Word: middlesex
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Danehy paints Ralph as an intolerant egomaniac. "He wants to be the mayor of Middlesex County," Danehy says. "Lester is quite happy so long as he can run the whole show...
...irrational," Michael E. McLaughlin, chairman of the Middlesex County commission, says, characterizing one of his fellow commissioners, S. Lester Ralph. "He wants to be the total dominating force. He reminds me of Adolf Hitler...If you're in his way, I truly believe Lester Ralph would push you right out a window...
McLaughlin maintains that before 1975 "Ralph would just sit in his office and hire people. That was it. He was everything, judge and jury." Ralph derived his strength, McLaughlin insists, from the acquiescence of Paul Tsongas, a former commissioner and aspiring politican whose "interest wasn't in Middlesex County." When Tsongas left the county for Congress in 1975, the two remaining commissioners, Ralph and Danehy, were left to find someone for the vacancy, with the Middlesex clerk of courts acting as tie-breaker. McLaughlin says Ralph hoped to perpetuate his power by appointing a political ally who had contributed...
...patronage constitutes the biggest source of contention among the commissioners, it is not the only one. McLaughlin takes Ralph to task for apathy and irresponsibility, saying "He hasn't proposed one thing to help Middlesex County--not an idea in almost two years." Danehy attacks him for never having filed a bill in the legislature. They both call him a spendthrift and blame him for Somerville's skyrocketing property tax, which has risen from $199.70 per $1000 to $237.60 in the last year. McLaughlin says that in the two years before becoming a commissioner, he watched Ralph drive the county...
...before 1975, "when," he says, "it was possible to accomplish something." In those years the commissioners reduced the patronage-ridden engineering department staff by more than one-third, cut the dog office from three men to one, pushed for the completion of the court house and closed the costly Middlesex County Training School, an institution for truant youths. Ralph says that McLaughlin's budget claims are "at very best a half truth" because the influx of federal revenue sharing funds in recent years has altered the county budget without any help from the commissioners. He resents the spendthrift tag. While...