My brother Jim was kind enough to make an audio CD of two recordings he made about 36 years ago.  One was with my Dad and a second with my Uncle Matt both about them growing up in Charlestown, Massachusetts.  I have sent many of you a copy of that CD, but let me know if you would like another.  It is a little easier to listen to since the background noise is removed.  I recently had the CD transcribed and it is attached at the bottom of this email. Please let me know if you can't open it and I will send it to you.  It is 22 pages long.  It takes a lot of patience to listen to the CD.  This way you can skim or browse the transcript of that CD if you want.  I’ve also listed below some excerpts about the historical events my father and uncle refer to.

 

My hope is to weave this information eventually into a longer narrative.  My father, uncle, and grandmother had a lovely pitch in their voices.  It is hard to describe, but if you ever watch an old Pat O’Brien movie from the 1930s and 1940s, it sounded a little like that.  Or like another old star Ralph Bellamy, but with a Boston accent.  My uncle talked quickly and softly, often lowering his voice.  When I do that my wife, Barbara, calls it mumbling.  

 

Joshua C. McGuire is the child mentioned on the recording.  His mother, Donna McGuire, is asking him to behave.

 

The recording gives you a greater sense of personality of those talking, my Uncle Matt, my dad and my mom.

 

My uncle talks about his siblings growing up, his father’s death, and his love for his siblings.  My dad, with my mom’s help, talks about his growing up in a neighborhood in Charlestown, his family, and the origins of the McGuires in Canada (Newfoundland -James McGuire senior and his wife Catherine Kelly(my paternal Nana) in Prince Edward Island), and discrimination against the Catholic faith in Boston.

 

I hope to weave this information into a narrative history.  The wonderful typist is Karen Rayman.  She does a lot of legal work.  So this reads a little bit like a court document.  However, I didn’t want to vary the format because I think it adds to the flavor.

 

I will also have prepared transcript of the four siblings visiting.  My hope is to have these documents posted to some type of family website with password.  You can learn more about listening to family stories at storycorps.org.

 

I look forward to your comments. Please forward on if  I have missed anybody or just let me know.

 

Thanks, Matt

 

The following is from Wikipedia on the Boston Brinks's robbery:

 

The Great Brink's Robbery was an armed robbery of the Brinks Building in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, on January 17, 1950.

The robbery resulted in the theft of $1,218,211.29 in cash, and over $1.5-million in checks, money orders and other securities. At the time, it was the largest robbery in the history of the United States. Skillfully executed with only a bare minimum of clues left at the crime scene, the robbery was billed as "the crime of the century". The robbery was the work of an eleven-member gang, all of whom were later arrested.

 

 

The plan

According to information later gleaned from Joseph "Specs" O'Keefe, Anthony "Fats" Pino was the originator of the heist. He brought in O'Keefe, Joseph "Big Joe" McGinnis and Stanley "Gus" Gusciora.

Secretly O'Keefe and Gusciora entered the Brink's depot; they picked the outside lock with an ice pick and inner door with a piece of plastic. Later they temporarily removed the cylinders from the five locks, one at a time, so a locksmith could make duplicate keys for them. Once this was done Pino recruited seven other men, including Pino's brother-in-law Vincent Costa, Michael Vincent "Vinnie" Geagan, Thomas Francis Richardson, Adolph "Jazz" Maffie, Henry Baker, James Faherty, and Joseph "Barney" Banfield.

The gang decided to wait for the optimal time for their heist. Pino studied schedules and was able to determine what the staff was doing based on the lights in the building windows. O'Keefe and Gusciora even stole the plans for the site alarms. The gang members entered the building on practice runs after the staff had left for the day. Costa monitored the depot from a room of a neighboring tenement building, exactly across from the Brinks building on Prince St. By the time they acted, the gang had been planning and training for two years.

The following is from a history of Boston from Wikipedia regarding "No Irish Need Apply" in job advertisements--

Throughout the 19th century, Boston became known as a haven for Irish immigrants, especially following the potato famine of 1845-49. Even to the present day, Boston still commands the largest percentage of Irish-descended people of any city in the United States. The Irish were held as an underclass by the Boston Brahmins, because the Brahmins were of English descent and Protestant, and the Irish were from Ireland and Catholic. "NINA" signs (for No Irish Need Apply) were common in Boston throughout the late 19th and early 20th century. However, almost purely by numbers, the Irish took control of the city, and Boston, once known as a WASP-Puritan stronghold, became thoroughly connected with the Irish. The Irish left their mark on the region in a number of ways: in still heavily Irish neighborhoods such as Charlestown and South Boston; in the name of the local basketball team, the Boston Celtics; in the dominant Irish-American political family, the Kennedys; in a large number of prominent local politicians, such as James Michael Curley; in the establishment of Catholic Boston College as a rival to WASPish Harvard; and in underworld figures such as James "Whitey" Bulger.

