The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [1]
The carriage rolled toward the mainland ferry, passing numerous taverns, dark havens that marked their presence by small signs. If Joe’s father, Patrick Joseph “P. J.” Kennedy, had set a symbol of his success on his mantelpiece, it would have been a humble glass of beer. As a youth, P. J. worked a short while as a stevedore. Then P. J.’s mother had grubstaked her only son to open a pub. As for her daughters, Bridget followed the pattern of her people and her time. She sent one daughter off to work in the jute mills and settled for another to become a shirtmaker, while she did everything for her son.
P. J. drank only enough so that he would not appear a parsimonious sort, his shot glass filled not with whiskey but with beer. In P. J.’s tavern, as in most others in East Boston, the talk was usually of politics. P. J. carefully built his clientele, expanded into the wholesale liquor business, and entered politics as a state legislator. Favors were the mortar of P. J.’s career, and he built his career one brick at a time.
By the time Joe was born, P. J. was the Democratic ward boss for East Boston, one of the most powerful political figures in the city. With his husky figure and handlebar mustache, P. J. appeared the perfect rendering of an Irish-American politician. Every evening the petitioners arrived at the house on Webster Street, bewildered new arrivals clutching legal notices, unemployed workers looking for a city job, and widows about to be evicted.
As the carriage turned onto Meridian Square and the ferry landing, it passed the Columbia Trust Company, an imposing four-story brick and iron building. Joe’s father was a founder of this new bank, one of the many businesses in which he was involved. The East Boston Argus-Advocate, in a rare moment of candor, described P. J. as “slick as grease.” Slick as grease he was, and slick as grease he had to be to climb out of the prison of poverty and accumulate a fortune, all without ever moving from East Boston.
When a husband died, P. J. was there with his condolences, but he was also there to buy the widow’s house at a good price. He and his business associates bought extensive real estate and other businesses in East Boston, usually keeping their interest quiet. P. J. used his political power as a lever to push him into all kinds of deals, including a major position in the liquor wholesale business, an industry that he helped oversee in the state legislature.
No matter how well off he became, P. J. never flaunted his wealth. Though he sailed a yacht in the harbor in the summer and wintered in Florida, he still rode the trolley and tipped his hat to the ladies.
P. J. was a shrewd, practical man who endowed his son with his own deep insight into all the machinations of human beings. He was a man, however, who had none of his wife’s overweening ambition, a man who saw East Boston as world enough for himself and for his son.
Everywhere Joe cast his eyes, he spied new arrivals from the ports of Europe and heard the rancorous clamor of peddlers. The horse-drawn wagon brushed past Russian and other Eastern European Jews selling goods from pushcarts and gesticulating Italians hawking sausages and vegetables where thirty years before Irish widows had begged passersby for a coin or two. These new immigrants, especially the Jews, were an exotic, threatening element to Irish-Americans. They were pouring into East Boston, crammed into triple-decker houses and tenements. There would soon be enough of them to become the largest Jewish community in New England, and by the time they founded their synagogues and opened kosher markets, the second-generation Irish-Americans were pulling out. Joe’s father could have left too, but this was his political bailiwick, and he was not giving it up to these new arrivals.
The carriage waited in line before moving onto the ferry that sailed between East Boston and Boston proper on the mainland. The pedestrians hurried onto the boat, paying their one-penny fares and passing through the turnstile to share the ride with a polyglot cross section of Irish,