Word: mayors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mayor of Boston, Curley is forever at words points with the Boston Finance Commission. The Commission (or the Fin Com as it is most commonly called) is a five-man board appointed by the governor to keep a constant eye on the city's financial condition. Since the state government was Republican during most of Curley's administration, the Fin Com was generally very hostile to him; even during his first administration when the late Senator David I. Walsh, a democrat, was governor, the members of the Fin Com bitterly fought Curley's spending. But, for all their efforts...
...political hold which Curley has kept over Boston has been a very strange thing; losing as many times as he has won the race for mayor, he can hardly be called invincible. Yet after every defeat, when his opponents predicted the end of bossism in Boston, Curley has displayed remarkable resiliency and come back to win again. One reason undoubtedly is that he leaves the city in such a poor financial condition when he is defeated that the burden of reform overwhelms the next mayor. The two men that shared the mayoralty with him during the Twenties, Malcolm E. Nichols...
...Curley so popular? The big reason is his colorful individuality. When he first ran for mayor, he bolted every other ward boss in the city--a trick commonly thought of at the time as political suicide. As soon as he was mayor, he jarred the banks by his out-of-town borrowing. He has made and broken political friendships with nearly everyone in Boston politics since 1900: Ely, Fitzgerald, Daniel B. Coakley, ex-governor Robert F. Bradford, Tobin and David I. Walsh. In no term as mayor has he built up a strong personal machine such as those operated...
Under the heading of the word color comes Curley's gift for public speaking. Originally, he was only a commonplace orator but he sensed the need for inspiring speech-making even before he was mayor. He studied nights under a Professor Staley at a public speaking school in Boston. Staley comments that Curley was so unrefined when he first went to the school that the young man had a very difficult time convincing the professor to keep him. Curley soon became Staley's best pupil, and even now, the teacher still sends written comments to the mayor on each...
...dress makes him distinctive, too. The story goes that Curley came over to Cambridge at the outset of his career and bought a second-hand rich boy's suit from Max Keezer that he were for years as alderman and mayor. Now, you see him mostly in a cutaway; supposedly he once showed up in a tuxedo to shovel the first clod of earth for a foundation, complaining that he hadn't hat time to change his clothes after a formal luncheon...