I was born in Massachusetts on March 29, 1948 in Boston City Hospital. My weight was ten pounds, ten ounces. My mother’s name at the time was Glenora Andrews and my father’s name was John M. Fletcher Jr. My mother and father were both French Canadians and I used to spend most of my summer months in Nova Scotia in a place called Yamouth My mother’s people were Native Americans and we used to pick the summer crop. My youth went by quickly, maybe because I always was working and trying to go to school. We moved from the south end of Boston into Dorchester, where I spent most of my life. I worked in Washington Market for Samuel Goldberg from the age of nine to seventeen from carrying groceries to a butcher and deli man. The Goldbergs even taught me produce and how to stock shelves at a very young age. My mother and all my brothers used to work for them also. We all used to go in to work every Saturday morning, from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. After the second riot came to Blue Hill Avenue in 1968, when Martin Luther King died, they had to sell the store to a community organization and they did not want me or my mother working there, so I went into law enforcement with a Boston community policing unit. But I was only a special officer, patrolling the neighborhoods and checking doors on Blue Hill Avenue from Grove Hall to Dudley Station. I was only twenty years old, and at the time, the Vietnam War was going on hot and heavy. I got married and had one child and a second one on its way by then. I couldn’t get on the regular police department because I did not finish school. The reason is; I had to quit high school and start working full time at the market when my mother was in a coma at Boston City Hospital and my father was laid off his job. I had two sisters and four brothers and I did not want to lose our house. So Samuel gave me a full-time job at the age of fifteen years old, making $140.00 a week; that was a lot of money then, but I worked over seventy-five hours a week, and with no overtime. But my mother survived that to only get killed in an automobile accident when I was twenty-three. My brother-in-law Leo Swan was wounded on my birthday on March 29, 1968 and died on the twentieth of April. My wife’s name is Margaret and she lost her brother, her mother, and then her father died all within a year apart. So we both had a hard start. No one but my mother ever gave us a chance of making it. But after raising nine children, four boys with special needs, and twelve grandchildren; we are still together. I am very ill now and fighting obesity and diabetes, but Margaret’s right here every day helping me. I moved to Middleboro Massachusetts; 11/01/1991 from Boston when I first took ill and have been studying since then and now have a Masters Degree in Criminal Justice. I lost my baby brother Michael in 2001 and my baby sister Denise and my older brother Preston Andrews in 2003. So I am dedicating this book to them, because they were so excited that I was going to do this. Like me, they all had serious health problems which kept them all from having a good occupation. In closing, I hope to be writing at least one book a year. So if you like this one and I hope it becomes a movie, you will love what I have in mind in the future. So look out for my complete life story.
Sincerely: John M. Fletcher Jr.
