Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century: A Biography

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Daniel and Catherine had married in Mallow in 1797, and raised seven children. Several were young adults when the great migration took place: Johanna, Michael, Callahan, Jeremiah, William, Daniel Jr. and Ann. Arriving in Massachusetts in the 1840s, the O'Connells settled in North Cambridge, on the skirts of a vacant meadowland of thickets and fields called the Great Swamp, known locally for its deposits of rich clay. There, they bought land and built homes, settling in a cluster at the point where a new railroad spur to the ice houses at Fresh Pond crossed a lane that came to be called Dublin Street.

North Cambridge was a distinct, rural portion of the city of Cambridge, the seventeenth—century town that faced Boston from across the Charles River. Old Cambridge harbored philosophers and ministers, Harvard University, and the fine Yankee homes along Brattle and Mount Auburn Streets; it had once served as capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At the end of the last ice age, the retreating glaciers had left behind a recessional moraine: a ridge of sand and gravel debris with summits that the colonists and their descendants christened Avon Hill, Observatory Hill, Reservoir Hill, Strawberry Hill and Mount Auburn. The hills formed a natural barrier between Cambridge town and the swampy plain beyond, leaving North Cambridge with its own character and pattern of development. At the time the O'Connells arrived, the area was primarily known for its farms and pastures, and the slaughterhouses that surrounded Porter's Hotel (home of the Porterhouse steak) at what is now called Porter Square. But for the next fifty years, the development of the "clay lands" into a robust brick industry changed the area from bucolic Yankee farmland to bustling industrial center. Irish and French Canadian immigrants were drawn to the area to work for brick makers like Nathaniel J. Wyeth and Peter Hubbell, as New England's entry into the industrial revolution created a demand for the ubiquitous red bricks that were used to build textile mills, shoe factories — and the newer halls of Harvard.

Daniel and Catherine's daughter Ann met and married Daniel Hayes, who was a switchman and gate tender for the railroad at the Dublin Street crossing. "It was a family function to take care of the busy crossing with trains coming at all times of the day," said Daniel's great—grandson Danny. "During the day they had signs, and at night they used lanterns. The train whistle was the signal for someone to run out and stop the buggies and wagons. Every member of the family took a turn." The family appeared to prosper. They kept in touch with their relations in Mallow, and there was considerable travel back and forth across the Atlantic. Catherine, the matriarch, who was known as Mummy Kate, became something of a local personage. She was said to stroll up to Harvard Square, there to take a place by a potbellied stove in a local grocery store and swap stories from Irish folklore with Harvard professors like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. At the age of one hundred she returned to Ireland to die, escorted by her seventy—nine—year—old son Daniel. She lived for three more years and was buried in Mallow.

Mummy Kate's daughter Johanna had remained in Ireland when the rest of the family left for North America. She was seventeen in 1822 when she married John O'Neill, a twenty—seven—year—old Irishman, at Mallow's newly built St. Mary's Church. They lived on Gallows Lane, near the banks of the scenic River Blackwater at the eastern end of the town of 8,000 people, beneath the ruined battlements of Mallow Castle, whose rebellious owner Sir John of Desmond had been killed and dismembered and his corpse hung on the gates of Cork by the English in 1581. John and Johanna's son Patrick, one of five children, was born in Ireland in 1832. He was Tip O'Neill's grandfather.

Though the family now had sturdy roots in America, it was disaster that ushered Patrick to the new world. In the fall of 1845 Phytophthora infestans, a potato blight, triggered an ecological catastrophe unparalleled in modern European history and a famine of Biblical proportions in Ireland. Starvation and disease —typhus, dysentery, scurvy and turberculosis —swept the island. Unable to pay rent, hundreds of thousands of tenants were evicted; their crumbling cottages dotted the countryside like skeletal teeth. Terror took Mallow when the 1846 crop failed. Landlords were assassinated. There were riots in nearby Dungarvan and looting in Castlemartyr. The winter was especially severe that year, and wild dogs consumed the wraiths who died by the hundreds on the roadside or in frozen hovels, defying the authorities' ability to inter the corpses. The next year was as or more cruel, remembered in Irish history as "Black '47." County Cork was among the worst hit by the great hunger, with yearly deaths of 30,000 to 40,000 from starvation and disease from 1846 to 1851. The fevers were particularly bad in Mallow, where some 30 to 40 souls died every week in the crowded workhouse and the coffin trade flourished, but the greyhounds of the Protestant gentry remained well fed and cared for. "The people are beginning to think and... to ask themselves why it should be so; and to consider by what means their condition may be improved," wrote the members of the Mallow Relief Committee. "They look round their wretched hovels, where they were born, and where their fathers and forefathers lived and perceive that the same squalid misery has existed for generations. They look into the faces of wives and half—fed and almost naked children and determine that such misery shall not exist for generations to come. They are even now accusing themselves of apathy and want of feeling for enduring so long." The emigration from Ireland, which in 1846 had been urgent but controlled, turned into a rout. The five children of John and Johanna O'Neill were among those who fled. One daughter married an Australian; another married a local lad and left with him for Chicago. The three boys —John, Patrick and Michael —joined their mother's family, the O'Connells, in Massachusetts. Patrick was nineteen when he emigrated in 1851, and at first he roomed with his brother John and family. In 1858, Patrick journeyed back to Ireland and married Julia Fox, a Mallow girl, and brought her to America. He and his bride moved in with his Aunt Ann and her husband, Daniel, in a house near the corner of Dublin and Railroad Streets (now Sherman and Pemberton Streets), across from the old West Cambridge railroad station. Their home was in the midst of the brickyard complex, at the southeast corner of the new Roman Catholic cemetery, and just south of the city's horse track. The brick yards boomed in the period during and after the Civil War, and from the large number of Irish immigrants who bought or leased workers' cottages in the neighborhood, it acquired the derisive names "Dublin" and "New Ireland."

