The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 17

THE BOSTON GLOBE MONDAY. JANUARY 23. 1984 17 Living 21 Arts Films 24 Comics 26,27 TV Radio 26,28 WTLiafs in store for riders MIKE BARMCLE By Paul Langner Globe Staff For the next nine months to a year, the 12,500 rail commuters who each, weekday come into Boston from the north and the west will have to leave their Boston Maine trains before reaching the city and transfer to MBTA rapid transit lines. North Station, which normally would receive the trains of the four commuter rail lines the operates for the transit authority is "for all intents and purposes closed," said James F. O'Leary, MBTA general manager, at a press conference yesterday during which he announced the steps being taken to convey rail travelers each day in and out of Boston.

The steps announced yesterday were made necessary by a still smoldering fire that began early Friday morning and cut off the rail lines where they cross the Charles River just north of North Station. The steps are essentially the same emergency steps taken Friday morning to handle passengers. The new measures involve: Stopping the Merrimack Valley Line at Maiden Center and letting passengers transfer to the MBTA's Orange Line. Stopping the other three lines in the rail yard in Cambridge just south of the Gilmore Bridge (formerly Prison Point Bridge) and shuttling passengers by bus to the Green Line's Lechmere station for a free ride into the city. Leaving the city, passengers would reverse the process.

O'Leary said that the trains leaving the Maiden Center station to head north would leave 15 minutes later than their usual departure time from North Station. The trains leaving from the Cambridge transfer station will leave five minutes after their originally scheduled North Station departure time. Outward commuters will have to pay the MBTA fare on the Green and Orange lines to reach the transfer point. O'Leary pointed out that commuters used these lines to get to North Station before Friday's fire. Transferring will be easiest for the Merrimack Valley Line riders, who will only have to cross a station platform at the Maiden Center Station.

For the riders on the other three lines the Fitchburg, Lowell, and Eastern lines temporary, heated waiting rooms have been constructed at the Cambridge transfer point and, O'Leary said, the MBTA would deploy as many as 75 buses daily to shuttle those passengers to Lechmere station. Also, O'Leary said, work crews spread extra gravel between the tracks to level the area to make walking to the buses COMMUTERS, Page 18 ROSEMONT-495 HAVERHILL GARDNER BRADFORD ROUTE 213 Ik MFTHUfN NORTH ANDOVER kSHIRLEY LAWRENCE LOWELL lkYER NORTH BlLLERICA VlTTLETON-495 ANDOVER jJTH ACTON 1 BALLARDVALE HAMILTON-WENHAM "OCKPORT EST CONCORD I NORTH WILMINGTON NORTH BEVERLY lPNC0RD WILMINGTON READING I FGLOUCESTER IkUNCOLN Ij MISHAIMIUJ DAOl a uiurnr, Jm -iARRDB 1 Three train commuter lines will terminate in East Cambridge. Passengers will be transferred to Lechmere station 2 One train commuter line will terminate in Maiden Center; passengers will cross platform to Orange Line trains I GREENWOOD CanCHESTER Nw HASTINGS I WINCHESTER CTR. MELROSE HIGHLANDS I BEVERLY FARMS Shuttle bus kendal green wedgemere i melrose-cedarpark IRides CROSSING JL to Lechmere brandeis-roberts I WEST medford Wyoming hill montserrat Atk Station WALTHAMk I OAK GROVE Jl BEVERLY DEPOT I MALDEN CTR. I 7V I 5 WAVERLEY ALEWIFEk SALEM I LECHMEfti- lc asatol PORTER SQUARE jC jFENTRAL SQUARE-LYNN 1 jf I I ---X WONDERLAND S.

I STAtBn I GLOBE MAP BY DEB PERUGI North Station: Not what it used to be But what did the jury say? There are dates in people's minds that pop up every once in a while like trail markers on familiar but lightly traveled paths: a birthday, a wedding, something big out of history or something sad out of a personal resume of grief. These are the incidents that time can not touch; chapters where the dust of decades never quite covers the emotion felt at the moment. "I was at my parents house in West Roxbury," Bill Hughes was saying. "I was getting ready to go out to a Christmas party with my wife. My father was sick with the flu and my brother was working at the drugstore in his place.

It was almost seven o'clock and the phone rang. "It was Pat O'Connor from the funeral home next to the store. He told me there had been a robbery at the store and that my uncle had been shot. He didn't say anything about my brother. It was Dec.

21, 1968 but it seems like yesterday." The store Hughes Drug was right across the street from the Mission Church. Inside, Bill Hughes' uncle Packy and his brother Pat had been shot to death during an armed robbery. One of the three men arrested, tried and sentenced to double life for the murders was George P. McGrath, now 36 years old. One week from now, McGrath goes before the state Parole Board in an attempt to get his sentences commuted.

"I remember leaving the house and going to the store," Bill Hughes was saying. "There seemed to be hundreds of policemen there and one of them told me he didn't think I should go inside. He told me they had taken my brother and my uncle to the Brigham Hospital and I should go oyer there. "When I got there, a doctor told me my brother was dead and my uncle was in intensive care and not expected to make it. It was about 8:30.

