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Seven Fun Facts About Cape Cod National Seashore

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Before it became the Cape Cod National Seashore, the 40 miles of sandy beach along the Outer Cape was known as the Great Beach. It deserved that name as  one of the longest expanse of sandy shoreline along the East Coast.

The Great Beach remained pretty much unspoiled until World War II. But after the war, Cape Cod’s population swelled. Real estate development took up vast tracts of land on the peninsula. By the 1950s, Cape Codders feared the Great Beach would turn into Atlantic City.

Cape Cod National Seashore in green.

And so on Aug. 7, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the law creating the Cape Cod National Seashore. As a longtime summer visitor to Cape Cod, he said he knew the new national park would be “useful.”

Here are seven more fun facts about a place you ought to go to if you haven’t been.

1. The Cape Cod National Seashore isn’t just seashore.

Of the 26,810 acres of land it comprises, only 1,700 acres are beach and tidal flats — or about 6 percent of the whole. That still leaves plenty of beach: Coast Guard Beach, Nauset Light Beach, Marconi Beach, Head of the Meadow Beach, Race Point Beach, Herring Cove Beach, Ballston Beach, Longnook Beach, Cahoon Hollow Beach and White Crest Beach. To name a few.

The seashore also includes 3,375 acres of grassland, 3,765 acres of deciduous forest, 11,500 acres of mixed pine forest, 2,550 acres of wetlands and ponds, 1,875 acres of salt marsh, 1,700 acres of beach and tide flats, 1,150 acres of developed land and 895 acres of heathland.  The National Park Service makes special note of the protected heathland because of its rarity.

Heathlands are open spaces covered with low vegetation like heather, gorse, broom and grasses. Cape Cod heathlands have a lot of broom crowberry, something you won’t find much of in the rest of the world. The entire national park provides a home to 25 rare and endangered species, including the spadefoot toad, the piping plover and the common tern (not so common anymore).

Kinnikinnick, red bearberry, broom crowberry, pitch pines in Wellfleet.

2. The Great Beach has inspired several literary classics.

Henry David Thoreau wrote the first one, Cape Cod, in 1865. He had visited the Cape several times and described hiking the Great Beach — now the Cape Cod National Seashore. Critics call it a classic.

Henry Beston wrote another classic in 1925. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod tells the story of his yearlong sojourn in a seaside cottage in Eastham. He only intended to stay two weeks, but the nature surrounding him kept him there for a year.

More than a few great works, though not about the beach itself, were written seashore-adjacent. Writers such as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Mary Oliver, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut spent summers or lived in Provincetown.

Other books about the Great Beach include The Great Beach by John Hay, The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod by Cynthia Huntington and The Shores of Bohemia:: A Cape Cod Story by John Taylor Williams.

3. The FBI took 50 years to solve a mystery of the dunes.

In 1974, dog walkers discovered a body in the dunes at the Cape Cod National Seashore. Her killer had nearly severed her head and cut off her hands, presumably to prevent identification.

Provincetown dunes

He (or she) succeeded for 50 years.  Called The Lady of the Dunes, she was the oldest unidentified homicide victim in Massachusetts when the FBI announced in late 2022 they now knew who she was. Ruth Marie Terry. She was 37 years old and came from Tennessee.

Law enforcement officials used investigative genealogy, which combines DNA analysis with genealogical research. They still haven’t found her killed.

4. It used to be called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

More than 3,000 ships wrecked off the Outer Cape from Chatham to Provincetown. For a century and a half, ships wrecked on the Outer Cape about every two weeks. People said you could walk from one end of the Outer Cape to the other on the bones of ships that sank.

Silver recovered from the Whydah

The Great Beach’s most famous shipwreck was a pirate ship that sank in 1717. Black Sam Bellamy  had captured the Whydah Gally, but it sank in a terrific Nor’easter on April 26, 1717 off the coast of Wellfleet. Black Sam Bellamy and all but two of the 142 men on board perished.

In 1984, underwater explorer Barry Clifford rediscovered the Whydah in 14 feet of water and five of sand. He also found its loot and, quite possibly, the bones of Black Sam Bellamy.

5. There was a fight to create the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Two senators from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy and Leverett Saltonstall, introduced the bill to create the national park in 1959. Then the fight was on.

The Great Beach wasn’t like Yosemite or Yellowstone, unclaimed wilderness with few permanent structures. The seashore stretched across private property in six established towns.

