(This goes back to the first half of the last century, to the raucous mill city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, a true-enough story.)

When guys get together, guys who knew Lawrence when it was more a movie than a reality, they talk of John Fallon, who fits into this city’s history the way his young hands once wriggled into boxing gloves. They talk of the diner he owned, a dynamite place that exploded on weekends, with Fallon flashing the neon sign to let police know a wagon was needed, and they remember he was the only politician to leave local office without a dime, without a plum job awaiting him, and without a summer home at nearby Seabrook Beach.

“Fallon,” they say, “where is he now?”

They know perfectly well where he is — living quietly with his wife Harriet in an elderly housing project, and they shake their heads because the man could’ve been a millionaire, could’ve been anything he wanted, this handsome Cagney-like character born in a Lawrence tenement in 1900.

His mother and father died the year he was turning fifteen, and he went on his own, living in a rented room, paying board to a family to mind his twelve-year-old sister, working in a mill eleven hours a day for $5.03 a week and working nights at whatever he could find. A bantamweight, not many inches over five feet, he wandered into the smoky clubs of Lawrence’s boxing circuit and peppered opponents with a blur of fists, this kid with only a doughnut in his stomach for breakfast, this boy from “Bloody City,” meaning Lawrence, meaning the gutter.

Except it was not the gutter. It was where men and women fought to make lives for themselves and their children, and where John Fallon became a city laborer and saved money and bought a diner in 1923 and created an atmosphere that endured until 1952 when he ran for alderman and topped the ticket.

Fallon’s Diner, with what he called a tea room hooked on it, was not a diner. It was a world. It was where John Fallon could’ve made a mint and instead fed free every hobo who wandered in, every street urchin who hadn’t eaten that day, and Fallon didn’t give them doughnuts. He served them muffins and eggs and full glasses of milk.

And he cuffed every racetrack bum who came in tapped out and lent money to WPA workers. In days when hamburgers cost a dime, he let guys run up tabs that reached $200 and never dunned them because he didn’t want to lose a friend because friends were his family.

That was one part of the diner and one side of John Fallon, who never had a key to the diner because it was open twenty-four hours a day and went wild on weekends, booze served in the tea room, with Fallon leaping over the counter like an acrobat to lay out cold some unruly character twice his size. That same character, sobered up, would come in with his black eye and say, “Jesus, John, it won’t happen again.” But it did.

It was a breakfast world that ran around the clock, with people actually lined up outside to get in, and it was a weekend world where, if there was no room inside, people stood outside for hours and talked. Everyone knew everyone else.

It was a world where guys in silk suits with slinky women went after doing the town, where workers in dungarees filed in with their wives or girlfriends, where a woman half-bagged came in wearing only her nightgown and, with great dignity, took a prominent booth in the tea room.

It was where Tom Concannon, superintendent of streets, big and husky, always surly, came in every morning with two strictly fresh eggs in hand, the only kind he’d eat, and he’d give them to Fallon and say, “Come on, fry ’em up.” And Fallon, for a whole year before Concannon caught on, palmed those two strictly fresh eggs and fed him different ones.

Guys who gather to talk about Fallon can’t eat an egg without thinking about him because if someone were giving him a hard time he’d hurl one at him. And then it would start. Everyone would be throwing eggs.

Ask Tommy Mixon about eggs. He worked in the city barns, and each morning, when Fallon was busiest, he arrived with a take-out list. “OK, John, I want twenty-four coffees, five with, four no, seven black, rest regular, and I want nineteen sandwiches, three ham and cheese with mayo, three without, and . . .” And Fallon would mutter, “I’ll kill that son of a bitch one of these days.” And one of those days a bunch of guys hid in a truck outside the diner, and when Tommy Mixon came out loaded with sandwiches and coffees-to-go, the guys pelted him with eggs, maybe a hundred. “They cremated him,” said an observer.

But Tommy Mixon got his revenge. He came in one day with a carton of eggs and smashed and smeared eggs from one end of the counter to the other. It took Fallon nearly three hours to clean up.

And it was this same Tommy Mixon who as a kid worked for Fallon and appeared on the Gerry O’Leary baseball radio show aired from Fenway Park. The radio was tuned high at the diner.

O’Leary: “And what’s your name and where are you from?”

“I’m Tommy Mixon, and I live in Lawrence and work at Fallon’s Diner.”

