Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  These same contradictions were to be found in the neighborhood with which she was so closely identified, her beloved South Boston. For a brief period in the 1850s, the peninsula which juts into Boston Harbor seemed destined to become the new home of the city’s Yankee upper class, but by the 1860s, South Boston began filling up with Irish immigrants, people with social distinctions of their own. The Irish middle class settled in the City Point section at the peninsula’s tip, where the grandest of the Yankee estates had been erected along the beaches, while the working-class immigrants gathered further north in a cramped quarter called Little Galway or the Lower End.

  Straight off the boat, John and Julia Day settled in the Lower End, where they eked out a meager existence. But their eldest son, William J. Day, was a young man of formidable energy and prodigious charm. After working his way through Boston College and Boston University Law School, he established a law office in Barristers’ Hall, right behind the Suffolk County Courthouse, and soon built a thriving practice, representing among others the Boston Musicians Protective Association, the Motion Picture Operators’ Association, and First National Stores. One of his principal clients was the Mount Washington Cooperative Bank, of which he became counsel, a director, and, ultimately, a major stockholder. His own money went into shrewd real estate investments. In 1910, he married Anna L. McCarron, a fashion model from Charlestown, and after living several years on the slopes of Bunker Hill, they returned to South Boston, purchasing a three-story, eighteen-room house on Columbia Road, facing the sea. It had taken Billy Day barely thirty years to go from the squalor of the Lower End to the splendor of the Point.

  In 1915, Governor David I. Walsh—the Commonwealth’s first Irish governor—named Day a special justice of the South Boston District Court (a part-time job which permitted him to continue his other lucrative activities). He soon built a reputation for leniency, particularly when the defendant was a friend or neighbor. One or two days a week, he sat in the juvenile division, where his compassion was particularly evident. “There’s no such thing as a bad boy, just bad luck,” he would say, finding any excuse not to send a neighborhood youth off to reform school.

  As a banker he was equally indulgent. Banking then was almost exclusively a Yankee preserve. South Boston’s other bank was the South Boston Savings Bank, headed by the very Yankee Chandler Bigelow. So it was to Mount Washington—known as “the Irish bank” or simply “Judge Day’s bank”—that the working-class families of the Lower End went for their mortgages, loans, and advice. Unlike the Yankees, the Judge rarely foreclosed a mortgage. If a family fell on hard times, he would suspend payments on the principal so long as the interest charges were met.

  Soon the combination of banking, real estate, and law made the Judge one of South Boston’s wealthiest men. He collected diamonds the way other men collect stamps. Once a week, he and a half dozen of South Boston’s leading business and professional men gathered at Gallivan’s Funeral Home to play cards in a group that became known as the Morgue Club. A pious Catholic, a daily communicant at St. Brigid’s Church, and onetime State Deputy of the Knights of Columbus, he was a powerful orator who frequently addressed religious and community groups on the menace of Communism, the evils of divorce, the folly of prohibition, and the rising tide of immorality which was “raising its foul head and challenging the power of God over the hearts of men, perfuming the human emotions with the odor of the pig sty.”

  An imposing figure with florid face and curly white hair, Judge Day seemed ideally suited for politics, yet he never showed the slightest interest in running for office. Some of his political friendships were eccentric ones for a South Boston Democrat—notably with the Republican governor, and later President, Calvin Coolidge (it is said that Coolidge wanted to give him a job in Washington, but that Day refused because he didn’t want to leave South Boston). “I think the Judge regarded party politics as beneath him,” recalls John Flaherty, his onetime clerk. “He would walk down the street and people would tip their hat to him, as they would to a priest. He was ‘the Judge,’ a respected figure, and that’s all he ever wanted to be.”

