Growing Up Poor in Irish Boston
"Growing Up Poor in Irish Boston” is a podcast series, colored with humor, nostalgia and pathos. It’s about a Boston tenement kid, born in 1939, clawing his way out of poverty by being hard-working, creative, persistent, entrepreneurial and by taking risks often. There are also stories of my later life in Boston, Cambridge and New England. If you like old Boston stories or Irish-American stories or old Cambridge stories, this is your podcast. If you like Pull-Yourself-Up-By-The-Bootstrap type stories and/or down-to-earth philosophy with a Roman Catholic, funny and relatively conservative slant, then this is for you.
I am Roderick Patrick Murphy, born into a large, loving Irish family in Boston, widowed after 50+ happy years. So I am now doing some writing, volunteering and learning how to be a bachelor again.
- Update frequency
- every day
- Average duration
- 7 minutes
- Episodes
- 100
- Years Active
- 2025
Ep. 32B Cleaning Up at Harvard Stadium
Episode 32B Cleaning Up at Harvard Stadium provides further details of Little Roddy's entrepreneurial efforts.
Ep. 22 What? Opera in the Hood?
Episode 22 What? Opera in the Hood? discusses an unusual aoppreciation of opera plus music and singing in the Murphy family.
Ep. 5A Flopping Fish & Trolley Cars
Episode 5A Flopping Fish & Trolley Cars is my memories of my big brother Garyy taking me to City Point in Southie to fish in the ocean.
Ep. 21 Intrepid Newsboy
Episode 21 Intrepid Newsboy presents me at an very early age showing my innate ballsy nature as an aggressive hawker of newspapers.
Ep. 38 General MacArthur's Triumphant Tour
Episode 38 General MacArthur's Triumphant Tour recalls the time after the Korean War when MacArthur was being considered for president. His entourage drove right by our neighborhood on …
Ep. 41 Who Needs Exlax?
Episode 41 Who Needs Exlax?
This episode agonizes over my mostly unhappy high school days.
Ep 49 The Canonization of St. Roddy
Episode The Canonization of St. Roddy
This episode provides a tongue in cheek literary device. The illusory sainthood reward for a devilish little boy.
Ep. 19 Dog Bites Boy
Ep. 19 Dog Bites Boy is a true story about why you should not tease a German Shepherd.
Ep. 43 Little Roddy Discovers Glenn Miller
Ep. 43 Little Roddy Discovers Glenn Miller is a story of a my teen years and finding the last vestiges of another type of popular music and an older woman.
Ep. 46 Eugenics & the Fernald School
This Ep. 46 Eugenics & the Fernald School is my judgement on America's overlords. Many of our politicians, our intelligencia, our doctors, judges, our religious leaders, our media owner…
Ep. 36 Nothing Fits
This Episode, “Nothing Fits” perhaps allows listeners, whose youthful economic situation was better than mine, to see the small things that poverty brings also.
Ep. 28 Boys Camp & Malice
This Episode, “Boys Camp & Malice”presents my opinion, gathered from decades of dashed expectations, that the people running most things are both incompetent and often malicious. This 8…
Episode 12 Weinstein's Fence
This Episode displays, strictly raised Catholic kids of my youth, ignoring such Commandments as, "Thou Should Not Steal". The kids' ability to be only concerned with the can-I-get-away-…
Episode #2A Boston & Cambridge Geography
These two Episodes, Boston & Cambridge Geography A & B, describe 1950's Boston and Cambridge, its ethnic makeup, its subways, buses, trollies, etc., and how my family lived, had fun, le…
Ep. 2B Boston & Cambridge Geography
These two Episodes, Boston & Cambridge Geography A & B, describe 1950's Boston and Cambridge, its ethnic makeup, its subways, buses, trollies, etc., and how my family lived, had fun, le…
Episode #1 Growing Up Poor in Irish Boston
This is the introductory episode of my story of my family, the Murphys, living on the financial edge in Cambridge and Boston during the last half of the last century. It is a happy stor…
Ep. 16 Winning the Huck Finn Contest
This Episode portrays the love and thoughtful guidance of my older brother and my family for me, as an extremely curious and alive 10 year old boy. It also lets the listener/viewer obs…
Ep. 8 Puttsy, Shooky & Other Boston Nicknames
What nicknames do my listeners remember during their youth? I think imagination and IQ is shrinking in today’s youth.
Ep.7 Shine Mistah?
This Episode gives a glimpse of a poor kid, me, beginning to be an entrepreneur.
Episode #3 Who the Murphys Are
This episode describes the ancestral and the makeup of Murphys and the Milans, my family .
FER FECK'S SAKE.
I'M NOT YELLING...
I'M IRISH. WE JUST LIVE LOUD!