Through a global existential crisis, I had found an unexpected and unlikely human connection with a gruff cussing politico almost four times my age who simultaneously calmed my own fears by revealing his.
Since Hiroshima, the idea of a nuclear war has always been with us, but it’s something most of us have pushed out of our minds so we don’t go crazy ruminating about it. But lately Mr. Putin has made the unthinkable thinkable. Many of us of a certain age have been through this before, albeit far more acutely. For about a week exactly 60 years ago the unthinkable became not only thinkable, but terrifyingly so. The adults then were perhaps more terrified than the kids who had only a vague idea that something momentously bad was going on. But kids could feel the terror too. For me, the most immediate vector of that terror was not my parents or teachers, but a guy called Stiff Picucci.
Angelo “Stiff” Picucci was the most colorful person I ever knew, and coming from Leominster, Mass. in the 1960s, that’s saying something. The long-time manager of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette office in town was a stogie chomping World War II Marine combat veteran. He drove a green Willys Jeep wagon and sported a pork pie hat—felt in the winter and straw in the summer. He could cuss and swear like a hardened convict and was a committed follower of everything that had to do with politics and the Leominster High School football team, past and present.
The word “stiff” in those days usually referred to someone drunk or dead, and since he was not dead, I assumed he acquired the nickname from its other meaning. I vaguely recall hearing that when he came home from the Pacific, in 1945, he went on a long bender, but I couldn’t say for sure, and I never saw any indication that he was a drinker. It might also have something to do with being in a job that didn’t pay much, as in “working stiff.” But however he got his name, he didn’t seem to mind it at all, and that’s what everyone called him.
Stiff Picucci was a friend of my father’s and the older brother of our next-door neighbor Louie. When I turned 12 in June 1961, my father asked Stiff if I could help out in the afternoons at the Telegram & Gazette office during the summer and after school to earn a few dollars. It was all arranged between the two of them, and dad told me to report for work the next day.
The office on Water Street across from Tim’s Diner was in a storefront with two large display windows flanking the entry. Each morning Stiff would set that day’s newspaper on a stand in each window so passers-by could see the headlines. Entering the building, you would first encounter a couple of desks on the left, each with its own Remington typewriter. There was also a teletype machine against the wall.
The equipment seemed to be from another time because I never saw the teletype come to life, and only rarely did a reporter from somewhere else come in to use one of the typewriters. So, this part of the office was usually deserted, and dust from the constant inflow and outflow of newspapers in the back room covered all the surfaces with a gray film.
A wall separated the reporters’ desks from the distribution room at the back of the building, which was Stiff’s domain. In that large room was his roll-top desk on the left, separated from the rest of the room by a counter that extended along the perimeter of the space where newspapers were sorted and stacked for each delivery boy’s daily route. The room smelled powerfully of newsprint as if you opened a newspaper and stuck your face in the fold and inhaled deeply through your nose. It also smelled of stale cigars and motor oil, which Stiff poured on the floor and spread around with an old mop to control the dust from all those newspapers, which made me wonder what would happen if a fire ever got going in there. The fluorescent lights that faintly flickered and hummed overhead would give you a headache after an hour or so.
Thanks to Stiff Picucci, I would bet that I am one of the few people around, apart from academic historians or Africans over the age of 80, who recognizes the name Moïse Tshombe. He was a Congolese politician and the president of the secessionist State of Katanga from 1960 to 1963. He was prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo for a couple of years after that. Why do I know this? Because during much of 1961, Tshombe (pronounced shome-bay, accent on the first syllable) was in the news, and Stiff, he of his own nickname, never called me by my own name, but instead always called me by the name of whoever was making headlines at the time. So, I was Tshombe for weeks on end. “Tshombe! How was school today?” or “Hey Tshombe, move your ass and take those goddamned bundled papers down to the basement.” Before the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year, I was Fidel (Castro) for over a month and off and Nikita (Khrushchev) on for most of the rest of the year. During the time I worked for Stiff, he called me by many other names like Bobby (Kennedy), Martin (Luther King, Jr.), de Gaulle, Lyndon (Johnson), and others I can’t remember. He even called me Eleanor (Roosevelt) for about a week after she died in November 1962. Although you can’t beat Tshombe for a name, Stiff’s favorite for me was Nikita. So, Nikita I was.
Stiff’s ceaseless cussing presented a specific challenge for a tender Catholic schoolboy like me. The nuns had taught us that whenever we heard God’s name taken in vain that we should silently and prayerfully utter the names of the Holy Family: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” So when Stiff would tell me to move my goddamned ass, I would dutifully pray, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” But sometimes, when he got angry or excited, there would be such a rapid string of profanities that included endless creative variations of God’s name taken in vain—goddamned, Jesus Christ, Chrissake, etc.—that I simply could not keep up with a “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” for each one. In those instances, I would end up silently saying something like “Jeeeze-Mar-Joze!, Jeeeze-Mar-Joze!, Jeeeze-Mar-Joze!, Jeeeze-Mar-Joze!” It was goddamned exhausting, I can tell you that! Finally, I would give up and would simply utter a pre-emptive “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” when I arrived for work each day and let it go at that, leaving it to God to apply this little bit of atonement wherever needed.
