by Jerry Williams

Created on: August 31, 2009

The Great Boxer-Shorts War started as most do, with perceived slights leading to threats and minor hostilities leading to major ones. A too-familiar slippery-slope of stupidity.

My hometown of Arnold was a cliquish little spot. Your own small area was fine, but all the losers lived a block or two in any direction.

The alley behind my house became a demarcation between the honest, hard-working folks of Victoria Avenue and whatever riff-raff chose to live on Woodmont Avenue a block up the hill.

The Scalise bunch lived across the alley from my family on Woodmont Avenue, and they were no favorites of my large, poorly humored father. Pete Scalise, patriarch and Woodmont Avenue's only success story, worked his way out of the local mills by building a modest carnival refreshments business. You knew of this in Arnold, of course, because Pete talked about it to every human being and to many stray pets.

In our neighborhood, men of Italian descent came in two varieties: scary big and grandmotherly scrawny. The self-promoting Pete tended toward the latter.

My family has no Italian blood, but my father was as scary big as any. And if the truth be told, he didn't like anybody very much and Pete Scalise particularly not. To my father, just as galling as entrepreneur Pete's boasting was his habit of storing carnival trailers in and near the alley. My dad could never vocalize exactly why it was such a bad thing, but he detested it.

The four Scalise kids, adapted to the freedom of running loose in small-town carnivals, were rough and scrappy. The two older boys, 12-year-old Joey and 11-year-old Petey, were especially troublesome and carney-tough. There also were two younger sisters, but they generally didn't drift down the hill into our area.

The Scalise boys were around the same age as my older sister Teddi and older brother Jeff. I was three years younger. My siblings and our friends enjoyed exclusive use of the alley while the Scalises were on the carnival circuit. When Joey and Petey were around, however, territorial disputes often lead to squabbles and crabapple-tossing.

The Great Boxer-Shorts War occurred on a warm fall day when I was eight. School was in session, so the Scalises had returned from their candy-apple travels. My sister was hanging out with a cousin, Cathy, who was visiting for the weekend, and the two girls were passing time drawing chalk pictures in the alley.

Apparently no lovers of chalk-art, the Scalise boys began to hassle our young women-folk

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