Word: knocko
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Real Shaked. Even before the balloting began, the McCormack men could see defeat in the offing. Eddie's dad, "Knocko" McCormack, sat sadly in the Cheddar Cheese Room, an eatery in the bowels of Springfield's Sheraton-Kimball Hotel, and spoke darkly about the Kennedy lieutenants. "They're cold, they're cold," said old Knocko. "I got here at 12:30 last night, and I got in the elevator with an old friend from Northampton. He's been in the American Legion with me for years, and I say, 'Hello...
John McCormack was just 13 when his bricklayer father died. Besides his mother, there were two younger brothers, Edward ("Knocko") and Daniel, to support. (Nine other brothers and sisters died in infancy or youth.) Mary Ellen O'Brien McCormack was a strapping woman with a great heart, who cheer fully took on the burdens of her friends and neighbors. "She was the Mary Worth of the district," says her grandson, Edward McCormack Jr. "The one whom everybody came to with their troubles, arbiter of disputes, nurse of the sick, comforter of the oppressed." But Mary Ellen could not manage...
...Then You Moved On." Rent for a two-room tenement was only $1.25 a week, but there were many times when John and his mother were unable to raise that much. "You never had no regular address," says Knocko. "You just stayed in one place as long as the landlord would let you, and then you moved on. We were poor, we were poor. We're not proud of it, but we don't shun the fact that we were the poorest family in South Boston." The family stove was fueled with stray lumps of coal that Knocko...
When the news got out, most Massachusetts Democrats were plainly disgusted about the whole thing ("We can't afford a senatorial baby-sitter"). Among those most angered: House Majority Floor Leader John McCormack and his brother Edward ("Knocko") McCormack Sr., who wanted the job for Knocko's son, Massachusetts Attorney General Edward McCormack Jr. This hardly left McCormack in a position to decry favoritism over merit, so he could only sulk...