Judge Weinberg Interview

Judge Weinberg Remembers the Allston-Brighton of his Youth

This is one of a series of interviews conducted by local historian Bill Marchione with long-term residents about the changing face of Allston-Brighton.

The following interview with retired Judge and former Allston-Brighton State Representative Norman Weinberg was conducted on January 16, 1999.

Bill Marchione: When did the first members of your family come to live here in Allston-Brighton?

Norman Weinberg: They came in the early 1900s. They settled originally in the North End. They lived there for some years and then moved to the West End. Then they moved to Revere. I think they came out into the Allston-Brighton area about 1915. I was born here in 1919.

BM: What brought them to this area?

NW: I'm not a hundred percent sure. It was a large family with quite a few brothers and sisters. I wouldn't say they were affluent, but they were middle class people and they wanted to move into a nicer area. Allston in those days was a pretty fancy area of large, single-family homes and apartment houses, and it was a quiet, well-respected, good middle class residential area.

BM: Were your parents born in this country?

NW: They came to this country when they were only four or five years old. My father's father was a custom ladies tailor. He developed a pretty good business and all the boys worked for him. He had a place down on the corner of Salem and Hanover Streets in the North End.

BM: That was a Jewish neighborhood in those days.

NW: Yes. And in those days women couldn't get ready-to-wear clothes made in factories. They had to get custom-made stuff and he was a custom tailor.

BM: What did your father do for a living?

NW: My father went to work for my grandfather and then, when his father died, my father ran a ladies custom tailor business himself. Later he went to work for an outfit that was a manufacturer of women's smocks, a company that was situated in Buffalo, New York. He worked for them for many, many years.

BM: Where did you live growing up?

NW: I lived at 20 Idlewild Street, which became Royce Road. Now in those days (I didn't realize it then when I was a kid), that was a fairly high class neighborhood, and a lot of guys had women that they kept there in those apartments, and the reputation of the street got such that they decided to change the name from Idlewild to Royce Road.

BM: Would you describe the general neighborhood at that time?

NW: Coming out along Commonwealth Avenue, after crossing Harvard Avenue, the first street on the left is Royce Road. On the next block was an apartment house and then the Capitol Theater was there and there were a couple of stores on each side of the theater. I remember when they built the theater.

On the Street after that (which is Gorham Road) the Dodge brothers had an assembly plant that put Dodge motor vehicles together. They did that for some years. They had a real factory there. That's where that gymnasium is now on Gorham Road, right in back of the CVS. Years later the Dodge brothers got out and the Table Talk Pies had a big plant there and a store where you could walk in and buy pies. They originally came out of Worcester. That's is where their main plant was. They kept a lot of trucks in Allston. I don't think they did any baking, but that was their main distribution center.

BM: Did you have any brothers and sisters?

NW: I only had one brother who was thirteen years older than me.

BM: Did your parents own your home?

NW: No, we lived in an apartment house on the middle floor. They paid seventy-five to a hundred dollars rent in those days, which was a lot of money. I remember that we had brass fixtures for lighting, combination electric and gas, because electricity wasn't too reliable in those days, so you had gas burners all around the electrical fixture.

BM: How long did you live at that location?

NW: Until about 1929, when we moved to 28 Colborne Road. It was a building that was just being completed. It was an apartment house; numbers 22, 24, and 28 and we moved into 28, a two bedroom apartment and it was brand new.. In those days, Colborne Road didn't run all the way through, but only from Commonwealth Avenue to Euston Road. There was a garage there on the corner, and it was all open fields as you headed over toward Chestnut Hill Avenue.

BM: On the avenue itself, a lot of the building was post-World War I (after 1918).

NW: I'll tell you what was post World War I. When you come up to Washington Street, when you get past the stores, that whole block on the left there, between there and the (Hasiotis) Funeral parlor was built. When you get to Mount Hood Road, and you start going down the hill, it was all just a big open area over to Cummings Road. Numbers 1662 and 1666 were built sometime in the thirties. The other buildings as you go down the hill were all there till you get to Chiswick Road. At 1800 Commonwealth there's a block there, three buildings, and they were built by the same guy that built the building on Colborne and the one right around the corner from Colborne over on Commonwealth, a guy named London. He built that building up on Comm. Ave., just past Washington Street on the left. He was a pretty good developer---London.

