Word: mccormack
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...prestigious new job, Speaker McCormack is paid $35,000 a year, plus $10,000 for expenses (an ordinary Representative gets $22,500). He also inherits two elaborate suites of offices and a cozy nook, a Cadillac with chauffeur, a private dining room. The power and the trappings of the Speaker are a big step up for any man-and a long way from the drab South Boston streets where John McCormack got his start...
John Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller have won full political rights for the very rich-their sons may aspire to any office. John McCormack's rise to the Speakership is a forceful reminder of an older American theme...
...Deserving Poor. The South Boston of McCormack's boyhood was a neighborhood of shabby respectability. South Boston's citizens, almost all Irish American, were poor but industrious (the "deserving poor"). Drawn together by their church (at one time, South Boston claimed to produce more nuns and priests per capita than any other U.S. community) and by the bitter prejudice of Boston's entrenched Yankees, the Irish were fanatically loyal to one another. A local saying has it that "if God came down to South Boston and ran for office against a fellow who was born...
...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...
...wood so we could get the basket," says Knocko. "Those baskets didn't have any oranges or grapefruit or nuts in 'em. It was a yard of dried fish and a bag of potatoes and maybe a little bag of onions." Friends still recall seeing young John McCormack crouched on a curbstone, reading by the flickering light of a gas street lamp. He devoured dozens of Dick Merriwell* adventures, and he retains a reverence for the rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger. "Parents," he says, "should make Horatio Alger stories must reading for their children. They build...