CANTON — Mike Rodman and Fred Waldman, Roxbury Memorial High School for Boys class of ’57, weren’t exactly BFFs back in the day.

They came from different neighborhoods – Rodman lived in Mattapan, Waldman in Dorchester – and traveled in different social circles in the 1,700-student, largely Jewish, high school. “We went to school together,” Waldman says, “but I’m not sure that we were really friends.”

Growing up, he said, “you tended to have friends in your own neighborhood.”

Nearly seven decades later, the octogenarians find themselves not only reunited, but living directly across the hall from each other at Hebrew SeniorLife’s Orchard Cove community.

Waldman remembers the sprawling, tight-knit Jewish world of their youth as a kind of urban shtetl with streetcars and brick apartment buildings.

“They tell me there were about 80,000 Jewish people in the area of Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury,” he says. “When you walked up the streets, Blue Hill Avenue in particular, it was a flourishing neighborhood. Every store was occupied. There were kosher stores, non-kosher stores.”

“The main street near where I lived was Humboldt Avenue,” Rodman says. “All the stores were Jewish operated. The fruit and vegetable store was owned by one of our classmate’s parents, the Weitz family, and the drug stores were all owned by Jewish pharmacists.”

“It was comfortable,” he says. “You know, it’s like when you go to Israel as a Jew, and the first day you say, ‘Oh my God, everybody’s Jewish.’”

On the High Holidays, that world spilled outdoors. “There would be thousands of people who would come up on Blue Hill Avenue to Franklin Field,” Waldman says.

“There was a wall, and people sat on the wall for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. You couldn’t drive a car on the street for those two days.”

That Jewish world had its limits, though. “There was a smattering of African American population,” Rodman says, but the real hostility he remembers came from “ignorant Gentiles, mostly the South Boston Irish. We didn’t go near South Boston. That would be a big mistake, because you’d have a confrontation almost immediately.”

“The Catholic kids came after the Jews,” Waldman says. “Even in high school, they would throw pennies at us. We were in the gym, and they would go up to the balcony of the gym and they would throw pennies.”

“Back then, the antisemitism I encountered was very localized, very specific, not general,” Rodman says. “I don’t think we feared that any of our institutions were going to get blown up. Now it’s a whole different ball game.”

After graduation, the boys traveled their separate paths, although their lives mirror those of much of their generation. Both had decades-long, white collar careers with a single firm.

Rodman started at UMass Amherst in engineering and switched to business and finance, ultimately finding himself in the commercial insurance industry. He became the first employee of a startup firm that advised large companies on insurance matters. “We grew the company and incorporated in 1978. I was a shareholder,” he says. A global brokerage firm acquired it in 2023, and Rodman retired in November 2025, after 56 years of service.

For Waldman, who’d worked as a soda jerk in a drug store, the guidance counselor’s recommendation was to become a pharmacist. Four months later, he switched to accounting, and in 1960 found himself working in his Allston cousin’s real estate management business. “He said, ‘Come in and help me out, answer the telephones,’ and I did,” Waldman says. He went on to work for multiple firms, then helped start a company that managed property throughout Massachusetts, staying there until 2024.

Both men left Blue Hill Avenue, married and raised families, and became active in their synagogues.

Waldman married his wife Dianne in 1970, bought a house in Needham, and stayed there for five decades. They raised two children, later welcoming four grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. They joined Temple Beth Shalom, where Waldman is still a member, in 1973. After Dianne passed several years ago, Waldman eventually sold the Needham house and moved to Orchard Cove.

Rodman married his wife Naida in 1965 and settled in Framingham. They joined Temple Israel of Natick in 1971 where, in the mid-1980s, Rodman served as temple president, working alongside the late Rabbi Harold Kushner. Two decades later, after their two children were grown, the Rodmans moved around: to Newton, Boston, Naples, Florida and finally, Cape Neddick, Maine. Four grandchildren came along the way. A year after Naida passed in 2024, Rodman moved to Orchard Cove.

Both men rave about the Hebrew SeniorLife facility. Waldman, the two-year veteran, thinks it was a great move. “They welcome you,” he says. “They keep you busy. They feed you. You have medicine here. Good life.”

Rodman, the rookie, says, “You go from being lonely to being surrounded by wonderful people who are caring and friendly.”

The schoolmates’ reunion was bashert. Rodman was set to visit Orchard Cove for a tour. “The funniest thing was, I saw that I was having dinner with a couple people, one of whose name was Fred Waldman,” he says. “I thought, I know that name. I think I went to high school with a Fred Waldman. It couldn’t possibly be the same person.”

Waldman thought Rodman’s name sounded familiar, but he had a hard time believing a Jew would come from Maine.

As Rodman describes it, he was already at the dining room when Waldman walked up. “The first thing Fred said was, ‘Where are you from?’ No ‘Hello,’ just, ‘Where are you from?’ And I said, ‘I’m from Roxbury Memorial High School.’ He said, ‘It is you.’”

Now the two neighbors share coffee in the mornings, enjoy dinner together, and reminisce about growing up in Roxbury. “He’s welcome at my table, and I’m welcome at his. Mike’s a good guy to have around,” Waldman says.

From Blue Hill Avenue to Canton, Waldman has spent a lifetime keeping his Jewish world close.

“Being Jewish is very important,” he says. “It’s just a way of life being associated mostly with Jewish people. Basically, it was a Jewish world that I lived in and still live in.”