On Fridays, Irishmen bent on polishing their copper tarried late into the evening before they finally sauntered or stumbled home. Tim Donovan was not a drinking man, but he liked to stand at the bar in the Swanee House at Michigan and Ohio or at Belgian Mary’s, still closer to home on Michigan, sip ginger ale, argue politics, and declaim Irish poetry. Now that he was no longer confined to school, he developed the scholarly ways of his father, and in his room in the big brick house on Michigan Avenue he began to fill shelf after shelf with books. There were works by Shakespeare, Dickens, other popular English novelists, and the Irish poets, and biographies of men who had helped to shape democracy both in Great Britain and in the United States. The books that Tim Donovan collected on his shelves were to prove fascinating to his son Will, and many years later would hold a place of honor in the large library in Donovan’s New York apartment.
Young Tim, as he was called to distinguish him from his father, met and fell in love with Anna Letitia Lennon, whose carefully brushed long brown hair, fresh prairie complexion, and lively ways set her apart from the other girls in the First Ward. Anna’s parents also were immigrants, from County Monaghan in the north of Ireland. They too had come to Buffalo and the Irish First Ward, but one of the periodic epidemics that swept through the poor neighborhoods took both their lives, so that Anna was left an orphan when still very young. Cousins took her to the Kansas prairies, where she was raised at Leavenworth. The Kansas relatives were comfortable, middle-class people, and Anna was to enjoy later in life telling her children of sunlit days in small-town Kansas, riding in her own pony cart. Anna also was given a good schooling. At the age of 18 she returned to Buffalo, where she met Tim.
It did not take Anna long to discover that the handsome youth with a railroad worker’s strength was gentle and considerate of other people’s feelings and concerns, and was as intrigued by the world of books as she was. Let there be an argument in the saloon, on the street, or around the Donovan family Sunday dinner table, to which Anna was often invited, and Tim Donovan would always champion the underdog. When it came to politics on the Buffalo waterfront, this meant that Tim backed the Republicans, whose policies scarcely were calculated to win friends among the Irish immigrants. Eventually Tim became the Republican leader in the ward, although it sometimes seemed as if he were both the leader and the entire Republican constituency. He was an easy man for Anna to love, and in 1882 Tim and Anna were married.
Tim and Anna Donovan’s first child, a boy, was born on January 1, 1883. The baby was baptized William at the font of St. Bridget’s Parish Church. At his confirmation he was to take the middle name of Joseph. A year later Anna gave birth to a second son, Timothy. The senior Donovans had kept the downstairs of the house on Michigan Avenue for themselves and their still young children, and Tim and Anna had moved upstairs to the second floor.
It was a happy family, made happier still by the birth of Mary, the first daughter, named for her grandmother. Four more babies followed in the next few years as Will and Tim and Mary tumbled about at play, grew stronger, and first walked the few blocks to St. Bridget’s Parish School at the corner of Fulton and Louisiana streets. Tragically, infectious meningitis was endemic on the Buffalo waterfront, and each of the four new babies in turn sickened with fever, headache, nausea, and then the fatal drowsiness and stupor. Their necks and backs stiffened, and the stricken children died.
To Will, death became a shadowy thing that lurked in the dark corners of the old brick house and crept out at night to take away small children. He mourned the loss of each baby and sometimes would throw his arms around the knees of his father or mother where they sat in the living room, reading their newspapers or books, and bury his head in their laps. Will did not cry. He was a solemn boy who rarely smiled but looked at his parents and teachers with a blue-eyed intensity that was almost disturbing. It was not easy to be the oldest son at the age of 6, 7, or 8 and to feel a big brother’s responsibility for the family when tragedy never seemed far away. He had learned at an early age that the deepest love could not keep back death. Then Vincent was born and lived. When Will was 15 years old, Loretta, the last of the Donovan children, arrived. It was shortly after Loretta’s birth that the first of the Irish immigrants appeared at the house. From then on muffled footsteps in the night were a part of the growing family’s life.
