The Evans family (from left): Paul, William, James, Thomas and John with Mayor Walsh and Ed Forry. Margaret Brett photos

November 1967 was a somber month in American history.

Five hundred thousand American troops were in Vietnam, and Gen. William Westmoreland was insisting that the United States was winning the war in Asia, which Americans would fight for another seven years, then abandon. On Nov. 19, a Sunday, while the Jets and Joe Namath were at Fenway Park, beating the Patriots, 29-24, in Vietnam, in the Central Highlands, the battle for Hill 875 began, a four-day siege with American casualty rates of 60 percent. On the same day, 9,000 miles away, in South Boston, six teenagers agreed to enlist together in the Marine Corps, and soon they were off to South Carolina, to boot camp at Parris Island, and then to Vietnam.

One of the six was Paul Evans, eldest son and nominal head of the Evans clan of South Boston, recipients this year of Boston Irish Honors 2015. A family of five sons ranging from 66 to 56, they are acquainted with grief. In 1962, when they were aged 13 to 3, their mother died of ovarian cancer. In 1968, when they were aged 19 to 9, a hit-and-run driver killed 11-year-old Joey, a Little League All Star. In 1974, when they were aged 25 to 15, their father died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 53.

The Evans family survived those heartaches by drawing on familiar resources, their faith in Gate of Heaven Parish, their neighbors in South Boston, their confidence in America, their loyalty to one another, and their adherence to the best of Irish values. Today, the five surviving Evans brothers count among their achievements the service of three of them who served in combat during the Vietnam War (Paul, James, and John, who won two bronze stars), two who joined the Boston Fire Department (Deputy Chief James and District Chief John), and two who became police commissioners of Boston (Paul, 1994-2003, and, currently, William). All five brothers scoff at the notion of living anywhere but South Boston.

Six boys, six Marines
The loyalty that runs deep in their neighborhood is reflected in what happened to the six boys who collaborated that day to enlist together in the Marine Corps. One of them, Johnny Cole, came home in a coffin. Another, Paul Evans, was slogging through the jungles near Khe Sanh when he learned that a hit-and-run-driver had killed his little brother. A third, Tommy Gill, was shot in the back by a sniper a few days after his arrival in Vietnam, and was airlifted to Japan with collapsed lungs.

“Doctors told his mother and father by telephone, ‘Don’t bother coming to Japan. He’ll be dead before you get here,’ Paul recalls. “Well, they underestimated Tommy Gill. Later, when my little brother was killed, I came home to Southie on emergency leave. Tommy was recuperating, and when I visited him, I was shocked because his legs were as thin as pencils. But he regained his strength, and, like his father, Tommy became a Boston cop and won decorations, only to be killed by a train in 1988 while searching for some stolen weapons in Brighton.

“We used to kid him and say, ‘Tell us some war stories, Tommy,’ because the poor bastard was in Vietnam only a few days.”
Next month, once again, as they have done every November for 27 years, the four surviving members of that clique who joined the Marine Corps together will gather at the Morton’s on Boston’s waterfront, and they will request a table for six, the two empty chairs memorializing their lost buddies.

“We’ve done this every year since Tommy was killed,” said Paul. “We drink a toast to all of us, but especially to Tommy and Johnny. We tell the same stories every year, and the waiter will come over and say, ‘Are there two others?’ And we’ll say, ‘They’re here, don’t worry about ‘em’ ”

Growing up on East Sixth Street
On a brisk autumn afternoon, the sun is shining off Dorchester Bay and into the venerable Puritan Canoe Club, founded in 1888, and around a long table, three of the Evans brothers are reminiscing about their boyhood at the family home on 529 East Sixth, a three-decker that has been converted to a two-family house where two of the brothers, John and James, now live with their own families.

What the brothers want to talk about is not themselves, but their father.

“People say we had a tough life, but no, never,” says Tom. “Sure, we had crises, but we had great times just growing up as a family. We had no girls, and our father did a tremendous job bringing us up. Every night we sat down to a full dinner, more food than you could eat, and every morning he was up to make us breakfast, pancakes, eggs, sausage.”

