They'll tell you where you can go

Faced with a throng of folks who fear all chaos will erupt if they step just one foot off that red painted line, the plethora of downtown tour companies and foundations will find easy prey to participate in the American tradition of marketing and packaging its own past. To find out what they'll hear, the Globe followed four men, steeped in the tour guide creed of no joke too corny, who put their own spin, be it a phony Irish accent or buckled shoes, on the standard recitation of Boston history. Let profits ring. Michael WestermanBoston Duck Tours So what if the kids on the other duck boats lined up in front of the Museum of Science get to yell "Quack!"?

The 16 fifth-graders on a field trip from Riverdale School in Dedham don't need such nonsense, nor is it encouraged from the 6-foot-tall man lumbering up to take the wheel of "Beacon Hilda."

He's called Johnny Baggodonitz. He wears black-and-white ostrich and alligator shoes -- wingtipped. His jacket says "Duck Tour Witness Protection Program," he sports sunglasses on a gray day, and, introductions over, his tour starts like this:

"Someone said this, someone said that, blah, blah, blah. American history. So listen

up . . ." Thus it goes with Johnny at the wheel, perhaps Boston's most unlikely history buff, who seems to be half Mafioso wise guy and half raunchy uncle who makes the kids laugh and Grandma blush. You get the feeling he enjoys saying that the back seats sit on the "poop deck" far more than the kids like hearing it -- and even they are squealing.

Yes, part of it is his work shtick: He's really Michael Westerman, 50, former recreational therapist of Franklin, and he's Irish, not Italian. His guayabera shirt that he claims was made by "old women on the island of Sicily with arthritic knuckles" turns out to be from Wal-Mart.

But onboard, the act works.

"Hey! Blabbahmouth!" he yells at a chatty brunette in the fourth row now sitting bolt upright. "If you want to talk, keep it down."

Then, to no one in particular: "So that's why I'm not a fifth-grade teacher."

"OK now, let's drop this 25,000-pound boat in 25 feet of water and see if it floats," Johnny says, with the tires poised at the top of a concrete ramp leading into the Charles River.