The brickyard workmen wielded pick and shovel, then bore the clay from the pits by pushing a wheelbarrow up a steep dirt ramp. Donkey carts and horse—drawn wagons, and then steam shovels and trucks, were introduced over time. The clay was pressed into bricks, dried in long sheds, and the bricks then carted to domed kilns heated by wood or coal fires, where they were stacked and fired. It was a self—enclosed community, out among the swamps and pits, isolated by distance, ethnicity, religion and class from the Cambridge of Brattle Street and Harvard. Of the 31, 000 residents of Cambridge in 1865, 6,000 had been born in Ireland. The Brahmin society greeted the immigrants with scorn, or worse. "It is a good thing they invented the wheelbarrow — it taught the Irish to walk on their hind legs," joked the comics in the local vaudeville shows.

The Irish had hit Massachusetts like a furious northeaster. By the turn of the century, almost half of Boston's 560,000 inhabitants were of Irish ancestry. They were a broken and destitute people, the unskilled refugees of a starving peasantry, and they filled the dockside neighborhoods of Fort Hill, Broad Street and the North End, crammed ten or more into dank, unlit cellars and badly ventilated rooms. They succumbed by the thousands to tuberculosis, typhus, dysentery, diphtheria or cholera, or from drink, or at their dangerous, low—paying laborers' jobs, which they were nonetheless happy to get. They begged and robbed and stole from each other and drank and fought in the streets and alleys. Their children were "literally born to die," said Lemuel Shattuck, who conducted the Boston census, and was shamed by the rate of infant mortality.

Their history as a subjugated people — forbidden by the British Penal Laws of the eighteenth century to vote, attend school or practice their religion — had left the Irish with a "blend of courage and evasiveness, tenacity and inertia, loyalty and double—dealing." They were proud and clever, a social people enamored of music and dancing, good conversation around the peat fires, rural fairs and horse races and the bite of homemade whiskey. But they could also be distrustful, insecure, sullen and fatalistic.

In many ways, the O'Neill brothers were blessed. In sharp contrast to the teeming tenements of the North End or East Boston, where the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys were getting their start in the new world, there was room in North Cambridge for a bit of garden and a chicken coop out back. The work was outdoors, healthy and steady, if arduous, and there was a prior generation to show them the way. Their O'Connell—Hayes relatives opened a grocery store, and then an oil business, and eventually produced a mayor of Cambridge. Yet the members of the family knew the bite of discrimination, and responded to Yankee authority with typically subversive Irish humor. When a horse was killed by a train at the Dublin Street crossing, the question of liability made its way to court. There, a member of the family was asked if he had signaled with his lantern. "Yes, I went out and waved the lantern," he replied. After arriving home, he confided to his family: "It's a good thing they didn't ask me if it was lit."

Patrick and Julia O'Neill had eight children, of whom seven survived — a high ratio at a time when the Irish American mortality rate was among the nation's highest. Patrick worked as a laborer, mason and stonecutter. With one exception — a daughter, Julia, was born on a brief trip to Illinois in 1872 — the family remained in the "Dublin" neighborhood until the time of the Panic of 1873, a national economic depression that put several of the brickyard firms out of business. For the next twenty—five years the O'Neills bounced back and forth between the Dublin area and the streets of industrial East Cambridge, another Irish immigrant community. It was politics that ultimately brought them some stability. In the 1890s Patrick was employed by the municipal government as a city teamster and settled at 52 Montgomery Street, where the Dublin neighborhood had spread across Kidder's Lane (later to be named Rindge Avenue) onto the subdivided grounds of the old racetrack. Patrick's sons William and Thomas were involved as young men in Democratic politics, and may have helped provide their father with that city job — or perhaps it was the old man who enlisted in the local political machine and tugged his sons behind him. Patrick lived until 1903, when, just a few weeks short of his seventy—first birthday, his heart gave out. Julia passed away seven years later, at the age of seventy—two, from heart failure preceded by bronchitis and dysentery.

