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132 my friend, angelo ralph orlandella My Friend, Angelo Ralph Orlandella William Foote Whyte Memoir (1995) My meeting with Angelo Ralph Orlandella in 1938 began a friendship and collaboration that has continued and grown stronger for more than fifty years. At the time, I was a twenty-four-year-old Junior Fellow at Harvard University, carrying out a sociological study of the North End slum district of Boston, which, at the time, was populated almost exclusively by first- and second-generation Italian Americans. Angelo Ralph Orlandella was then a nineteen-year-old high school dropout. (I have always called him Ralph because that was what his friends in the North End called him. Many years later, when his immediate boss was named Ralph, Orlandella went back to his first name of Angelo so as to avoid confusion.) Our backgrounds were completely different. I am the only child of John Whyte, a university professor of German, and my mother, Isabel VanSickle Whyte, who had a master’s degree in German and who had taught that subject in high school. Her forebears were Dutch and English who came to this country in the eighteenth century. I am named after my grandfather, William Foote Whyte, who came with his family from Scotland to Wisconsin when he was three years old. My parents, and especially my mother, were socially concerned people, worried about the plight of the poor, especially in big-city slum districts, but I had had no prior experience with slums before entering the North End. I had grown up in small towns, Caldwell, New Jersey, and Bronxville, New York. I had had many casual friendships, but I had never had anyone I could call a pal or had been a member of any tightly knit informal group, anything like the street corner gangs I found in the North End. My mother used to say with pride that I was becoming a self-sufficient person, by which she meant that I could get so absorbed in what I was doing that I did not need anyone else to entertain or interest me. Perhaps that was true to some extent, but there were times when I was bored or lonely. I was fascinated by the leadership and structure of street corner gangs. I had made a start as a participant observer, carrying out a study of the North Bennett Street gang of men in their mid- to late twenties. Its informal leader was Ernest Peed, whom I called ‘‘Doc’’ in Street Corner Society. To generalize my findings, I needed to study other street corner gangs. By this time, I had already lived eighteen months in the district yet I still had not figured out what I was doing. I had accumulated files of interviewing and observational materials on a wide variety of topics for what I intended to be a community study, but still I could not see how it might all fit together. It was William Foote Whyte 133 through the further study of street corner gangs that I began to see the overall shape of the book I was to write. In 1938 I had learned that Frank Havey, head of the North End Union settlement house, had secured a grant to finance three storefront recreation centers. I had found that the settlement houses did not attract street corner gangs. For young men, they served primarily to attract those who were striving to move up and out of the district. This effort to reach the street corner boys on their corners interested me. For the three center director positions, I urged Frank Havey to choose current or former street corner gang leaders. I was only partly successful. He appointed two men with master’s degrees in social work and my first choice, Ernest Pecci. It was Pecci who introduced me to Ralph Orlandella (whom I called Sam Franco in SCS). On the first night Pecci’s center opened, Ralph came in as emissary of his Endicott Street gang. After a brief conversation with Pecci, he went out and brought his gang in. By the second night, Ralph had become Pecci’s informal and unpaid assistant director of the center. Pecci knew a few people in this part of the district, but Ralph knew everybody. Pecci suggested that Ralph could help me to extend my studies of street corner gangs. I invited Ralph to come up to the North End apartment where Kathleen and I lived from 1938 to 1940. He...

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