latter chronicles life on

and off the parquet during

the 1970s, when court-

ordered busing of Boston

public schoolchildren

polarized the city.

I was a business communication major at Bentley, so there was some writing involved with that. [Professor of English] Barbara Paul-Emile was one of my favorite teachers. But the passion didn’t really bubble up until after college, when I got into writing and did my first book — which got my foot in the door of the publishing world. I also do some blogging for the Boston Herald.

Q

But you also have a “regular” job?

I’m a vice president at Stoneham Bank in Stoneham, Mass. I got a foundation in business and numbers from Bentley. That’s the day job, while writing is a lot of fun and a passion of mine. I’m very fortunate to be able to do both.

Your new book opens by describing an incident on the subway, when you
were caught in the middle of a racial exchange and had a gun pointed at
you. What did that moment mean for you?

I went to a parochial school, so my family was pretty much insulated from what was going on. When you saw racial incidents or buses being stoned, it seemed like any other event on the news — no different from Lebanon and other problems going on in the world at that time. The subway incident was tangible evidence that busing was affecting everyone who lived in Boston. It brought the issues home for me and for the Connelly household.

Q

Q

The busing decision came down in 1974, and Larry Bird played his
first game with the Celtics in 1979. Why write this book now?

When you see a guy like [former Major League Baseball star] David Justice build into his contract that he’ll play anywhere but Boston, there’s a perception that Boston is a racist city. That’s false. My book shows that the city suffered through a period of aberration during the 1970s. The worst occurred when Ted Landsmark, an African American attorney, was attacked on the City Hall steps. Boston came full circle after the Celtics won the 1981 championship and Larry Bird greeted 1. 5 million fans on those same steps. Bostonians finally felt good about themselves again — about where they lived, where they raised their families, where they worked. But for years what was going in the city was embarrassing.

Q

What’s the connection between busing and the Celtics?

The crux of the book is that Bostonians look to the Celtics as an outlet: a symbol of why they’re special. During the Seventies, not only did you have the busing crisis embarrassing the city, but later in the decade the Celtics weren’t winning. Even though the team had only three or four years of decline, it hurt that much more, because people were desperate for an outlet and the Celtics didn’t provide it.

Q

Why did busing encounter such resistance?

Busing was viewed by some as an extreme remedy for the racial imbalance of Boston Public Schools. The schools were in violation of both the Massachusetts 1965 Racial Imbalance Act and the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which held that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” When the Boston School Committee and city politicians failed to comply with these rulings, the task of finding a solution fell to the courts and one federal judge. That solution — mandated busing of students to achieve integration — was seen as violating the natural right of parents to protect and choose what’s best for their children.

12
OBSERVER