The family flat on the middle floor was small – kitchen, parlor, two back bedrooms, and a small room in front not much bigger than a closet. “I don’t remember having a certain bedroom,” recalls Tom. “It was first come, first serve.”

Single fathers have a significant challenge, especially when there are six sons, and by the testimony of his boys, Paul Evans Sr. rose to the challenge with devotion and discipline. Whatever the tale, and no matter who is telling it, recollections about life in the cramped three-decker revert to their father, who was hard-working, autocratic, given to pranks, protective of his sons, and determined to give them a normative boyhood.

“All of us went to Gate of Heaven School, and in those days, we’d come home for lunch,” says Tom. “So, my father would leave his job at the Boston Herald, and he’d probably get fired for this today, but he’d come home and prepare our lunch and have it on the table every day at 11:30 – soup, sandwiches, tuna fish, and then we’d have to be back to school by 12:15. For supper, he’d cook so much food that it was ‘take off your shirt and unbuckle your belt,’ because you couldn’t get any more food on your plate.”

From his job as forklift operator at the Boston Herald Traveler, their father slipped away frequently for the meaningful moments in the lives of his sons. With six of them playing baseball, basketball, and football, there was always a ball game to attend.

“If one of the older brothers was playing on one field, then my father would go and stay at that game for a while,” recalls James. “And then, he’d leave to go to another field where another one of his sons was playing, and then to a third field, from Columbus Park, to M Street Park, to the Babe Ruth League Park, and then back again to Columbus Park.”

When John became captain of the South Boston High School baseball team, his father would write letters to the nuns at Gate of Heaven School, asking that John’s brothers be granted early dismissal in order to watch him play.

The father knew how to puncture their pomposity, too, and when Paul introduces a story about the day John hit three home runs in one game, his brothers burst into laughter. “They weren’t just home runs,” says James. “John hit every one of them out of the ballpark, except that on his fourth time at bat, he struck out. When he arrived home late that afternoon, my father greeted him by calling him the K-O kid,” -- a reference to the symbol in baseball that scorekeepers use to indicate a strikeout.

Life, and love, with their father
As the anecdotes and laughter ripple from the memories of the Evans boys, life at the their three-decker sounds like a blend of “Boys Town” and “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”

“We grew up next to a home with three girls, and what they must have seen,” says Tom, “because we never pulled a curtain, never closed the bathroom door.”

The father kept the boys on edge. When report cards from Gate of Heaven were ready for distribution, nuns required a parent to come to the school after the eight o’clock children’s Mass, and it was a day the Evans boys dreaded.

“On the morning report cards were to be handed out, my father would be getting our breakfast,” says Tom, “and to remind us of what we faced, he’d walk around and say, ‘Hello, Sister,’ and ‘Yes, Sister,’ ‘Thank you very much, Sister.’ ”

“If their father, by today’s standards, seems to have been tyrannical, his sons remember him with affection, respect, gratitude, and a deep love.

“Here’s an example,” says Tom: “In those days, the style for guys was hair to the shoulder, and one day, my brother John sat down to breakfast, and he was half asleep when my father grabbed him by the hair at the side of his head and lifted him off the chair and he said what he said so often: ‘This is what I don’t like. I’ll give you until this afternoon to get it cut.’

“Now, my brother had a short fuse, but he wouldn’t say a word back to my father. Nobody had the courage, ever, to speak up to my father, nobody that I knew of. So, even though all my brother’s friends had hair to their shoulders, John went to the barber shop and got it all cut off, and when he came home with his ‘boy’s regular haircut,’ pouting like hell, my father looked at him and said, ‘Boy, you look foolish.’ And we all laughed.”

The home with seven males sounds like a frat house, and in a manner of speaking, it was.

“Dad loved hitting people with a wet dish towel,” recalls Paul, “and he knew how to push buttons, although with some of us, he couldn’t push our button because we knew him and we expected the ribbing.”