BM: Do you recollect his first name?

WM: No, but he had a couple of sons, Harry and Jack. I remember them. Harry was a lawyer. The old man I remember as having white hair, very distinguished looking guy, but I don't remember his first name.

BM: Was the neighborhood becoming Jewish in those years?

NW: I wouldn't say it was a majority, but there were a lot of Jewish people living in the area: you wouldn't call it an enclave, but enough of them so that they felt comfortable and familiar. A lot of their own people were living there. I'd say maybe 35, maybe 40 percent were Jewish. When I ran for State Representative in 1952 there were a considerable number of Jewish families in the area.

Those apartments that were built prior to World War II were all large apartments---they were all six roomers or better. The Three Fields building (1368 to 1364 Commonwealth Avenue), at the corner of Allston Street, was a very fancy apartment building for the times. They had a indoor swimming pool in there. The swimming pool is still there. It's all boarded up. There was nothing like that around Boston at the time. A fancy building.

And in back of there, up on Warren Street, on the corner of Brainerd Road and Corey Road, there was a dairy farm, called the Kingston Brothers Dairy. They were there for years. They delivered and sold a lot of milk around here in glass bottles. They had a farmhouse up there. And they had a lot of cows---I think they were Guernseys, brown and white cows---and they were all up over that hill, that was their pasture.

BM: It's amazing how the area has been transformed.

NW: It sure has been transformed. I remember a lot of the stuff that was built around here. I remember that building down there that B&W is remodeling now---the Auto Car Company originally built that, a trucking outfit. The block just before it, as you're going into town, on the right, containing four or five doorways was named the Portland Boat Building. Why they named it the Portland Boat Building I have no idea. It was small apartments, built after World War II, a yellow brick building.

BM: Tell us about your schooling.

NW: I started at the Frederic A. Whitney School (in Union Square, Allston) in 1923. I was in the kindergarten and first, second, and third grades there. Then when I got through there, I went over to the Andrew Jackson School (on the site of the present Jackson/ Mann Schiool), for the fourth and the fifth grades, and then, after we moved up to Colborne Road in Brighton in 1929, I did the sixth grade over at the Baldwin School, at the corner of Corey Road and Washington Street. We were not in the building itself. We were in a portable, a wooden building that stood outside in the school yard, with a coal stove for heat.

BM: That shows how quickly the school population was growing in Brighton at that time. The Baldwin had only recently opened up.

NW: Yes. When I was at the Baldwin, we took manual training, and had to go over to the Bennett School once day a week for instruction, across from the (Brighton Municipal Courthouse) on Chestnut Hill Avenue. The left wing of the courthouse was being built by the WPA at the time. Roosevelt was President then, so there were many big public works projects going on. As you face the building, the portion to the left side from the main entrance was under contruction. I did the seventh and eighth grades at the Winship School. I attended ninth grade at the Edison School. I was in the first graduating class at the Edison in 1933. I have some pictures of that.

BM: The Edison School was the first junior high school in the area?

NW: The first junior high, built in 1933. A fellow named Gammon was the Principal. That whole area across from Chestnut Hill Avenue was then open land. It was developed with brick houses between the First and Second World Wars. The extension of Colborne Road over to Melton Avenue was built in the same period. Nottinghill Road was always a nice residential area. They had a big pottery factory up there. Do you remember that place? I remember that place very well.

BM: The Paul Revere Pottery. The building is still there.

NW: Yes. What did they make out of it?

BM: Condominiums. I think there are three in all.

NW: It was a low, stucco building.

BM: The Paul Revere Pottery was established in 1909 with the financial support of Mrs. James Jackson Storrow, and was originally located on Hull Street in the North End. It moved to Brighton in 1916.

NW: Oh, really? Her husband Storrow was a founder of the West End House. He was also President of the General Motors Corporation at one time.

BM: He was in business with Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Their banking firm was called Lee & Higginson. Mrs. Storrow financed the Paul Revere Pottery, which employed Italian and Jewish immigrant women in the North End and provided a much healthier work environment that was available in the factories of the period It was quite a success and by 1916 needed much more space.

