The Congress: Mr. Speaker

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John McCormack was just 13 when his bricklayer father died. Besides his mother, there were two younger brothers, Edward ("Knocko") and Daniel, to support. (Nine other brothers and sisters died in infancy or youth.) Mary Ellen O'Brien McCormack was a strapping woman with a great heart, who cheer fully took on the burdens of her friends and neighbors. "She was the Mary Worth of the district," says her grandson, Edward McCormack Jr. "The one whom everybody came to with their troubles, arbiter of disputes, nurse of the sick, comforter of the oppressed." But Mary Ellen could not manage alone after her husband's death, so John quit school and went to work. "It was him that kept us together," recalls Knocko McCormack. "The main support was that he had a pretty good paper route, there in Andrews Square. He never went to high school, never went to college. He did nothin' but work. He had to work, to keep his mother together and to keep the two of us—my brother and me—from goin' to the Home."

"Then You Moved On." Rent for a two-room tenement was only $1.25 a week, but there were many times when John and his mother were unable to raise that much. "You never had no regular address," says Knocko. "You just stayed in one place as long as the landlord would let you, and then you moved on. We were poor, we were poor. We're not proud of it, but we don't shun the fact that we were the poorest family in South Boston." The family stove was fueled with stray lumps of coal that Knocko and Dannie picked up in the railroad yards, and John's meager earnings were supplemented by a "pauper's basket" from the welfare department. "I had to go down to the Chardon Street welfare home and chop wood so we could get the basket," says Knocko. "Those baskets didn't have any oranges or grapefruit or nuts in 'em. It was a yard of dried fish and a bag of potatoes and maybe a little bag of onions." Friends still recall seeing young John McCormack crouched on a curbstone, reading by the flickering light of a gas street lamp. He devoured dozens of Dick Merriwell* adventures, and he retains a reverence for the rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger. "Parents," he says, "should make Horatio Alger stories must reading for their children. They build fine character."