True Compass (8 page)

Bobby was chafing to enter the service as soon as he came of age. He followed the war's news intently in that summer of 1941. He would turn seventeen in November of the following year and become eligible to enroll in a training program for the navy.

The summers at the Cape changed as the war went on, with so many of my brothers and sisters absent, and sometimes one or the other of my parents as well. I sailed alone and with Joey Gargan, exhilarated by the freedom and sense of power in my little sloop, at the safe fringes of an ocean where U-boats preyed upon convoys of ships.

The war reached its midpoint in 1943, and that was the moment when Jack was nearly killed and emerged a hero.

Jack got himself assigned to the Solomon Islands in the Pacific theater and arrived as the twenty-six-year-old commander of a patrol torpedo boat, an extremely dangerous assignment that he'd virtually demanded. PTs were small, often badly built, lightly armed craft deployed to prowl combat-zone waters at night in search of Japanese destroyers and cruisers. Jack's boat was numbered 109.

On August 2, as part of a squad of fifteen such craft sent to intercept a Japanese convoy off the island of New Georgia, PT 109 was rammed by an enemy destroyer and sliced in half. Two of the thirteen-man crew were killed. My brother exhorted the survivors to swim toward a flyspeck island, personally towing the badly burned engineer for five hours by clamping the man's lifeboat straps in his mouth. Jack then swam back out into the ocean to try and signal a passing boat, though he'd been without sleep for a day and a half. Unsuccessful, he swam back to his men half unconscious. The ordeal continued for a week, with Jack directing swims to larger islands. The men went days without water. The navy assumed that all of them had been killed, and in fact held a funeral service for them on the small island of Tulagi a few days after the encounter. On August 9, the party made contact with a New Zealanders' camp on Cross Island via a message Jack had scraped into a coconut shell. (That coconut is now in the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.) The message made it to an American base, which sent a PT to rescue the men.

I didn't even know my brother was lost and presumed dead until I learned he had been found. Along with my sister and some friends, I rode my bicycle over to the News Shop in Hyannis Port one balmy August night to get the papers for our parents. We stared at the big headlines that confronted us, along with a drawing of a PT boat. We raced home, yelling that our brother was a hero. Dad heard us out, and then told us he had been notified several days earlier that Jack was missing. He'd remained hopeful, he said, and had decided not to worry us with the news.

On furlough the following year, Jack playfully let me share the aura of his "hero" image--which he himself never took seriously. Tanned and rawboned and flashing his great smile, he showed up at the family residence in Palm Beach with his service buddy Paul "Red" Fay Jr. When I ventured inside his room to awaken him on that first morning, he hugged me, then dug some war souvenirs out of his duffel bag and gave them to me: native swords and clubs from the South Pacific.

Then he appointed me courier in a make-believe PT mission. He ordered me to awaken "Red" Fay, down the hall, with the message, "This is PT 109 to Captain Fay, over." I gladly ran off. Red sent me back to Jack's room with, "Romeo Echo Delta A-okay. What is our first mission this morning?" This went on for a while, and the jargon got a little too military for me to understand--but those two found it a great joke. And I was in the clouds.

Better still, Jack escorted me on board an actual PT boat. He was stationed at a shakedown center in Miami Beach, and before sunrise one morning he rousted me out of bed to come along with him. I couldn't believe it. I was barely twelve years old, and my hero brother was going to take me aboard a ship with him. What I didn't know at the time was that civilians, especially little kid civilians like me, weren't really supposed to be aboard navy vessels and certainly weren't supposed to go out to sea on them. But my brother knew how much it would mean to me and all the crew enjoyed being co-conspirators in our adventure.

As we boarded the boat and headed for open water, I had a huge smile plastered across my face until I got drenched by a torpedo-like squirt of tobacco juice from the mouth of the biggest sailor I'd ever seen. It splattered my shirt and hands. The crew loved it, and Jack showed me no mercy whatsoever. After I got over the initial shock, I thought it was pretty funny too. I prowled the coastal waters for a couple of hours that day with my brother and his crew, and I've treasured the memory my entire life.

