A Note On The Profile Of The Manager Of This Blog-"Tales From Old North Quincy"

Note: I write for several blogs, public and private, under the blog name Markin. I will use that pen name here, as well. I use that pen name in honor of a man, and even more so his father, who set me straight about a lot of things in life long ago. Since this site is specific to North Quincy my profile information elsewhere would not be helpful so I have placed some pertinent information here in this lead blog. For those who are not familiar with blogs you can set the date for the entry in advance. That is why the date is set so far in advance in order to keep this as the lead blog, it is not your old eyes deceiving you.
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Al Johnson, Class Of 1964, comment:

Here are the background facts of my life that are important to understanding the why of the creation of this blog and the reason that I can speak with some authority about the old pre- 1964 North Quincy, at least to tell some tales about it. My maternal grandparents, Anna (nee O’Brien) and Daniel Radley lived on Young Street over across from the Welcome Young Field almost all their lives, and various members of this branch of the Radley family have lived in North Quincy up until very recently. My grandfather was actually born in that house on Young Street and my grandmother elsewhere in Quincy. As far as I have been able to trace back one or the other families goes back the Irish “famine ship” times in the late 1840s, although that information in pre-"green card" times is sketchy at best. Needless to say my late mother, Doris, NQHS Class of 1943 and her siblings were born in Quincy as well. My mother, during World War II, fell in love with and married a Marine, the late Preston, who had been based at the Hingham Depot, and who hailed from coal country down in Hazard, Kentucky. They had three boys, Preston, the late Kenneth and me, all born in Quincy right after the war.

We three boys all went through the Quincy school system, although I will just give my own public school resume here. I went to the Snug Harbor Elementary School down in the Germantown housing project, a place that we wound up at after some time on Young Street. I started from the first grade there and then is where I came of age, graduating in 1958. After a brief period at the Broad Meadows Junior High (now Middle School) we moved back to North Quincy over to Walnut Street near the old Duggan Brothers Garage. I went to, and graduated from, the Atlantic Junior High (now Middle School) in 1960. I spent all four years of high school at North, graduating in 1964. That last date is important to the sense of purposes of this blog as well. Events, places, and people described since that time mentioned in my various writings are a result of current reflections, hearsay, a few trips back, or some other form of indirect recollection because after that year I, effectively, no longer could be described as a North Quincyite. Oh, except, of course, that tiny little nagging problem of some forty years later finding that I am fiercely driven by some “inner demons” deep in my soul to feverishly write some tales of old North Quincy, my old hometown.