of Cambridge. Caulfield and the others are forever attached to those roots. “I tell ya, where we’re from, every three-decker house had four, five kids to every floor, and every morning they were out the door and headed for St. Paul’s School.” Wood frame homes were divided into three parts for the families that had emigrated from County Kerry, Ireland. These were large families whose lives revolved around work, the Roman Catholic Church, the Democratic party, and whatever sport was in season.
    Every guy had a nickname. Hutch, Lefty, Nibby, Mac, Dude, Jabber, Spud, Bugs, Tea Pot—whatever it was, it stuck for life. They were a gang, but not in the modern sense of guns and dope and senseless violence. They were a gang of pals, and when they got into a fight it was with each other, and then, as one of them says, “We shook hands and forgot.”
    As teenagers they led lives of innocent deprivation. They used the showers at the playground fieldhouse because no one had showers at home. There were no swimming pools so they took their dips in the Charles River. They organized their own baseball and basketball games without the current worries about uniforms and liability insurance. They got whacked by the nuns at St. Paul’s, the neighborhood parochial school, when they stepped out of line; and if they went home and complained to their parents, they were likely to be whacked again. Their mothers stayed home and their fathers went off to jobs as laborers, policemen, firemen, plumbers, printers, railroad men.
    When Pearl Harbor was attacked, they signed up for the Navy, the Army, the Marines, the Merchant Marine. Someone put up a big banner in the neighborhood— KERRY CORNER ’ S CONTRIBUTION TO THE UNITED STATES —with a star for every young man who enlisted or who was drafted. Mothers and fathers would gather on the square to organize Christmas packages for the boys who were fighting their way across Europe or the Pacific as infantrymen, radar operators, aircraft controllers, helmsmen, and quartermasters. None became a highly decorated hero or senior officer, but the boys of Kerry Corner, and millions more like them from neighborhoods across the country, were the muscles and bones of the U.S. armed forces.
    It was the biggest adventure of their lives. Before Pearl Harbor their world was defined by the ten square blocks of their neighborhood. As Eddie O’Callaghan remembers, “I was glad to get out and get back, but it really was an education because when we were kids a trip to Cape Cod was really a big thing—sixty miles away.”

    John Caulfield (middle row, second from right), August 1942,

St. Paul’s CYO baseball team
    Not even the war could separate them. One of their favorite stories was told by the late Angie Backus, a Marine in the Pacific in 1942. His unit had been in heavy fighting on Tulagi for six weeks, with no reinforcements and no fresh supplies. Finally some more Marines landed, so Angie decided to take his mortar crew for a midnight raid on the supply depot. “We sneak down,” Angie said, “and we get stopped by a sentry. He looks at me and says, ‘Angie, is that you? It’s me, Sonny Foster.’ Way out in the Pacific, in the middle of the war, I bump into a kid I grew up next door to. Small world, huh?”
    Remarkably, only a few from the Kerry gang didn’t return. They can count only a half dozen. The others came home to the old neighborhood at the end of the war. But before long it began to change,