Union Square Portraits: Conversations about America – with Joe

On February 16, 2018, in Latest News, by The Somerville Times

Former Somerville police officer, Joe.

By JT Thompson

Joe, mid 50s, a former lieutenant on the Somerville police force, retired in 2015 after 26 years of service as a cop, and now works with disadvantaged teenagers.

Joe is a big guy, round-shouldered and burly, with friendly, intelligent eyes, a frizzy, grey goatee, a bald head, a dark leather jacket, and slender reading glasses with pink frames. He is deeply comfortable in his own skin and moves easily in his storytelling between sturdy strength and emotional vulnerability.

As we settle in to talk at a bench in the bloc 11 courtyard, he tells me about a jazz show he saw the night before, brimming over with enthusiasm as he describes the night.

“We had seats right up front, it was amazing…Brian Blade, the leader, who’s on drums, the guy must be all of 130 pounds. But he was sizzling. He was so far inside the music…so lush. That guy’s the real cat!”

Joe grew up right off Powderhouse Boulevard, by Tufts, “in a neighborhood full of very middle class people. Insurance salesmen. Cops. My dad was a cop. My mom was an RN. There were a lot of nuclear families, unlike today, now it’s all condos.

“I spent 45 years in that house – my mother’s parents lived on the first floor.

“This cold weather reminds me of how into hockey I was as a kid. I’d shoot pucks in the driveway till my mom couldn’t stand the sound anymore, and I’d come inside with snot pouring out of my nose,” he laughs.

“Another great memory is my YZ80 dirt bike, which dad got me when I was about 10 or 11. When I was that young, dad was an MDC detective, he always had an unmarked Ford LTD. We’d put the motorcycle in the trunk and head up to the Stoneham woods, and I’d ride there.

“You couldn’t do that today. He’d sit in the car reading the newspaper, while I was out there blasting away. I wore a helmet, but it was a freer time, just a great abandon. Now, cops would have stopped me.”

Joe’s lifetime love of music took off in high school, where he was a lead trumpet in the jazz, marching and concert bands.

“I still have the trumpet dad bought me when I was in 5th grade. It cost $575 in 1975, which must have been at least a week’s pay. I’d alternate between practicing trumpet in the house, and hockey. As I got older, I played hockey year round, and dad and I would drive all over the place together.

“He always had seized cars, all muscle cars. A 1970 black Charger. A 1972 Buick Riviera with a boat tail like a Corvette. He’d let me start them, warm them up in the driveway. The Riviera had been used in five Miami bank robberies, the cops couldn’t catch the car. Finally, they caught it, and somehow my dad ended up with it.

“We’d go out driving, and at the Northgate rotary, he’d rip around the curve and when we hit the straightaway, the Lynn Marsh Road, he’d just bury it. The car would almost stand up,” Joe laughs. “We’d be going well over 100 miles per hour. And he was a cop! It was awesome,” Joe chuckles.

“He’d drop me off at school, and kids would see me in this muscle car with tinted windows – nobody had tinted windows then. He’d have the window rolled down just far enough so you could see his brown scally cap, and green army jacket, and long white hair. The kids would be, Who is that guy?! He was a bad ass. Such a great guy.”

I ask him if things he loves about America are coming to mind.

“I love that if you just kind of mind your own business, you can do whatever you want. If you come from somewhere with nothing, you can do ok here.

“Now we’ve got a boob in the White House. Uneducated. Unintellectual. I’m just embarrassed.

“But there’s nobody climbing over a wall trying to get out – with all the bad mouthing that we’re racist. I don’t see that. When I see jazz shows, race, gender, they’re not there. Everybody’s just enjoying the music.

“The outrage over the kneeling and all that – it’s just a distraction.” Joe reaches over and taps the side of my head. “All the hatred spewed every day in the media – much of it is manufactured. A lot of it doesn’t exist. I look around and people are being polite to each other.

“I spent 26 years as a cop. I loved it. When I walked through Davis Square, people knew me, I put them at ease. I loved arresting bad guys. I loved just talking to people.”

Joe hit a pivotal moment in his career and personal life in 2011.

“There was a confrontation, and I had to shoot a kid. A kid I knew from the Y.”

After the shooting, in which one of his fellow officers was shot five times (and survived), Joe was awarded the George L. Hanna Medal of Honor. His father had also been awarded the Hanna medal; they are the only father and son to be awarded the medal in Massachusetts law enforcement history.

“Afterward, I ended up turning away from my family, not into it.”