His favorite target was “Mouse,” the nickname he gave his youngest son, William, and even though William has been Boston’s police commissioner since 2013, and even though he was acclaimed nationally for his role in the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing, in South Boston, he is still known by many as Mouse.

“My father loved red peppers,” he says, “you know, the ones with the hot seeds in them,” recalls Paul, “and when Mouse wasn’t looking, my father would mix those into Mouse’s mashed potatoes, so the next bite would make him gag.”

“Here’s another example,” says Tom, plucking from his endless file of anecdotes. “Now, my father made us lunch for school every day, and one day, at breakfast, he gave me my lunch and he also gave me five bucks. ‘What’s this for?’ I asked, and he said it was in case I wanted something at school. So, okay, all morning, I’m feeling pretty good. I got my lunch. I got five bucks in my pocket, and then, when it’s time for lunch, I sit down in the cafeteria with my buddies, and as we open our lunches, everybody says, ‘what do you have, and what do you have?’ When I open mine, what do I have but a raw [expletive] potato, not even cooked, right out of the bag, and although I could buy a lunch with the five bucks, my friends were laughing like hell at me.”
The boys had their way of getting even, though, just by being boys. “He’d go to work on Saturday morning,” recalls Tom, “and we’d head for his bedroom and, using rolled up socks as a ball, we’d run the bases, on and around his bed, turning the bedroom into mayhem.”

Always, a fraternal competition
In addition to their acidic tongues, senses of humor, and loyalties to one another, the Evans boys also inherited from their father a competitive streak so strong they contest everything, even down to who makes the best meatballs.

“Our father told us that all we have is each other,” says Tom, “and we’ve stuck by that.”

Paul, who was a cop and a Marine, shakes his head. “Except in one aspect,” he says, wryly. “We have a lot of give and take about the police department versus the fire department, and the Army versus the Marine Corps. My brother John, who was in the Army, tells me the Marines think they’re the only ones who fought in the war.”

They also inherited a fervid patriotism, which explains why three of them served in the armed forces during the Vietnam War, and it’s dramatized when they overlap one another in telling what they agree is the classic story about their father.

“He was a Navy veteran of World War II,” says Paul, “and after school one day, when we were about to sit down to dinner, he insisted we eat in front of the TV. So there we were, watching the six o’clock news, and all of a sudden, on comes a story about draft dodgers burning draft cards at South Boston District Court, and as the camera pans the scene, my father yells, ‘There I am.’ And sure enough, there he was. As one guy lights a match to burn his draft card, from out of the crowd my father sucker-punches him. “What a shot,’ my father said proudly. ‘It caused a riot.’ The Boston papers were on strike, but it was played up in a New Hampshire paper,” says Paul, “and I still have the clipping.”

It was not until the early Sixties that their father invested in a Chevy station wagon, and for the family’s entertainment, he’d pack a lunch and then pack the car with kids and head to Nantasket Beach and Paragon Park, or perhaps to Salisbury Beach.

“Not so much my older brothers, but with me and my two younger brothers,” says Tom, “on a Sunday my father would go up the street and buy two large sub sandwiches, five bags of chips, and all the tonic you could drink, and he’d take us to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox. In those days, you could watch a double-header, starting at one o’clock, and you’d be good till seven. When he dropped us off, there’d be a lamppost on the corner, and he’d say, ‘See this lamppost. When the games are over, you come back to this lamppost, and do not move from there until I come back to get you.”

The brothers don’t talk about one another for very long before the competitive streak appears. As a result of his role in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, William appeared in Runners Magazine and then, after he appeared in GQ, he said to Paul’s wife, Karen, “Was Paul ever in GQ?”

Commissioner’s just one of the boys
In the eyes of his family, being police commissioner does not give William immunity from family barbs, and his absence from the interview at the Canoe Club leaves him additionally vulnerable.

“Have you seen his picture in full uniform?” asks Paul. “How does he look in that hat? It’s oversized, right? He looks like somebody who stole his father’s uniform.”

The comical caricature is then followed, as always, by praise. “When Paul was commissioner, he always took care of Mouse” says Tom. “I mean, he had a lot of influence on him, but Mouse earned his own way.”

