I lost one of my childhood best friends yesterday and I’m reeling
quite a bit. Robbie McCracken was one of a kind, a regular nut-job, and was a
dear old friend of mine, at one time “my
best good friend” to quote Forest Gump. Someone
who weaved oddly in and out of my life for over three decades, since I was
roughly 10 years old. Always Robbie, never Rob, Robert, Bob, or Bobbie, at 42
years of age, he passes away still just Robbie, a kid-like name for a guy who
was always a big kid-like man.
I’ve experienced quite
a few losses the last couple of years, too many really, two in the last two
months alone. One, Wade, was a customer of mine and a casual friend for a
couple of years, who I was just recently getting to really know well. He was
young just in his early 50s, but had lived a pretty full life, and quite
frankly as sad as I’ve been about his loss, and I have been, he was not a
life-long close childhood friend in his
early 40s! Frankly, the many looses these last couple years are getting quite old,
and this one like the loss of my
brother, digs pretty deeply. Can we just stop all this dying shit now? Please?
I had something of a crazy childhood, so losing all
connections to it, might sound like a good thing, yet it’s not. I for whatever, reason find it quite
discomforting, and a real loss of my own identity, in addition to the loss of
these folks in my life. I find myself the last couple years, without my little
brother , my main side-by-side companion for all of his 37 years, and now a close childhood friend. The two of them
where the only ones there at a VERY crazy time in my childhood, that most folks
wouldn’t even believe, I feel like it ceases to exist now that no-one is there
to remind me it all happened. I am just a
bit shell-shocked.
Robbie and I grew up in the Philly Southern Suburbs, on the “bad
side” of the boro of Collingdale PA, in what came to be known as “The South End”.
Delaware County, PA, is the oldest and arguably the most
working-class of Philly’s surrounding counties. Some parts of our surrounding
area are middle class, some even have true wealth, old money . Much of Delco
however is working class and/or poor even. Collingdale certainly being towards
the lower end of the socio-economic scale of the region.
South End, as the area, and residents, are now fondly called
by those who grew up there, was named for a gang, that was named for who knows
what? You see, even as a kid I understood that we were not at the South End of
Collingdale, nor even the South End of our County, so where the South End name came
from, I may never know, but South End it was, and WE ARE! The gang, founded around
1980, by Robbie’s older brothers Terry and Daryl, had only a couple dozen
members spread among itself and the South End Junior. The gang and neighborhood
built quite the reputation in the early 1980’s.
Collingdale is something of a Hood today, but even in the
70s it wasn’t exactly Beverly Hills! The lower end of Collingdale, closer to
Darby, was considered the bad end of town (wrong side of the tracks as it were),
though it was less a tracks dividing line, and more about Roberta Ave, in my opinion.
The old Pusey Ave. School was at the corner of Roberta and Pusey, and seemed for
whatever reason, to be about where OUR end of town began. I can’t think of ALMOST
anyone from beyond that point, who was ever considered South End, except for
John Dowling and his sister Charlotte. Johnny was killed in South End and
Charlotte dated Daryl, so they are South End through and through, Roberta Ave.
be damned!
I remember when we younger kids formed South End Junior, on the
heels of South End, picking nick-names, probably around 1981 or so. I can’t
recall a hundred percent who was actually “in” the gang, but I know there were
less than a dozen South End Juniors in the beginning. Jason Aikens ~ Little
Toes, after his older brother’s nick-name Tommie Toes. Mikey Montanaro, Robbie,
Myself, just can’t remember who else was in that first group. Maybe Pat Mullen,
The Casey Brothers, possibly Johnny D, not sure he was hanging with us that
much, just yet.
The Warriors was playing on cable constantly, and the S.E.
Hinton books were being taught at Collingdale Junior (the horrible movies weren’t
even out yet!) and us kids wanted to be like those characters. Robbie wasn’t any
kind of leader type, he was actually pretty shy in most ways, but being Terry
and Daryl’s little brother, he was sort of the central point of our little
group. The McCracken house seemed to be where we all gravitated to. Watching the
exploits of the older guys, we were in awe of their hijinks.
We all ran around, one or two of us most times, sometimes a
few at a time. EVERYONE came together just on rare occasions, like when Terry
got “snuck” in Darby. I can recall that whole night like it was yesterday,
coming up out of the woods onto that street, maybe as many as 40 or 50 of us,
and the Darby kids shitting a brick. Terry saying “wait till my little brother gets
here!” and those kids freaking when they found out that “little” brother was
Daryl McCracken, he being our neighborhood bad-ass! Getting messed with by
older guys when I moved for a short time to Darby, and telling the two kids “I’m
South End, Daryl and Terry McCracken are like my big brothers” and the Darby
kids being like “well ummm yeah, sorry, nevermind, have a nice day kid”! I will
not go into the many stories of South End that I can remember, at least one
story is simply too sad to share with strangers, you weren’t there, you couldn’t
understand. Southenders will already know it ~ Rest in Peace Johnny D!