Jack's back problems prevented him from returning to active duty, but while in a naval hospital, he was awarded four more medals. He was released in October 1944.

* * *

If my brother gave me an imaginative glimpse into World War II that year, another colorful relative whisked me back into the brass-band exuberance of my Boston Irish political roots.

Fessenden was near enough to the city that on autumn Sundays I could board a train on the Boston & Albany Railroad line in West Newton and roll along the few short miles to South Station in the heart of town. From there I would walk up Beacon Hill to the old Bellevue Hotel. Standing as it did next to the State House with its golden dome, the Bellevue is properly remembered as "a political Grand Central Station." I would wait in the lobby until I was summoned up to the suite of the stationmaster, one of Boston's greatest politicians: my maternal grandfather, John Francis Fitzgerald. Honey Fitz.

He was eighty then. He was the son of an Irish immigrant family who made it to the top: a Massachusetts state senator from 1892 to 1894, a U.S. representative (1895-1901), and twice mayor of Boston (1906-08 and 1910-14). But those offices hardly begin to describe how much Grampa meant to Boston, and vice versa.

Pay a visit sometime to Franklin Park Zoo, that wonderful seventyacre site down in Jamaica Plain and Roxbury. It's one of the oldest zoos in the hemisphere now, built in 1913. That zoo was developed by Grampa.

He played a key part in the shaping of Fenway Park, which was finished in 1912. This was back in the glory years when the Red Sox won six pennants and five World Series from 1903 through 1918. Honey Fitz was right in the middle of it all--a passionate Red Sox fan. He formed the team's first pep club, the Royal Rooters, along with his pal Mike "Nuf Ced" McGreevey, a bartender with a walrus mustache. Every Opening Day, the two of them would put on their silk top hats and cutaway coats, hoist a few frothy pints at the bar, light up their cigars, and then go strutting at the head of a parade through the city to the ballpark, waving their red umbrellas and belting out songs, while a brass band behind them oom-pa-pa'd. Grampa was short and stout, and he had a big, sweet tenor voice. If things were going badly for the Sox, either Grampa or "Nuf Ced" was likely to begin bawling from the stands the words to the sentimental waltz "Tessie," which became the team's unlikely lucky song:

Tessie, you make me feel so badly,

Why don't you turn around?

Tessie, you know I love you madly,

Babe, my heart weighs about a pound
.

Don't blame me if I ever doubt you,

You know I couldn't live without you
.

Tessie, you are the only, only, only
.

"Tessie" may sound a little quaint to today's ears, but Grampa's rendition of it was good enough to cause the great Pittsburgh third baseman Honus Wagner to commit three errors in one inning during a World Series game.

Honey Fitz provided and lit the first civic Christmas tree in the United States, on Boston Common, back in 1912. New Yorkers sometimes like to claim credit for the first public tree, in Madison Square Garden, but an expert researcher named Caroline Kennedy did some digging and figured out that Grampa's tree went up fully thirty minutes before the one in New York.

He was a life force, and that force fueled the life of the city. Many of his ideas came from his travels in European countries. He'd take note of the dynamic civic features in all the European capitals, and he'd say, "There's no reason that Boston can't have these, just like these other great cities!" So he adapted them to Boston. And then his innovations were adapted in other cities across the country.

Grampa loved people. And the people he came in contact with felt his warmth and returned it. I think Grampa wished he could get to know every single person in town.

There's no question that I inherited this joy of people from him. I inherited the whole way I approach politics. Being in a crowd, looking into new faces, shaking hands, laughing, swapping stories, singing some of the old songs--I love it all.

Still, Honey Fitz's love of people exceeded anything I've ever seen. He used to board the passenger train at North Station and ride it up the Atlantic coast to Old Orchard Beach in Maine, a distance of about a hundred miles. The trip would take two hours and ten minutes. Once there, he'd board the next train back to Boston. These trains left at intervals of about an hour in those days, and Honey Fitz would take them all, at intervals of about five days. He'd stagger his departures and returns so that each time he would catch a different crowd of commuters. And what would he do on those journeys? Why, he'd walk up and down the aisles of the passenger cars the whole time, tipping his hat and shaking the hands of the people on board. Grampa respected working people, and it's largely because of him that my brothers and I respected and fought for them as well. Grampa would lean down and start chatting with some fellow puffing a stogie and squinting at the racing form, learn his name and opinions, and by the time the train pulled into Old Orchard Beach, Honey Fitz would have fifty or seventy-five new friends. And then he'd get on the train heading back, with a new group of strangers, and do it all over again.

