Other descriptive data:
Oral history interview with Richard Card. Card grew up in Bath, Maine and attended Bowdoin College and Harvard Business School before beginning to work at First National Bank and moving into the Back Bay in 1958. In 1963, he purchased a vacant house on West Brookline Street for a low price and renovated it. He describes the transition of the neighborhood in 1963-1965 from mostly rooming houses and apartments with majority-white residents to a diverse neighborhood of young, middle-class homeowners. Card describes his leadership roles in the South End Historical Society, the Ellis Neighborhood Association, the Old West Church, the Sepco Executive Committee, the South End Urban Renewal Committee, and the Ward 4 Republican Ward Committee. Card also discusses crime rates, Boston Public Schools, and other residents’ resistance to urban renewal and demolition. Other topics mentioned include Tony [Terrapiuto?], Doe and David Sprogis, Jim Fitzgerald, Arthur DuCharme, Butler Roland Wilson, Frederick Douglass, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Cabot Lodge, Hannibal Hamlin, West Canton Street, Pembroke Street, West Newton Street, Rutland Square, West Hampton Street, Dartmouth Place, Castle Square, Washington Street, Copley Square, Roxbury, the New York Streets area, the Prudential Center, the 1888 Republican National Convention, the Museum of African American History, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA), the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, Buckingham, Browne and Nichols School, Boston Latin School, the Advent School, and Brimmer and May School.