How Saugus copes with COVID-19 T he Saugus Girl Scout Brownie Troop 67744 was eager to get to some normalcy in their life. They held a Zoom virtual Girl Scout meeting on Wednesday, March 25. They were excited to be together, even if it was on screen. There were lots of greetings and giggles, then it was down to business. They began the meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance and recited the Girl Scout Promise. They talked about their Girl Scout Cookie sales, end of the year celebrations and how they have been coping with staying home. “Staying connected as a troop is so important right THE SAUGUS ADVOCATE – Friday, March 27, 2020 MY HOMETOWN | from page 12 Saugus Girl Scout Brownies are adapting by beginning to hold online meetings By Julie Cicolini now,” Troop leader Rebecca Wise-Bono said. “I know they are feeling uncertain, stressed and scared of what is going on around them,” she said. They look forward to getting together for the next meeting in a few weeks. They plan to continue with virtual meetings. Girl Scout Troop members include Ella Falasca, Marian Muldoon, Ashlyn Michaud, Lily Gibbs, Kaelyn Peterson, Georgia Condakes and Addison Beatty. Editor’s Note: Saugus resident Julie Cicolini is an adult volunteer who is very involved in the local Girl Scouts in Saugus and serves as the Treasurer to the Saugus/ Revere Service area. plosive, wandering his tastes, sorting them out for me with gunfire delivery. Now I read Don Junkins’ new book, Journey To The Corrida, as I am surrounded by Bart Brady Ciampa’s exquisite trumpet on his own CD from Vancouver way, hearing his Latinas Reflexiones, and he does all the instruments, one atop the other, pretending it’s about the Southern Desert, and all the time it’s all about Saugus. Bart and Don, what a pair! What a pair! And they level out with Tim Churchard and his music, and their long ties, and how they graced the same field as Tim and I did. And geologist Tom Weddle, unfailing communicator, writing elegantly of Tontoquon the Indian who roamed the banks of the Saugus River a few centuries ago. And we all, to a man, love Saugus for what she is and what she has been in our lives. It was my son Timmy, whose home is in Franklin, Maine, who said, “So you and your pals are writing a book about Saugus in this past century. For example,” he continued, “tell me about the Forties. What were they like? Why do some football players from those times write poetry? Or what in East Saugus made such music in the beginning that it now comes out of your computer, all the way from the West Coast? Or how do you hibernate in the night with an old teammate’s book of poems, or another’s sheaf of letters?” It was not smugness on his part. But I did not know if that choice of his was spontaneous or specifically directed, as if he had in mind a period related to his own age, young, impressionable, bursting, a place where we all have been. It was a catch in the throat, I said. I tried to explain it to him: There was a time in the high school corridor when a girl turned away from me and walked elegantly off to her lifetime, smiling to this day, a raving beauty yet, mother-proud, bearing regal in her skirts just cut so, and the perfect edge of temperament. It was the time when I slyly tore open my brother’s fragile Victory Mail letter from the wild Pacific before anybody else could get to it, its onionskin quality like a manuscript marked up by an editor serious at life. It was hearing my cousin’s telephone voice from a Port of Embarkation hidden somewhere on the East Coast, for the lone single last time. I remembered how he’d call with that falsetto air to his brother while skating in the swamp near Siaglo’s piggery on Longwood Avenue. He was mimicking Richie and Sumner Sears’ mother calling out for them, the night late, the cold stealing down atop us mindless except for small joys. Or it was seeing a neighbor’s son heading home with one olive drab pant leg sewn much higher than the other one. It was watching newsreels, like Pathe News, at the State Theater on Friday nights, not really knowing what the gunfire and sudden combustion was all about, that gray mass of exploding sand or snow up there on the screen, now and then body parts in the mix, or hearing the high screech of shells or a plane diving off the clouds as if those sounds had been artificially appended to the film. Wondering if those sounds could be real. It would be early in the Fifties I’d come to know them for