kevin crowely

Somerville — You can count me out as a citizen who refers to our fair city as the “ville” or the “Paris of New England.” You can count me in as a supporter of our city’s application for the All American City Award. I hope the mayor brings the award back home to Somerville.

This is not the first time Somerville is a finalist for the All American City Award. In 1973, the city received the accolade as a community that demonstrated excellence arising from broad-based community involvement and leadership, resulting in outstanding community development.

In January 1970, S. Lester Ralph, a minister and attorney, was inaugurated as mayor of Somerville. Six months prior, he was an unknown citizen who announced his candidacy for mayor. Two months earlier, he was elected mayor. He won 36 out of 38 precincts in the election.

A mere 30 months later, the city received the All American City Award. Specifically, it was bestowed upon the city for three areas of government and community participation: services to the elderly; development of and initiation of a master plan for building community schools, rebuilding old schools and remodeling all schools; and the efforts of citizens to install a reform government that exposed mismanagement of tax dollars, citing Mayor Ralph’s efforts to lead the government to be more responsive to community input.

Ralph’s election capped a six-year effort by civic groups dissatisfied with their municipal government. Between 1965 and 1970, Somerville citizens formed a host of civic organizations to change, upgrade and create a new atmosphere of citizen and government cooperation.
Some of these reform groups included ESCA, East Somerville Citizens for Action; CSS, Citizens to Support Schools; ESNIC, East Somerville Neighborhood Improvement Committee; EMOC, Eastern Middlesex Opportunities Council; SRUC, Somerville Racial Understanding Committee; SWRO, Somerville Welfare Rights Organization; WTCA, Ward Two Civic Association; MHTA, Mystic Housing Tenants’ Association; SCAT, Somerville Citizens for Adequate Transportation; CPP, Citizens for Participation in Politics (local branch); and INTERCOM, a group formed to foster communications between all these citizen groups.

This was a turbulent time in the country and in the city. These civic organizations received little or no assistance from the municipal government. It was a scandalous indifference.

They say “wisdom cries out in the streets.” Ward 1 streets were aroused by plans to destroy the character of their community with a plan for urban renewal. Community action stopped that plan. Ward 1 residents also led the city to renounce a state plan to encircle Somerville with multilane highways.


Imagine Somerville surrounded on three sides by highways. The state plan was to have I-93 divide the city to the north, extend Route 2 through Cambridge and Somerville to the south, and connect I-93 with an “Inner Belt” connecting Somerville to the Mass. Pike to the east. The Inner Belt was to pass through Somerville and Cambridge. Sound crazy? Surprisingly, most city officials were in favor of this plan.

These citizens’ groups were the catalysts that aroused other residents to oppose this strangulation of the city. Through strong activism over a period of five years, they were able to stop the extension of Route 2 and the four-lane Inner Belt. Unfortunately, the state went ahead with construction of I-93 without depressing the highway through Somerville, causing, as predicted, a split city, pollution and noise. The protest of the activist groups was the first crowbar to disturb the loud and blowsy attitude of many city officials.

On the other hand, however, more community groups formed to rehabilitate or re-create our school system. They sought to institute a school lunch program to ensure adequate nutrition for all children and to free women from the necessity of remaining home all day, unable to work, since they needed to be home at lunchtime. Even after Carla Johnston, the ace of community organizers, testified before the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and the program was endorsed by Sen. Edward Kennedy, the majority of the School Committee voted against the school lunch program. Most students in low-income Somerville were entitled to this program under law. It was a federally funded program.

Ideas to initiate a community school system were defeated. Once, parents, though invited by the superintendent of schools to visit and inspect the schools during National Education Week, were turned away from many schools when they arrived with checklists to record the physical conditions of schools, the majority of which were built between the Civil War and the early 20th century. These parents were called “outside agitators,” “socialists” and “hippies.” Privately, the shibboleth “commies” was a common slander.

Even high school girls were under attack for wearing pants to school. A gathering of female students dressed in pants was told to “go home and change your clothes if you want to go to school.”

Community schools? Well, they were simply too new-fangled for consideration. The prevailing official attitude was that most schools were to be open only during the school day. After-school programs, drug education, community meeting access, teen programs and preschool programs were not in the cards for parents. These parents were working mothers and wives of working-class workers. They were seen as agitators and troublemakers




Meanwhile, down at the Housing Authority, residents, beset with structural and heating problems, organized themselves into a tenants’ association. One night, they had a fundraiser that was raided by the Somerville Police. An innocent game, similar to bingo, was a vehicle used by churches, veterans’ groups and nonprofit agencies to raise money for their expenses. This game, though illegal, was universal in Massachusetts ($20 scratch ticket, anyone?). The chief of police, when contacted, ordered the fundraiser stopped. Akin to the police chief in the movie, “Casablanca,” he was “shocked” to discover gambling in his city. Now, this was a time when every barroom in the city had its own bookie and the third-largest organized crime outfit in New England was headquartered a mere 1,000 yards up the street from the fundraiser.

