The Congress: Mr. Speaker

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Knocko's Horse. The McCormack brothers went different ways. Dan, the youngest, served in France in World War I, afterward became a drifter and an odd-job man, is now living in Texas. Knocko drove a team for a while, served overseas with the Yankee Division, returned to South Boston, where he ran a saloon that was the scene of many a celebrated Donnybrook. A huge (275 Ibs.), roaring Irishman with a blackthorn wit, Knocko and his antics have delighted Boston for decades. Once, on a dull afternoon, he persuaded two plumbers to install an overhead shower and a concrete drain in the middle of his living room. When his wife came home, she found Knocko seated under the shower, pulling the chain. He silenced her with a question. "And why should I hafta move when I want shower?" In 1940, when Knocko named grand marshal of the Evacuation Day* parade, there were newspaper stories wondering how anyone could find a horse that would not collapse under the marshal's weight. "It is the tradition that the chief marshal must ride a horse," roared Knocko. "Therefore I'll push my personal feelings out the window. I just want to say that I don't want to get into trouble with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." Knocko led the parade—on a spavined, swaybacked but steady old ash-cart horse —to the cheers and laughter of all South Boston.

John McCormack, as spare and serious as Knocko is broad and fun loving, chose the Alger road. From his paper route, he moved to a $3.50-a-week job as an errand boy in a brokerage firm. Then Lawyer William T. Way offered him $4 a week as an office boy. "He turned out to be my benefactor," McCormack wrote, years later, "for he encouraged me to read law. The day I left the broker's office and went to work for Mr. Way proved to be the turning point in my life, even though at the time I made the decision I was guided solely by the fact that my new job gave me 50¢ more a week."

At 21, McCormack had read enough law to pass his bar examinations (just before the Massachusetts legislature passed a law requiring two years of high school as a prerequisite to admission to the bar). Mary Ellen McCormack had died a few months earlier. There has been only one other woman in John McCormack's life: Harriet Joyce, a neighborhood girl, who became his bride in 1920. A talented contralto, Harriet had sung in St. Augustine's Church choir, gave up a budding career for a semi-cloistered life as Mrs. Mc Cormack. Their romance has been an un fading valentine. The McCormacks, who are childless, live quietly in a suite at the Washington Hotel, at the Treasury bend of the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route. Between congressional sessions, they dwell on the second floor of a grey-shingled, two-family house in Dorchester, an aging Boston neighborhood. It is one of McCormack's proudest boasts that he has never once missed having dinner with his wife in their 41 years of married life. Rarely seen in public, Harriet McCormack is her husband's closest confidante; every day he scribbles dozens of notes on matters he wants to tell her about that eve ning. When he is with her, says an associate, "you might as well forget everything else—he only has eyes for her."