Although only a T ride away, the Ashmont/Lower Mills section of Dorchester, the mainly working-class Irish enclave where Alex MacDonald (CAS’72) grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, was far removed from the ivory towers of Harvard, MIT, and BU. MacDonald describes the neighborhood of his youth as “preposterously homogeneous. None of our fathers went to college; they were police officers, house painters or, like my dad, union organizers. Our purview of the world was, in retrospect, very limited. We had the sense that everybody lived the way we did.” Read more