Of course, even a man of Honey Fitz Fitzgerald's energy needed a little downtime now and then. And so on weekends he would march into the lobby of his favorite hotel, find himself a comfortable easy chair, and wait for the people to come to him. Someone would walk through the main door, and he'd jump up and bound over to them with his hand outstretched. He would do this all day long. When I was about sixteen, I remember driving Grampa to the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. Grampa's idea of fun was to sit in the lobby and wait to meet new people. He would tip the hotel desk clerk to ring the bell when guests checked in--once if they were from Massachusetts; twice if they were from Boston. When the bell rang twice, up would go Grampa, introducing himself to the strangers. "I'm John F. Fitzgerald. You're from Boston, aren't you?" By the end of the day, he would have gotten himself invited to lunch and dinner and would have had the time of his life. I'd pick him up at 10 p.m., and he was overflowing with stories about his great day. Grampa loved to laugh. He would get tickled by his own stories. One of his favorites was a tad off-color. But nobody ever realized that it was off-color, because Grampa could never get to the punch line without falling into a laughing fit so severe he could barely breathe, let alone finish the joke. The joke involved the name of a lovely little seacoast town about twenty miles southeast of Boston, named Scituate. Well, I can't reconstruct Grampa's joke completely, but the punch line involves a slight scatological mispronunciation of the town's name, so that it comes out--well,
you
know. Grampa would always try his best to make it through. But as he got close, he'd begin to chuckle, and then fight for breath, and his eyes would squeeze shut and fill with tears, and his face would turn red, and he'd fish his handkerchief out of his breast pocket. And everybody else in the room would be laughing and choking along with him, not knowing really why they were doing it. They were all just captured by Grampa's sense of fun. It was so infectious.

In 1943, Honey Fitz was just seven years from his passing in 1950, but his mind was still sharp and his political sense acute. On those autumnal Sundays of 1943, I had this marvelous legend all to myself. He took a special interest in me, for Lord only knows what reasons. In my later grade school years, he and I grew very close. While my older siblings would be off at different places and doing different things, Grampa Fitzgerald and I would be together, traveling around Boston.

Entering his suite at the Bellevue, the first thing I'd see would be what looked like a moving newspaper, with short legs. Grampa liked to keep informed, and he'd have torn-up editions of all the Boston papers scattered around the floor. In those days the newspapers published several editions, with updated news all day long, and Grampa read all of them from cover to cover. The items that interested him he would pin to his lapels and other parts of his clothing. (When he visited at the Cape, he'd have us kids constantly on the run to the village for the latest editions.) I believe Mother's habit of adorning the bulletin board near our dining table with topical items came directly from this.

He'd unpin himself--mostly--and take me downstairs to lunch in the hotel restaurant. I'd have to hustle to keep up with this plump, dapper old man with the twinkling blue eyes. We'd enter through the kitchen. This gave Grampa the chance to introduce me (once again, in most cases) to all the cooks and waitresses. At the table, I could hardly wait to order my mashed potatoes and meat, but as soon as we sat down, a crush of Bostonians would descend upon us, and Grampa would greet each one and make introductions again. Often my ice cream would be melted before I had a chance to spoon it. Then we'd hurry out of the hotel--Grampa scooping up the newer editions of the papers in the lobby--and he would lead me on one of his enchanted walking tours of Boston.

He'd take me to Milk Street and tell me, "It's called Milk Street because that was where the cows used to walk down and wait at the Commons." And Water Street: "Because of the well that was there." And then down to where the ships came in. And then we'd walk over past Paul Revere's house, and he'd talk about Paul Revere.