did he die like a yellow rat?

 did he die like a yellow rat?





    Boomers go on about how they never sat and stared at phones or video games when they were kids. They rode bikes, walked to the store. etc. etc. ad nauseum. Kids in the Gate did stay outdoors a lot since we had this great one hundred acre park to explore but we also spent plenty of our precious youth laying across from  black and white TV sets drinking up what are now considered classic shows and old movies that had expired copyrights. These daytime movie offerings were aimed at old people seeking to relive some old memories or kids seeing them for the first time. Really great films were rarely shown but there were mountains of movies we could connect with despite their antiquated sets and cornball plots. In the Creason and Sheehy homes we all loved the East Side Kids, or the Bowery Boys or the Dead End Kids that featured Muggs, Glimpy, Bobby Jordan, Gabe Dell and other punk kids with New York accents and a penchant for mischief. They spoke in a broken Brooklynese that we loved and repeated at every chance we got. Jack and I first started to say "let's sympathise our watches" or "this calls for drastic measurements." Mostly, the plots were simplistic and good fun but later the cast made a serious and heartbreaking film with the added gravitas provided by two great actors in Pat O'Brien and Jimmy Cagney. The kids were actually delinquents in this movie, They were "Angels with Dirty Faces" and the boys  were poised to enter a life of lawlessness. Cagney as Rocky Sullivan was a big time gangster who had been a member of their youth gang and they idolized the adult crook. Without going into too much detail O'Brien as a priest is trying to keep the kids out of a life of crime. He was a child best pal of Rocky who escaped a boyhood arrest because he was a fast runner. Sullivan was not so after his arrest and time in jail he went into a life of crime. When Sullivan gets arrested once again and is sentenced to the electic chair Father Connelly begs him not to be the model of a criminal for the boys. Rocky refuses but as they lead him to the chair he begs for his life and cries to fulfill the request of his old pal The crucial scene after the execution where the boys read an account of the snivelling death and demand that the priest tell them it isn't true. "Is it true, father, like they say it was, did he die like a yellow rat? This line was repeated by Jack, Me and later Greg ad infinitum. The save the best line for the last as the good father tells the boys it was true and then adds  All right, fellas... let's go and say a prayer for a boy who couldn't run as fast as I could.



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