Sixth grade at LaMonte School is decent until Junior Montana arrives.  The Mets are in the Series and Joe D and Laura Cellini are in my class.  The Monkees are on TV and Mr. DeGhetto is our first man teacher.  He’s also the Bound Brook High School football and baseball coach who encourages us to play four way running bases out on the blacktop before school and at recess.  I think I’m the fastest trumpet player, math doer, and, most importantly, runner. 

            Junior Montana says “Me run faster den ju muchachos.”  He’s our age but in fifth grade and newly arrived from Puerto Rico.  I didn’t know it then but Bound Brook was a town of immigrants, starting in the 1880s with Sicilians from nearby Ellis Island recruited by the principal property owner George LaMonte to work his woolen mills along the railroad tracks at the south side of town.  Third generation families like the Patullos, Romanos and Jannones had children in every grade at St. Joe’s and BBHS.  The forties brought Poles to factories lining the Raritan River at the south side.  Union Carbide, Johns Manville, American Cyanamid, and General Aniline and Film took advantage of cheap effluent and labor as well as proximity to the port at Perth Amboy twelve miles downstream.  Most Polish kids went to St. Mary’s but the poorer ones landed in my west end public school.  Refugees from Appalachia like my parents joined the fray in the fifties, piling us “young’uns” into north side apartments and jostling for trucking jobs in New Jersey’s post-war shipping boom.  By the late sixties an uneasy truce forged by numerous nose bleeds had settled among the Guineas, Wops, and Limeys, as kids of the day would have called each other.

            Junior Montana is in the first wave from Central America and he is fast but not around the bases or down the football field.  The “Spic” can talk.  Even sixth grade girls drift from their circles on the edge of running bases to hear Junior with his curly black hair and dark skin rap.  Joe D coming out with “Cellini has mucho matteta” is the last straw.

            A crow flies up from a garbage can as a snowball fight erupts across LaMonte Avenue.  We’re making our way home from school in an unexpected early December storm.  Junior Montana, exuberant in his first snow, runs up shouting “Me nail dem for ju, me nail dem for ju.”  Seeing his weak lobs plop onto the road, I cross the street and start pelting this Junior Montana.  He laughs and yells some more until the third hit.  Fear flashes across his dark eyes as he ducks behind a garbage can.  My chunk of ice arches over a branch and through the wires, clattering the lid before striking him on top of the head.  Tears stream down Junior Montana’s face as he slumps back toward school.  I trudge home oblivious to the joy of that first snow.

            Junior Montana fades from my life until basketball season.  The night before the championship I’m scrambling to finish a book report due the next morning.  It had taken a month to summon the courage to ask Mr. DeGhetto for a recommendation.  Hoping for a football or baseball story, I got The Bronze Bow.  It looked promising at first with its gold Newberry medallion and the possibility of an archery story.  By the time I discover it’s about two Jewish boys struggling with anger about the Roman occupation it’s too late to find another book.  Preoccupied with the next day’s big game, it takes hours to paraphrase the dust jacket into what I hope will be my own words.

            The game is tied as Joe D leads our fast break offense against Richie Jeskulski’s tough inside game.  With less than a minute to go Jeskulski rejects my layup, grabs the loose ball, and takes it up court.  We wall him into a corner and he lobs a pass across the lane.  Junior Montana takes it in stride and hooks an arching shot that bangs up off the rim and in as time runs out.