O’Leary: “Oh, and what do you do at Fallon’s Diner?”

“I kill cockroaches.”

The explosion at the diner was heard all over the city.

Fallon’s Diner. Quite informal. “John, come on! I want more crackers than this in my soup.” And Fallon would pitch fistfuls at him, as much as he wanted and much more.

Fallon’s Diner. Very touching. “We used to watch John make meals for old-timers who came in every day. He worked lovingly at it, as if each old guy was his father and deserved the best.”

Fallon’s Diner: Inviting. A down-at-the-heels artist who arrived daily at noon with his own bottle of ketchup to make soup. All he needed from Fallon was a bowl of hot water and free crackers. The crackers were politely handed to him, not thrown.

The odd balls: Such as the fellow who deposited his false teeth in a cup before eating. He preferred gumming everything, even sirloin steak, for his gums were like razor blades.

The tricks: Such as Fallon’s patience running out with the customer who constantly badmouthed the soup. So Fallon put beetles in the soup and passed them off as spices, which pleased the customer until he felt something crawling under his tongue.

The people who worked for him. He never paid them. They paid themselves. They rang open the cash register and took what was due them. That was the way Fallon operated. And no one ever cheated him, at least not in a noticeable way.

The big glass jar on the counter. That was for kids. “Come on, put something in it!” he’d tell his customers, and they did, and he ran a penny lottery, collected a bundle, and for years sent kids to summer camp in New Hampshire. There was nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for a kid.

Once a year he gave out free hot dogs to kids in the city, hundreds and hundreds of kids, even though he knew they were sneaking in from neighboring communities, but that didn’t matter. Kids are kids, and Fallon never had a real chance to be one.

In 1952 Fallon became, in his words, “an alleged alderman.” He won the elective office in a landslide. He became director of public parks and property and sold the diner to Mike Massis, who worked for him. “He sold the diner to me the way he did everything in life — with style and with warmth. He said, ‘Mike, you want the diner, it’s yours. Pay me when you can.’”

And John Fallon walked away from the place that had been his life and became an alderman, serving until l963, and was more popular than his buddy, Mayor John Buckley, which wasn’t altogether fair to the mayor, who certainly must have remembered when he had a hotdog stand that was failing and Fallon quipped, “John Buckley’s doing a nice quiet business.”

A memorable alderman and an honest politician, Fallon retired undefeated, which was a rarity in Lawence. He and his wife spent their final years in a housing project, where they were honored residents. They spoke proudly of their son, who went to Phillips Academy and Annapolis, and Fallon talked affectionately of his sister, the wife of the city’s building inspector.

And occasionally he talked about the diner. When he didn’t, others did.

Those who were left.

__________________________________________

Andrew Coburn is the author of 13 novels, 3 made into French films. His work has been translated into 14 languages. He and his wife Casey Coburn, an editor who teaches writing in a women’s jail, live in Andover, Massachusetts.

Night Train Magazine: Read It Now!

Editor, poet and writer of fiction. Like most of us in the literature racket, Rusty Barnes wears many hats. He is the co-founding editor of Night Train Magazine, hosts numerous literary blogs, and is busy revising his novel. Still, though, he found the time to answer our questions about the business of literary magazines. Sidestepping inquiries into what makes a story unique, or which types of fiction he prefers, this interview focuses on the schematics of literary publishing, Web versus print journals, and when, if ever, editing a literary magazine is a rational endeavor.

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Pay Attention In Church, Or Else

Our supreme leader, and editor, seems to think we contribute a decidedly leftist take on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But this week we’ve got Wednesday, so we’ll avoid politics. Or try to. Instead we’ll talk about another conversational no-no: religion. And since we’re playing Kevin, we’ll start with Catholicism. His name is Murphy, he’s Irish, and he’s from Boston. You do the math. Her name is Margaret O’Brien Steinfels and her mind matured in a Chicago filled with Catholicism and political activity. A man after our heart, Philip Pullman continues to rabble rouse with The Scoundrel Christ. A study of Chinese children debunks any theories that morality is rooted in cultural and religious values. Dr. Frankenstein took a shot at playing God. And R. Crumb’s rendering of the Book of Genesis is finally coming to the bookshelves. In Case You Missed It, here’s an old interview with Mr. Crumb. – Andrew Geer

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