Awaiting the casket and family of Lt. James Pagano at his funeral Friday are, from left, Marc Adler, of Narragansett, Mark "Mick" McWeeney, of Warwick, John Cooney, of Winchester, Mass., Paul Kopech, of Providence, Steven Feinberg, of Cranston, and Larry Glick, of Coral Springs, Florida.

CRANSTON

Jim Pagano had a pea-green Ford Maverick in high school.

Nothing special. Just enough to get him around town.

Unless John Cooney was borrowing it. Or Stanley Glick. Or Mike Coleman. Or Paul Kopech. Or Marc Adler.

Or any of a circle of three dozen friends who knew they could skip class at Cranston High School West, stick a random Ford key –– or screwdriver –– into the ignition and take off for lunch.

Truth was, there were more people driving the Maverick than Pagano knew.

“But even when he found out there were dozens of us, he didn’t care,” said Cooney, now 44.

That’s the way it was for the Garden City Boys, a crew of Irish, Italians and Poles who took their name from the neighborhood of trim ranches and tidy lawns at the center of their childhood.

A crew of Protestants, Catholics and Jews who came back to Cranston last week to bury Pagano, a city firefighter allegedly shot and killed by next-door neighbor Nicholas Gianquitti last Sunday in a spat over a child’s stray tennis ball.

The “GC Boys” are angry. They’re devastated.

And like so many in this city of close neighborhoods and extended families, they are grieving deeply. But they find comfort in shared memories of their childhood friend and their unbroken ties to each other – ties even the Boys can’t fully explain.

Maybe it was the place that brought them together –– the safe streets, the open doors, the gangs of shouting kids.

Maybe it was their parents. Pagano’s father, Anthony, for one, knew the value of neighborhood ties: he had grown up in Cranston’s Laurel Hill Avenue area, with three brothers and a group of guys nicknamed “Snookie,” “Bunny” and “Radar.”

Or maybe it was none of that. Maybe it was just the lucky chemistry of friendship.

Whatever it was, Jim Pagano was in the thick of it.

“Jim and I have known each other since I was old enough to crawl out of my crib and walk across the street,” said Stanley Glick, now 42.

And walk across the street, he did: to horse around with Jim in the backyard, to check out his presents on Christmas morning, or to join in the sprawling Christmas night party the Paganos hosted every year in their two-bedroom Cape.

Sports defined boyhood in Garden City, a 1960s neighborhood in the heart of Cranston, next to the shopping center of the same name.

There were football games, baseball games, basketball games, Wiffle ball games –– some in the street, some on the fields of Garden City Elementary School.

But there were more ambitious endeavors, too.

Steven Feinberg, 44, now the executive director of the Rhode Island Film & Television Office, remembers the kids organizing a Jerry-Lewis-telethon-inspired carnival to raise money for muscular dystrophy research.

And the boys filmed a few shorts they projected onto the Paganos’ garage for neighborhood viewings.

Jim took a star turn in one of those movies, Feinberg remembers, playing a man who rescued an old woman in distress.

But Pagano’s role in the group, from an early age, was not that of the brash hero.

Friends remember an easy-going guy –– well-liked, always smiling, always laughing.

“He was one of those guys who’d come over to the house and your mom would like him,” said Chris Flynn, one of a handful of women who were friends with the Garden City Boys as girls.

There were struggles. Two of the boys’ friends died in a canoe accident on Worden Pond in South Kingstown in the late ’70s.

And in high school, Pagano had a withering battle with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare nervous system disorder that left him atrophied and near death, breathing by way of a tracheotomy.

But when he came home from the hospital, the Garden City Boys were there to help.

“We took turns carrying him around,” said Cooney, an advertising executive with Sports Illustrated and Golf Magazine.

As the gang got older, some drifted away. Stanley Glick’s brother Larry moved to Florida.

Paul O’Hara, who runs a landscaping business, wound up in New Hampshire.

Pagano didn’t go far. But he was plenty busy.

He graduated from Providence College in 1989, joined the Fire Department in 1991 and married Adriana M. DeMarco, also of Cranston, at St. Matthew Church in 1994.

The couple had two children –– Adriana and Louis –– and were busy parents, always running off to their children’s sporting events and hosting pool parties at their Daisy Court home.

Jim’s family –– his father, Anthony; mother, Rosealba; and sisters Lisa and Jean –– were regulars.

But the Garden City Boys remained close. Not two or three of them. Not five or six. But dozens.

For the past two years, Larry Glick met Pagano on his birthday to play golf in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

O’Hara, who works part of each week in Rhode Island, would round up 7 or 10 or 15 at Warwick’s Cornerstone Pub to watch the Patriots when they were playing on a Monday night.

Kopech remembers personal chats with Pagano –– about parenting, and the flower and vegetable garden the firefighter was building behind his house.

And every winter, for about a decade, the gang has gathered at O’Hara’s house in New Hampshire or Kirk O’Brien’s place in Vermont for a ski weekend.

But there was no bonding agent for the Garden City Boys quite like the hallowed Green Jacket.

Procured from the Ballyliffin Golf Club, in County Donegal, Ireland, it went to the winner of a never-ending series of golf matches between a group of about a dozen of the Boys.

There were rules: the holder of the Green Jacket, when challenged, must defend his title within two weeks or surrender the jacket.

The Green Jacket should never be washed.

And, of course, there was Subsection 12, Paragraph 4, Part (d) –– the winner must thank his mother, thank his agent and pray to Jesus (with a papal dispensation for Stanley Glick, who is Jewish).

The original Green Jacket was retired just a few months ago, though.

O’Brien, who would host the winter weekend from time to time, died in a skiing accident in Killington, Vt., in February.

The jacket went in the coffin. And the week of O’Brien’s funeral, the Garden City Boys gathered at Fitzpatrick’s Pub on Park Avenue to have a drink, tell a few stories and pose for a group photograph in the back.

Glick still has the picture stored in his digital camera. Pagano is in the back, smiling as always.

On Thursday night, the Garden City Boys were back at Fitzpatrick’s.

Cooney said the toast: “To Jim Pagano –– the nicest, kindest human being I’ve ever had the privilege to know.”

The group posed for another photograph.

And they told the story of a pea-green Ford Maverick. Shared.

dscharfe@projo.com