Some drunk called him a wop so grandpa threw the drunk through the window at Wikey's bar. Uncle Joe had to go down to the police station and bail out grandpa. Moral of the story: don't say the W word to Italian guys whose arms look like Rocky Marciano's on steroids... even an old Italian guy. "The only thing I'm sorry about is I broke Wikey's window and we were on the first floor." Fortunately for grandpa the judge was an Italian gentleman who let him off with a warning.
Wikey's was an old storefront neighborhood bar in East Boston near the Blue Line Orient Heights station. Grandpa stopped there at the end of the day on the way home from the North End where he ran two vegetable bays for a wholesaler. When the old guy died who owned the vegetable bays, grandpa inherited them. He was the son the old guy never had. When grandpa died his oldest son, Uncle Emil, sold the bays, too bad. If he'd held onto them they'd been real valuable after they built Quincy Market, but Emil was in medical school and Uncle Joe had a union job with the power company. They didn't have time for the vegetable business.
The vegetable business needed watching. My mother-in-law, Phyllis, remembers getting drafted to go through records and sort out how much one of the employees had stolen. That's when she found out where the oranges grandpa brought home to kids came from. As she watched through the office window, she saw her dad get pissed off at something and throw a crate of oranges against the wall. What was left that wasn't spoiled went home to the kids.
Grandpa hung out with Klucker and the guys at Wikey's. Klucker lived in a car parked in a vacant lot a few blocks down the street. It was the Depression. It wasn't unusual for people to live in vacant lots. On holidays and some weekends, grandpa brought Klucker and other vacant lot dwellers home for dinner.
When the war came, the draft board managed to find Klucker even though his only address was Wikey's. He got KIA somewhere. Maybe Europe. Maybe the Pacific. The Army sent the telegram that Klucker was gone to Wikey's. The bar's a tattoo parlor now.
