SBOL_Jeanne

Twenty-five-year-old Julia Sprofera grew up in Medfield, went to college at Wake Forest in North Carolina, worked in Charlotte, but it seems as if she was destined to call South Boston home. “I knew I had to come “home” to Massachusetts after working for a year in Charlotte and so looked at a lot of neighborhoods. South Boston appealed to me because it was more of a community,” she said. Moving from apartment to apartment over three years, she is busy without seeming pressured. Working at Arbella Insurance, and pursuing an MBA at Boston College, Julia listens, observes, and engages. She has developed an appreciation of South Boston, and a recognition that it is not always easy for those who have been in the community [...]

Dolly Pickup has lived all of her sixty-three years in South Boston and could write her own book about a community she knows from experience at four 02127 addresses. Asked about almost anything and she quickly recollects the history of an area, business, family or landscape. One of the eight children, with grandparents and extended family houses away, has raised four daughters in South Boston, ran her own day care program, and commutes to her job at the Copley Fairmount Hotel. She chooses to focus on her joy and pride in all of life, and not on the challenges that required her to work hard and stay on course. “We had it all,” she said, recounting days of skating on a flooded “M” St. Park, [...]

(This series features those who have made South Boston home for thirty years plus and those who are new to the neighborhood.) If you are ever tempted to think that all new neighbors to South Boston, bring ill-regard and annoyance to the treasured neighborhood, you haven’t met Alabama born and raised, Alan Barlow. At twenty-seven, he completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in Alabama, is a Physician’s Assistant and visited forty-eight states. He has now landed in South Boston, the only place he has lived outside of Mobile. “I absolutely love my job at Mass. Eye and Ear,” he said. “Everyone who works there seems to want to be there. I randomly applied through Indeed, and interviewed at other Boston places, too, but I couldn’t have [...]