The Irish First Ward was hardworking and friendly. “Lace curtain” Irish families with more means, who could afford to hang Victorian lace at their windows, had settled along the Niagara riverfront. Many of them worked as governesses, cooks, and servants in the fine mansions that were being erected by wealthy people along Delaware Avenue and looked down on the inhabitants of the First Ward of Will Donovan’s boyhood, but there was no denying the close bonds that tied together the working people of the waterfront. Each of the cottages along the dirt streets was surrounded by a white picket fence, a kitchen garden, and flowers blooming about the doorway. The neighbors, who had come mostly from the rural regions of Ireland, kept chickens as well as geese, ducks, and even cows and pigs in backyard sheds.
The housewives kept their homes scrubbed clean and tidy even if they could afford to hang only muslin or net curtains at their windows. They draped their laundry in the backyards on wash days and gossiped across the fences. There was no room for juvenile delinquency, for let a rough boy begin some mischief and there was always an alert mother to bring him around with appropriate remarks. Every mother’s son of the Irish boys knew that it was the Irish mothers who were the disciplinarians both in the family and the neighborhood. The Donovan family was no exception. Will Donovan grew up loving both his parents, but while he looked to his father for understanding and companionship, he was in awe of his mother’s authority.
The Erie is a-risin’,
The gin is gittin’ low.
I scarcely thought I’d git a drop
‘Til I git to Buffalo!
Boatmen barging the long miles of the Erie Canal to the entrepôt on Lake Erie, and Great Lakes mariners sailing from such western lake ports as Chicago and Milwaukee arrived in Buffalo parched and thirsty. The two groups came together on the waterfront and were not exactly restrained in their behavior. When Will Donovan was a boy, the district lying just across Main Street possessed 93 saloons, 15 so-called concert halls, and a large number of dance halls. The women of the district might keep boarding houses, work as laundresses or seamstresses, or tell fortunes, but the sailors and boatmen found that they were equally available for night employment at other age-old tasks.
Will was warned by both his father and mother never to cross Main Street into this sinful neighborhood, particularly after dusk. “Only scamps and hooligans go over there,” Donovan later in life remembered his mother telling him. Then one day he vanished into Buffalo’s waterfront jungle. “The family looked for him to go to a funeral, which the whole family was obliged to attend,” recalled an aunt, Mary Duggan. “He was nowhere to be found. Later they discovered he had got himself a job over on Garrison Street near the docks so he could watch the boats.”
Will’s father was not one of the scoopers and railroaders who chose to do their drinking and fighting with the boatmen and sailors. Tim Donovan was a family man, and often he would take his oldest son with him to a neighborhood saloon at noon on Saturdays. Will would stand beside his father, sip a glass of ginger ale, and help himself to the free lunch set out on the counter. Around the boy raged impassioned discussions of politics, Irish history, poetry, and any other subject that occurred to the eloquent drinkers. A scooper who might heft bags of grain on weekdays became a bard or a master political strategist on Saturdays, and the boy listened eagerly. He would smile his small but delighted smile when his father scored a point off his opponents, who generally included all the other men in the saloon. Sometimes the conversation would come to a sudden halt.
“What do you think of that, boy?” somebody would demand, and Will, having grasped not only the sense of the discussion but often a solut
ion to the problem under consideration, would reply. As he spoke sense, even the warring factions would conciliate, somebody would order “another glass for the lad,” and Will’s father would clap his arms around his shoulders and give him an affectionate squeeze. In this way the precocious boy practiced soothering, and it is scarcely a wonder that by the time he grew to manhood he was a master of the art.
