Word: craned
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Edward A. Crane '35, poor son of a Cambridge cop, Harvard magna cum laude, successful Boston lawyer, director of Harvard Trust, Cambridge City Councilor for almost 30 years, was a power broker for as long as most Cantabrigians can recall. "He touched all the bases," says insurance man Jack Dyer, an inveterate political observer of Harvard Square...
...Crane was a product of his times. It took three hundred years before the political setting was ready for its cog and for the powerful interest that revolved around him. And it was with the Harvard Square bushings that he meshed best...
...Under Crane that fieldon, stretching from the kiosk to the point where you couldn't get a New York Times at the corner newstand, was conveniently divided into powerful parcels with politicians, bankers, developers and a university monopolizing most of the tithes...
...wasn't always like that. There was a time in the early seventeenth century when the upper class, not yet concerted in its Brattle Street redoubt, ruled unopposed. In 1688, 16 of the 20 most prosperous Cantabrigians held elected posts. They were all alumni of Harvard but unlike Crane and many of his political cronies of a later day, being in the majority they didn't have to straddle the Harvard Yard fence. It wasn't political suicide if the politicians sided with Harvard...
...this vacuum that Crane decided to fill. The CCA backed candidate fought his way onto the council and with the help of political and collegiate pal Joseph DeGuiglielmo '29, a man with Crane-like credentials, wasted no time in manipulating Cambridge's first city manager, John Atkinson, into making 13 years of yes-man decisions...