With the traditional vacation month about to begin, my thoughts turn to June trips, ones both from my childhood back to Boston, my father’s homeland, and also from the buddy road trips I’ve taken to see baseball in cities like Chicago, Baltimore and New York.

On one such trip in 1988, I grabbed a former teaching colleague of mine, John Williams, and local pals Ric and Greg Stolly and, as a bonus, Brooklyn-born Jim Puma, he of the heavy New York accent that stubbornly refuses to be compromised no matter how many decades he’s lived in Lima, to provide us with a guide for our trip to his home environs.