Turning 70 and dealing with a debilitating back operation has given me the opportunity to reminisce about my early days in Boston and how I learned the culture and politics of the city in my early days here.

I grew up in a working-class section of New Jersey near where Route 1, the Garden State Parkway, and the NJ Turnpike intersect. The area was filled with factories in the 1960s and nearly all of the fathers and many of the mothers worked in them. Though my parents were union Democrats, my upbringing wasn’t especially political, except for high school anti-war demonstrations, and concern and awareness of racial crises in nearby Newark. The tumultuous ‘60s taught me that politics could make a huge difference … or not. I was intrigued.

I came to Boston for college but wound up getting married and leaving school to work on the United Farmworkers Union lettuce boycott in Colorado. In 1973, we returned to Dorchester, found work in a Waltham factory and got involved in Codman Square civic activities, which presented the opportunity to see urban politics up close.

In 1974, I returned to college at UMass Boston and took courses on Massachusetts and Boston history and politics. Part of that education involved going to Boston City Council meetings, where the discourse on urban issues by this collection of personalities and blowhards was both entertaining and engaging. I became a regular attendee.

My wife and I found part time jobs, which in those days were sufficient to both pay rent ($85/month) and tuition ($300/semester). With summer coming, I looked for a job that would allow me to be outdoors, and I heard that City Hall hired people on “30-day appointments,” mainly for working in parks. I loved the idea of helping to make Boston’s parks, in terrible disrepair in those days, usable.

Hearing that the appointments were political, I asked around at a City Council meeting and City Councillor Albert L. “Dapper” O’Neil said that he would put my name in. In June, I got a call from the Parks Department and was assigned to the Dorchester district, under Mr. Doherty, the foreman whose office was in Fields Corner, in the Town Field maintenance building, now the headquarters for All Dorchester Sports & Leadership.

Mr. Doherty asked me where I wanted to work, and I told him Hemenway Park on Adams Street, which I regularly used for basketball. It was in deplorable shape. There was a full-time department worker who was in charge of the park, and the foreman assigned three additional 30-day appointees to work with me. I started going to work at Hemenway and soon noted that I was the only person who was actually there most days – make that all days. I saw the others assigned to the park on Fridays at the Town Field office, where we went to pick up our paychecks. I found out that the full-time worker had a full-time job elsewhere, and was a “no show,” as were the other appointees, who seemed to spend most of their time swimming at the quarries in Quincy. One told me that he didn’t have to work because his cousin was “the mayor’s chauffeur.”

This gave me a blank slate at work; I could do whatever I wanted. So, in addition to cleaning up the park every day, I tended the steep overgrown hill at the eastern edge of the park, which clearly had not been touched in many years. Mr. Doherty got me a powerful grass mower with traction, which I would walk to the park. I started cutting the weeds on the 50-foot hill, which took me a couple of weeks, and removed the overgrown brush. I found a tremendous amount of glass under the weeds, due to the practice of young men drinking at the top of the hill at night and throwing their beer bottles down the slope.

One Friday, I got five 55-gallon drums and filled them with glass. With great effort, I moved them to the top of the hill next to an adjacent street to make it easier for the Parks Department dump truck to pick them up.

I walked to the Town Field office to ask Mr. Doherty to arrange for a pick-up of the barrels, and he told me to head up to Ronan Park, as most Dorchester park workers had been assigned there because there were complaints to the mayor about the conditions in that park. I walked up to Ronan and found about 15 people, none working, some with rakes in their hands, and an empty dump truck with a driver and passenger in the cab. When I went to the driver and asked him to pick up the barrels above Hemenway Park, he said, “The mayah wants us at Ronan Pahk. We’re assigned to Ronan Pahk and we ain’t moving out of here.” “But…,” I said, and he retorted, “We ain’t moving out of here.”

Before going back to the park office, I went into the Town Field Tavern, a blood and guts type of bar with a pay phone. It had hit me that if the mayor required the park workers to be at Ronan, he could just as easily tell the dump truck crew to go to Hemenway Park.

I dropped a dime into the phone and called the mayor’s office. With my best attempted Boston accent, I said, “Hi, I’m Jimmy O’Connor, and I’m up here at Hemenway Park in Dorchester. A park worker put some 55-gallon drums filled with glass at the top of the hill on Daly Street, and they need to get picked up now, or the boys tonight will just roll them down the hill and make a mess. Can you make sure they get picked up today?”

I waited maybe 15 minutes, and walked into the park office, just as Mr. Doherty was getting off the phone. “Billy, go up to Ronan and tell those guys that the mayor’s office wants the barrels at Hemenway picked up!”

Gleefully, I walked back up to Ronan Park and informed the guys in the dump truck of their new assignment. The driver turned to the passenger in the truck and said, “We ain’t gonna get no [effen’] break today.”

That was my first lesson in how to get City Hall to act. It was clear that the Mayor of Boston was the center of power. I filed that away, and it was very helpful as the Codman Square Health Center board wrestled with Mayor White three years later to allow the facility to be launched in a municipal building.

My 30-day appointment was soon up, and I found out that other appointees were getting re-appointed for another month, so I asked the Fields Corner Little City Hall manager if I could also be re-appointed. The answer was no. Despite my work, my source for the job was from the City Council. I filed that away, too.