The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 Read Free Page A

boy has to go through to become a true man. A teenage boy who was “a perfect gentleman has something the matter with him.
    “An able-bodied young man, who can not fight physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is generally a milk-sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak,” wrote Hall, a Harvard Ph.D. and the president of Clark University. “He lacks virility, his masculinity does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the core.” Risk was risk and danger was danger, and Hall did not shrink from the implications: “Better even an occasional nose dented by a fist, a broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even sometimes the sacrifice of the life of one of our best academic youth than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed be, as it sometimes is, its real alternative.”
    Out on the streets of East Boston, the games were sometimes rough. Boys had their noses bitten, ears half torn off, groins kicked, heads stomped on, and lips split. Boys yelped and screamed, exhorted and cursed. A boy asked no quarter and gave none. A boy who whined was a sissy, a dandified, effete mommy’s boy.
    Danger was everywhere. Joe often hitched a ride on the back of one of the long coal pungs that moved laboriously from the docks to the ferry. These horse-drawn wagons were so long that the driver rarely could strike his unwanted passenger, as often happened when boys jumped on a carriage. Joe still might have fallen off and had his legs crushed by one of the wheels. There was danger even when he stayed home. Joe had been injured playing with a toy pistol; so had one of his friends, and the boy died of blood poisoning. The dead boy’s brother invited Joe to go sailing with him. It was the first of the month, the day on which young Joe always took confession, so hesaid no, and the boy upset the boat and drowned. Danger might be omnipresent, but Joe stepped around it like a puddle of water in his path.
    Life in the streets, though, was not all danger and risk. Young Joe loved the rituals of patriotism. He always attended the parades to watch the drum corps and the Civil War veterans and the bands marching proudly by. One Memorial Day he got together all his friends in uniforms, and they marched in the parade, falling out long before its end. Back at the house, he orchestrated a flag-raising ceremony with all the neighborhood children present, and his own sister Loretta swathed herself in a flag and wore a glorious “Columbia” crown.
    Joe’s father and mother could easily have given their precious son an allowance large enough that he never would have had to bother getting a foul taste of the workaday world of America. They did not do so, however, and were proud that young Joe went out hustling jobs. He ran errands at P. J.’s bank. He hawked newspapers on the street corner. He lit stoves on the Sabbath for Orthodox Jews.
    One summer Joe got together with a friend, Ronan Grady, to raise pigeons, which many in East Boston considered a delicacy. Ronan had the coop and the pigeons, but Joe didn’t fancy himself as a pigeon farmer, feeding the birds expensive food, cleaning the coops, and waiting months for them to fatten. Instead, he and Ronan regularly picked out two of the most likely pigeons, secreted them under their shirts, and took them to Boston Common. There they released the birds. By the time the boys got home, their pigeons had already returned, bringing amorous partners with them. The boys sold the birds and split the profits. Joe was beginning to learn that there was nothing worth more than a good idea and a better angle.
    T he nuns might educate his sisters, but for Mary Augusta’s son, only the finest secular education would do. Joe set out in September 1901 to take the ferry to attend seventh grade at Boston Latin School on the corner of Dartmouth Street and Warren Avenue. He was entering what was probably the finest public school in