UP FROM EAST BOSTON: The Man Who Was Friend to Politicians

Into the public eye last week swam a wealthy, aggressive Bostonian whose fortune brought friends, and whose friends brought him unexpected fame. His name: Bernard Goldfine, 67, textile and real estate tycoon.

Up from Steerage. In the spring of 1897, Bernard, then 7½, landed with his mother from the old Rotterdam's steer age to take up residence in the tenement slums of East Boston. Bright little Bernie skipped every other grade at Lyman Grammar School, put in a year at Mechanic Arts High School before a brother's death made him pick up a bread winner's load in his close, protective Jewish family. To get his first job at the age of 14, he started one morning in the center of Boston's business district and, methodically seeking out each proprietor, worked his way halfway across town by 4 p.m. when Billy Hand the Hatter put up $3 a week for him to deliver hats. "Any young man who would do what you have done today." said Billy, ''deserves a job." On the Way. When his father started up a junkyard, young Bernie lugged scrap metal, stowed away nickels from his own pay for his account in the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank until, at 19, he had $1,200 to start his own business.

He formed a partnership (Strathmore Woolen Co.) with a young Scottish friend who happened to be a nephew of a Maine millowner — and able to open doors to other mill bosses around the region.

"You have to start small, work hard and do what you can," said Bernie Goldfine who did well enough in World War I to start buying mills for himself. His loose-woven little empire (now grown to six mills employing 1,372 in Maine, Vermont. Massachusetts and New Hampshire) never became a major factor in the industry, but it gave him the funds to begin major investments in real estate in mid-Depression. One day he heard that Western Union wanted to build on a choice block near the financial district, so he bought a corner building as a toe hold, quietly worked out a deal with Western Union to pick up the rest of the property on percentage. His profit: $125,000.

He picked up other choice buys over the years, acquired a pair of real estate companies. East Boston Co. and Boston Port Development Co., and land later to be developed for expansion of the city's tiny airport. As he rounded out his first million, he bought a fashionable home for his wife and four children in suburban Chestnut Hill.

On the Rise. Social connections were harder to make than money, but he worked at it and discovered friendships to be quick and warm among the political officials in the states where he had plants. "You operate in the state and you have problems," he told a TIME correspondent last week.