  To his daughter, the Judge was “the greatest fellow who ever walked this earth,” “my first and only hero,” and “the greatest influence in my life.” Her, mother had died in 1932, when Louise was sixteen. From then on, Louise was the only woman in a family of four men—her father and three brothers, William Jr., Paul, and John—and she quickly assumed many duties of wife, mother, cook, and housekeeper. Even after she married John “Jay” Hicks, a former ice-skating champion from Albany, New York, she did not leave her father. When Hicks got out of the Navy in 1945, he moved into the Judge’s house. In 1946, they named their second son William, after the Judge. Louise was surrounded by men and boys, but the Judge remained her first love.

  And she was his. He boasted to lawyers in his courtroom when she won a race in the annual swimming competition off City Point. He preened when, as a student at Nazareth parochial school, she won a statewide essay competition sponsored by the Ancient Order of Hibernians on “America’s Debt to Ireland.” When she was twenty-four, he made her a clerk in his law office, where she became expert in searching real estate titles. As a hearing examiner for the Office of Price Administration during World War II, he took her along on his travels. She was with him at the Paddock Club at Suffolk Downs on May 27, 1950, when he suffered a heart attack. She was at his side three days later when he died. And on his deathbed, she says, her father told her, “Take care of my people,” the little people of South Boston who had come to depend on him for mercy in court, easy terms at the bank. No doubt these people genuinely revered the Judge. Shortly after his death, with wide community support, the roadway along the beaches of South Boston was renamed William J. Day Boulevard.

  Mrs. Hicks has often called her father’s death the “turning point” in her life. His final admonition, she has said, convinced her to become a lawyer so she could “carry on his work,” though she has probably exaggerated this for political purposes. In fact, she had entered Boston College Law School in February 1949—fully fifteen months before the Judge’s death—remaining there off and on until February 1951, when she dropped out.

  Another event which the family doesn’t talk about may have been just as important in nudging her toward a public career. On August 18, 1941, her oldest brother, William Jr., died mysteriously at age twenty-nine. There is strong evidence that he committed suicide. His father’s heir apparent, Bill studied law at Boston College, but quit before receiving a degree. He had been a handsome and popular playboy who courted a show girl named “Bubbles” and drank heavily. Friends suspect his untimely death may have stimulated Louise’s ambition, just as the wartime death of young Joe Kennedy prompted his younger brother John to enter politics. Ultimately, another Day brother, John, did become a lawyer and took over the Judge’s practice. The third son, Paul, followed his father into the Mount Washington Bank. But neither boy had the Judge’s ambition or flair for public life. A longtime friend of Mrs. Hicks says, “Louise loved being Judge Day’s daughter. Growing up in South Boston, she’d been a princess. She might have preferred that one of her brothers carry on that family tradition, but when it became clear that neither of them was going to do it, she decided the torch had been passed to her.”

  Her father’s death does seem to have given Mrs. Hicks a new sense of purpose. Until then she had proceeded somewhat aimlessly: a year at Simmons College studying home economics; three years at Wheelock College, where she got a teacher’s certificate; two years teaching first grade in suburban Brookline, while she studied for an education degree at Boston University; then nearly ten years as a clerk in her father’s law office; finally, her first attempt at law school. But soon after her father’s death, she returned to Boston University to complete her education degree. Then, in the fall of 1952, she plunged into Boston University Law School.

  For a thirty-six-year-old mother of two that would be somewhat unusual even today. I
n the early 1950s, when few women of any age studied law, it was rare indeed. But for a South Boston woman, steeped in the Irish mystique of home and family, it was extraordinary. It meant handing over much of the housework and the care of her children to a family retainer, Mrs. Augusta Manson, who had helped raise Louise and her brothers. John Hicks, never very successful in his “engineering” career, also picked up some of the burden at home. Even then, Louise’s schedule was relentless: up at 4:00 a.m. to study for several hours before attending morning classes, afternoons in her brother’s law office, home in time to have dinner with the family and put her children to bed.