The saloons of the Buffalo waterfront were an integral part of Will Donovan’s boyhood. He learned that among the roughest men who frequented them was a code of honor and courtesy. Later in life he told how a man’s drink was always respected if he were called away from the bar. “He need only attach a note to his unfinished drink, and he could be confident that when he returned, the drink would be waiting for him,” he recounted. “That is, except for the time when an enormous scooper attached a note to his libation that read, The man who owns this drink weighs in at 250 pounds and has the muscles of a prize fighter. He will be back.’
“A skinny leprechaun of a man winked at the saloon crowd, quaffed the drink, and wrote out a note which he left beneath the empty glass: ‘The man who drank this weighs 90 pounds and can run like the wind. He won’t be back.’ ”
Sometimes the men would be overcome by a fit of nostalgia for old Ireland or an attack of tenderness and fall to singing ballads and love songs. Will sang along with them, and all his life he was to be fond of singing.
To young Will, the ward, as old-timers called it, was the sort of place in which you could not throw a stone for fear you might hit a cousin. He was the acknowledged leader of the neighborhood boys, cousins or not, even those who were one or two years older and consequently stronger than he was, because he had a thoughtful and determined way about everything he did, and he was always selfless in his decisions.
None of this kept him from often being the butt of many of the boys’ pranks. On hot summer days, the boys walked down to the Michigan Avenue bridge over Buffalo Creek, stripped off their clothes beneath the bridge, and plunged into the murky waters that only a boy would dare swim in. Invariably Will would emerge naked and dripping from the water to find that grinning boys had knotted his corduroy knickers in a way that defied untying. One day when he knew his mother waited anxiously for him at home, he lost his temper and in a fury threw some half-dozen or so whooping, partly clothed youngsters into the creek. Will Donovan was a quiet boy who seldom took offense, but he had uncommonly strong muscles and was a match for any of them if he decided to fight. To his credit, Will’s fighting was almost always in defense of a child being bullied by a bigger boy. He would even champion a “narrow back,” which is what the broad-backed Irish boys, accustomed to working hard from early childhood, called a more slender native American boy.
The Irish author Liam O’Flaherty once remarked that “the Irish respect the poet, the warrior, and the priest. The poet’s sense of beauty, the warrior’s courage, and the priest’s immortality.” Ward mothers never disparaged a son’s sense of beauty or his courage, but to a woman they were determined to achieve immortality for him. Whether a boy had a pleasing voice or sang like a crow, they urged that he be allowed in the choir of the parish church, and they importuned the priests to let their offspring serve as altar boys. Anna Donovan was no different from the other women, and she was proud and delighted when the Reverend James Edward Quigley at St. Bridget’s selected both Will and Tim to serve as altar boys. Will, who early developed a firm religious belief, was among the most faithful of the altar boys, but Tim, impatient with the lengthy masses, became adept at excuses for not being able to serve.
On December 12, 1896, the Reverend Mr. Quigley was named third bishop of Buffalo. The newly selected bishop took both Tim and Will, 13 and 14 years old, with him to St. Joseph’s Cathedral, where they carried his train during his solemn consecration on February 24, 1897. Bishop Quigley kept the two boys on as altar boys at St. Joseph’s, and Will and Tim either trudged to the cathedral or rode there on the jangling trolley cars that ran on South Park Avenue.
Encouraged by his mother, Will could think of no better life than that of a priest, and he determined to get an education that would make an ecclesiastical career possible. When he served at the altar in the cathedral, the organ seemed to rumble of sacred things, and the pipes spoke to his Gaelic heart and soul. The boys in the cathedral choir had been carefully chosen and were well trained. When they sang, their voices rose thrilling against the high, vaulted roof. Will listened, and the age-old mysteries of his church stirred within him.
As he grew up in the church, Will formed a close and affectionate relationship with James Edward Quigley. Born on October 15, 1855, in Oshawa, Ontario, Quigley was the sort of clergyman who could inspire a vigorous youngster from the Buffalo waterfront. He had first tried to gain entrance to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point but then decided on the priesthood. Quigley was a learned man with an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and a brilliant pulpit speaker, but he was equally at home on a corner lot playing baseball with parish boys. The priest was Will’s boyhood idol, and Will took a boy’s delight in showing his hero that he was one of the best ballplayers in the parish.