NW: The Storrows lived in Lincoln and many years ago they used to take kids from the West End House to their estate for the day, and I went there one time. Mrs. Storrow was a very nice woman. She lived a long time after her husband and she was very active. They had a great spread out there, with a long driveway, and a big house. It was very impressive. We had never seen anything like that.

BM: Where did you attend high school?

NW: I went to English High School in the downtown. During the summer while attending high school I worked up in the White Mountains. I had some relatives that had a hotel up in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, a big tourist area because of the altitude. There was very little pollen there during the hay fever season, that being before antihistamines were available, so people flocked up there during July and August. Most of the people were from New York and Canada. It was a kosher hotel, a high class Jewish operation. It was called the Sinclair, a fancy place with excellent food and service. I worked as a bellhop and also in the dining room.

BM: Where did you go after high school?

NW: I went down to the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia in the 1936 to 1940 period, working at the Sinclair Hotel during the summers.

When I completed college in 1940, I had a low draft number. I registered down in Williamsburg. I wanted to continue my schooling, but I figured, if I got caught up in the draft it would disrupt things, so instead I went to work over at the (Charlestown) Navy Yard. I worked for an outfit called
J. F. Fitzgerald Construction Company. They were building a pier over there, Pier 4. I worked with a surveying crew, until I enlisted in the service, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor.

BM: You had completed your schooling at that point?

NW: Yes.

BM: What did you think of William & Mary?

NW: It was a small college in those days. I don't think there were more than perhaps 2,500 students altogether. The majority of them were girls. The area was all farm country. No hotels. There was an inn, the Williamsburg Inn.. There was a little business area down one end, right near the college. There was a grocery store, a drugstore, a pool room, a store that sold haberdashery. That was pretty much the town in those days. Then Rockefeller started that restoration (Colonial Williamsburg). They did a fantastic job, but they transformed the character of the town with all the hotels and tourist-related facilities.

BM: Where did your World War II service take you?

NW: It took me to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri; and then to Santa Monica, California. When I got out of Jefferson Barracks, I was assigned to the Army Air Force, and they sent me to a school called California Flyers. We were living in Santa Monica. The army took over a place called the Edgewater Beach Club. It was a fancy place, right on the Palisades, overlooking the Pacific. They would bus us to this factory school every day.

When I was finished there I went to North American Aviation, which was in the same area. They sent us to a medium bomber manufacturing factory. They were making the B-25 and we were becoming B-25 mechanics. I was out there about five or six months.

Then they shipped me back to Columbia, South Carolina and I was in a B-25 outfit there, and then to Walterboro, South Carolina, maybe 75 or 80 miles south of Columbia to get ready to go overseas. However, they instead pulled me out of there and sent me to a officer's training school. The military were so desperately short of personnel, that if you had a college degree, they grabbed you. At that point I was sent to Miami Beach, Florida for 90 days, where I got a commission as a Second Lieutenant. Then I was assigned to an engineering outfit in Salt Lake City.

BM: You saw a lot of the country.

NW: Yes, I did.. I was in Salt Lake for about a month, and got sent from there to an outfit in New Mexico. Next they sent us to Pueblo, Colorado. I was getting a little restless by then. I really wanted to go overseas. So I got into an Air Force outfit, but they put me to work as an inspector of maintenance at bases that extended from Needles, California all the way to Louisiana, and we traveled from base to base inspecting the work of new trainees.

BM: Did you finally make it oversees?

NW: Yes. But not immediately. I got into a B-29 outfit that was sent to McCook, Nebraska to train for B-29s. From there I went to Seattle to a Boeing factory that manufactured the plane.

I went overseas finally about the end of 1944, flying from Sacramento to Honolulu, Hawaii and then to Tinian in the Marianas where I was based for the rest of the war. We spent a year there altogether. I didn't get out of the Pacific until the end of 1945, after the war was over. I was a major then, and in command of the troops on the troop ship coming back, a 15,000 ton auxiliary ship. It was a rough ride. We returned by troops train via Canada to Fort Devens. By the time I left the service in 1946 (I'd been in for four years by then), I was a Lieutenant Colonel.

BM: Tell us about your schooling.