Race Point Beach at Sunset

Saltonstall put the controversy in a nutshell. “The most important and complicated problem before us is to preserve the scenic and historic features of Cape Cod without injuring and unduly restricting the towns and individual citizens directly concerned,” Saltonstall said.

People who lived in the area proposed for the park didn’t want their homes taken. Real estate developers didn’t want to give up the chance to turn the Great Beach into a honky-tonk mecca. Not everyone liked the idea of setting aside beachfront property for conservation, or banning off-road vehicles. Still others thought the government should clear off all the homes.

White Crest Beach, Wellfleet

The final compromise reached earned the name “Cape Cod model” for other national parks. The National Seashore was the first U.S. park to let private property owners keep their land and dwellings inside the park.

Buildings, lands and homes were purchased by the government or donated by the towns or the property owners. It didn’t make everyone happy, but millions of people every year enjoy their visit to the seashore.

6. Eventually the Cape Cod National Seashore will disappear.

Anyone who owned a property developed before 1959 could keep the house. In some cases, they couldn’t keep it for long. The sea eats away at the Great Beach at the rate of 3.8 feet a year. Houses in Chatham have fallen into the water. The storm of 1978 took off the Coast Guard’s 300-car parking lot, and lighthouses have had to be moved to new sites farther from the shoreline.

Highland Light in North Truro had to be moved

The sea doesn’t erode all of the Great Beach, though. It picks up sand in Chatham and Orleans and deposits it in Provincetown. But the Cape loses more than it gains. Geologists say erosion will reduce it to a few islands in 2,000 years.

7. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places 25 times.

The seashore doesn’t just have historic homes, it has entire historic districts. The Nauset Archaeological Site includes artifacts of ancient settlements since at least 4,000 BC. There’s also the Truro Highlands Historic District, made up of Highland Light, Highland House and buildings along Highland Light Road. The Fort Hill Rural Historic District comprises 100 acres of what used to be two farms.

The Old Harbor Lifesaving Station

The seashore also has the Marconi Wireless Station Site, which sent the first wireless transatlantic message to Europe in 1903. It has half a dozen lighthouses, a cemetery, a life saving station and a number of historic homes. They aren’t all 18th century Cape houses, either. You can find historic mid-century modern houses within the seashore.

Marconi Wireless site

One 18th century Cape house, the John Newcomb House, had a famous visitor in the mid-19th century: Henry David Thoreau. He described the house and its inhabitants in his book Cape Cod. People know it as the Wellfleet Oysterman’s House.


Images: Map By EricM – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26489659. White Crest Beach By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21367219; White Crest Beach Von This image or media was taken or created by Matt H. Wade. To see his entire portfolio, click here.@thatmattwadeThis image is protected by copyright! If you would like to use it, please read this first. – Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15837066; Old Harbor Lifesaving Station By JCefaly – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21669791. Race Point By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1411213. Heathland by Doug McGrady via Flickr,  CC BY 2.0/.

Provincetown dunes By LEONARDO DASILVA, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46696548. Race Point Beach at Sunset By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5,, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1411219. Highland Light By John Phelan – Own work, , CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23654849. Silver from the Whydah Gally By Theodore Scott – Flickr: Look At That Booty, CC BY 2.0/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22019309.

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7 Fun Facts About the Trapp Family, Before & After The Sound of Music

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There’s a lot more to the Trapp Family Singers than you’ll find in The Sound of Music, one of the most beloved (and lucrative) movies of all time.

In the film, an Austrian novitiate named Maria leaves the convent temporarily to work as a governess for the seven children of Georg von Trapp, a wealthy widower. She sings with the children and plays outdoors with them. The widower and the novitiate fall in love as Hitler rises to power. They win the Salzburg Festival and start singing professionally. Finally they decide to flee when Hitler annexes Austria. In the final scene, they carry their luggage to freedom over the Alps.

The broad outlines of the story are true. Baron Georg von Trapp was indeed a widower, and Maria a young novitiate. The von Trapp family did live in Salzburg and they did sing professionally, starting in 1934.

The rest of the real  story takes place elsewhere. They toured internationally, then arrived in the United States in late 1938 with little money. They continued performing to critical and popular acclaim. Within four years they could buy a 660-acre farm in Stowe, Vt., which they turned into a summer camp and later a ski lodge. Until 1956, the Trapp Family toured extensively. Then they followed separate careers, though they kept the ski lodge in Stowe.

The movie came about because Maria published her memoirs in 1949. She called it The Story of the Trapp Family Singers.