THOMAS P. O'NEILL, the future Speaker's father, was born in the fall of 1874. He was Patrick's and Julia's youngest son. Thomas was an ambitious man who began in the brick yards as a laborer for the New England Brick Company and learned the mason's trade. He lived at home until his mother Julia's death to save money, started his own neighborhood contracting business and was active as a union organizer. Thomas also took an early interest in politics, and at the age of twenty—eight was elected by the voters of the eleventh ward to the Cambridge Common Council, the lower of two legislative bodies of the city government. He served for three years, with seats on the important finance and roads committees. He became a member of the Democratic Ward and City Committee and the Cambridge Elks lodge and a Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus, whose balls, parades and minstrel shows were at the heart of Irish Catholic society.

North Cambridge was undergoing further transformation. The horse—car line from Harvard Square and the railroad from Boston had lured housing developers and home buyers to the area, and the opening of an electric trolley along Massachusetts Avenue completed the neighborhood's conversion to streetcar suburb in 1890. French Canadian immigrants were replacing the Irish in the dying brickyard industry, and roomy new two—family homes on tree—lined side streets began to displace the workers' cottages that had sheltered an earlier generation — signs that the Irish Americans were climbing the economic ladder. Politically, the immigrants and their kin now outnumbered the Yankees in Cambridge, and in 1901 a silver—tongued Irishman named John H. H. McNamee defeated Yankee Mayor David T. Dickinson to become the city's first Irish American mayor.

In 1904, Thomas O'Neill married Rose Tolan, a twenty—eight—year— old dressmaker from Woburn, a small town to the north of Cambridge. Her parents, James Tolan and Eunice Fullerton Tolan, had been born in different villages in County Donegal, emigrated around 1870, then met and wed in Massachusetts. Rose was one of twelve children who packed their warren of a house on Buckman Court in Woburn's South End. A sister, Anna, became a prominent member of the Mary knoll order of Roman Catholic nuns. A brother, Ed, took to wandering out West and died in Montana at an early age of complications brought on by diabetes, when an injured leg refused to heal. According to the family genealogists, the Fullertons were descended from a German ship captain whose vessel had been wrecked on Ireland's rocky northern coast, forcing him to settle there. Thomas and Rose O'Neill had four children: William, born in 1905; Mary Rose, born in 1906; Catherine, who died in infancy; and Thomas Philip O'Neill Jr. — who was born in Cambridge on December 9, 1912, in a rented third—floor apartment in a three—family home at 25 Locke Street. "Can't you change him for a girl?" his sister, Mary, asked the doctor.

It was an eventful year for the O'Neills. Thomas Senior had finished atop the list in the Cambridge civil service exam and won appointment as superintendent of sewers to replace the late Theodore Pike. The job came with the grand salary of $2,000 per year, lists of jobs and contracts to let, and the responsibility of maintaining 150 miles of city sewer lines. The following year Thomas bought a house at 10 Fairfield Street, off Rindge Avenue, for $3,500. Through the hard work of three generations, the O'Neill family had claimed respectability. William would become the first in his family to go to college — to Holy Cross — and win a scholarship to Harvard Law School. Mary became a schoolteacher and then the first female principal in the Cambridge public school system. Young Thomas would attend Boston College, and follow his father into politics.

Though he never rejected his Irish heritage, Thomas Senior was an assimilationist. He was tall and austere, disciplined and punctual, and nicknamed "Lord Fairfield" or "the Governor" by his neighbors. He never gave his children whippings — his imposing bearing, high standing in the community and the lash of his tongue were more than enough to keep them in line if the rattan switches of their teachers should fail. He shaved every night before dinner and sat in the same pew each Sunday. His brother John had succumbed to drink and vagrancy, so Thomas's mother made him swear off liquor. He eventually became the president of the St. John's Catholic Total Abstinence Society, where he was helped by the fact that from 1886 until 1936 bars and saloons were banned in Cambridge. He was stern, but not an unforgiving man, as he marked the curb outside his home with a white "X" in his brother's memory, to signal hoboes they could get a meal inside. "He really was a very strong man. And I never heard the man condemn anyone. There were always two sides to everybody, and while From Dublin Street to Barry's Corner they may have their faults, and you may disagree, he could always see a reason for liking a person," his daughter—in—law Mildred O'Neill would remember. "He was a very fair man. Very fair."

