The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [31]
Joe wanted his sons to compete manfully on the fields of sport. Jack was team captain in a baseball game played in May 1926. Joe would have been there, but he was in New York. So he cabled his “Good Luck” to eight-year-old “Captain Jack Kennedy.” Even without such encouragement, young Jack knew that on the baseball diamond and the football turf he and his brothers were to show their mettle and spirit as Kennedys.
One of the biggest of the boys, John Clark Jones III, tormented Joe Jr. after school until young Kennedy ran scurrying down the street to take up sanctuary in St. Aidan’s. “This is a shrine!” Joe Jr. yelled. “You can’t touch me here.” A Catholic church was a dark mystery to the Brahmin boys. They would no more have chased Joe Jr. in there than risk bad luck by chasing him under a ladder. The Kennedy boys used their sacred preserve again and again. “When they’d shoot a snowball in our snowball fights, they’d duck over to the church and get inside the building there for protection,” recalled Holton Wood, a fellow student.
As much as Joe Jr. and Jack fought each other, they stood together against this foreign world. On the playground Joe Jr. would challenge other boys to a fight, the bigger and older the better. Jack would stand by, betting on his big brother, with marbles as the currency. As the days went by, Jack’s little bag of marbles grew larger and larger. To boys like Augustus Soule Jr., Joe Jr. was the perfect archetype of the despicable Irish thug that he had been told about—” very pugnacious, very irritable, very combative.” Joe Jr. was a strange Irish bully, however, a fourth-generation American picking on boys who were bigger and older than he was.
When the headmaster sold the school to a developer, Joe was one of seven members of a committee to found the new Dexter School. For the first time in his life, he was on an equal footing with the other private-school fathers. His sons had been the opening wedge, but he was an equal only because he had the money to contribute substantially to the building fund. The parents whispered about Joe and passed on rumors about the illegal ways in which he was making his fortune. But his dollars gave off no foul odor, and they rationalized that even though they took his money, the Kennedys would never grace their homes socially.
Joe did not have to tell his sons that they were different, but he wanted that memory stamped on them indelibly. He was often gone from Brookline, but he pointedly took them out for football practice the first time in September 1926. To Joe, the football field was still the plain of honor where manhood was forged. He had recoiled at the struggles on that field himself and turned back toward more sedate sports, but he wanted his sons to prove their mettle, as he had not.
“Well, coach, you’re going to have quite a problem, because here are two young ‘micks’ who need discipline,” Joe told Willard Rice, the new coach, a Harvard man. “Mrs. Kennedy and I will give you carte blanche for any disciplinary measures that you need to take to get them into line.” “Mick” was a term of derision. By using it, Joe was raising the stakes, which, on this field, were already high enough. The boys were the only two Catholics on a team that wore imitation Harvard uniforms. Their teammates did not need added incentive to tackle and block these papist encroachers until they ran whining off the field. The coach inspired laggards by kicking them in the behind, a practice that Joe and Rose considered “a wonderful idea.”
The Dexter boys thought of football as their sport. They had every reason to believe that someday they would wear these same colors in Harvard Stadium, as did their big brothers and older cousins and friends. There they would compete against