Boston's Uncommon Scold

George Frazier is a man of muscular opinions. To him, Harry Belafonte is "America's number one slave"; Mississippi's Governor Ross Barnett is a "son of a bitch"; Roger Maris is a "fink" and Mickey Mantle is an "unfrocked fink." In Frazier's considered judgment, "all hockey players are crazy," all Texans are "a little ridiculous," and Brooks Brothers "is like a giant class reunion."

Frazier is also constantly upset at life's imbalances. He is dispirited to find cars, not deer, at deer crossings; and when his thoughts drift to Howard Johnson's--a direction that Frazier's corpus rarely takes --they are wistful. "If only Howard Johnson's would serve liverwurst sandwiches!" On the other hand, suitable equations gladden his heart. "Tell the truth now--don't you think Pat Brown and California deserve each other?"

Unlikely Proposition. These views, and others just as provocative, bloom in the barren soil of Boston, a city so unappreciative of common scolds that in the old days it put them in pillory. Many readers of the Boston Herald, where Frazier's column appears six times a week, write in to suggest that such punishment is much too good for the Herald's uncommon scold. George Frazier, 52, is possibly the most roundly despised man in Boston--and the most widely read.

That a man of Frazier's "class"--to borrow one of his favorite words--should find harbor on the Herald is as unlikely as the discovery of Lucius Beebe's byline in Mad magazine. Boston papers, the Herald included, rank among the dreariest in the land, a reputation enriched every year. One measure of Boston journalism is that the Herald hired Frazier in 1961 to replace four comic strips. No doubt the paper considered the exchange a compliment to their new man.

On the Border. What the Herald got was an undomesticated ego with the habit of erecting insults on the very borderline of libel. When Jack Ricciardi, Boston's commissioner of public works, faced the prospect of appearing as a witness before a U.S. congressional committee (he was never summoned), all Frazier could talk about was Ricciardi's curly hair. "My own view," wrote Frazier, "is that if U.S. Representative John Blatnik has any feeling for beauty, he will first compliment Mr. Ricciardi on his barber. Then, if he has any investigative zeal, he will inquire how many strokes with the brush Mr. Ricciardi gives those dazzling locks each night." Enraged. Ricciardi consulted his lawyer, who advised: "All he's said is that you have a nice head of hair. You can't sue for that, my friend."

Frazier's rhetorical flights carry readers past such disquieting polysyllables as "crepuscular," "demetry" and "blevins." The last, as hundreds of Bostonians discovered after vainly combing the dictionary, is no word at all, but a typographical error. Frazier meant Bruins, the name of the city's ice hockey team. The point is not that some Herald hand faltered, but that Frazier followers faithfully went on a blevins hunt.

Badge of Honor. The son of a West Roxbury, Mass., fire inspector, Harvard-man ('33) George Frazier has spent most of his life as a freelance writer and a fulltime embellisher of his self-anointed role as an eccentric. When the mood hits him, he drives 464 miles to Buffalo, where the Charter House Motel serves a salad dressing to his taste. He wears $265 suits, brings his own hot dogs to baseball games, and snoots the common man. "Can it seriously be argued," he asked, after observing the deportment of a hockey crowd, "that these ignorant, ill-clad, ill-spoken hooligans--common men all--are the equals of the civilized products of Groton?" All this, Frazier hopes, qualifies him as something of a snob. It is a badge he wears proudly, like the Legion of Honor.

Frazier's hauteur is not confined to Boston Common. During a visit to New York last week, he found the new Americana Hotel "more awful than anyone can imagine," and densely inhabited by ''all the brassy blondes whom you seem to remember from Miami, all the sharp-featured characters in their wrap-around polo coats." Turning away disdainfully, he trained his eye on the city's newspaper strike, found an unexplored facet: the special travail of Manhattan's paper-trained dogs. "It strikes you as so strange." Frazier wrote, "to hear one woman complain, 'I just don't know what I'm going to do about my dog--my poor little Curt. He was so used to the Times that he simply won't have anything to do with any other paper.' It seems so certifiable to hear somebody say something like that, and yet, when you stop to think about it a minute --why, what could make such sense?"

Only George Frazier.

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