'A young Republican' in the back alley

“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.’’