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Larry O'Brien was born in the Roland Hotel, a small hostelry that his father owned, in downtown Springfield, Mass., on July 7, 1917-six weeks after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born, 75 miles across the state and a world apart, in his father's big home in Brookline. Both Lawrence O'Brien Sr. and Myra Sweeney O'Brien were immigrants from County Cork. Myra was a proud, slender woman and a talented cook-her clam chowder, beef stew and soda bread were locally celebrated-who had worked as a domestic before her marriage...
...when Larry was a part-time helper in Springfield's Democratic headquarters and his father was a state committeeman from western Massachusetts, the O'Briens defied their Irish Catholic neighbors and supported Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, instead of Al Smith, who was the local favorite. O'Brien Sr. was denied a seat in the Massachusetts delegation for his heresy, but history proved that Father knew best...
When he was 20, Larry started taking night-school courses at the Springfield branch of Northeastern University (Jack Kennedy was a Harvard sophomore that year). He graduated in 1942 with an LL.B., but he had never had any real notion of practicing law: "If there had been a course in practical politics, I'd have taken that." He was, in fact, getting all the practical politics he could absorb-accompanying his father around the state, stumping for Curley and every other Democratic candidate in sight, and chinning with ward heelers over the mahogany bar in his father...
...Best Man. During World War II, O'Brien marked time unhappily as an Army sergeant at Massachusetts' Camp Edwards. His poor eyesight (20/400 vision) redlined him for combat duty. On one ten-day furlough he married Elva Brassard, the daughter of a Springfield house painter. They had courted sporadically for five years-on O'Brien's terms. "It was always going to political rallies, or running over to see what the city council was doing," recalls Elva O'Brien. "That was Larry's idea of a date." Their best man was Foster Furcolo...
After the war, Larry O'Brien returned to Springfield to manage the O'Brien Realty Co.-which had grown to include a gas station and a parking lot in addition to the restaurant-and to get back into politics. In Best Man Foster Furcolo, Organizer O'Brien had a ready candidate. Having come up through the wards, Furcolo was ready for the big time, and O'Brien was eager to handle his campaign for Congress. With his usual attention to detail, he gridded the Second Massachusetts District into 60 units, recruited a corps of "secretaries...