It was with much sadness that I found out Brian Turner, AKA the hilarious cartoonist Renrut (“Turner” spelled backwards) died back in 2021 of cancer at age 71. He was an Acres guy, from Birchland Avenue.
Turner was a writing instructor at Smith College for more than 30 years, but he was more known for his cartoons. After he graduated from AIC earned an MFA in English with emphasis in fiction writing at UMass Amherst, he bought a Springfield Newspapers delivery truck and took his cartoon business on the road. The venture failed, but eventually his “Renrut’s World” and his SCAT Comics Gazette, based in Northampton, were big hits in The Valley and beyond.
Despite Turner confessing he wasn’t much of a ballplayer in his humorous take on his Sixteen Acres youth baseball days, which I featured in another post, he was a prolific baseball author, frequently being published in The National Pastime and Base Ball: Journal of the Early Game. He also co-authored The Hurrah Game, a companion book to an exhibit at Historic Northampton, and The Florence Eagles Base Ball Club.
Turner, a fan of Hell’s Acres, messaged me a couple of times, insisting I should author a book. “I hold out hope that someday all your material can be pulled together into a really thoughtful, not to mention highly entertaining chronicle of life and times in the Acres,” he wrote. “I mean the blog is an accomplishment in itself, but I'm hoping you do a book.”
Well, readers, what do you think? Is some of this blog book material? I’ve always been comfortable in the blog format, but I guess you never know. Leave a comment if you would buy a book that I wrote (even though the material is all covered free online!).
Turner mentioned a couple of crazy Acres dudes he knew, including a guy who ran away from home when he was 15, lived in the woods off North Branch Parkway, and one day robbed customers at knifepoint in the International House of Pancakes on Boston Road in 1971. “Like stagecoach holdup, it didn't work out very well,” he wrote. “You capture those insane days really well, and I am sure I only know a tiny portion of the nonsense Acres lads got up to back in the day. I was too much of a goody-two-shoes for my own good.”
Here is a autobiographical cartoon of him getting arrested in front of The Fort/Student Prince restaurant in Springfield.
Who remembers the old Mass Pike sign? Decades ago, before the controversies about Native American mascots and team names, the state realized the turnpike logo might be just a tad offensive. The original sign did show, however, that King Philip’s War still remained in the collective unconscious of the Bay State.
It’s always great to find another photo of the Riverdale Drive-in theater screen (on the left). I do remember Town & Country Liquors—now Table & Vine—but not a Topps department store (although I recall the Topps on Boston Road).
The sight of no beggars holding signs on Riverdale is indeed a nostalgic one. Here is some more Riverdale Drive-in nostalgia, including the 1950 grand opening ad and the swing set. Read more about this drive-in and others in this post.
I gotta get me one of those hoodies!
And these T-shirts!
Speaking of Steiger’s: Bloomers and petticoats—“fetchingly styled”—at Steiger’s in 1914.
At Friendly Field, the old baseball field at Greenleaf Park (now the north side of the parking lot for the Sixteen Acres library), the dugouts used to be perpetually flooded, so many players sat on top of them, explaining the sneakers at the top of this photo.
The swing set at the old Camp Husky at 885 Grayson Drive, which was a day camp opposite the intersection of Grayson and Spear Road from 1953 to around 1967. They had two pools and pony rides!
I had always heard about the discrimination against the Irish back in the day, including signs and ads that included the sentence “No Irish need apply.” So I looked up this requirement in the Springfield Republican online archives and found several examples, including one in a classified ad from November 9, 1866 (above).
I then typed in “Irish need not apply,” and found one from March 20, 1890, just three days after St. Patrick’s Day. The interesting thing is that upon further examination, the ad in its entirety said that the family was looking for a good cook—German preferred—“colored or Irish need not apply.”
I had heard that this kind of ad was published in the mid-19th century—1890 seems to be a little late for this overt bigotry. In fact, it's less than 20 years before my grandfather came to the US from County Kerry.
Richard Jensen, a retired history professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote in a 2002 article in the Oxford Journal of Social History that the “Irish need not apply” trope was false, and that “there have been no documented instances of job discrimination against Irish men.” This was debunked by a 14-year-old girl in 2015, who did a casual newspaper archive search and found plenty of these ads, refuting his claim that “The NINA myth fostered among the Irish a misperception or gross exaggeration that other Americans were prejudiced against them, and were deliberately holding back their economic progress.”
Jensen added further insult to injury by insisting that the NINA stories “have been kept alive by Irish-Americans today is possibly due to “the political need to be bona-fide victims.” He seems to think many Irish-Americans are using this “myth” to make the case that they suffer from the same injustices that Black people have endured. Wow, was he missing the point. We as a country still have a long way to go to achieve true equity for every one of our citizens. This became even more obvious in 2020 after several high-profile police killings of Black people—the murder of George Floyd being the most prominent. This prompted our country to reckon with its long history of systemic racism. But to claim that systemic discrimination against Irish-Americans was a fallacy was idiotic. The 14-year-old girl found 69 NINA newspaper ads—and even Hell’s Acres found some!
It’s obvious that Jensen’s research was shoddy. I think I’ll print out Jensen’s paper—so I can wipe my ass with it.
The Tower Hill Restaurant on Ridge Road in Wilbraham burned to the ground on June 17, 1954. Owned by the E. C. Porteri family, it served hot dogs, hamburgers, ice cream, shakes, etc. Located a quarter-mile on the left from Monson Road intersection, there was no hydrant around, so four Wilbraham pumper fire trucks did what they could, spraying the water in their tanks when the 12:17 p.m. call came in, but the flames were too intense for it to be doused.
The cement steps leading to the 90-foot tower, as well as the foundation footings, and some broken window glass in the topsoil, are still there, but the entire structure, as you can see, was a total loss (it was uninsured) and never rebuilt—which is too bad, because it must have been quite the destination.
Designed by Springfield architect Atwood C. Hall, it was built entirely out of Douglas fir atop a terraced green in 1930 and was intended to be reminiscent of an early 16th-century English watchtower. The family still flies an American flag daily at the site.
The place had been known over the years as the Porteri Tower, the Fire Tower Restaurant, the Porteri Lookout, and the High Tower Tea Room. People said the tower was visible from Sumner Avenue in Springfield, and it was the place to go on a summer day because of the incredible views and the fact that the ridge was always around 10 degrees cooler than the valley, which retains heat notoriously. I had always heard defective wiring from a ham radio on the tower caused the fire. Anyone else hear this rumor? There were also arson fires at the nearby Rice Fruit Farm buildings around that time, so there are other rumors as well. A witness said it burned from the top and spread down. Anyone remember this fire or hear about its origin? Leave a comment!
