Word: curleys
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Curley was deeply touched by their generosity and good judgment; he presented each of them, in return, with an autographed document. But when his visitors asked for more signed doctuments for other members of their students' committee, the Mayor began to smell a rat. He noticed that they didn't talk like anyone from B.C. that he knew. And indeed they didn't. They were prospective members of the Harvard Lampoon out about the pranks that characterize that magazine's bi-annual Fools' Week. As for the urn, it was and remains the sturdy and much-used punch bowl usually...
...wasn't often that the boys from Harvard, or their teachers, managed to put one over on that canny Irishman. Since Curley was Curley and Harvard remains Harvard, the two did frequent battle. There is an unlimited fardel of tales about Harvard's collisions with Curley. It would be as foolish as impossible to attempt to separate legendary fact from factual legend...
This is as Curley would have had it. It is, in fact, a view that he wished to lure from the realm of story-telling to that of contractual relationships between public officials and the people they hire to build bridges, dig tunnels, bulldoze beaches,, and supply the flowers on funerals and other state occasions. It was to the everlasting disgrace of the Boston Finance Committee that they failed to accept this application...
Nevertheless, Curley's view of the truth was in some ways unique and should be hinted at. He rarely explained anything he had said, unless by contradicting it. His attitude toward those of his own utterances that someone had had the temerity or good sense (depending on the circumstances) to record, was, at the least, oracular. Claims were facts because he had made them; petty and unsympathetic attempts to verify his remarks rendered an individual unworthy of Curley's further attention. His attitude toward facts resembled that of the student of the earliest Byzantine or Russian history...
...When Curley was around," Professor Charles Cherington recalls,, "he told the stories." And as Curley himself once remarked, "It isn't what a politician says but what he whispsrs that gives a slight clue to what he may be thinking." Thus, an attempt to give even so modest an account of Curley as his Harvard History is infected with compounds of uncertainty. But it has its compensations. To go from the faded pages of ancient Crimsons or the often jaundiced accounts of old adversaries to Curley's own recollections is to proceed from Arctic regions to land of balmy, ever...