Thomas had a passion for sports and helped organize a renowned semi—pro baseball team, sponsored by the local Knights of Columbus, or K of C, that lured thousands of fans to North Cambridge's Russell Field. From the time of his days on the Common Council, he worked to find jobs for his constituents with the city government or the local gaslight or telephone company, and in his years as sewer superintendent his neighbors and employees took to seeking his counsel and assistance when a husband drank too much or there was a bad boy in the family or financial calamity loomed. "Somehow they arrived at my house to talk to my dad," his son, the future Speaker, recalled. "He had the respect of everybody and for that reason they all seemed to migrate to our home for favors." Through his political and social contacts in the city, the Governor knew who needed a job, a Christmas dinner or a winter coat —and would find it for them. Unlike some other Irish American political leaders of his day, he didn't fan the resentments of his constituency. "My father used to say, 'There is nothing better than a good Yankee.' We weren't supposed to be prejudiced against the Yankees," his daughter, Mary, recalled. The virtues that Thomas tried to teach his children were loyalty to one's own, integrity and charity toward the unfortunate. "His word was absolute and complete law," his son Tip remembered. "We never questioned him."

"He has a large man's slow motion, the careful tread of the sagacious elephant who, conscious of poundage, tests every plank of a bridge as he crosses," said a contemporaneous profile in a Cambridge newspaper. "He does not encourage what is termed chatter, the small talk that empty minds indulge in."

Yet "there is humor in this interesting Celtic countenance, as well as strength and sagacity. He knows his own limitations and is too self—examining to indulge in any pretense. If you seek the practical, the plan, the initial sense of any matter, he is just the man to know," the journalist concluded. "The elemental nature of his vocation has not sullied his native sweetness.

THE DEFINING CHILDHOOD MOMENT for baby Tom arrived before he was old enough to grasp what happened. When he was but nine months old, his mother died of tuberculosis. Rose had contracted the disease several years earlier and was thought to be cured after spending time in the state sanatorium in Rutland, Massachusetts. To aid her recuperation, the family had lived briefly in the "hills of Arlington," the town to the northwest of Cambridge, where the air was considered cooler and cleaner, said Mary. Thomas told his daughter that Rose had contracted tuberculosis while caring for a relative who was stricken with the disease. It was prevalent enough at the time, especially in the immigrant communities of Boston, where the rate of infection was among the highest in the nation. It was one reason that Thomas gave up his contracting business: that work was seasonal, and he needed the city's steady paycheck to take care of his wife. When Rose fell ill again, the O'Neills rented a cottage in New Hampshire for the summer of 1913. Mary remembered playing in the barn with Bill while Rose sat on the porch cradling the infant Tom in her arms. The crisis came on September 10, and Rose succumbed eight days later at the age of thirty—eight. "We came home from New Hampshire right after Labor Day and she died," Mary recalled. A nun was called to look after the baby while the family attended the funeral.

Before she died, Rose made her husband promise not to divide the children among relatives, but to keep them together as a family. Thomas complied, but he was then starting his new job, working six days a week for the city, and couldn't give his children the attention they required. A warm—hearted French Canadian housekeeper looked after them, and the Dominican nuns from the nearby St. John's convent did what they could to help. But Tom later recalled being "passed from aunt to aunt — it wasn't a happy time."21 He found compensation by winning hearts on Fairfield Street. He was a slyly charming little boy, fawned over by the women on the block, as his father tried his best to be both mother and father. Amid the loneliness, there were times of happiness. "The Christmas I remember best was 1917, when I was five years old. I still remember the sled my father gave me," O'Neill said years later. "The night before, we had a snowstorm, and I remember the rollers came down the street to pack the snow so the sleds would be able to travel. There were very few automobiles at that time. Parker Cahill, the mailman, was pulling a sled. Mail was still delivered on Christmas Day.

"My mother had died some time before, and my aunt Suzie Kelly was living downstairs. The Kellys and the O'Neills would have an From Dublin Street to Barry's Corner old—fashioned turkey dinner with cranberry sauce. I recall everybody on the street had a Christmas tree, but nobody had electric bulbs. Each tree had candles on it, and after dinner they would light the candles and watch them for five minutes and then blow them out for fear of a fire. Everyone would walk up and down the street looking in other people's houses to see their Christmas tree."

In 1918, Thomas O'Neill faced another wrenching ordeal when his two sons were stricken by the Spanish influenza, a gruesome flu epidemic that killed 28,000 people in Massachusetts, half a million Americans and 20 million people worldwide. Many of the victims died within forty—eight hours, drowning as their lungs filled with fluid from the viral pneumonia. In Cambridge, whole families were wiped out, the fearful folk took to stringing bits of camphor to hang around their necks and the local gravediggers couldn't match the flu's deadly pace; bodies went uncollected, and coffins were piled in the cemeteries. Soldiers waiting to be shipped overseas to the battlefields of France were felled instead in their crowded barracks outside Boston and their corpses stacked like cordwood. "We were very lucky," Mary recalled. "My father and I did not get it, and we had a nurse living with us at the time. A lot of people didn't have nurses, didn't get proper care. My father, of course, was devastated with worry."