I had quite a few things to do for Stiff each day, beginning with sorting the papers for delivery. Each paperboy (no girls in those days) had a route with a certain number of newspapers that I would have to count out and stack so they would be ready when the boys came in to get them. After that, I would use a razor blade to cut off the masthead of each of the previous day’s unsold newspapers so that Stiff could return them for credit. Then those papers would have to be bundled up, tied with sisal rope, and taken down to the basement where they would be stored until a recycler would pick them up. This last task was most challenging because the stairs were steep and dimly lit, and the 35-pound bundles were a lot for a kid to carry. I could tote one handily if I held it from the bottom with both hands, but then it would take a long time to take all the bundles to the basement. If I tried to take two bundles at a time by carrying each by its rope, the rough rope would cut into my hands and hurt. Eventually, I solved the problem by throwing the bundles down the stairs and then moving them to where they were stored.
The other part of the job that got me out of the office was delivering a few copies of the Evening Gazette to the drug stores and neighborhood grocery stores in the French Hill section of town. When there was no snow on the ground, I used one of the office’s massive ancient clunky Schwinn bicycles that had a large wire basket in front and wide handlebars that resembled the horns on a Texas steer. The Schwinn allowed me to make the loop in about 20 or 30 minutes, and then I could go home. But if there was snow on the ground, I had to walk, and that took forever. I once had the bright idea of fashioning a simulacrum of snow tires on the bike by lacing a lot of sisal rope around the back wheel. Still, the rope broke off within minutes, and I slipped and slid around French Hill, which caused Stiff to yell, “For Chrissake, Nikita, stop screwing around with that bike and get those goddamned papers delivered.”
This was how it went. I showed up for work each day after school and learned how to cuss from a master of the craft, interact with some of Leominster’s colorful characters who came into the office to see Stiff, and learned a lot about current events and politics. And I got teased relentlessly, though gently, by Stiff for being the dumb, naive kid that I was every single day except for one week in October, 1962.
On Monday, October 22, 1962, I made the six-minute walk from St. Leo’s School to the Telegram & Gazette office on Water Street, stopping at Carberry’s News Stand on Depot Square for a snack as I usually did. But this day, something was different. John Carberry had ripped the front page off a copy of the Boston Globe evening edition and taped it to the front door, something I had never seen before. The headlines read:
KENNEDY BRACES US FOR BIG STEP On TV at 7 Tonight on Matter “Of Highest Urgency”
When I got to Stiff’s office, he said, “Steve, get those papers sorted and then take this deposit to the bank.”
Steve? My name? I hadn’t even been entirely sure he even knew my first name until then. Why wasn’t my name Nikita or Fidel or Tshombe or something other than Steve? What was happening?
The next morning the headlines in the Boston Globe were terrifying:
IF CASTRO LOOSES MISSILES US
Below the headlines, there was a map of the western hemisphere showing the range of the Soviet nuclear missiles based in Cuba, and we all saw that Massachusetts was well within their reach. That afternoon, Stiff, who was always on the go and was usually quite gregarious with something to say about everything, brooded silently at his desk smoking a cigar. And again, he used my real name whenever he told me to do something, which only added to the strange and grave sense of foreboding.
On Wednesday, it was the same while the world awaited the showdown that the news reports said could come “at any hour” between the American navy and Soviet ships bearing more missiles to Cuba. No one spoke about what might happen when the ships met up in the Atlantic, but no one had to. Everyone knew that a confrontation could quickly escalate into a nuclear exchange and the end of everything.
The morning editions of Thursday’s papers teased us with the news that the Russian transport ships had stopped, but it was unclear what that meant. Were they waiting for Soviet warships to catch up with them? Were they just pausing to see what the US Navy was going to do before proceeding? Or would they turn back? It was as if the whole world, which had been holding its breath since Monday, knew it had to hold that breath for a while longer. Then, that afternoon shortly after I arrived for work, WBZ, the Boston radio station that Stiff always had on in the background, announced that the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, had ordered the Russian ships to turn back. There were still missiles in Cuba, and on Friday the tension mounted as we waited to learn what the Cubans would do now that they seemed to be cornered. But the news reports hinted that negotiations were underway, and that provided a bit of hope for a terrified nation.
It snowed that day, and the storm got worse just as I was supposed to head out to French Hill to deliver the evening Gazette to the stores. Because of the snow, I knew I would have to walk, and so I put the papers in a canvas bag and made for the door just as Stiff was coming in. “Stevie boy,” he said, “get your ass in the Jeep for Chrissakes.” For the first and last time, Stiff, still calling me by my own name, drove me around French Hill, and we made all the deliveries in ten minutes. None of the adults in my life were talking much in front of me about what was happening. But Stiff’s small kindness, which was so out of the ordinary, conveyed the gravity of the moment as nothing else could. Then, amazing me further, he drove me home. The metallic taste of fear was in my mouth.
Over the weekend, we were glued to the TV and radio as we fearfully hungered for any good news from Washington or Moscow or Havana. But the only new information came on Sunday when we learned that a US plane had been shot down over Cuba, and we went on holding our breath, terrified of what might come next.
The next day the headlines in all the morning papers brought the welcome news that Khrushchev had agreed to withdraw all Soviet missiles from Cuba. There were a lot more details to the story than that, but we grasped that the crisis was over and we were finally able to exhale.
That afternoon, when I showed up for work, Stiff was at his desk smoking a stogie and doing some bookkeeping. Without looking up, he said, “For Chrissakes, Nikita, where the hell have you been? Get those goddamned papers sorted before the boys get here and find you sitting on your ass again.” Through a global existential crisis, I had found an unexpected and unlikely human connection with a gruff cussing politico almost four times my age who simultaneously calmed my own fears by revealing his. When it was over, I was back to being Nikita again and the cussing resumed. The world had somehow righted itself. At least for a while. Until Mr. Putin came along.
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