“In the early 1980s, when I started teaching at North Shore community College’s temporary campus in Lynn, MA, people told me about a nearby neighborhood called the Brickyard. I learned many prominent people grew up there . . . The more I heard, the more intrigued I became and I soon embarked on a college-supported oral history project to capture what I believed to be the magicof a neighborhood that had been wiped out by urban renewal [of the 1960s and 1970s].  . . Many of the people I interviewed for that first book(Brickyard Stories: A Neighborhood and Its Traditions, 1985) had been displaced by urban renewal and were sorry for the passing of a way of life focused on the neighborhood.”

Even after its publication, Carlsen continued to interview Brickyarders, former residents and people connected to the neighborhood.  “I tried to capture something essential about each speaker in each story, to select stories that show what lies at the heart of that neighborhood and to represent the diversity of the neighborhood,” states Carlsen.

Here are two oral histories excerpted from Brickyard Stories 2.0:

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• OLD MAN MISCOLA  and  OLD MAN MOHAWK
• As told by Marguerite Puleo on June 5, 1986

Old Man Miscola

We used to get mushrooms too.  You always go after a rainstorm.  But you had to know the right one to pick.  We had one guy end up in the hospital every year.  He’d almost die from the mushrooms.

He believed that old wives’ tale – if you got a quarter or a fifty cent piece, it doesn’t matter what kind of coin you use, if you put it in the mushrooms while they were cooking, and it didn’t turn black, then the mushrooms were safe. 

 When he’d be cooking them on top of the stove, pink, white, green mushrooms, you’d say, “Oh my God! Which ones are good?” and he’d say, “I’ll show you,” and he’d take a coin and put it in, and God knows what would happen with all these chemicals, and it would come out and be shiny and clean and he’d say, “It’s good.”

And then you’d sit down and you’d be eatin’ pink, green, all kinds of mushrooms, and ah, every spring, it’d be in the newspaper.  He’d be at the hospital to have his stomach pumped out and every year, people would still say, “Don’t show me that trick again.  We’ve been through this.”  But every year, he’d be at the hospital.

Old Man Mohawk

The janitor from a court near 18 Neptune, we called him Old Man Mohawk.  I don’t know if he was Indian or not, but that was the name he had.  He lived on the first floor and he was always chasin’ kids out of the yard, but this was a court.  Old Man Mohawk, his job wasn’t really takin’ care of the place; it was just keepin’ the kids quiet.

I remember we had this huge tree that grew out over the garage that was there and we’d climb the tree, get the branch that hung over the garage and we’d swing out about fifty feet.  Thanks God we weren’t killed.  The girls would do it.  We’d climb the fence, jump on the tree, grab the branch, and swing out about fifty feet back and forth.

Mr. Conway owned a very respectable court next door and his tenants were very well to do people and here we were – troublemakers!  Nothin’ but kids, but it was his tree we were swingin’ on, so he’d complain to Old Man Mohawk, and Old Man Mohawk would come out with a broom and he’d try to hit us as we swung by on the tree branch.

Well, one day my mother was looking out from our apartment and she saw Old Man Mohawk and he had my little sister Marilyn, and Marilyn was about ten or twelve, and he was hitting her leg as she swung by on the tree branch about fifty feet in the air.  He’d jump up and try to swing the broom at her. 

Now Marilyn was scared to let go, she couldn’t get back to the barn and she was screaming, “Mama, Mama,” and my mother looked up out the window.  She was ironing, which was unfortunate, because she just pulled the iron out of the wall and “Look out now!” she threw it and got Mohawk right at the head, knocked him cold.  He recovered, but he never, he never hit Marilyn again.