Joe ended up leaving his wife and reconnecting with an old love, Stephanie, who he is still with today. “I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes away from her.”

After retiring from the police force, Joe eventually ended up working at Alliance House, a 12 bed residential treatment center for teenagers charged with crimes, and committed there for group therapy and individual therapy.

“They’d had six directors there in three years. No one could get a handle on it.

“It was chaos there, it was horrible when I took over. It was being run like a hospital, the kids were just being warehoused.

“In six months, I transformed that f**king place.

“I got rid of the overheard lighting, brought in floor lamps. And hundreds and hundreds of books. I started a literature and poetry program. And music – drums, keyboards. I brought in a recording guy, set up a little recording studio on a table so they could record their own songs.

“It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. Sixty hours a week, driving around a 100 miles a day. If it had been 11-7 Monday through Friday, if the phone hadn’t always been going off at 2am, if I didn’t always have Saturday work because people were bailing, if everything hadn’t always ended up in my lap – I’d still be doing it.

“But I was losing my sanity, losing my health. In the morning before heading in, I’d be crying at the breakfast table. Stephanie kept telling me I should quit.

“I wanted to last at least two years, and made it to 13 months.

“It was sad. I loved working with those kids. I got tight with maybe three or four of them. They loved me, I loved them back. They’d had tough circumstances. Drug addicted parents, or alcoholics.

“There was this redheaded kid, he broke windows, would run away. I turned him around. I was with him for 11 months, and he ended up asking me if I would adopt him.

“Those kids, their entire identity was the street, the gang, the block, nothing else.

“A Dominican kid, a gangbanger, who liked to paint, I brought him canvasses and painting materials. He was 17 years old and had never been to a museum. The first day he was eligible for a day pass, he and I got in my Cadillac and drove to the MFA.

“This kid lost his mind. At the top of the stairs was Sargent’s Daughters of Boit, it’s about 8-10 feet tall, about 16 feet wide. The kid spread his arms, Oh my god! That’s a f**king oil painting?! How the f**k did he do that?!

“Another kid, from Peru, he didn’t know about Machu Picchu. That’s the sadness. An amazing culture, and he didn’t know he was part of it. I brought him a poster of Machu Picchu and he hung it over his bed.”

I ask Joe about his own culture – whether there are things about America that he thinks are great.

A long pause, and then a chuckle.

“Wow, that’s a loaded question.”

Joe looks away with a smile, then back at me.

“What’s great is that really no one is telling me what I can do and can’t do. There’s very little of that. I can ride my motorbike too fast. I can listen to my sons’ music.

“They’re three of the most talented kids you could ever f**king  meet. They play all over, their band is named Helen, after my mother. They had grown up in that house on Ossipee Road.

“It’s a country of f**king complainers at this point. People have a very short historical memory of how far we’ve come in offering opportunities. It’s not perfect, no. But people from all over the world are coming here. No one’s fleeing here to get to China. Or El Salvador. Or Syria.

“It’s an indication that we are doing something right. That we are offering opportunities.

“Are there lots of elitist jerks here? Yes, definitely.

“When I was a cop, I saw immigrants living 14 in a house, sleeping and eating in shifts. You can come from anywhere, and make something of yourself. I know people will say, Ahh, we’re racist, but nobody’s telling people what they can and can’t do. You may have to work a shitty job, but you can get somewhere.”

Following his work at Alliance House, Joe was recently asked to be on the Board of Directors of Elevate Youth, a non-profit based in Somerville whose website says their “mission is to empower youth from underserved neighborhoods by cultivating long term mentoring relationships through engagement in transformative outdoor experiences.”

Joe is in the process of buying a sailboat, “a 33 foot French sailboat from the 80s. I want to get kids out sailing. It’s the same population I was working with at Alliance House.

“I understand we gotta teach math, biology, chemistry. But what the f**k are they going to do with that? We should focus more on the arts. These kids have never seen anything beautiful.”

Joe has faced a lot of ugliness in his life, but that hasn’t burnt out his own sense of beauty, or his desire to share that with others. He’s faced some intense challenges in his professional and personal lives, and has come through them with his kindness and generosity intact.

 

1 Response » to “Union Square Portraits: Conversations about America – with Joe”

  1. This was a good article, Joe seems to have had a pretty interesting life. It is nice that people still go out of there way to help the next generation. It was also nice who he did for the Peruvian kid. Has Joe ever visited Peru? seems like he would like it here.