From Wikipedia on the Irish and Newfoundland, Canada:

In modern Newfoundland (Irish: Talamh an Éisc), many Newfoundlanders are of Irish descent. It is estimated that about 80% of Newfoundlanders have Irish ancestry on at least one side of their family tree. The family names, the features and colouring, the predominant Catholic religion, the prevalence of Irish music – even the accents of the people – are so reminiscent of rural Ireland that Irish author Tim Pat Coogan has described Newfoundland as "the most Irish place in the world outside of Ireland".[1]

The following is from Wikipedia on the 'Pullman Stike" referred to by my Dad in the the last pages of the transcript:

Great Railroad Strike of 1922
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The Great Railroad Strike of 1922, a nationwide railroad shop workers strike in the United States, began on July 1 and was the largest railroad work stoppage since 1894. The immediate cause of the strike was the Railroad Labor Board's announcement that hourly wages would be cut by seven cents on July 1, which prompted a shop workers vote on whether or not to strike. The operators' unions, representing the engineers, trainmen, firemen, and conductors, did not join in the strike. The railroads employed strikebreakers to fill three-fourths of the roughly 400,000 vacated positions, increasing hostilities between the railroads and the striking workers. By the end of July, National Guard troops were on duty in seven states and some 2,200 deputy U.S. marshals were actively clamping down on meetings and pickets.

President Warren G. Harding proposed a settlement on July 28 which would have granted little to the unions, but the railroad companies rejected the compromise despite interest from the desperate workers. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, who opposed the unions, pushed for national action against the strike, and on September 1 a federal judge named James H. Wilkerson issued a sweeping injunction against striking, assembling, picketing, and a variety of other union activities, colloquially known as the "Daugherty Injunction."

There was widespread opposition to the injunction and a number of sympathy strikes shut down some railroads completely, but the strike eventually died out as many shopmen made deals with the railroads on the local level. The often unpalatable concessions — coupled with memories of the violence and tension during the strike — soured relations between the railroads and the shopmen for quite some time.

 

Biographical information on Paul Dever

Paul Andrew Dever (January 15, 1903 – April 11, 1958) was a Democratic politician from Boston, Massachusetts. He served as the 58th Governor of Massachusetts.

He attended the Boston Latin School and worked as a shoe salesman and clerk to finance his legal education at Boston University. When he graduated with high honors in 1926, he also had high expectations. Just several years earlier his cousin from Woburn, Massachusetts, William E. Dever had gained national prominence as the "Mayor who cleaned up Chicago." Dever was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1928, and served from 1929 to 1935, when he was elected the youngest attorney general in the history of Massachusetts at age 31. In 1940, he challenged the popular incumbent Governor Leverett Saltonstall, coming within a small margin of creating an upset victory.

As World War II began, Dever enlisted in the Navy. He lost the 1946 race for lieutenant governor, but two years later he defeated incumbent governor Robert F. Bradford by a substantial margin, and became the 58th Governor. Governor Dever increased state aid to schools and issued an executive order to extend higher education benefits to Korean War veterans. Among his chief concerns were civil defense and resisting domestic communism. He advocated increasing old age and workers compensation insurance. He made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952. Dever had many of his supporters on the state payroll, creating a strong political machine. However, he lost a second re-election bid by 15,000 votes against Republican and future Secretary of State Christian Herter.

The Dever administration came under fire in 1952 when the Massachusetts Federation of Taxpayers Associations found pensions for members and former members of the state legislature were increased. One of those eligible was former mayor of Boston and governor James Curley, a convicted felon. Dever gave in to pressure groups, calling a special session of the legislature that repealed the bill.[1][2]

Governor Dever died in 1958 and was buried in St. Joseph's Cemetery in the West Roxbury section of the city of Boston, Massachusetts.

 

The Irish in Charlestown

Around the 1860s an influx of Irish immigrants arrived in Charlestown. The neighborhood remained an Irish stronghold in the cultural, economic, and Catholic traditions of neighborhoods like South Boston, Somerville, and Dorchester.

Throughout the 1960s until the middle 1990s, Charlestown was infamous for its Irish Mob presence. Charlestown's McLaughlin Brothers were involved in a gang war with neighboring Somerville's Winter Hill Gang, during the Irish Mob Wars of the 1960s. In the late 1980s, however, Charlestown underwent a massive gentrification process similar to that of the South End. Drawn to its proximity to downtown and its colonial, red-brick, row-house housing stock, similar to that of Beacon Hill, many upper-middle class professionals moved to the neighborhood. In the late 1990s, additional gentrification took place, similar to that in neighboring Somerville.[citation needed] Today the neighborhood is a mix of upper-middle and middle-class residences, housing projects, and a large working class Irish-American demographic and culture that is still predominant

Hough's Neck is a one-square-mile (2.6 km2) peninsula in Quincy, Massachusetts. It is surrounded by Quincy Bay, Hingham Bay and Rock Island Cove. It is lined by Perry Beach, which runs along Manet Avenue; Nut Island, which is just beyond Great Hill at the very end of the peninsula; and Edgewater Drive.

Hough's Neck is commonly referred to by locals as "The Neck," and its residents as "Neckahs" or "Neckies".[1]