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Little drummer boy
By adamg on Fri, 12/25/2015 - 9:59am
Mayor Curley, his wife Mary and the youngest of their nine children, Francis X., celebrate Christmas.
John White notes:
A somewhat tragic figure, his father wanted him to be a pol; he wanted to be a Jesuit.
From the BPL's Leslie Jones collection. Posted under this Creative Commons license.
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Comments
she looks good for nine kids
she looks good for nine kids
Meaning?
She looks good for (another) nine kids?
Or, she would feed about nine kids?
Or, number ten would be beyond her limits?
:)
Now for the real story. This woman did not give birth to nine children. In this picture, she is only in her early 20s.
Curley's first wife, Mary Emelda Curley, died of cancer in 1930, at the age of 46, when the boy in the picture was six.
The woman in the picture? That's Curley's daughter! Mary Curley Donnelly, born in 1908. This is her in 1934: http://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/5x21...
The senior Mary Curley is in this photo (note that the little boy is much younger):
Jeez, Swirls, switch to decaf
You are really lacing into this guy, and why? The guy just saw a photo, whose caption states that the kid is with his mother and father, and since the guy knew that the parents had 9 kids, noted that the mom looked good. He just went on the information provided with the photo and basic facts about the family.
Yes, it is in fact the sister, but why being so harsh?
You need to watch this sensitivity training video.
produced by the above keyboard defender of all things PC....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FPFUrXbQgc
Dude
I think you are the one who needs decaf. If you bothered to read the comment, I even bothered to put a smiley in, denoting snark. I could have instead engaged in an eloquent and principled deconstruction of that comment, with a lengthy feminist critique of Catholicism and female fertility if you would have preferred.
Just a light hearted way of noting 1) grammatical ambiguity of the odd comment and, 2) despite the labels on all these photos, that is not Curley's wife! If I was totally crank, I would insist that the various archival sources correct their captions.
Now, go back to assembling the fifty seven ingenious and poorly described safety mechanisms on that tricycle for your kid ... and, maybe, drink some leftover spiked eggnog.
Allow me to slap myself upside the head
I missed the smiley.
Perhaps I had too much nog and not enough egg.
No problem
I knew somebody was going to react to that reaction. ;)
Good luck with any and all assembly tasks with the wee one, if they aren't already complete.
I Cant Believe He Gave Me A Potato Masher For Christmas!
Nobody...
...looks particularly happy in this photo.
Peace On Earth With Armed Soldiers Surrounding The Nativity Fort
Military=bad. Got it.
Thanks for that biting observation.
Peace on earth.
Peace on earth.
No, Try Again — Not Bad, Just Ironic
Looks like the dining room in the ...
Curley Mansion in JP. Toured that Mansion when it was up for sale in '88 just before the city bought it. The tour guide told a story that Curley went down the to Henry Rogers Mansion in Fairhaven when it was being torn down and slip the construction foreman a wad of bills to get the dining room.
Can't find anything on the web to back that story up, but BostonIrish.com has a fun read article on the house: Happy 100th to the ‘house with the shamrock shutters’
The Ancients did once proclaim...
"If thine enemy offend thee, give his child a drum."
That being said, it would appear as if this drum was a present from Hizzonner. Not clear to me when this photo was taken, or how old Francis X. was at the time, but in another several years he probably could've made some pretty good coin playing with the ceili bands at the Dudley Square dance halls.
F. X. Curley...
...was a big opera buff & a noticeable member of the audience (he wore a cape once part of traditional, formal Jesuit garb) when the Metropolitan Opera used to stop in Boston in April on its yearly tour. He was very traditional himself, in fact, and ended up leaving the Jesuits in the 70's over reforms in the order & the church in general. I was introduced to him at one of those Met performance by one of my teachers from a certain institution of higher learning on Morrissey Blvd. He was a wiry man with a mischievous glint in his eye & a dry wit. When I mentioned I liked Puccini, he looked at me and said, "Well, young man, God will forgive many things, even that." The contradictory fact that we were talking during the intermission of a performance of MADAMA BUTTERFLY, didn't deter him in the least from getting off a good line.
so not "somewhat tragic"?
It sounds like he was not "somewhat tragic" - despite this gloomy photo- if he did in fact achieve his Jesuitical aspirations, and got to enjoy the opera to boot.