Boys were under constant surveillance by supercilious clerks. There I could wander through aisles flanked by baseball bats through thickets of split-bamboo fly rods and stubbles of short, steel bait-casting rods (fiber-glass rods and spinning reels were as yet unknown) through an arsenal of rifles and shotguns, blue steel barrels glinting against the warm-grained walnut stocks and through a long array of heavy woolen winter clothes and thick leather hunting boots. "Always Something Doing, One to Eleven, at the Old Howard" read its ads in the Boston Globe, followed by the titillating phrase, "25 Beautiful Girls 25." Scollay Square was off limits to me, and no wonder.īut Iver Johnson's was a wholesome interest. It faced on Washington Street near the edge of Scollay Square, that opening in the cow-path streets where stood the Old Howard, a burlesque theater famous for supplementing the curricula of Harvard students. My target was always Iver Johnson's, the famous old sporting-goods store that captured the hearts of Boston lads in those days. This was my Gobi Desert, my Mountains of the Moon, my Tarzan Country. I was finally deemed capable of handling the ancient subway system and the narrow, clogged streets, and I responded by making ritualistic expeditions from the boring security of the Back Bay to the perilous excitements of Washington Street. When I was a boy in Boston and had reached a sufficiently sophisticated age, I was allowed to go downtown by myself. Written by native Bostonian Edwards Park, a longtime contributor to Smithsonian, this chronicle of the deadly disaster details the lasting effects that the tragedy had on the city. ![]() Editor's note, January 14, 2019: In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Great Boston Molasses Flood, we are publishing online for the first time a story from our November 1983 issue.
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