Young Tom recovered, never to forget the morning of November 11, 1918, when news of the armistice ending World War I reached the United States. Factory whistles blew at the brickyards and at the nearby pottery. Church bells rang and the fire engines rolled from their stations to puff and clank around the neighborhood. "I was just about five years old and it sticks in my mind —the pottery whistle and the blares of the few horns from the automobiles there were, the steam fire engines with the beautiful white horses and Dalmatian dog parading through the street, and the happiness in the neighborhood," he remembered. "But more particularly, I remember the excitement because that was the first day I had seen an airplane."

A year later, the course of Tom's childhood was altered again when his father married Mary Ellen Cain, the thirty—nine—year—old daughter of a middle—class Cambridge family who lived around the corner on Rindge Avenue. The boy was a few weeks shy of his seventh birthday at the time. The Cains were a prosperous family, and Mary Ellen looked down upon the Fairfield Street house, which she and her new husband sold in favor of a larger, two—family home surrounded by mansard— roofed and Colonial revival houses in a nicer neighborhood on the other side of Massachusetts Avenue. The O'Neills took the top two floors at 74 Orchard Street and rented out the bottom; the ownership of the house was in Mary Ellen Cain's name. The family was moving up in the world. Thomas introduced his wife and young son Tom to Governor Calvin Coolidge when they crossed his path at the Quincy House Restaurant. Thomas and Mary bought the new device that was all the rage: a radio. They took automobile trips to Niagara Falls and Montreal. But it was not a good marriage —"There was never much happiness in that home," O'Neill remembered. Nor did Bill, fourteen, and Mary, thirteen, get along with their new stepmother, or like the move to Orchard Street. "My father had disappointed me," his daughter recalled. "I told him, ÎEverybody says you are going to marry that lady.' And he said, ÎYou're my girl.' So I took it for granted that I was his girl. I loved my father. He was a wonderful man. But he disappointed me."

Young Tom's childhood home was plain but comfortable. The ground—floor apartment was rented out to a series of tenants, while the O'Neills lived on the two upper floors. A curving staircase led up from the downstairs vestibule to the main living area, which had a parlor with a fireplace, a dining room with a built—in hutch, a tiled kitchen with a cast—iron sink, the family's only bathroom and a room that the kids referred to as "the den," but their stepmother called "the library." The floors in the hallways and at the edges of each room were made of polished hardwood, but wider boards of cheap, rough pine made up the flooring in the middle of each room, where it would be hidden by rugs. There were three roomy bedrooms on the third floor for daughter Mary, her parents, and the two boys.

Thomas Senior added a large screened porch to the back of the house a few years later when Bill was stricken with a serious case of pneumonia and the doctors prescribed fresh air. The family moved to rural Wilmington that summer, when young Tom was still in elementary school, and stayed through Thanksgiving as Bill recuperated. They lived on Glen Road, near "Pop" Neilson's farm, and ten—year—old Sylvia Neilson delivered their milk in a pony cart. On Sundays they attended Mass in the dance hall at Thompson's Grove, then stopped at Pop's vegetable stand on their way home. Other summers found the family in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where young Tom discovered deer and muskrats and blueberries.

It was about that time — on July 1, 1920 — that Thomas took Tom on the trolley to his first Red Sox game, at Fenway Park, paying with a few quarters for two bleacher seats. The Washington Senators were in town, and pitcher Walter Johnson threw the only no—hitter of his Hall of Fame career. Young Tom became as big, if not bigger, a fan than his father. "I thought it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen," he recalled. Tom loved to keep the line score in his program, marking down the batter—by—batter progression of the game and computing batting averages. He and his father would take after—dinner walks up the avenue to John D. Lynch's drugstore, where the day's baseball results and box scores were hung in the window. When the World Series came around, another druggist, who owned a wireless set, would announce the game, pitch by pitch, through a megaphone to hundreds of people gathered around his store.

Sixty years later, O'Neill could still name many of the players from the North Cambridge baseball team, which played on Sundays before thousands of fans because the big leagues were, by law, forced to honor the Sabbath. There was Gaspipe Sullivan, Doc Gautreau, Sonny Foley, Tubber Cronin, Cheese McCrehan and Chippie Gaw. Since the K of C team couldn't lawfully sell tickets for Sunday baseball, the sponsors would charge admission for a pregame band concert or sell ice cream at inflated prices. As a boy Tom hawked popcorn in the Russell Field stands on weekends and weekday evenings, where he saw the Red Sox, Boston Braves and Negro League teams, with stars like Josh Gibson, play exhibition games. The Roaring Twenties, the years of O'Neill's boyhood, were a golden age for American sports, the era of Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Knute Rockne, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney and Red Grange. The most memorable exhibition young Tom witnessed took place in 1927, at Glendale Park in Everett, as a benefit for the victims of a huge oil tank explosion. The Red Sox played a local team, the Roche Club, that had enhanced the gate by getting New York Yankee teammates Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig to play on its side. Ruth popped up in his first time at bat, and the Red Sox manager told his pitcher to groove one down the middle so the fans could see "the Sultan" swat. "Ruth drove the ball over the fence, over the clubhouse, over some tennis courts and across the street onto the roof of some three—deckers. That ended the game — in pandemonium," O'Neill later recalled.

