But now William Joyce, the chief clerk, is starting back over the resolutions that each caucus has offered to see if there are changes to be made. East Cambridge passes. The Central Four-Model Cities Area, with its complement of student radicals, moves that the East Cambridge resolutions condemning the "growth" of the Universities be changed to read "expansion." The clerk is confused as to what the change is, whether it is acceptable to East Cambridge or indeed whether it has not been adopted already.

And in the chaos Vellucci is on his feet for the first time, moving toward the microphones twenty feet to his right. Before he is anywhere near it he raises his right arm yelling, "Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman, there is something that I would like to say here," and begins to speak.

At the outset it is extremely hard to hear him without the aid of the amplifying system over the bored chatter of the rest of the delegates. But the crowd recognizes him and begins to quiet down just as the mike begins to pick up his voice. And by the time that he is up to it, the entire place is quiet for the first time while the powerful PA system, modulated to carry over the expected room noise at any convention, is blasting him over a silent audience. The effect is overpowering. The process: a desert rose blooming in a slow-motion Walt Disney movie. The product: the force of a natural phenomenon, electronically produced.

And there is Al Vellucci, in his own element, filling the room with sound, rocking on the balls of his feet as he speaks, gesturing sharply with his right hand. "I'm no lawyer," he begins, "and I don't understand all this fancy language. Sure I'll go for 'expansion' rather than 'growth.' But I do want to say here that I will support any program, any program at all, no matter what you call it, see, that gives rent-control to the poor and brings in low-cost housing for the people who need it most--just so long as it also sends Harvard and MIT packing across the river. Now if we don't do that, our future generations will be the subjects of that Harvard and they will all owe their allegiance to that royal messiah, Nathan M. Pusey."

The two-minute tirade--complete with insulting aside to the University--proves to be the most moving moment at the convention Everybody here had come for the same thing and in the same spirit. And everybody knows who the enemies are: MIT, Harvard, NASA, and the big outside realty companies who have all contributed to the spiralling rents so destructive to the poor and to those who live on fixed incomes. But amidst the factionalism imposed by the caucus arrangement and by the emphasis on the shades of shadows of differences in the wording of various resolutions, it is only Vellucci who can define this common spirit and emphasize the fundamental unity of concern.

He finishes by apologizing for the outburst, explaining, "I've just been itching to get my hands on this microphone for a long time now," as if someone had been preventing him. As it turns out, however, it is only his instinct for the public emotional jugular that has held him back. He spends the rest of the afternoon wandering from caucus to caucus, speaking whenever he wants to at whatever mike is nearest, obviously enjoying his frequent conversations with women in the audience.

But before the Convention is adjourned he does manage to get in the final word to the chair. "What I would like to know," he asks, "is what is going to happen to all of these resolutions when this is over. What are you guys going to do when we get out of here?"

III.

What Al Vellucci has been doing for the last fourteen years--four as a school committeeman and ten as City Councillor--is providing his own answers as best he can for his East Cambridge constituents.

As a community they feel particularly threatened these days by the forces of a changing world that they certainly never made, do not fully understand, and want no part of. Composed almost entirely of lower middle-class factory workers of Italian, Portuguese and Polish extraction, they view intellectuals with suspicion, students with scorn, and money with fear.

Roll these three up in a growing MIT to the immediate south of the area and an expanding Harvard to the west, consider that the Somerville line is twenty feet north of Vellucci's front door and that East Cambridge is appropriately named, add the fact that even there rents have gone up from $20 a month for a four-room apartment five years ago to $60 now and that huge real estate cartels are beginning to show an interest in acquiring property there, and one resident's remark--"They are squeezing us to death here. In ten years there will be completely nothing for us"--makes some sense. Vellucci reports that one National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) official who is helping to build the huge complex which will bring 5,600 well-paid Federal technocrats into the East Cambridge area next year told him, "My God, you are sitting on a gold-mine down there."

The real problem is that the residents of the area in silent general and Vellucci in noisy particular know in their hearts that the Federal bureaucrat is right--but for themselves and for non-monetary reasons. Everyone there would cash in and move out if they weren't so attached to the neighborhood and to the distinctive way of life that characterizes it.

Pass through Inman Square in your way down Cambridge Street and you do find yourself in a different world where life is in the streets when it's warm enough and in the bars when it's not, where to the outsider the most infuriating institution of local social life is the 1963 Buick stopped dead in the middle of the street with people hanging from all the doors and windows talking, where there is a strong sense of racial solidarity and an even stronger sense of family solidarity so that on every block, as on Eighth Street, there are two sisters, a mother, dozens of children, and countless inlaws within three doors of each other, and where there is no such thing as a current issue, so strong is the feeling of a neighborhood past that impinges on it. Nobody simply exists in East Cambridge; everybody lives next to his neighbors and close to his family history.

The current housing crisis, which occupies most of Vellucci's talking hours, boils up at the intersection of this fundamental human commitment to the way things are on his own turf and the way things are moving in the rest of Cambridge. The whole social structure of East Cambridge depends for its existence on the kind of owner occupied, family rented three story buildings guaranteeing relatively cheap housing and restricting it to the kind of supportive community now found there.

It is to the perpetuation of this that Vellucci has dedicated himself. Some years ago he had the entire neighborhood zoned residential and now supports either an immediate rent freeze or rent control for the whole city even though East Cambridge--so long as remains as it is--will have a reliable and entirely informal system of control based on community solidarity. Residents simply will not rent to students and are reluctant to sell to outsiders no matter what the price. And when they do--as recently happened on Plymouth Street where an outside realtor bought some property from the estate of a deceased resident and doubled the rents, thus forcing out the family there -- Vellucci sics the City Health Inspectors on the buildings and makes life as uncomfortable as possible for all concerned.