The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [6]
The nuns might educate his sisters, but for Mary Augusta’s son, only the finest secular education would do. Joe set out in September 1901 to take the ferry to attend seventh grade at Boston Latin School on the corner of Dartmouth Street and Warren Avenue. He was entering what was probably the finest public school in America. Alumni included Samuel Adams, one of the fathers of the American Revolution; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the author; Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard; and George Santayana, one of the university’s most distinguished professors.
The youths who surrounded Joe in the Boston Latin classrooms did not bear the great names of the old city. The upper-class Protestants thought of Boston Latin as their school, but they had largely given it up rather than have their sons’ sweet souls soured by sitting next to the likes of a Joseph P. Kennedy. They had made their hegira to the undefiled premises of a group of new private prep schools scattered across New England, where their sons would sit only among their own kind. That left only a few of the poorer Brahmin brethren to sit in classrooms full of immigrant sons and grandsons.
The boys who dominated the academic life of the school were almost all Jews. Joe was not one of those thrusting his hand up, waving it for attention. He was not a good student. His grades were pathetic, including Cs in elementary and advanced Greek and his second year of elementary French; Ds in English, elementary history, elementary Latin, elementary algebra, and geometry; and Fs in his first year of elementary French, elementary physics, and advanced Latin.
These grades did not temper Joe’s ego. He looked disdainfully at the humorless, relentless, merciless struggles of grade grubbers. For him, the glory of these years lay elsewhere, especially on the athletic field. On the baseball diamond all of his natural aggressiveness played out. He slid with spikes up, argued with umpires whose casual ineptness appalled him, and batted each time as if the game depended on him stroking the ball over the fence. For Joe, there was purity in this world that he found nowhere else. Years later he would lovingly remember the details of each school game, reliving the glory of those long past days.
Joe befriended one of the best athletes at Boston Latin, Walter Elcock. Not only was Elcock captain of the football team, but he was sure to be chosen captain of the baseball team as well. Joe took his friend to steak dinners that he would not have been served at home and talked him into stepping aside so that Joe would be named captain. Thus two years in a row, Joe was captain in name and deed.
Joe learned of the profound dangers of sex, not of its pleasure. There was no purity in the world of sex, especially not in the Ireland from which Joe’s ancestors had emigrated. In the name of God, the peasant priests drove the sexes apart, patrolling the Irish countryside in search of couples so foolish as to seek out a dalliance. Men married late and reluctantly, seeking another farmworker as much as a wife. Then, and only then, did they partake in the short, brutish business that was sex and prove their manhood nightly by continuing to lift a few with friends at the village tavern.
In the Boston of Joe’s childhood, a gentleman did not talk about sex. As for children, when they talked of “the dirty place” or “the dirty parts,” it was clear of what and where they spoke. They might disguise the words, but they could not disguise the acts. Hall recalled that, growing up in the small town of Worthington, Massachusetts, youths experimented with “homosexuality, exhibitionism, fellatio, onanism, relations with animals, and almost every form of perversion.”
The list of sexual experiments in East Boston may have been smaller, but life for an adolescent was presumably not radically different. No one of any honor and decency