It was baseball that gave young Tom the nickname he carried through life. A player named Edward O'Neill had been a batting champion with the St. Louis Browns in the late 1880s — largely because he would foul off pitch after pitch until he got a walk, or the pitcher grew tired and threw a fat one. For his uncanny ability at tipping all those foul balls, he became known as "Tip" O'Neill, and O'Neills across the country were saddled with the nickname. Both Bill and Tom wore the name as kids — Bill being "Tip" and Tom being "Little Tip" — but it stuck only with Tom.

Tip's boyhood was a genuinely urban, yet genteel, experience. With its wide central avenue, tree—lined streets and sampling of handsome architecture, North Cambridge had the air of a small, prosperous Mid—western city during the 1920s — not the desperate urgency of Al Smith's East Side in New York, or Jim Curley's South End neighborhood in Boston. There was work in that decade of Coolidge prosperity, and the economic and international crises that followed were yet beyond the horizon. The horse—drawn wagon, with its rumbling iron wheels, had not given way to the car, a novel contraption which still had to be started with spark, crank and throttle. There were open fields and picket fences, and a Poor Farm by the Arlington town line. In the summer there was swimming in the ocean at Revere Beach or in the Charles River or at Jerry's Pit, an abandoned claypit near the brick—yards. In the winter, when the flooded pits froze over, they served as splendid skating rinks — though dangerous, as an ill—fated childhood pal named "Salty" Reagan discovered when he fell through the ice and drowned.

Horse—drawn wagons delivered ice, bread and milk. The milk was in glass bottles, with inches of cream at the top. Doors were not locked; the ice man chipped off blocks with an ice pick, shouldered them with tongs and carried them directly to the icebox, whether anyone was home or not.30 Tip was taught by the good sisters at St. John's grade school on Rindge Avenue, a tall, bell—towered building built in 1891 that doubled as church and school for the Catholic community; it had a hall for worship on the ground floor and classrooms upstairs on the second and third until a proper church, St. John the Evangelist, was built on nearby Massachusetts Avenue in 1904. The nerviest boys in the neighborhood would peer through the latticework that shielded the convent yard from the world and try to discover what the nuns wore under their habits. "There were 16 classrooms and two bathrooms," Francis Ready, a schoolmate, recalled. "Those nuns took From Dublin Street to Barry's Corner care of 45 to 50 in the classroom, and none of us had a thirst for learning."

The nuns formed a procession each morning, the youngest sisters in front, and marched two—by—two from the convent to St. John's for 6:30 a.m. Mass. The pastor distributed report cards to the children, shaming the poorer students by reminding them of the sacrifices their parents had made to send them to parochial school. In addition to the academic grades, the report cards tracked attendance at Confession and Sunday Mass and Communion. If a boy got out of line, Father John Keohane, a former boxer and football player, would belt him a good one. When the church needed a new monstrance (a golden stand to hold the communion wafer during holiday rituals), the parishioners donated their jewelry and gold watches to be melted down. The monstrance was three feet tall, and so heavy that one person lifted it with difficulty.

The milestones of Catholic boyhood passed: First Communion, Confirmation, graduation to St. John's High School. Tip had a paper route and joined the Boy Scouts; decades later he found he still could tie the knots. He learned the Catholic catechism — Who is God? God is the Supreme Being who made all things. He consumed the library's Tom Swift and Horatio Alger books. "Do or die, sink or swim, now or never," O'Neill recalled. "I read them all." Tip hung around with Francis "Red" Fitzgerald, who lived around the corner and whose house was like a second home. When the local police caught them skinny—dipping at Jerry's Pit during school hours, the paddy wagon would take them away — but only as far as their own neighborhood, where the cop would say, "All out, boys." Tom and his buddies could walk or catch a ride to Central Square, then hike across a Charles River bridge and join the "Knot Hole Gang" — kids who got in to watch baseball for a nickel — at Braves Field. It was, Fitzgerald said, a "Huckleberry Finn" boyhood.

TIP'S TEENAGE YEARS revolved around a place called Barry's Corner and the group of young men who frequented it, calling themselves the Barry's Corner gang. They were his lifelong friends, and midwives to the birth of his political career. The corner's formal name is Sheridan Square, a baffling intersection where three streets — Rice, Cedar and Middlesex — converge on Rindge Avenue. As a hub of the Dublin and Race Course neighborhoods, the square had been a fixture among the Irish and the French Canadians for forty years. Here was St. John's convent, the French Canadian community's Notre Dame de PitiÈ Catholic church, a drugstore, a market and a candy shop. "My grandmother met her husband on Barry's Corner," Red Fitzgerald said. "He must have whistled at her."

