A yellowed, brittle Nashua Weekly Telegraph newspaper of May 13, 1909, carried the long, detailed story of a murder that was committed in a downtown alley called "Pins and Needles."

This time would be different, I promised myself, as I dragged the cardboard boxes and recycling bins away from the spiders and down the hall into a hopelessly cluttered space that, according to my property deed, was once a bedroom.

No more excuses, I muttered; it was high time I attack this thing I’ve laughingly called an “organizing project” for going on, well, five or six years now, but is in reality a lot closer to an impending “shovel and purge” operation.

Semantics aside, I really felt ready that chilly, dreary, otherwise ho-hum Saturday, ready to make a noticable dent in my “collection” of you-name-it-it’s-in-there-somewhere “collectables” that seem to have reproduced themselves when I’m not looking.

And I got off to a great start, filling at least two recycle bins and a couple of “to-keep” boxes, trying my best to adhere to the “only keep it if you love it or you can sell it for money” philosophy.

But alas, as the Looney Tunes characters used to say: Drat! Foiled again!

This time the culprit was a particularly eye-catching headline jumping off a brittle, yellowed newspaper page: “Balatsos held for Murder of Marrotte.”

Curious, I gingerly peeled the flaking pages apart to find the front page, which told me this was the Thursday, May 13, 1909, issue of The Nashua Weekly Telegraph.

Wait, weekly? Didn’t The Nashua Telegraph start publishing daily (except Sunday) around 50 years earlier?

Yes, and yes. Sometime after it became a Monday-Saturday daily, the Telegraph launched a companion weekly that came out on Thursdays. Editors, who called the weekly “our little brother,” decided they needed a place to put non-timely or feature stories that got edged out of the daily.

And once I was able to find each of the three pages on which this behemoth of a story was continued, it appears editors also utilized their “little brother” weekly for the stories that were simply way too long to use in the daily paper.

But I’ve got to say, the great detail that this story of near-epic proportions goes into makes for some seriously fascinating reading.

So yet another “organizing project” came to a premature end.

“Young Man Fatally Stabbed During Fistic Encounter in Alley Between Factory and High Streets” reads the secondary headline. I guess “fistic” is the adjective form of “fisticuffs.”

The victim was 19-year-old George Marrotte, “known about town as ‘Reddy,'” according to the story. He was “fatally stabbed during an encounter with a man alleged to be Theodore Balatos,” it states.

The deadly encounter apparently stemmed from “trouble between a party of Greeks and French-speaking fellows” earlier in the evening.

What that trouble was, what sparked it, and what happened over the next hour or so leading up to the confrontation between Balatos and Marrotte is quite a tale of how friction between two immigrant groups boiled over to murder here in early 20th-century downtown Nashua.

That tale I will further explore in this space in the near future, so sit tight. In the meantime, anyone ever heard of a place called “Pins and Needles,” that once existed right in the heart of downtown Nashua?

Me either. At least until I flew into research mode upon learning it’s the place where poor Reddy Marrotte breathed his last.

I found out that Pins and Needles was a narrow alley that ran between Factory and High streets, about 100 feet west of Main Street.

I looked around over there the other day, and from all accounts it looks like the Factory Street end was just about opposite Mechanic Street, and it came out on High Street near the rear entrance to Bank of America.

Described in the murder story as “dimly lit,” the alley seems to have been a good place to conduct whatever unsavory activity one had in mind.

OK, but where did it get its name?

I did find a Telegraph story from July 1910, about 14 months after the murder, called “Fencing Pins and Needles.”

One morning, a “force of carpenters” arrived at the Factory Street end and began erecting a 12-foot fence, the story states. While the story isn’t clear about who hired the carpenters, a couple of businessmen whose buildings abutted the alley may have done so, perhaps to make it less attractive for unsavory activities.

But not surprisingly, city fire officials weren’t too happy, first because they apparently weren’t made aware ahead of time but mainly because blocking one end of an alley between a bunch of big buildings is a big no-no in the realm of fire safety.

OK, but where did the name Pins and Needles come from?

At last, I found the answer. A Telegraph story popped up almost like it knew I was looking for it.

“Pins and Needles Alley (an) Old Time Street,” the headline reads. Then, “Many Persons Don’t Know Just Where It Is.”

After describing its location and noting some of its characteristics, the writer tells us the name “originated years ago,” inspired by “the custom of Main Street stores sweeping their refuse, containing pins and needles and remnants of cloth, out of their back doors and into the alley.”

That clothing stores and tailor shops were common at the time, there was no shortage of pins and needles strewn about the alley at any given time.

And in an era of waste not, want not, mothers sent their kids to the alley to pore over the piles, pick out the newest-looking pins and needles and take them home.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Sundays in The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-1256, dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com or@Telegraph_DeanS.