Word: curley
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...undertaker dressed James Michael Curley in the morning coat and grey trousers he always affected on high occasions, laced a rosary in his hands, and around his waist tied the knotted white cord of the Third Order of St. Francis. Boston politicians draped City Hall in crape and half-staffed flags; they carried the casket to the Statehouse, where it rested three days with a policemen's guard around the bier and 100,000 filing past. Whispered one old lady: "If the Good Lord had made a pact with Curley and given him a choice between this here...
Long Life & Grace. Curley would have taken the funeral Mass too, with his own Jesuit son. Father Francis, as celebrant and the Archbishop of Boston in the sanctuary. Packing the pews and spilling into the streets: notables and Knights of Columbus, workingmen and housewives and ward politicians, down to 79-year-old William ("Up Up") Kelly, who through so many campaigns dashed into rallies shouting: "Up, up, everybody up for the Governor," and was never fazed until the night he dashed into a deaf-mutes' rally. But one thing Curley might not have liked. In keeping with diocesan practice...
...Goos" and K.K.K. Tenement-born son of an immigrant hod carrier. Curley came to boyhood while the Brahmins ran Boston and the want ads read: "No Irish need apply." He decided that politics was the quickest vehicle to carry him from shanty to lace curtains, developed two tricks to grease the passage. He haunted public libraries, feasted on Shakespeare, Dumas, Dickens and Thackeray, became a silver-throated orator. And he played skillfully and sometimes shamelessly on the pride and privation of Boston's Irish poor...
Lyons concluded in 1936 that, "Curley controls the Commonwealth by means of the smallest and cheapest political heelers that ever shined their trousers in the seats of public office in Massachusetts." In this year's Al Smith and His America, Handlin refers to Curley's "richly deserved prison terms," finds him "the prototype of everything that Smith abominated," a "freebooter." These are understatements; for his original text had "the publishers a little worried and they softened it down some." Harsh as it is, this view may be typical of what Harvard thinks of Curley...
...could have transported himself to an ideal Boston, Curley would quite possibly have tolerated the Harvardians for sentimental reasons so long as the Irish had the money. But it seems less likely that the Harvard community (insofar as it exists), were it transported to an ideal community (insofar as it could agree on one), would be inclined to accord Curley a similar favor