The Barry house was a two—story yellow affair, with commercial space on the ground floor that hosted the odd barber shop or grocery or pool hall over the years but, in O'Neill's time, was used as a club—house by the gang. The front room had the barber chair and pool table, where sometimes a barber cut hair and sometimes Frank O'Connell, the gang's aspiring entrepreneur, best known as "Red" and "Moose" for his unforgettable hair and build, charged a few cents a rack to those who shot pool. The back room was the clubhouse, which the boys passed the hat to rent, with a wood stove and a table. Upstairs lived the Barry family, who were there for three generations before the place was torn down in 1937. The building's main amenities were its location, next to Nelligan's Market at the corner of Rice and Rindge, and its big, wide set of porch steps, which served as the gang's grandstand as the world walked by. The seating was limited, and allotted by the strictest rules of seniority. There was a boulder and a chestnut tree for the younger boys to lean against while they looked on enviously, and a barn out back of Nelligan's that was sometimes used by dice players, or as a place to bed down by "Barber" Burke, the local drunk.

Across the street lived Cheese McCrehan, the star pitcher of the K of C team, who had led Boston College to a 30 to 3 record in 1923. When Cheese came out of the house, the gang would stand and cheer, and he — following a time—honored ritual — would doff his cap. They would then switch to boos and raspberries, and he would throw his hat to the ground in mock anger and disgust. Diagonally across the square was the Notre Dame church, and though the Barry gang was multi—ethnic, with its Labos and Broussards, it was not unusual for the French to sing out, on a summer night, "Corned beef and cabbage makes Irishmen savage!" and the Irish to respond, "Poor man's johnnycake — a Frenchman's bellyache!" The neighborhood girls, who avoided the corner like the plague, had their own song: "Cambridge girls are pretty. Somerville girls are tough. Arlington girls with all their curls think they're just as rough."

The gang had up to sixty members, including Henry Owens, an African American, and Lenny Lamkin, a Jew. Bob Cain sometimes brought his ukelele, but mostly there was a lot of talk, usually about From Dublin Street to Barry's Corner sports but often about girls, and from time to time there were rumors of impending street warfare between the Irish and the French. "Every—body would be making mallets and clubs, but nothing ever came of it," Fitzgerald recalled. "Gang" was a misnomer. The boys would often show up at the clubhouse in coats and ties, and their potential for rowdiness was limited by the tight—knit nature of their community, where any mother or father could lay down the law or report a young man to his parents. "Even if you were inclined to be a little bit of a fresh kid, everybody knew it and they'd call up and tell your mother," Fitzgerald said, "and then — what was the use? — you'd get a shellacking." The police were Hollywood archetypes: brawny beat—walking lads from the neighborhood named Leandro and Sheehan, gruff and firm, adept with a billy club, but fair. Father James P. Kelly would drop by Barry's Corner with a bat and a ball and his dog, Pal, get a game going to keep the gang occupied and return to the rectory. The St. John's convent was uncomfortably close, and if the boys chose Rindge Avenue for their route home at night, the watchful nuns would know why their home—work looked hurried the next day. If all else failed, at semi—regular intervals, Old Man Barry would douse them with a tub of water from an upstairs window, no matter that Timothy Ready might be wearing his best Easter suit. "You had to be alert and quick of foot to escape," O'Neill recalled.

"There was a back room there with an old stove," remembered William McCaffrey. "And all we had to burn was tar blocks. They were tearing up the streets here, laying down macadam roads, and ripping them up: beautiful fuel, tarred wood. The whole stove would glow bright red and Old Man Barry would come down saying, ÎYou can't use that stuff. You'll burn the house down. Get the hell out,' and push us out. But he always relented and let us back in." When the boys needed money they would caddy at the Arlmont Country Club for seventy—five cents a round, or deliver phone books from a horse—drawn wagon. Or they'd steal apples from a fruit stand, or sweets from the little candy store. Golf brought out the best of Tip's budding talent as a raconteur. He claimed to have caddied, at the age of fourteen, for U.S. Open champion Willie MacFarlane, who allegedly eagled the fifth hole at Arlmont, though stymied by a tree, by intentionally bouncing his ball off a fence and into the hole. O'Neill also insisted that he lost a member's bag while caddying when he forgot that he had hung it from a nearby tree while looking for an errant ball. The bag, he claimed, was not discovered until the foliage fell in the fall.

