South End will never forget!

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.