By Robert Louis Sheehan

You see, here's what happened. Prior to the Bicentennial celebration in 1976, City of Boston officials decided that they ought to spruce up the appearance of the city by removing all of the handsome blue enamel street signs clad in heavy wrought iron frames, and replace them with new unclad green ones. These, they thought, would be more in keeping with the image of the great modern city they wanted to show visitors during the Bicentennial year. The trouble was, the wafer-thin new signs with no means of support, and made of the flimsiest sheet metal, would bend with the slightest breeze and became an open invitation to vandalism. Subsequently, the green signs were reinforced by the installation of metal rods across the tops, but they have never achieved the distinction of the old blue ones.

Meanwhile, those wrought-iron-clad, blue enamel signs were thrown in a heap in junk yards ready for the smelters, or sold to dealers who might be able to sell them to sentimental ex-Bostonians, eager to have a souvenir of Boston streets they had lived on as children, prior to the family's move to the suburbs. One of the shops which purchased a cluster of them was the quaint "Quarterdeck" located on Front Street, Scituate Harbor adjacent to the Town Dock. The shop often featured old commerical or street signs mounted on sides of the building. The Quarterdeck, incidentally, had also gained a small measure of fame when the facade was seen briefly in "The Witches of Eastwick," a film starring Jack Nicholson.

One day, while passing by, I spotted a pile of the Boston signs lying on the ground beside the shop. At the time, I was writing my Dorchester Streets story, and stopped to look, thinking that surely I would find a sign from one of the numerous streets we had lived on. However, the only Dorchester sign I saw as I went through the pile, was the one from "Rundel Park," a short circular street with a park in the middle located at the top of Ashmont Hill just above Carruth Street.

What a discovery! This was the sign located at the head of the street when President Kennedy had visited his grandmother at 3 Rundel Park on Novermber 5, 1962. The Boston Globe had featured the visit in a front page story that day. It was noteworthy not only because Mary Fitzgerald was 97 years of age, but because her grandson was the only president whose grandmother was alive during his presidency.

The president had also come to Boston to vote for his brother Teddy who was running for Jack's old Senate seat for the first time. That seat had been occupied during the previous two years by an obscure political figure named Benjamin Smith, former mayor of Gloucester, so that Teddy could reach 30 years of age, the minimum Constitutional age requirement for a U.S. senator.

There was another reason for my special interest in the Rundel Park sign. My brother Tom who had been a state representative for Ward 16 which included Rundel Park, bought the Fitzgerald house from Tom Fitzgerald and lived there for three years. My brother had always been interested in Dorchester history and in the Kennedy-Fitzgerald story. However, circumstances dictated that he sell the house and move to another area.

At one point, I wrote to Dave Powers, personal aide to President Kennedy and later named first Curator of the Kennedy Library. I asked him if he would like to have the sign for the Library. In a cordial reply, Powers thanked me for the offer, but politely declined, saying that the Library already had over fifteen hundred artifacts stored in a warehouse, objects pertaining to the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds which they could not use.

The Fitzgerald house, of course, is still there, another fascinating Dorchester home which ought to be preserved. As for the Rundel Park sign, I still have have it and would be glad to turn it over to any institution willing to preserve it. To my knowledge, there is only one of the old blue enamel signs which somehow escaped the wrecker's hammer and is still in place. It is a double sign located at the curve on lower Greycliff Road on the east side of the former Archbishop's residence in Brighton. It too should be preserved as a bit of memorabilia of the old Boston.

A final word: when you think of how archaeologists treasure bits of broken pottery and shards of glass, you can see that artifacts are also "documents" and are as important to history as are written documents. We should therefore, preserve them whenever we have the opportunity to do so.

Robert Louis Sheehan, O.F.D., is a retired professor of Romance Languages at Boston College and the author of two books about his childhood and formative years in Dorchester.