what they were. It all came down eventually to my lost brothA VIRTUAL GIRL SCOUT MEETING: Ella Falasca (right photo) and her friends in Saugus Girl Scout Brownie Troop 67744 can’t hold meetings because of social distancing rules since COVID-19 shut down school and all community events. But she and other troop members began to hold online meetings this week, using their home computers. (Courtesy photos to The Saugus Advocate) er, locked up forever in my mind. There is a catch in the throat, a first order of breathlessness I remember behind my eyes with a clarity that could disturb some minds. It was suddenly finding someone whose ear, like mine, could turn quickly to a cool jazz musician right after hearing Puccini at his very best (that in New Jersey, Jimmy Smith would give anything to hear the trumpet and flugelhorn Page 13 I’m tending on right this minute). Or knowing what Auden had to say about another poet, “In the nightmare of the dark/All the dogs of Europe bark,” the words on the porch on Main Street falling from my Grandfather’s lips. It was as if the old gent were reading from an Old-World cairn, the Red Fergus put away or one more of the warring O’Sheehaughns. The words were blessed and lovely, full of a music I vaguely could begin to hear, to recognize as my own. And a massive war about to begin that would change everything we knew or could feel, the measurements of that war forever at hand. The catch in the throat became the names in thick black type in the local newspaper pages: Basil Parker, Larry Daniels, Tommy Atkins; boys who would never again make the walk along Summer Street or Appleton Street to Stackpole Field, a walk that I would make for four years in the same Forties they trod it. A walk that teammate Don Junkins would write about, the catch again in the throat, deeper, like a barbed hook had set, clutching what was soul. The list of names came growing and running through the streets of the town; the Kasabuski brothers almost in one pained but exhilarate breath (them together forever), Vitold Glinski and his pal Alexander Chojnowski from East Saugus practically together again, Walter Barrett missing in the Pacific, Charlie Lenox killed in France, Al DeStuben wounded in Germany. The list grew and grew, the catch in the throat thicker, heavier, a weight coming with it, like measurement taking place, hand spans, arms’ length of things. My heart is forever locked into this town whose streets I walk the way I might one day walk another paradise, if there is one like this, if it is one I can earn my way to, where the river comes pale and palpable in its touch at East Saugus. If it is one where you can look across to Lynn, where old pilings and boats worn out by muscle and devotion continue their journey back into the earth. Where the marsh turns suddenly brown, then white, and where friends, the old and the new, the lost and the forlorn, herald every corner I turn, telling me they love what I still have. Yes, Timmy, here is part of it, the Forties, the pain, the grace, the recall, the sound of another’s words, another’s music, coming to me at the same time. The images sound. Bart Ciampa’s trumpet or Tim Churchard’s banjo plays like one of Don Junkins’ or one of Jimmy Smith’s metaphors. There is no mouth, no voice, but a place…Saugus! God, I am still here, smack dab in the middle of it all. Remarkable, Donny. Remarkable, Bart. Remarkable, Tim. Remarkable, Jim. Remarkable, Tom Weddle. Ah, yes, Timmy, remarkable, the Forties. For two years those Forties and all the years since ran through our minds as we set them down in our book, A Gathering of Memories, Saugus 1900 – 2000. For two years we garnered and gathered and placed them in order and ordered them in place, scribing a pass at a collection of memories. And it came about, after a total and consuming labor of love, an endless poke at the imagination. Saugonians from 47 states and places outside our borders have ordered the book. John Burns and Bob Wentworth and our committee prepared for them a true feast for the memories. The book sold out in a few months, all 2,000 copies including the last five damaged copies, after doing our own warehousing, packaging, mailing for months of pure excitement. Five hundred more were printed and sold. A perennial scholarship stands, The John Burns Millennium Book Associates Scholarship, for Saugus High graduates. It was a noble effort. Perhaps, that too will be remembered as a piece of Saugus.
14 Publizr Home