Dorchester native Gerard Healy, who was featured on the front page of the Reporter two decades ago following his return from the Desert Storm operation in Iraq, has written a memoir detailing his experiences growing up in the neighborhood during the 1960s while attending the Saint Mark’s parish elementary school, Christopher Columbus High School, and Suffolk University.

Released in September, “Originally From Dorchester” is a look back at the everyday life of an adolescent boy who grew up during that tumultuous time. Healy’s memory focuses on the lessons and values he learned from his parents, teachers, community, and boyhood experiences that have continued to guide him throughout his life.

The book emerged from a series of short stories that Healy wrote while attending a creative writing class at Old Dominion University in Virginia, where he lives with his wife Sujin. Local readers will recognize many of the streets and landmarks highlighted in the book, including Wainwright/Cronin Park (now named Dr. Loesch Family Park), Centre Street, Dix Street, the now-closed Lucky Strike bowling lanes, and the famous Eire Pub in Adams Village.

The memoir includes some of the grittier details of Healy’s teenage experiences: a brutal street fight that he witnessed has stuck with him in vivid detail to this day; a schoolteacher’s beating of a fellow student; the tragic tale of a peer’s descent into delinquency that ended with his own mother handing him into police, and a personal run-in with the law that shook his conscience.

Healy also pays attention to the joys of growing up in a tight-knit community and developing lifelong friendships, saying that the importance of friendship was one of the main values he gained growing up.

“You got kids who are gonna take you the wrong way, and there are kids who are gonna take you down the right path,” he told the Reporter in a telephone interview. “I was fortunate enough to have some good friends. And it made a big difference to me, it took me down the right path as opposed to the wrong path.”

It’s no surprise that in the back of the book, he includes a photo of his group of friends as adults dressed in suits at a wedding.
Growing up in Dorchester in the 1960s also instilled in Healy an appreciation for adventure.

“I guess the great thing about growing up in Dorchester was you had so many kids around you,” Healy said. In the other places I’ve moved and lived in through all my life – suburbia – there aren’t many people, not many kids. Whereas in Dorchester you have kids all over the street, everybody just looking for how to have adventures, how to have a good time, and how to have fun.”

It was this appreciation for adventure that led Healy to pursue a career in the military. He says the first US Army recruiter he spoke with told him that if he joined, he would get the chance to jump out of airplanes. Healy was instantly persuaded and went on to become a Lieutenant Colonel.

His book also illustrates the way in which neighborhood adults formed a united network of support and moral instruction that extended to all the children. When Healy and a group of boys steal some pies from an unlocked delivery truck, the mothers of the community find out in the kind of mysterious and instant way that only mothers truly can and the incident turns into a lesson about the impact of stealing . A respected older woman tells the children that they have stolen from a delivery man who gets up at 5:30 in the morning six days a week to provide for his family, and Healy describes a sense of shame that is more instructive than any beating could be.

Healy was aware as a child of the differences between his parents’ upbringing on a quiet farm in Ireland and his own childhood in a city full of people and three-deckers. He thought his parents’ homeland sounded wonderful but also thought, “Well, that doesn’t really relate a lot to what we’re going through here.” All the same, he says, “looking back … the values were still the same.”

The memoir also provides cursory references to the larger social and historical happenings of the time, contextualizing Healy’s childhood within an eventful decade that marked a number of cultural and generational shifts. The beginning of the Vietnam War in particular had an increasingly personal impact on Healy. While he doesn’t tell this story in the book, he said that he remembers being in fourth grade and first hearing about the war in what was then called “Indochina” from a foreign exchange teacher from France. Interestingly, another teacher walked into the classroom during the lesson and immediately told the French woman to stop discussing the topic. It wasn’t until images of the war started showing up on television around 1965 and young men from around the neighborhood started going off to war that Healy and his peers grasped the impact of the war.

It also was not until the North Vietnam/Viet Cong’s Tet offensive in late January 1968, says Healy, that he began to take the antiwar protesters seriously. It was after that point that he realized the United States was not winning and, he says, that “everyone started thinking, ‘Hey, maybe these hippies [and] college kids really know what they’re talking about. Maybe they’re not just troublemakers. Maybe it isn’t a great thing to be over there.’ And then I went the full spectrum ‘Peace with Honor’ kind of thing. And I think everybody from the Dorchester culture kind of related because there were a lot of kids from Dorchester who were going to the war.”

“Originally From Dorchester” is available online at Gerard Healy’s website, originallyfromdorchester.com, as well as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books a Million, and other sites. Healy is a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in combat operations Urgent Fury, Grenada; Desert Storm, Iraq; and Iraqi Freedom, Iraq. His awards include the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star. He and his wife Sujin live in Carrollton, Va..