Growing Up Poor in Irish Boston

Rod Murphy

7 episodes Last Updated: Apr 24, 25

"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 a lot of writing and I am a bachelor. There are still a few over 60, unencumbered, local ladies that I haven’t dated but I’m working on it.

Episodes

Apr 24, 2025

Ep 49 The Canonization of St. Roddy

This episode provides a tongue in cheek literary device. The illusory sainthood reward for a devilish little boy.

Apr 23, 2025

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 owners and our writers are amoral or evil. What those "enlightened" people did to handicapped children in the last century calls for their being sentenced to capital punishment.  

Apr 22, 2025

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 year old boy’s story was the beginning of my unsentimental and hard-headed realization that the world cares not.

Apr 21, 2025

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-with-it aspects and not the morality of a situation is universal, unfortunately.

Apr 18, 2025

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, learned and worked here. 

Apr 18, 2025

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 story with some pathos.

Mar 31, 2025

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!