NW: I started at the Frederic A. Whitney School (in Union Square, Allston) in 1923. I was in the kindergarten and first, second, and third grades there. Then when I got through there, I went over to the Andrew Jackson School (on the site of the present Jackson/ Mann Schiool), for the fourth and the fifth grades, and then, after we moved up to Colborne Road in Brighton in 1929, I did the sixth grade over at the Baldwin School, at the corner of Corey Road and Washington Street. We were not in the building itself. We were in a portable, a wooden building that stood outside in the school yard, with a coal stove for heat.

BM: That shows how quickly the school population was growing in Brighton at that time. The Baldwin had only recently opened up.

NW: Yes. When I was at the Baldwin, we took manual training, and had to go over to the Bennett School once day a week for instruction, across from the (Brighton Municipal Courthouse) on Chestnut Hill Avenue. The left wing of the courthouse was being built by the WPA at the time. Roosevelt was President then, so there were many big public works projects going on. As you face the building, the portion to the left side from the main entrance was under contruction. I did the seventh and eighth grades at the Winship School. I attended ninth grade at the Edison School. I was in the first graduating class at the Edison in 1933. I have some pictures of that.

BM: The Edison School was the first junior high school in the area?

NW: The first junior high, built in 1933. A fellow named Gammon was the Principal. That whole area across from Chestnut Hill Avenue was then open land. It was developed with brick houses between the First and Second World Wars. The extension of Colborne Road over to Melton Avenue was built in the same period. Nottinghill Road was always a nice residential area. They had a big pottery factory up there. Do you remember that place? I remember that place very well.

BM: The Paul Revere Pottery. The building is still there.

NW: Yes. What did they make out of it?

BM: Condominiums. I think there are three in all.

NW: It was a low, stucco building.

BM: The Paul Revere Pottery was established in 1909 with the financial support of Mrs. James Jackson Storrow, and was originally located on Hull Street in the North End. It moved to Brighton in 1916.

NW: Oh, really? Her husband Storrow was a founder of the West End House. He was also President of the General Motors Corporation at one time.

BM: He was in business with Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Their banking firm was called Lee & Higginson. Mrs. Storrow financed the Paul Revere Pottery, which employed Italian and Jewish immigrant women in the North End and provided a much healthier work environment that was available in the factories of the period It was quite a success and by 1916 needed much more space.

NW: The Storrows lived in Lincoln and many years ago they used to take kids from the West End House to their estate for the day, and I went there one time. Mrs. Storrow was a very nice woman. She lived a long time after her husband and she was very active. They had a great spread out there, with a long driveway, and a big house. It was very impressive. We had never seen anything like that.

BM: Where did you attend high school?

NW: I went to English High School in the downtown. During the summer while attending high school I worked up in the White Mountains. I had some relatives that had a hotel up in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, a big tourist area because of the altitude. There was very little pollen there during the hay fever season, that being before antihistamines were available, so people flocked up there during July and August. Most of the people were from New York and Canada. It was a kosher hotel, a high class Jewish operation. It was called the Sinclair, a fancy place with excellent food and service. I worked as a bellhop and also in the dining room.

BM: Where did you go after high school?

NW: I went down to the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia in the 1936 to 1940 period, working at the Sinclair Hotel during the summers.

When I completed college in 1940, I had a low draft number. I registered down in Williamsburg. I wanted to continue my schooling, but I figured, if I got caught up in the draft it would disrupt things, so instead I went to work over at the (Charlestown) Navy Yard. I worked for an outfit called
J. F. Fitzgerald Construction Company. They were building a pier over there, Pier 4. I worked with a surveying crew, until I enlisted in the service, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor.

BM: You had completed your schooling at that point?

NW: Yes.

BM: What did you think of William & Mary?

NW: It was a small college in those days. I don't think there were more than perhaps 2,500 students altogether. The majority of them were girls. The area was all farm country. No hotels. There was an inn, the Williamsburg Inn.. There was a little business area down one end, right near the college. There was a grocery store, a drugstore, a pool room, a store that sold haberdashery. That was pretty much the town in those days. Then Rockefeller started that restoration (Colonial Williamsburg). They did a fantastic job, but they transformed the character of the town with all the hotels and tourist-related facilities.