A West German film company, Gloria,  bought the rights to the book and made a musical comedy drama called Die Trapp Familie, released in 1956. A sequel, The Trapp Family in America, followed in 1958. Rodgers and Hammerstein turn it into a Broadway musical in the fall of 1959, and it ran for more than three years.

Then in 1965 came the big one: The Sound of Music, the film

But what really happened before – and what happened after — the film now viewed as a cultural treasure? Here are seven fun facts.

1. Georg von Trapp was a war hero.

The patriarch of the von Trapp Family, Baron Georg von Trapp, was a highly decorated naval hero for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He served as commander of two U-boats during World War I, sinking 13 Allied vessels.

Baron Georg von Trapp, when he was commander of U-5

He received the Military Order of Maria Theresa, Knight’s Cross, for sinking the French armored cruiser Leon Gambetta – the first underwater nighttime attack on a vessel in the Adriatic. While Georg had been born a hereditary knight due to honors bestowed on his father, his valor earned him a knighthood in his own right. Then he was later elevated to baronetcy.

But the collapse of the Austro-Hungary Empire after World War I left Austria landlocked and Georg without a naval post.

He didn’t need to work for a living, but he did.

Georg lectured and wrote on military history and strategy, published his memoir, To the Last Salute, and ran several international shipping companies.

He married Agathe Whitehead, the granddaughter of Robert Whitehead, who invented and manufactured the torpedo. Agathe inherited quite a bit of wealth, but died of scarlet fever in 1922. Georg then married Maria in 1927, when he was 47 and she was 22.

Georg von Trapp aboard his U-boat

2. Some of the Trapp Family Singers wanted out.

Not all the children wanted to spend their lives singing The Carol of the Drum on stage. By the time the group disbanded, most had reached their thirties and forties and were ready to focus on their own careers, families and interests. Both Rupert and Werner served in The Tenth Mountain Division during World War II and had already spent long stretches not performing during their service.

Only Maria’s iron will kept them together until 1956.

The real Maria was indeed a novitiate in an Austrian convent. However she bore little resemblance to the sweet, lovely character played by Julie Andrews. She could be difficult and demanding, with an explosive temper.

Maria herself told the Washington Post in 1978 that the characters “were too gentle — like girls out of Bryn Mawr.”

The Trapp Family Singers actually included Georg’s seven children by his first wife and three with Maria. Later non-family members joined the group as the children moved on to their own careers.

Rupert went to medical school and became a doctor. Agathe taught kindergarten in Maryland, and Werner went into farming, Hedwig taught music and Johanna married and eventually returned to live in Austria. Martina also married and died in childbirth; Rosmarie and Eleonore both settled in Vermont.

The Trapp Family Singers.

When the group broke up, Maria and three of the children went to Papua New Guinea as Catholic missionaries. Maria Franziska worked there as a missionary for 30 years. Johannes ran the Stowe lodge as a ski resort.

Years later, the von Trapp grandchildren and great-grandchildren continued the family tradition. Elisabeth von Trapp, Werner’s daughter, became a folk singer who toured, recorded albums and sang the Star Spangled Banner three times at Fenway Park. And four of Werner’s grandchildren formed a singing group, recording five albums over 15 years before disbanding in 2016.

Others record and perform in various groups, and some perform with professional symphony orchestras.

3. The Trapp family traveled in a bus for their first two years in the U.S.

The bus had “The Trapp Family Singers” painted on the side. They had arrived in the United States in 1938 with only $4.00, having left all their possessions behind. To support themselves, the von Trapp family traveled the country performing. Their first big U.S. concert happened at The Town Hall in New York on Dec. 10, 1938.

For 15 years their Town Hall performance was a Yuletide tradition in the city.

In December 1940 they performed at Jordan Hall in Boston. They also visited the Massachusetts Statehouse and signed Gov. Leverett Saltonstall’s guest book. Baron Von Trapp gave their address as 252 Merion Rd. in Merion Pa.., where a music lover had offered them refuge.

The von Trapps didn’t move to Stowe until 1943. They chose it as their home because it reminded them of the Austrian Tyrol.

4. They didn’t hate The Sound of Music. But they didn’t love it.

Some people find The Sound of Music too saccharine. Among those critics were Maria von Trapp and her youngest son, Johannes.

