One cannot talk about attending MIT in the ‘50s and ‘60s without talking about the Paradise Cafe. It was run by Roland “Mac” MacSorley as a classic neighborhood dive. It had only a beer and wine license. It served inedible sandwiches, and there was a bottle of pickled pigs’ feet that predated Stonehenge. The rest rooms were beyond belief, and I speak with authority because I’ve seen a lot of third world latrines as a geologist.
There were three groups of customers. One group included hulking warehousemen from the Metropolitan Warehouse a block away. They provided a big chunk of the 5-8 crowd as they desperately tried to avoid going home to their wives. The second group consisted of truckers from a nearby trucking company up Albany Street. They were mostly the lunchtime crowd. When they came in they would order five Houlihan’s 16-ouncers at once because they were in a hurry to get back to their trucks. Then there was the Ten Year Club MIT types, almost all from PK, who took care of the 3-Midnight shift, playing bridge before heading to the Tiki Hut in Chinatown for the 1-5 after hours shift.
Mac was a bit lax when it came to checking IDs. I had been frequenting the place so long that I was tending bar for him to pay my tab before I turned 21. When I got drafted, I was in a unit at Ft. Bragg that required a top secret clearance, and I gave Mac as a credit reference. The FBI went to see him and he thought I was in trouble, so he told them he never heard of me.
Sadly, the Paradise Cafe changed after Mac died. At 5 PM it would shut down for an hour while they brought out rubber plants and pictures of ‘30s boxers. At 6 PM it would re-open as a gay bar. So, the Ten Year Club had to set up a new headquarters at the F&T Delicatessen in Kendal Square. Physically the F&T was a major step up from the Paradise since the food was edible. When the F&T closed in the late ‘70s, due to the onslaught of a growing MIT, everyone in the Ten Year Club had managed to graduate and had left the womb. It was the much lamented end of an era.