BM: Where did your World War II service take you?

NW: It took me to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri; and then to Santa Monica, California. When I got out of Jefferson Barracks, I was assigned to the Army Air Force, and they sent me to a school called California Flyers. We were living in Santa Monica. The army took over a place called the Edgewater Beach Club. It was a fancy place, right on the Palisades, overlooking the Pacific. They would bus us to this factory school every day.

When I was finished there I went to North American Aviation, which was in the same area. They sent us to a medium bomber manufacturing factory. They were making the B-25 and we were becoming B-25 mechanics. I was out there about five or six months.

Then they shipped me back to Columbia, South Carolina and I was in a B-25 outfit there, and then to Walterboro, South Carolina, maybe 75 or 80 miles south of Columbia to get ready to go overseas. However, they instead pulled me out of there and sent me to a officer's training school. The military were so desperately short of personnel, that if you had a college degree, they grabbed you. At that point I was sent to Miami Beach, Florida for 90 days, where I got a commission as a Second Lieutenant. Then I was assigned to an engineering outfit in Salt Lake City.

BM: You saw a lot of the country.

NW: Yes, I did.. I was in Salt Lake for about a month, and got sent from there to an outfit in New Mexico. Next they sent us to Pueblo, Colorado. I was getting a little restless by then. I really wanted to go overseas. So I got into an Air Force outfit, but they put me to work as an inspector of maintenance at bases that extended from Needles, California all the way to Louisiana, and we traveled from base to base inspecting the work of new trainees.

BM: Did you finally make it oversees?

NW: Yes. But not immediately. I got into a B-29 outfit that was sent to McCook, Nebraska to train for B-29s. From there I went to Seattle to a Boeing factory that manufactured the plane.

I went overseas finally about the end of 1944, flying from Sacramento to Honolulu, Hawaii and then to Tinian in the Marianas where I was based for the rest of the war. We spent a year there altogether. I didn't get out of the Pacific until the end of 1945, after the war was over. I was a major then, and in command of the troops on the troop ship coming back, a 15,000 ton auxiliary ship. It was a rough ride. We returned by troops train via Canada to Fort Devens. By the time I left the service in 1946 (I'd been in for four years by then), I was a Lieutenant Colonel.

BM: What did you do after you returned from service in World War II?

NW: Well, there were thousands of veterans around then, and I went to work for the Veterans' Administration in the Insurance Division on the corner of Beacon Street and Tremont Street, right across from King's Chapel, in the old Houghton & Dutton Department Store building. I was there for three or four months, when I decided that this wasn't for me, and I applied to law school. I applied to Harvard and B.U., and Harvard said they could take me but that I wouldn't be able to begin their program until the following January---January of 1947. But B.U. said I could start in May of 1946, and they had a two year program then to accomodate veterans, no vacations. You went five days a week, and you were off Christmas, New Year's, the Fourth of July and a couple of other holidays, that was it.

BM: Normally it's a three year program?

NW: Yes. I got through and graduated there in May of 1948 and I took the bar exam in June and passed it and was sworn in as an attorney in September or October.

BM: Wht kind of law did you practice?

NW: General practice. I went to work for a guy for $25 a week at 18 Tremont Street. That wasn't much money. But I worked there for awhile. Then I got together with a couple of other fellows that graduated with me, and formed a practice down at 27 School Street right next to the Old City Hall and I was with those three guys. One of them quit, but I remained with the other fellow. And then I ran for the legislature and then we bought a building---20 Beacon Street. You must remember that. Goodspeed's Book Store was in the building. That was the original administration building of Boston University. It's over a hundred years old. So we established our law office there---this other fellow and myself---and I was there until I went onto the bench.

BM: What was your law partner's name?

NW: Albert J. Rosen. His father and brother were contractors, major builders.

BM: What I'd like to explore a little bit is your political career, how you got involved in politics. You were elected State Representative in 1952?

NW: Well, I'll tell you, I started to work for candidates before then. There was a fellow named Alvin J. Clark, who was in the Marines. I'd known him before I went into the service. Funny thing is, I met him out in the Marianas when I was out there, on Tinian. He was living up on Comm. Ave, just beyond Washington Street on the left. He ran for the State Senate. I worked for him in that campaign. He lost it. Charles J. Innes was the Senator then.

