With its stone-bricked structure and its round towers, the Cranston Street Armory resembled a castle.
Inside the dingy old building in the west end of Providence, it was anything but a castle. The former site of indoor track for the Rhode Island Interscholastic League housed a 176-yard wooden oval whose loose boards often creaked. On any given wintry night, heat was sometimes an option and the excessive dust that floated around the air would burn your throat.
LINCOLN – Don't believe everything you read.
That was no flat-screen TV in the box, like the label said. That was Alex Camperone's trophy.
It was his prize for spending most of a drizzly and raw, post-Thanksgiving night waiting outside the Target store at Lincoln Mall.
Those other folks in a line of customers that snaked halfway around the mall, waiting, along with Camperone, for the store to open – they were Camperone's rivals in a hungry quest for doorbuster bargains.
