and the winners stand confused

Today I'm going to take a look at a rare treasure that manages to combine two of Armagideon Time's recurring obsessions -- Bay State parochialism and the immortal gloriousness that is Captain Marvel Adventures. For a couple of years in the early-to-mid 1940's the series ran monthly stories spotlighting various American cities. The tales took the form of rather anemic edutainment travelogues featuring bits and bobs of local color and call outs to various real-life local politicos or personalities under the guise of fostering a wartime spirit of national solidarity (by having a giant tree devour Akron's shopping district or corncob smugglers bedevil the inhabitants of Sioux Falls).

After stumbling across a few of these stories, I got to wondering if my own stomping grounds were ever shown any CMA lovin' and, sure enough, issue #40 (October 1944) of the series spotlighted my beloved Beantown in a story titled, "Captain Marvel and the Mayor for a Day." I'd like to apolgize in advance for the quality of the images. They were pulled from microfiche and my Paint Shop Pro (because I'm too lazy cool to learn Photoshop) wizardry could only do so much with the raw material I was stuck with.

The story begins with Billy Batson, boy radio reporter and Captain Marvel's alter ego, disembarking at North Station to attend a ceremony where the brightest high school student in the city will be awarded the honorary title of "Mayor for a Day." As Marvel's wisdom of Solomon would be useless in figuring out to to get to the Green Line concourse from Causeway Street, a local philanthropist has a car waiting to take Billy to the pre-brutalist nightmare version of Boston City Hall. (The gorgeous French Empire city hall building on School Street has been repurposed for commercial use.)

Upon arriving, Billy is introduced to a couple of members of the local broadcasting fraternity:

WEEI is still on the air as sports talk radio format station. Sister station WNAC eventually changed its call letters to WRKO, where it presently hosts a veritable smörgåsbord of ignoramus-friendly fare from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Howie Carr, Michael Savage, and Coast to Coast AM.

Inside City Hall, the ceremony commences, overseen by Mayor (and eventually Governor and U.S. Secretary of Labor) Maurice Tobin, for whom the Mystic River bridge and popular destination for the suicidal is named. (Mayor Tobin courteously took time out of his busy schedule of avoiding an indictment over his complicity in the Cocoanut Grove tragedy to attend the event.) The honor of Mayor for a Day is to go to the perky and WASPy Bob Wright, Boston's best student (by virtue of his parents' sending him to private schools though his K-8 years then suing the district in order to get him into the prestigious Boston Latin High School, as per the normal protocols).

Before privileged Bob can be sworn in, however, the festivities are interrupted by a member of the "De Boston Better Citizens League" (branches in Charlestown, Winter Hill, and South Boston), advocating for his own candidate for the honorary title, the not-at-all ethnically stereotyped wannabe Dead End Kid, Terry Mahoney:

When a call to the school confirms Terry's valedictorian status, Captain Marvel smells a big Hibernian rat and sets out to discover the truth. He also engages in a little sightseeing...

...swinging past the Bunker Hill Monument, commemorating both the Battle of Breed's Hill and Charlestown's need to overcompensate, and Fanueil Hall, where he drops a few hundred bucks on overpriced tourist junk.

Marvel's investigation reveals a low Chandlerian conspiracy involving stolen cigarette cases, destroyed records, and dastardly frame-ups. In an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery, Billy dons a Scalley cap and an unexplicable faux Brooklyn accent (technical term: pidgin white ethnic-ese) to infiltrate the De Boston Better Citizens League, in a scene that reads like a Classics Illustrated version of The Departed:

Billy's ruse is detected (after he asks for a bottle of "pop" rather than "tonic") and the gangsters decide to get rid of him by tossing him inside a cement mixer, violating the local tradition of a point blank shot to the head or a severed aorta, followed by burial in a shallow unmarked grave in a brownfield by Tenean Beach. Billy escapes the slowly-rotating death trap by transforming into Captain Marvel, who makes short work of the thugs.

Marvel is able to see past the red herrings and false leads, and flies off to the Roxbury-Jamaica Plain frontier (free from attacks by escaped gorillas since 2003)...

...to confront the mastermind behind the fiendish goings-on in his cement factory lair and bring him to justice (after some hot superheroic action involving construction equipment, of course).

So what was the reason for trying to rig the Mayor for a Day results?

To nab a sweetheart no-bid contract for the mastermind's cement firm by taking advantage of a little known law which apparently grants the mayor unlimited powers. (The same law has been a cornerstone of current Boston mayor Tom Menino's nigh-eternal reign.) My own excessively elaborate plan to exploit for my own gain the archaic Boston statute forbidding bathing more than once a week also failed miserably.

Also, graft and corruption in the Bay State's public works arena? The Devil, you say!

Billy Butler - Boston Monkey (from The Right Tracks, 2007) - Jerry "Ice Man" Butler's younger brother was an exceptional Northern Soul artist in his own right, despite never getting the attention or chart success he deserved. It also didn't help that his material had been out of print or unavailable for decades. Here's a choice sample for your edification and enjoyment.

Also, how can you tell a Boston monkey from the more mudane variety? It's unable to figure out how turn signals work, it drops the r's from its grunts, and it wears a "YANKEES SUCK" t-shirt. (Just because it's facile doesn't mean it isn't true.)

Dream Syndicate - Boston (from Out of the Grey, 1986) - From the South Side of the Windy City to the West Coast haunts of the Paisley Underground, the bards sing their songs in celebration of the dubious virtues of this hard-bitten city of Bean and Cod. "The whole thing ain't gone down according to the plan..." Truer words about this place have never been sung.