  There were only 9 women among the 232 students who started out in the class of 1955. Their male classmates tended to regard them as freaks—ambitious blue stockings tolerated in the classroom but largely ignored outside. So the women huddled together, seeking reassurance from one another. Within a few weeks, Louise had sealed a friendship with two classmates—Elaine Reeder, a Jewish girl from Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Isabel Gates, a black from Durham, North Carolina. They met in the ladies’ lounge and soon were sitting together in classes, studying together, eating together.

  Before long, the trio became the nucleus of an informal study group whose members helped one another prepare for examinations. Most of the others were either women or blacks. There was Elaine Sartorelli, an Italian girl from Chelsea, and Eleftheria Themistocles, a Greek girl from Newton. Two black men—Reuben Dawkins and Jim Purdy—were regular members, and the five other blacks in the class all attended from time to time. “It was a coming together of the scorned minorities,” one member recalled years later. “The women knew what the blacks were going through, the blacks knew what the women were going through. The few white males who studied with us were those who could accept us as people; without being blinded by our color or our gender.” The mid-fifties were years in which most Northern whites never exchanged more than a sentence or two with a Negro; for at least three years, Louise Day Hicks had far more contact with blacks than all but a handful of her contemporaries.

  The study group usually met at Elaine Reeder’s apartment on Peterborough Street. Elaine was known as “Perri,” after Perry Mason, a nickname gained in childhood because of her passion for defending the underdog. She had been an early civil rights activist, setting out to become a lawyer because she was “enamored of the Constitution of the United States.” She once told Jim Purdy that she wanted to become a judge so she could “right wrongs quickly.”

  Isabel Gates, too, spent much of her time in Roxbury, often attending the Twelfth Baptist Church, where she knew Dr. Hester, Mike Haynes, and, of course, Martin Luther King, then a student at the university’s Divinity School. There were so few blacks at the university then that they all hung out together. Isabel was a frequent visitor at King’s apartment on Columbus Avenue in the South End, and it was King who introduced her to her husband, Donald Webster. In later years, Isabel and Donald Webster were to become prominent leaders of the civil rights movement in Atlanta, but in those law school years, Isabel, Perri, and Louise rarely discussed such lofty matters. They talked about classes, about boyfriends, about clothes. Louise, ten years older than the others, often took them to the shrine of her patron saint, St. Anthony, where the three girls, Jewish, black, and Irish, knelt side by side in prayer. Or she brought them home to the house on Columbia Road, where they would sit around the kitchen table playing Scrabble. On St. Patrick’s Day, South Boston’s special holiday, they would don green hats and join the family’s friends and neighbors for a party which lasted long into the night.

  Louise had something of a head start on the others in the study group. Not only had she been to law school before, but she had a decade of experience in her father’s office. “We shared the law,” Louise says. “I learned more about the law from my father than from any book I ever read.” She was particularly well versed in property law. Following her father’s lead, she had invested heavily in real estate, purchasing several substantial apartment houses in the Back Bay. “My father collected diamonds,” she told friends. “I collect buildings.”

  “Louise was a very pragmatic lady,” says Perri Reeder. “She understood corned beef and cabbage; from pâté de foie gras she could have cared less. She had enormous respect for property and money. For her, the law was a means of making your way in the world; she didn’t give a damn about constitutional law.” During their second year at law school, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Perri and Isabel were stirred by the landmark school desegregation ruling, but they can’t remember Louise reacting to it. “It probably rolled right off her back,” says Perri. “That wasn’t where her act was.”

  When she passed the bar examination in March 1956, Louise wrote Perri she felt “born again.” She promptly went into partnership with her younger brother John. Operating out of their father’s old office in Barristers’ Hall, the new firm of Hicks & Day didn’t make much of a splash in Boston legal circles. It was a crimped, hidebound practice, like hundreds of others across the city, dealing primarily in real estate transfers, trusts, and wills—the musty, fly-blown instrumentalities of the law. But soon Louise broadened her activities. She examined titles for the Suffolk County Land Court. She served as an unpaid counsel for indigent defendants in Boston’s Juvenile Court, carrying on her father’s concern for errant youths. And she started building a base of community support as a founding member of the Catholic Lawyers’ Guild, treasurer of the Massachusetts Association of Women Lawyers (where she worked closely with Ethleen Diver), and regional chairman of the 1961 Cancer Crusade. Then, in the spring of 1961, she announced her candidacy for the Boston School Committee.

