The Fence - Dick Lehr [26]
Maureen had been working for some time as a waitress at the Park Plaza Hotel. She’d gone back to work when the twins were in the fifth grade. Having taken her role as a stay-at-home mother so seriously, she actually asked the eleven-year-old twins Kenny and Kris for their permission. “She explained we would only be home alone for about thirty to forty-five minutes between the time we got home from school and when she got home from work,” Kris said. “She was all concerned, but we thought it was great.” They’d go wild during the brief but daily stay of parenting. “We’d have these blow-out fights,” Kris said. But the shenanigans ceased once they heard their mom pushing open the big front door.
When it came to school, Kenny Conley—along with Mike Cox in Roxbury and Smut Brown in Mattapan—was a child of busing, the court-ordered remedy to desegregate Boston’s public school system. None of the three boys was ever directly in the line of fire. Their parents joined the legions of Boston parents who, during the busing era, avoided the tumultuous public schools and sent their kids elsewhere. Mike Cox was sent to St. Mary’s School in the neighboring city of Brookline, Smut Brown was enrolled in the METCO program and bused to the affluent Boston suburb of Wellesley, and Kenny Conley attended one of the Catholic parochial schools not far from home.
Kenny considered himself a “Gatie,” and the Gate of Heaven School was right around the corner, but he and his sister attended elementary school at St. Peter’s. The brick Catholic parish school with the tiny asphalt playground was located on Sixth Street, a “commute” of three blocks from Kenny’s house. He attended St. Peter’s because Cheryl had gone there and his parents liked it. The school was grades one to eight. Kenny’s classmates were the same year after year—another stitch in Southie’s tight-knit way of life. “Each grade was about thirty-five kids, and I basically went through with the same kids.”
He was a freckle-faced boy of five, with a big smile and a mop of hair, when the buses began rolling in 1974. They carried black students from Roxbury to South Boston High School, and they transported white students from Southie to other city neighborhoods. It turned Southie into a war zone. State police patrolled school corridors, riot police flooded the streets, and police snipers took up positions atop three-deckers to enforce the law against the often violent anti-busing protesters. Many in Southie did not deny the school system was segregated, but they found unacceptable a solution that forced students out of neighborhood schools. But to a national television audience the angry confrontations between blacks and whites made Southie seem a hotbed of intolerance. Some of the ugliest moments showed Southie women shouting, “Niggers go home” at buses filled with black children trying to get to school.
The clash of politics, law, and educational equality was over Kenny’s head. But the high school was only a few blocks from his house, and the protests and street fighting were all around. Kenny, Kris, and their mom were eating dinner at a neighbor’s first-floor apartment one evening when the front door flew open and a teenager came running through the house. “No one locked their doors back then,” said Kenny, “and this kid came in and ran through the kitchen and out the back door. There were a couple of cops right behind him. It was crazy. We watched and went back to dinner.”
During the early years of busing some of Kenny’s peers were swept up in the anti-busing fervor and joined the demonstrations. Not Maureen Conley’s son. “I was the kid, when they were egging buses, I was always coming home.” Fourth Street was a route protesters took to the high school for a demonstration, and Kenny, his sister, and their friends were sometimes hauled off the street by a watchful parent. “I can recall being told to hurry and get inside,” Kris said.