Here’s an example of Mouse’s dedication, says Paul.

“When Mouse was a teenager, he was playing softball at M Street Park and someone slid into first base and tore up Mouse’s knee so bad they had to operate on it. When he decided to go on the police department, I told him he’d better do something to strengthen his knee, because there’d be physical exams. Well, Mouse is like Forrest Gump, because he’s been strengthening his knees ever since. He’s up every morning at 4:30, and he runs eight miles or so. He’s run in more than 50 marathons, and he’s run Boston more than 20 times, sometimes under three hours. He looks small, but there isn’t an ounce of fat on him, and if he were here, he could drop down and give you 100 pushups and 200 sit-ups.

“I was his brother, and I was obviously up in the ranks in the department, but he made sergeant because he topped the list. As part of my job, I’m promoting my brother, so there’s an ethical question, and I remember praying, please, let him do well in the exam,” said Paul, putting his hands together prayerfully, and lifting his eyes to heaven. “Well, he made life easy for me, because every exam he took, he topped the list.”

Topping the list runs in the family. Paul, too, topped exams in the police department, and James topped the exam for deputy chief of the fire department.

The family anomaly is Tom, who declined to follow his brothers into the military or into the fire or police departments, and instead enjoyed a successful career at Boston Edison Co.

“My brothers did well,” says Tom. “James went as far as he could in the fire department as deputy chief, and John was district chief, and I was kind of like the screw-up. When people realize what my brothers had done, people would say to me, ‘Jesus, what happened to you?’ And this question would come from some bum whose job was cleaning streets, and here I was working for the Edison and getting pretty good dough.”

After castigating their brother John in language that does not lend itself to recitation in a newspaper, the brothers then heap praise upon him.

If there’s a Martha Stewart in the family, it’s John.

“He’s a hell of a cook,” says James. “He’s been cooking for us since he was 12 years old. He inherited it from my father.” Continues Tom: “He’s the type of guy that for 25 years now, I can call him and say, ‘John, I’m putting a 20-pound turkey in the oven. What temperature, and how long? His best dish? My father’s meatballs. I’ll be honest with you, they’re phenomenal, but don’t tell him I said that. Don’t encourage him. Tell him my meatballs are better.”

At every family outing, says James, John’s got to bring his meatballs. “We tell him, ‘don’t bother. We’ve got plenty of food,’ but he always shows up with meatballs.”

Be careful, warns Paul. “He’s liable to show up at the Irish lunch at the Boston Seaport Hotel with a bowl of his meatballs. He’s more proud of the meatballs than he is of his combat medals from Vietnam.”

Keeping in touch is a priority
The brothers get together regularly, often on Friday nights, at the Shamrock Pub, at H and Eighth Streets, where their father drank.
Later, after the interview in the Puritan Canoe club, Paul calls to say they should have spoken more about their mother, Catherine, who died when he was 13.

“Her family came from Ireland, from Sligo and Cork,” he says, “and she adored her sons. Someone saw her one day with her six boys and said, ‘don’t you wish you had a daughter, and my mother said, ‘No, I love my sons.’

“She was a spitfire, too. My father got his marching orders from her, and I’m sure she admonished him to take care of us. It was my father who went to the games, but it was my mother who taught every one of us how to throw a football and how to catch a baseball and how to hit a baseball, too, except for my brother James, who still can’t hit a beach ball.”

“After my mother died, it was my father who kept us together,” says Paul. “He’d probably kill us for talking to you the way we are, because it was a rule of thumb – whatever went on in our house stayed in our house.”

What would Paul Sr. say today about his family?

“I don’t think he’d say anything publicly,” said Tom, “and he wouldn’t be too happy that we’re talking to you. He always told us that we should look out for one another, and I think if he could see us today, it’s not the titles and the successes that would make him proud, but it’s the fact that we’re still together. That meant more to him than any honor or achievement. If my father could see us all together now, what would make him proud is that we’re still doing what he taught us to do. We’re still taking care of one another.”