1 was stunned. Next thing I knew, my brother's wife, Diana, walked in with her brother, Dickie. I told her what happened. I tola her that Pat was dead and she wouldn't believe it. "She was pregnant at the time.

They had a little boy at home who was three years old. Pat was going to law school. Everything was out there for them, you know what I mean? And then, it was over. Just like that: all over. We buried them on Christmas Eve." Now, whenever people come up for commutation there are always witnesses to testify to what fine fellows they have become since being jailed.

Nearly every prisoner who goes before the board will have someone willing to state that the inmate in question is today a combination of St. Francis and Mother Teresa. George P. McGrath is no different. There will certainly be a couple of people, maybe more, who will point out that McGrath has become a computer whiz since the night he participated In the double murders on Mission Hill.

McGrath has enjoyed numerous furloughs in the last dozen years. He has been married twice since his conviction. He was such a whiz with machines that he was Implicated In a computerized book-making scheme while at Framingham. But next week's commutation hearing raises Issues larger than compassion or rehabilitation. It goes right to the heart of one of the bigger problems of the day: the fact that a lot of people no longer have much faith in the judicial system.

Why? Well one of the reasons might be that life in prison no longer means life. More often than not, it means about 1 1 years plus change. Of course, a life sentence meant exactly that for Pat Hughes, 27. and his uncle Packy, 62. but to some that's beside the point.

What's Important, these people maintain, is that society show itself capable of forgiveness, capable of recognizing that anyone, especially the young, can make mistakes. So that brings us to the bottom line: Not what Is a life worth? (That somehow seems too big to wrestle with); but, simply, what should the George McGraths be required to pay for their "mistakes?" Our prisons are full of people who de-' serve commutation or parole. But this wasn't just an armed robbery or a murder committed In the heat of passion. Nobody stopped after a shot was fired and gave up. screaming, "I'm sorry.

I didn't mean to do It." Two men died. A family was disrupted forever. And a piece of Mission Hill also went by the boards: The store never reopened. It was the kind of place where a woman could get a prescription for a sick husband with no money in her pocket-book. 'Packy' Hughes would tell her, "Don't worry about It.

Pay when you get a chance." Just ask Ray Flynn's mother. At his last commutation hearing In 1978, George McGrath said he was "well aware of the tragedy. I've done all I've been able to do. My punishment Is that I have to live with myself for the rest of my life." He Is right about that. And a Jury sworn to the law said he should live with himself In prison until he dies.

IT W-'SA ft- Jwv jgf I Pi it i 7 7 By Jeremiah V. Murphy Globe Staff The crowd early yesterday afternoon surged through the old North Station in the January grayness and then gradually disappeared up the ramps to the Boston Garden and the Celtics game. There were thousands of young and old people in that crowd, and for almost an hour, the old and shabby looking Boston Maine Railroad Station had come alive again with the shrill sound of voices and the shuffling of feet. The big doors would swing open and you sometimes could hear the Causeway street cart vendors calling out, "Peanuts! Get your roasted peanuts here!" But then the sports crowd was gone and the old North Station settled back into its near silence. Lucille Smith of Woburn is a ticket agent.

She sat there behind the grill and sold train tickets and told people how to take the MBTA Green Line to Lechmere Square, or the Orange Line to Maiden, to make connections with the trains to the north and west of Boston. The station had no trains. And the trains will not return to North Station for several months because of the six-alarm fire early Friday that destroyed Charles River piers and resulted in the closing of the tracks that iLM i rtTTTmrrri I'TfflP I 'K 11 m-. 'bp1 V' MEW kOTKI I '7iL i I Sole ticket window, occupied by Lucille Smith, ticket agent, inside a quiet North Station. Globe photo by wendy maeda carried some 80 daily commuter trains have been the life of North Station all cast tough times for the old station, in and out of the Station.

these years. Now the trains are tempo- "It has all changed, North Station." The trains and the Bruins and Celtics rarily gone and some people have fore- NORTH STATION. Page 1 8 Deaths of 3 in Rte. 128 crash investigated V) By Paul Langner Globe Starf The possibility that a third car started the sequence of events that claimed the lives of three young people Saturday night In a two-car crash on Rte. 128 In Lexington was under police Investigation yesterday.

The crash happened at 9:35 p.m. In Lexington on Rte. 128 between Rtes. 2 and 4 A 2A. It took the lives of two Woburn men, one of them a reserve police officer, and of a Boston College student from Wllllams- town.

State Police at the Concord Barracks, who are investigating the accident, say that a 1983 Dodge, driven by Charles W. Tucker. 22, of Canterbury road, Woburn, was traveling south, Jumped a double median barrier and crashed into a northbound car carrying six Boston College students. LEXINGTON, Page 47 1 or ku. Scene of crash that killed three on Rte.

128 in Lexington on Saturday night. PHOTO BY PAT BEUIVPAU '1 4.