By Bill Forry

The rumors have been flying around for a while now and maybe you've heard them too. Gerard's - the hub of Adams Corner for 33 years - is "in trouble." Maybe on its last legs.

Perish the thought.

After a series of mishaps that would have laid low a lesser man, Gerard Adomunes reports this week that all is well in his corner of ... the Corner.

"I'd be a liar to say I haven't had problems," Adomunes told the Reporter on Monday. "A fire, a bad accident, I incurred some debt in the meantime. But I've worked my business hard. And we've addressed all the issues that were necessary and things are wonderful."

Wonderful, in part, because the folks at Mount Washington Bank stepped up big time to support their new Dorchester neighbor. When some other lenders took a walk, Mt. Washington worked closely with Adomunes to refinance his properties and help close a numbers gap that was haunting Gerard since the infamous summer of 2001.

That's when Adomunes endured a vicious one-two punch that nearly brought down his years of labor in the cruelest of ways.

In June of that terrible year, Gerard went down in a heap when a ladder collapsed under him outside his once-popular Carson Beach cafe (which he no longer runs). The fall left him hospitalized for weeks, his ankle shattered. He was wheelchair-bound for months. Then, two weeks later, an overnight fire crept quietly through the walls of Adomunes's Dorchester building. The damage from the blaze didn't look so bad at first glance, but it left the restaurant dark for months. In the maelstrom, Gerard lost his beloved mother.

It was a bad run for the Dot native who bought the corner store as a 20 year-old college freshman - and gradually built it into one of the neighborhood's premiere addresses.

Since that gloomy season, Adomunes has bounced back from his injury, rebuilt the restaurant with a new, modern look, and set about the business of making up for lost time. It hasn't been easy.

"Running a neighborhood business is tough and I'm not saying that just for myself. All of the merchants on the boulevard and the corner know it," Adomunes says. "You draw from the neighborhood. You're not a Borders who draws from all over. That goes for the Blasi's and the Eire Pub and everyone in this area. You're the maintenance man, the buyer, the general manager. Small businessmen put so much into what they do."

Try 90 hours a week for starters. Luckily for Gerard - and the whole of Adams Village, really - he has a supportive clientele, staff, and, most importantly, family. His wife, Ruth, works full time as a nurse and his kids, Justin and Jamie, are now key parts of the Adams Corner business.

"One thing that's been big for me is that my children have shown an interest in the business," says Gerard. "I would never steer them into the business, but if this is what they chose to do, it's great."

"I'm here 34 years this June and I hope to be here another 34. I just love my business and my clientele and what I do. It's in my nature."

•••

When veterans and their many neighborhood supporters gather on the lawn of Cedar Grove Cemetery next weekend for the annual Memorial Day exercises, they may want to give a careful listen to the main speaker. Retired Lt. Commander Michael J. Walsh, who grew up on Kenwood Street near Codman Square, will give the keynote remarks this year. The former Navy SEAL served five tours in Vietnam, part of it as a supervisor in the controversial Phoenix Program- where he coordinated the abductions and sometimes outright "eliminations" of Viet Cong officers. Walsh then went on to play a key role in special operations in Latin America and Lebanon.

Walsh recounted much of his harrowing career - including the ambush that finally knocked him out of Vietnam - in his 1993 autobiography, SEAL!. In the book, the cold warrior, who has since become a born-again Christian, also expounds on his disgust with the "New Left", offers prescient warnings about gathering terrorist threats and reveals his frightening post-Vietnam flirtation with "targeting" anti-war icon Jane Fonda.

Both of Walsh's parents served in the military during World War II, and his tough-as-nails dad worked for a time as the janitor at the old Shawmut Bank in Adams Corner. Some of Walsh's harshest memories in his war memoir are reserved for the nuns at Saint Mark School, whom he likens to "Nazi drill instructors."

In a chapter devoted to his childhood, Walsh writes that he "joined the navy to get as far away from (Boston) as possible, and when the plane lifted off from Logan to take me to boot camp I vowed never to return." Today, the Navy SEAL lives in western Mass and has mellowed out on his hometown a bit. Still, Walsh's Cedar Grove homecoming should make for interesting Memorial Day conversation.