BM: Clark was a Democrat?

NW: Yes. He had a pretty good war record.

BM: The district had been Republican at one time, hadn't it?

NW: Yes. Innes, the Senator, was a Republican. Charlie Driscoll, who was Representative at the time was a Democrat, but Louis Lobel, another of the Representative, was a Republican too. It was a Republican area in a city that was overwhelmingly Democratic. The House and Senate---the legislature---were both Republican back then. There was a Democratic Governor when I ran, Paul Dever, but Christian Herter, a Republican, beat him in 1952, so when I began my political service we had a Republican House, Senate, and Governor.

In any event, I worked for Clark. And then he ran for Representative, and lost that race too. So I was involved in a couple of campaigns. And I also got to know a fellow I'd worked for before I went away---Mike Ward. Do you remember that name? He was a Senator and he was on the School Committee, and I did a little work for him, so I had some familiarity with the political scene.

Then I figured, "I'm going to take a shot at this thing myself." At that time, there was a fellow named Charles Driscoll, from Brighton, who was in the House. Edmund Lane was in the House. At one time he was both a City Councilor and a Representative. He lived at 1666 Commonwealth. The third Rep was Louis Lobel.

BM: It was this one of those multiple districts?

NW: Yes, it was. Ward 21 was a three-man district. And I think Ward 22 was a two-man district. Joe Graham and Charlie Artesani were the Representatives from Ward 22.

There were no vacancies at the time I decided to run. Then Driscoll decided he was going to run for the Senate. Dever was the Governor at the time and he was running for reelection. Dever talked Driscoll into running for the Senate, but both Dever and Driscoll lost. There must have been 25 or 30 guys running for that vacant seat as soon as it opened up. Fortunately, I did a lot of work door-to-door, and also had a lot of veterans working for me knocking on doors, so it worked out pretty good, and I won that first time around.

I stayed in there for 26 years. It was really too long. One of the reasons I stayed in there so long was I was fortunate. My office was almost next to the State House at 20 Beacon Street and I could maintain, with my partner, a pretty good law practice. I was one of the few guys in the legislature who could maintain a law practice and be in the State House at the same time, and do a half decent job of both.

BM: Did you ever face serious competition politically?

NW: The seat was a pretty safe one. I had some competition, but nothing really serious. I had a pretty good rapport with the peolpe out here. I was a native of the area. I was the kind of guy that followed up---if people called I got back on the same day. I didn't stall anybody. If I couldn't help a guy, I wouldn't stall him. I's say, "Look. I can't help you." If I could help, I'd do it quickly.

It's a personal kind of profession, politics. If people have confidence in you you can stay in there a really long time, providing you don't do anything improper or misbehave. It was a service job. There was no local City Councilor for quite awhile. They had that at-large business (the nine-member at-large City Council). So the State Reps were actually the City Councilors. If there was a hole in the street, or people's garbage wasn't collected, or the street lights were out, or they needed some sort of city service, they'd called you. And I always responded, even when they were out of my ward. I got lots of calls from Ward 22. I knew a lot of people over there. And when I got redistricted, I didn't have much problem in Ward 22 because I had helped out so many people over the years.

I put a lot of people to work as well, particularly kids in the summer time. In those days you could really get jobs---50 or 75 jobs in the summer time. They were building the turnpike, and the MDC and the City of Boston had jobs available, and I had fairly decent rapport. And then I was able to get some permanent jobs with the state. I was chairman of the Banking Committee and the Legal Affairs Committee. So over a period of years I put a lot of people to work.

But by 1978 or so, and they were redistricting for about the third time, I was sort of fed up with the thing, and I went to the Speaker and said, "I want a single district. There's no reason why I should have to run in a double or triple district." And he said, "Look, you've been here so long, we'll give you a job up here after you leave---something that you'll find is comfortable and that you can do." So, I took his word for it, and didn't run, and for a couple of years I was counsel to the Energy Committee, and then I got lucky enough when Ed King was Governor to be appointed to the bench. I practiced law actively for all those years up to my appointment as a judge in 1981.

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