⛹️♂️🏀 MORE FOR THE KIDS OF LINCOLN STREET!🎒📚 🏊♂️
📸Photo: Rose and her two sisters with their Polish Bapy, from their Girls Club days.📸
Yesterday as I was making my way around the city I drove by the old LINCOLN HOUSE Girls Club of my childhood - now the Nativity Jesuit school for boys. My Girls Club clubhouse was called WINTHROP HOUSE because it was located on Winthrop Street, but our clubhouse held joint activities - swimming and drama club - with our Lincoln House "sisters."
Every summer, Kindergarten thru grade 6, at 8:30 a.m. sharp our mother walked with me and my two little sisters to our beloved Girls Club on Vernon Hill. She dropped us off for a day of fun and walked down along the then gorgeous, tree-lined Vernon Street to her job at the drycleaners on Millbury Street. At the end of her work day she'd take a taxi cab up to the clubhouse and pick us up, her three giggling, squirmy little daughters who shoved slices of homemade pizza under her nose - pizza they'd made in cooking class - and urged her to try on the painted elbow macaroni (painted by them!) charm bracelets they had just made for her in "game room," under the good-natured guidance of the petite Mrs. Bousquet, who at 4'10" tall, was smaller than many of the girls. We were exhausted from our day of exercise, arts and crafts and ... learning, so Ma, a single, working mom, knew she'd have a calm house in which to cook our supper and get ready for the next day.
Sometimes, these days, I drive by my old Winthrop House Girls Club, now the pointless, moribund GIRLS INC, and imagine I'm "crowned" executive director of my old clubhouse for a summer, for a paltry stipend - and I TURN THE PLACE AROUND!! I turn the place around SO ITS A REAL GIRLS CLUB AGAIN! I dump all the downer self-esteem bull sh*t navel gazing seminars they've brought in and bring back beauty parlor!!! with 100 different bottles of colored nail polish. I'd reinstate cooking class where kids learn how to make real pizza and where they create their own veggie toppings...yoga class, too ...knitting and crocheting and sewing clubs and relay races in the morning sun ... and Friday hamburger and hotdog cookouts in the rear parking lot ... and lifeguard certification classes and swim dips - for every girl! For practically free of charge! The way it was for me and my two kid sisters! And in the locker room in the swimming pool area: scores of those terrifically ugly cobalt blue cotton swimsuits that all of us girls had to wear for dip or even lap swim. We were all equal in our ugly cotton bathing suits with their high necklines - and, more important, we were not sexualized in our swimsuits. We were just kids diving off a diving board or doing the sidestroke - having a blast in our gigantic pool with Charlene the excellent lifeguard watching over us. Those Styrofoam flutter boards!
Of course, the Lincoln Street girls have absolutely nothing these days - not even a crappily run clubhouse like GIRLS INC on Vernon Hill. The old Lincoln House girls club was never replaced.
When I was a kid some of the LINCOLN HOUSE girls were bussed to our Winthrop House clubhouse twice a week to swim in our lap pool and have fun with their Winthrop House "sisters." My kid sister became friends with a tall Black girl from the Lincoln House who was a very good basketball player. My sister loved basketball! Together they'd do lay-ups in the Winthrop House gym for hours! As a kid who was raised by a strict, old-school Catholic mom I noticed but never commented on the fact that the girls from Lincoln House were mostly Black and brown-skinned and that they seemed poorer than the girls who ran, skated, swam and skipped through our Winthrop House. Here it is 50 years later and, driving thru the Lincoln Street area, I see that the girls, and boys, are still pretty poor, especially all along lower and mid-Lincoln Street and its side streets...and they're still kids of color.
THERE IS NOTHING FUN HAPPENING FOR GIRLS AND BOYS IN THE LINCOLN STREET AREA. The old Boys Club in Lincoln Square is long gone - now fancy apartments. That Lincoln Square Boys Club used to complement the Ionic Ave boys club in Main South, which is also gone. But its proud history was used by a couple of phony balonies to parlay it into an arts center... for them to buy and renovate the old boys clubhouse for an arts center for themselves and their friends. NOTHING OFFERED TO THE POOR KIDS OF MAIN SOUTH!!!
But I digress. Decades ago Worcester's city council members, its old sports titans/jocks and movers and shakers saw the need in the Lincoln Street area and came together. They tried - and succeeded in - supporting poor girls and boys through terrific boys and girls clubs. And by supporting the poor kids, the clubhouses helped their families, creating opportunities for all. Maybe it was a box of food, a bag of school supplies ... casual, friendly conversations - a street wise kind of counseling. This meeting families every day on their own turf WORKS. Through the Iconic Ave Boys Club, the Winthrop House Girls Club, the Boys Club at Lincoln Square and the Girls Club's Lincoln House, a stone's throw away from the Boys Club at Lincoln Square, LIVES WERE CHANGED.
What happened, Mayor Joe Petty? City Councilor Donna Colorio? Worcester School Committee member Maureen Binenda? TO WHOM HAS THE GREAT GORDON HARGROVE PASSED THE TORCH OF YOUTH SPORTS, RECREATION, LEARNING... and FAMILY SUPPORT?
I'm told that poor families take buses to the Friendly House all the way from the top of Lincoln Street, from Lincoln Village where they live, to my Grafton Hill neighborhood across town to the FRIENDLY HOUSE, for FH services. To get food from Friendly House's food pantry, to get help with finding housing, to get help with children and caring for old folks. And then, ably assisted by FH social workers, often cradling bags of food, they take two buses home back to Lincoln Street. This happens in the winter cold and in the summer swelter ...
The LINCOLN STREET area needs a kick-ass Friendly House branch - and a girls club and maybe a boys and girls club - to get things rolling again in that neighborhood!
Why not make Mike Moreshead, the smart, terrific assistant director of the Friendly House on Wall Street, the new director of FRIENDLY HOUSE II - on Lincoln Street?
Why not once again offer kids their own space where they can enjoy sports, team opportunities, too ... art classes and more?
Why not BUILD A NEW CLUBHOUSE - for BOYS AND GIRLS - in the lower Lincoln Street area?
Why not try to secure grants$$$ for the building of this new clubhouse, in a poor neighborhood, in the second largest city in New England, from the BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB OF AMERICA NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS? Why not get the seniors from Worcester Voke and the apprentices from the Carpenters Union to build the new Boys and Girls Club? To save money and to offer A GREAT LEARNING EXPERIENCE FOR THE YOUNG PEOPLE in their carpentry/electrician and/or plumber programs?
Let's tamp down the youth violence! Let's bring back the compassionate Worcester I knew as a kid! The Worcester that didn't forget downtrodden families from our poor neighborhoods! The city that actually invested in poor kids, maybe even loved them a little bit more because we weren't from the West Side and we were up against a lot ... but we still tried. We still had our dreams ... and the City of Worcester helped us realize those dreams through terrific Boys and Girls Clubhouses.