There were three Barry boys, Jed, Dave and Jack — who was the unofficial leader of the gang by virtue of his prestigious job as a sports—writer for the Boston Globe. One of his responsibilities was to take the results of the day's baseball games and compute each player's batting average for the newspaper. It was a task that appealed to O'Neill, who had quite a facility for numbers, angles and odds, and was now exclusively referred to as Tip, given the boys' penchant for nicknames. There was "Potatoes" Labo, and "Jap" and "Frogsy" Broussard, and "Skippy" McCaffrey and "Pinky" Sullivan and "Touch" Goodwin and "Blubber" Sheehan and "Red" or "Redfish" Fitzgerald and "Moose" O'Connell and "Wee Wee" Burns and "Fat" McDonald and "Hambone" Sullivan, who always hated the name, which could be traced to a "hambone" error he had made playing baseball. "You know how I got my nickname?" said Pinky Sullivan. "We were sitting on the steps in front of Barry's Corner one day. Two girls went by and said, 'Hi, Jimmy.' Tip, he turned to me and said, 'You're pink!' "

The boys loved baseball, and Jack Barry got them interested in a relatively new sport: basketball. Tip was tall for his age, and exuberant, so it was natural that he and some others tried the game: on summer hard courts at Rindge Park and for St. John's High School, on whose team he was the senior captain in 1931. The team was not a great success; nor was O'Neill. His great virtue, on both offense and defense, said his pal Tom Mullen, was his immobility: "He was very, very tough to get around." Said Pinky Sullivan: "When he pivoted, the whole building shook." But strength and endurance were more highly valued than speed or coordination. It was a rough, physical game in its infancy — one contest ended in an 8 to 8 tie after several overtimes — and the team photograph shows most of the players wearing knee pads. In an entire season, O'Neill scored 17 points.

His lumbering strength was better suited to football, where the players were on the field for both offense and defense, and he was a guard and captain of the Barry's Corner sandlot team. The gang hatched a plan to form their own semi—pro team — the North Cambridge Catholic Club — challenge teams from other neighborhoods and charge admission. They raffled off five pounds of sugar to get money to buy helmets, pads and uniforms, then built a schedule by From Dublin Street to Barry's Corner guaranteeing their opponents $25 a game. They hoped to gross $100, but rarely did better than $35, and then had to cover their medical bills.

"Lenny Lamkin was the manager of our team," Fitzgerald remembered, "and he got us a game with the Wellesley town team. They had thirty—three men, and we'd go and play them with fifteen. Well, that was the day we left Tip, Lenny Kelly and Mickey O'Neill in the Wellesley hospital — all injured in the game. We had to call the game off in the third period: we didn't have eleven men who could still play. One guy on the Wellesley team had had his arm cut off, halfway to his elbow. Tom Sheehan came up to me and said, 'This guy is sticking the stump in my eye all the time.'"

"There wasn't a blade of grass on those fields," O'Neill's pal Leo Diehl recalled. "More tar and stones than anything else."

O'Neill liked to bet, and he didn't like to lose. Henry Owens was a burly guy, and the Barry's Corner gang decided that they could make some money by entering him in a prizefight. They traveled to Lowell for the big match, only to see their hero get beaten around the ring. Every time Owens hit the canvas, the lights in the place would go out and interrupt the referee's count, affording the fighter a few needed minutes to recuperate. Owens ultimately lost the match, but for years his buddies were convinced that O'Neill was the culprit who manipulated the lights to give Henry a chance for victory. John Tatton, a fireman who was one of Cambridge's top young tennis players, remembered how O'Neill promoted a money match pitting him against an East Cambridge ace. Tatton lost by default when the alarm sounded; the fire trucks rushed by and he had to run from the court to catch them. He could hear O'Neill calling, "Come back!"

O'Neill wasn't much of a student, but he led the debating team with his facility to "talk you deaf, dumb and blind," recalled Sister Clarita, one of the nuns at St. John's. He was a likable guy who liked to play hooky. A yearbook ditty about him read, "Never worried, never vexed, in one day and out the next."

THE IDYLLIC TONE of O'Neill's boyhood was real enough. The Barry's Corner boys formed lifelong bonds and remained close friends; working in political campaigns, spending the summers of their college years in a rented cottage on Nantasket Beach, learning together about liquor and sex and gathering for reunions well into the 1980s. North Cambridge would always be an anchor for Tip, not a stale, claustrophobic environment from which to flee. He sank roots in the neighborhood — buying a house around the corner from his childhood home — and lived there throughout his life. But the halcyon days of youth did not last forever. They were shattered in October 1929, midway through his junior year at St. John's High School, by the great stock market crash. There were not a lot of Wall Street speculators, caught up by margin calls, plummeting to earth from skyscrapers in North Cambridge. But the Depression that followed, and their need to make their way in a suddenly uncertain and dangerous world, put an end to those Booth Tarkington boyhoods and left a searing impression on O'Neill and his friends. The intensity of the experience, coming as it did just as the boys became men, worked like a bellows on their fears and insecurities, and tested their character. It was during this time of disorienting political and economic change — during the days of demagogues and the dust bowl and soup lines and Red scares in America; the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and war abroad; the crisis of the old order and the coming of a New Deal — that Tip O'Neill chose his lifelong vocation.

Copyright (c) 2001 By John A. Farrell