The new community groups were a creative lot. Where programs did not exist, they, with the help of nonprofit public agencies, started their own. The first area nursery school was established by volunteers in Winter Hill. A “well baby” clinic was successfully launched. Three teen centers were opened in the “housing projects.” A Community Ambassador Program provided “scholarships” for Somerville students to spend summers abroad. The first mental health clinic was founded. A health clinic was opened. A summer day camp was sponsored by the Somerville Racial Understanding Committee. Miniature community schools were organized on weekends in churches. Food programs were opened. Groups formed to clean up playgrounds and parks. A community housing and development agency was formed. Gene Brune was busy gathering support to build a Boys & Girls Club complex.

Money was raised from donations from civic leaders, federal funding and community gatherings. People from various groups met at potluck dinners to raise revenues and share the spirit of their many endeavors. This was democracy in action.

It all seems so long ago. A pervasive pattern of inside politics, hidden from its citizens, was surfacing in Somerville. A compliant populace was rising to challenge the established order. Even though the ideas of citizens’ groups were constantly shot down, the mere act of getting under officials’ skin revealed a cabal of politicians who did not know enough to stay out of their own way. As the late columnist for the Boston Globe, George Frazier, wrote of all entrenched politicians, “If you let your guard down for a single moment, you were suckered by their stealthyness.”

Some political leaders were in agreement with the new civic spirit in Somerville. There was Alderman Lee Figgins, who fought endlessly for change at Board of Aldermen meetings. Somerville politics was raw and acrimonious. Lee Figgins was in the foxhole, and there was none better than he. There was School Committeeman John Holmes. He carried the banner, alone, in the School Committee for revamping the school system. There was Alderman Leonard Scott, who shared many ideas of community activists and tried to advance their goals.
Sadly, space considerations deny me the opportunity to tell more of the story or to name the hundreds of heroic citizens involved



Political change did come to this city. Armed with confidence gained from years of community organizing, many of these citizens banned together to support and elect S. Lester Ralph mayor. His administrations instituted many of the programs conceived by the community groups of the late 1960s.

The All American City Award is not given to a community because it has attained perfection. It seeks to find a point in time where one can measure where it was then and how far it has traveled since that time.

Successive Ralph administrations brought change and new ideas to Somerville. There was fervor in the city for change, and change it did. Ralph initiated many of the successful agencies, transportation policies, affordable housing issues, arts awareness programs, financial steadfastness guidelines, tenants’ programs, development concerns, community health awareness, tree plantings, elderly programs, beautification policies, and park reconstructions that exist and flourish today.

Under the category of “victory has a thousand fathers,” file the “Red Line.” In 1972, the proposed extension of the Red Line was to travel only through Cambridge from Harvard Square to Alewife Brook. After the scuttling of the Route 2 extension, the Ralph administration received a commitment from then-Gov. Francis Sargent to alter the planned route to include the stop in Davis Square. And hasn’t that made all the difference?

The schools: it was always the schools. The Ralph administration built five schools, rebuilt four schools and remodeled every school. They embedded within the new community schools preschool programs, community access programs, nutrition programs, an alternative high school and the school lunch program.

As Mayor Ralph said at the time of the award, “No one person, group or agency can claim this award as their own; but together, Somerville can certainly be proud.”

This story is incomplete without mentioning Shelley Cohen, the former crusading editor of the Somerville Journal and present editorial page editor of the Boston Herald. She expanded the Journal, through the letters section, to open a community forum for floods of varying opinions. If something was happening in Somerville, you knew about it through her persistent reporting. If you had an opinion, she printed it.

Contacted recently, she noted what an “astonishing time” it was, and the terrific opportunity she had to report on the “bubbling up from underneath of a citizens’ reform movement.” Speaking of Mayor Ralph, she said, “He was the most unlikely of politicians … He did what needed to be done under very difficult circumstances.”



So, though some may think Somerville is today the “Paris of New England,” I say there was once a “moveable feast” that many of us still carry with us. It is in this spirit, with an understanding of our past, that I look forward to the mayor returning from Florida with the All American City Award, not for the “ville,” but for the people of Somerville. We are indeed an All American City, and of this we can be proud.

Kevin T. Crowley is a lawyer in private practice in Somerville. He was an administrative assistant to Lester Ralph, and former assistant city solicitor under then-Mayor Gene Brune.