Most likely Father Quigley smiled at Will’s youthful efforts to demonstrate his athletic prowess, but he was more impressed by his mind. It was Father Quigley who instructed Will in his catechism and who officiated at his confirmation when the boy chose the name Joseph from the roll of the saints as his middle name. Father Quigley also encouraged the boy to enter Nardin Academy, and he very likely helped to arrange financial assistance so that Will could continue in school.
Nardin Academy shaped Will’s young mind, and he was always appreciative of this. The Daughters of the Heart of Mary, who founded the school, had their origins in 1790, during the French Revolution, when the anticlerical terror raged in France. Many convents and monasteries were burned, and monks and nuns were tortured and put to death. Marie-Adelaide de Cice, a young noblewoman, determined to establish an order for women whose members would live in the world without wearing habits, secretly if necessary to escape persecution, and yet go about their religious life. To this day the Daughters of the Heart of Mary may serve Christ within the community without identifying themselves with an order. A Daughter of the Heart of Mary is often a professional woman, a lawyer or a doctor, who carries on her work in the community but is a secret member of the order.
“If you ask me if I’m a member, I may not answer and tell you I’m a religious,” explained Irene Murphy, who is the principal of Nardin Academy today. “It depends on the work we’re doing.”
It is conceivable that an intelligent and perceptive boy, whose mind was trained by a sisterhood who do good works in the world while literally living cover lives, might have learned from them some of the attitudes and skills that were to serve well in the world of international intrigue.
The sisters at Nardin Academy encouraged scholarship, daily attendance, and exemplary conduct. Miss Nardin lectured the boys of Will Donovan’s time. “You may one day be a leader among men. How sad if at the supreme moment or in a case of urgency you would lose control of self.”
She might well have had Will in mind. His quiet ways concealed a violent temper that his brother Tim, his opposite in personality, was gifted at arousing. An angry Will would lunge at Tim, and the boys would flail at one another with bare fists until they could be separated. Finally their father bought two pairs of boxing gloves, which he hung in the barn behind the house. If the boys grew angry with one another, Tim Donovan seized each by an arm and led them to the barn, where he bid them put on the gloves and settle their differences. “Go to it, boys,” Will Donovan recalled his saying.
Will and Tim would punch at one another with all their might until at last, exhausted, they would grudgingly shake hands and try again to be good brothers. Gradually Will conquered his temper because his father and the sisters at the academy convinced him it was a weakness. He learned that even when he was angry he could keep his voice soft and measured
. Still, as any OSS man who had erred could testify, he never managed to keep the flash of anger from his eyes.
Will Donovan’s classmates remembered him as having a quiet sense of humor and as being proud, sensitive to slight and injustice, and easily the most determined youngster in the ward. One classmate remembered, “The thing that impressed me was that Will was not bright in the ordinary sense of the word. Studies never came easy to him, but he had the tenacity of a bulldog, and when he once got a fact in his mind, nothing in the world could ever pry it out.”
Will showed the same tenacity on the football field. When his passing arm failed in accuracy and strength, he persuaded his brother Tim to go with him to the beach at the foot of Michigan Avenue, where, for hours on end, afternoon after afternoon, he practiced throwing a forward pass until a tired Tim was near sobbing in his anger and bafflement at such monumental determination. Will hefted dumbbells in the barn and ran on the beach to develop his strength. On Saturdays he prowled the railroad yards, the waterfront, and the farmers’ market, walking for hours, lone and observant, watching the people. He boxed and wrestled any boy who would go to the barn with him, and he read everything he could find by or about Theodore Roosevelt, who was his boyish idea of what a man should be. Will tried with what almost became desperation to make himself like the New York City aristocrat whose self-made good health and rugged life captured the imagination of a whole generation of American boys.
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