“Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston’s
‘hardly passionate Marlborough Street,’
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is a ‘young Republican.”’
— From “Memories of West Street and Lepke,’’ by Robert Lowell (1917-77)
Lepke was Louis Buchalter, known as Lepke Buchalter, (1897 -March 4, 1944), an American mobster and head of the Mafia hit squad “Murder Inc.’’