I don't even remember
actually "meeting" Robbie. He
recently said we were friends since we were like 3 years old (a complete
exageration, lol, but it's all good). We probably met through Mikey Montanaro,
who lived right around the corner from the McCrackens. Mike and I met at about 8
years old, through our dads, and a front porch job. I probably would have met
Mike a year or two later, but not that soon as those 2 or 3 blocks were long
distance at that age! Mike and I became best of friends, hanging out and
getting in trouble, lighting fires, stealing soda from the meet market, vandalizing
stuff, yeah like most South Enders we were "bad kids". I think Mike introduced me to Robbie, we all
three became friends and did the odd-man out stuff that kids do, and founded
South End Junior together. Hell Mike had the big C with a cross jailhouse tattooed
on his skinny little 13 year-old arm! We hung out together, tortured one
another, and cared for our little group, like a true dysfunctional street
family. There were things about each of our home lives, that clearly made us
feel safe to have each other in and around our houses without any fear of judgment.
When I moved at 14, Mike and Robbie were the only friends from Collingdale who
I kept contact with, still saw, and who came to visit me in my new life in
Clifton. Life for me was much more how it’s supposedly meant to be in Clifton,
but truth be told, all I really wanted was to get back to South End!
I got calls when John was killed, when that craziness at
Kelly’s Deli went down, and when Robbie’s house burnt to the ground. Lots of drama
for a kid, but Robbie never wavered in his love of South end through it all.
Robbie was simply one
of my two best friends for several years before I left Collingdale, and was my
one strong link to South End after I did. I would ride my bike back to town to
hang with him and/or Mikey Mont, even after my dad told me to stay the hell out
of there! When his family lost their house, we hung-out at the Motel in
Springfield where they lived for a while, going to the Springfield Mall and
chasing girls. I tried to set Robbie up with the friend of a girl I was seeing,
but the girls said “no way, he’s "goofy mug"!” I never did tell him
that story. Yeah I guess he was a bit of a goofy mug, but what would you expect
from a freshly displaced and nearly burnt up South Ender? When he moved to UD,
we hung out a bit again, going to the same school for a short time. I lived in
Clifton and his family belonged to Clifton’s Pool, so we would see each other in
summer. When I became a partier he would come up and we partied in the apartments
in Clifton. It was one hell of a walk home to Collingdale together in summer of
1985, me bad- tripping out badly and Robbie not knowing what to do with me as I
acted like a loon for two hours. He was a little under the weather himself
actually, but I won’t share that here. We managed to always run into each other
or keep in touch over the years and decades. Catching up with him was often
weird, as he was such a nut, but the connection of our childhood was quite
strong. Growing up in that same crazy neighborhood in such similar
unconventional households, bonded him, myself, and Mikey Mont. We could and did
share some stories that NO-ONE else was/is able to relate to at all. We both
dealt with clinical depression and other issues and could totally still just
shake our heads, that “earth people” would never get what it was like to be
like us.
I saw Robbie a couple weeks back. I went over to meet up
with him with some Phillies shirts. He was in Broomall working on painting a
house for an old friend. He was proud, he wanted to show-off the work he had
done so far. We walked through, looked at the job, and talked a while. I busted
his stones about something, and we stood on a lawn talking about trying to just
have one’s life together and folks expecting more out of you than you think you
even have to give. We laughed and ran down some of the crazy stuff, and he said
something along the lines of “and they expect me to be NOT depressed?”. He had health issues and seizures, along with
the depression. I know cause he told me, that Robbie didn’t expect to grow “old”,
but I don’t think he expected to be gone quite so soon. Robbie’s smile and easy
going nature, actually masked a great internal struggle and pain that so many
of us hide so well. We two knew and appreciated the truth of those hidden
things and those crazy times in the “South End” of the big C, and trying to
seem “normal” out there with all these earthlings. We had a few moments that
day, that I will cherish, as it’s the last time my friend and I will ever share
those things. Did he give me a hug? I can’t recall, it wouldn’t have seemed
important at the time. We didn’t know it
was the last time we would see each other, you usually don’t. Had I had any
idea, I would have gave him a real big hug and told him I really loved his
crazy ass, and I was gonna miss him big-time, and he deserved better, and he
had a great-big old heart, how I was grateful he had been my friend, then and
now. I would have told him how to me he was always gonna BE the Fucking South End.
FOREVER!
I love you Rob, I’m gonna miss you lots man, Rest in Peace
my friend. South End Baby.