  Both of her brothers were against it. “If you’ve got to run for something,” said Paul, “why don’t you pick a job that pays?” “Why do you need it?” John argued. “What will it get you?” That was undoubtedly the position their father would have taken. “The Judge would never have approved Louise going into politics,” said his ex-clerk, John Flaherty. “It wasn’t dignified.” But for a politically ambitious woman, a seat on the School Committee was the obvious office to seek. Here was the one body in the city to which women had traditionally been elected, presumably because children and their schooling were considered to be the mother’s province.

  Boston’s School Committee had an honorable pedigree, running back as far as America’s notion of the common school. In 1784, a town meeting declared that Boston’s schools should serve “the Benefit of the Poor and the Rich; that the Children of all, partaking of equal Advantages and being placed upon an equal Footing, no Distinction might be made among them in the Schools on account of the different Circumstances of their Parents, but that the Capacity & natural Genius of each might be cultivated & improved for the future benefit of the whole Community.” This high ideal was implemented five years later when Massachusetts passed the nation’s first comprehensive school law, requiring every town to support an elementary school. A few months later, Boston established a twenty-one-member School Committee.

  The committee changed shape over the years, responding to political exigencies. As long as Boston remained a relatively homogeneous Yankee town, the schools operated much as they had in colonial times, under relaxed local control, and the School Committee reflected local interests, ballooning to 116 ward representatives. Its members were doctors, merchants, and ministers—men of like backgrounds and rearing who, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “carry the Common in our heads as the unit of space, the State House as the standard of architecture, and measure off men in Edward Everetts as the yardstick.”

  But by the mid-nineteenth century, following the flood tide of Irish immigration, such men became obsessed with the threat to the social order posed by “the ravenous dregs of anarchy and crime, the tainted swarms of pauperism and vice Europe shakes on our shores from her diseased robes.” Education was quickly enlisted in the struggle for social discipline. “Unless [the children of immig
rants] are made inmates of our schools,” School Committeeman George Emerson warned in 1846, “they will become inmates of our prisons.” The common school, once a reflection of natural community, became a means of wrenching community out of diversity, of assimilating foreign elements to American civic and moral standards. “The whole character of the instruction given,” said the Boston School Report of 1853, “must be such, and only such, as will tend to make the pupils thereof American citizens, and ardent supporters of American institutions.” These were the concerns which motivated Horace Mann, the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and often called the father of the American public school. If they were to compel immigrants to become “morally acclimated to our institutions,” Mann argued, the schools themselves had to be centralized and professionalized. In 1851, after a long battle, the committee finally named a superintendent to run the system.

  Meanwhile, the Irish themselves—the very newcomers who threatened to rend the social fabric—were gaining seats on the ward-based committee. Long before the interlopers were much of a factor in mayoral elections, the School Committee was the arena in which they and the Yankees did battle. By early in this century, they gained an iron hold on the School Committee which they maintained into the 1970s, doing unto the Yankees, the Italians, and the blacks as they had once been done to. Between 1905 and 1976, there were 48 Irish Catholic members, 8 Yankees, 5 Jews, and 2 Italians; after 1942, all but four members were Irish. And the committee took care of its own. Since 1920, all school superintendents have been Catholic and all but one have been Irish. During most of this period, the system’s administrators and teachers have been overwhelmingly Irish. In the mid-1960s, one investigator counted 68 Sullivans, 61 Murphys, 40 McCarthys, 30 O’Briens, 25 Walshes, 22 Dohertys, 21 McLaughlins, 21 Lynches, 18 Kelleys, and 14 Kellys in the system.