Happy St.Patricks Day. James Michael Curley on the left..( my great uncle x4 with Honey Fitz (JFK's grandfather)..Both Mayors of Boston.. James was a likeable rogue. A book, The Rascal King was written about him... " James M. Curley was a transition figure, a symbol of the emergence of the famine Irish from their proletarian status to political dominance. It is the recurring phenomenon of one class replacing another. In 1776 the Boston merchant oligarchy succeeded the Tory squirearchy by revolution. It in turn, if more slowly and by attrition, was superseded by the Celts. Curley’s career is a symbol of this process. His father, Michael, came to Boston from Galway in 1865 at the age of fourteen. Sarah Clancy, his mother, arrived that same year—a meager-boned Connemara girl of the type Dr. Gogarty called Firbolg. She was twelve years old and worked first as a maid” on Beacon Hill. Michael Curley became a hod carrier at ten cents an hour by the grace of Patrick “Pea-Jacket” Maguire, boss of Ward 17, where Galway men clustered. Michael Curley was good-looking in a stumpy, plodding, impassive way, strong, and as he grew older, bearded. At 21 he married Sarah and took her to a tiny flat in one of the rotting three-deckers off Northampton Street. Along Roxbury Neck there were hundreds of those fetid wooden tenements that had been run up by jerry-builders for the shanty Irish. Beyond Northampton Street lay the North Bay, and at low tide the marsh gas sifting in across the mud mixed with the sour permanent stench of the Southampton Street dump. It was said that in Ward 17 children came into the world with clenched fists. In that Roxbury flat James Michael Curley, the second son, was born in 1874. The boy’s horizon was the water-front slum. By the time he was five he ran with an urchin gang, pilfering, dodging the cops, wandering...."#jamesmichaelcurley #irish #boston #bostonbosses #wardboss #honeyfitz #mayorofboston #mayor #stpaddysday (at Middleboro, Massachusetts)