Johannes von Trapp said in a 1998 New York Times interview, “it’s not what my family was about. . . . [We were] about good taste, culture, all these wonderful upper-class standards that people make fun of in movies like ‘Titanic.’ We’re about environmental sensitivity, artistic sensitivity. ‘Sound of Music’ simplifies everything. I think perhaps reality is at the same time less glamorous but more interesting than the myth.”

The family especially didn’t like the film’s portrayal of Georg as a cold martinet. In reality, he was a warm, attentive father.

Maria, appearing on Julie Andrews’ TV show, told her she was “wonderful” in The Sound of Music.

Maria complained the film got geography all wrong. “Don’t they know geography in Hollywood? Salzburg does not border on Switzerland!” Had they crossed the Alps from their home in Salzburg, they would have reached Germany.

And in reality, they didn’t walk over the Alps. They just crossed the railroad tracks behind their house to the train station. And they went to Italy, not Switzerland.

However Maria, a devout Catholic, praised the film for its religious sensibility. She said it brought joy and hope to millions of people, according to her New York Times obituary in 1987.

“The great good the film and the play are doing to individual lives is far beyond money,” she said. “So many people write about how much the film has helped them in restoring their confidence in God.”

The von Trapp family only made very little money from the movie, which grossed $180 million.

5. Maria didn’t turn the family on to music.

The family, including Georg, already sang together when Maria arrived in 1926. They all had grown up with music in the household, and all played instruments. Maria did teach them to sing madrigals.

Maria von Trapp from her naturalization photo

In 1935, the von Trapps lost a large portion of their money in an Austrian bank collapse. Maria, who had married Georg eight years earlier, dismissed the servants and took in boarders to make ends meet.

A local priest, Father Franz Wasner, came to their home to perform a Mass. He was a musical genius who recognized their talent. He taught them Baroque and Renaissance music, ultimately becoming their musical director and helping to mold them into professionals.

According to Maria’s book, Trapp Family Book of Christmas Songs, their repertoire included a sixth-century Ambrosian chant, medieval lullabies, dance carols from France and Sweden, a somber Spanish song, a majestic Polish air, a bagpiper’s tune from Naples, gay and haunting German and Austrian music and American folksongs. At Christmas they sang Carol of the Drum, Shepherds Come A-Running, and Il est ne, le Divin Enfant.

6. When the Trapp Family Singers fled their home, they had already been to the U.S.

They had gotten their big break when a famous opera singer, Lotte Lehman heard them sing in their home. She suggested they compete at a folk song festival in Salzburg. Then they decided to go on stage.

Then known as the Trapp Family Choir, they performed in Austria and Germany in 1936. In 1937 that expanded into Italy, France, the U.K. and Scandinavia.

Georg didn’t like the idea of the family performing in public because he felt protective of his children and was uncomfortable with the attention. But Eleonore told the Washington Post in 1987 that he “accepted it as God’s will that they sing for others.”

From 1937 to 1938, they toured France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Italy and the United States. In 1939 they returned to Europe where they toured Scandinavia and the Netherlands.

Several developments led to the family’s decision to leave Austria. Rupert, who had just finished medical school, was offered a post at a hospital that had sudden vacancies left by known Jewish doctors who had gone missing. Then Hitler offered Georg a naval commission and invited the family to sing at his birthday party. The von Trapps realized they could either go with Hitler or go against him. So they left for the United States.

Heinrich Himmler, who engineered the Holocaust, later moved into the von Trapps’ Salzburg home, turning one of the children’s bedrooms into his office.

7. The family went to court over the Trapp Family Lodge.

Johannes von Trapp, Maria’s youngest son, was one of several family members who managed the lodge as president. Maria had run the lodge after Georg passed, then Johannes ran it. His nephew George took over for a time until Johannes returned.

He said he resented his older siblings because they couldn’t or wouldn’t run the business.

Johannes had earned a master’s degree in forestry at Yale while still an undergraduate at Dartmouth and designed the ski trail system. In the late 1960s he hired a Norwegian ski instructor to teach guests to cross country ski.

The Trapp Lodge at Christmas

The original lodge, a rustic chalet with 28 small rooms and shared bathrooms, expanded but in 1980 burned to the ground. The von Trapp family lost the contents of the lodge and some of their personal effects. They replaced the lodge with a 73-room, $7.5 million building, since expanded to 96 rooms.

When Maria died in 1987, 32 family members owned stock in the lodge. By 1994, they wanted to leave the business. The rest of the family sued, believing they didn’t get enough money for their share of the business. Five years later, they won the lawsuit.

He regretted it, according to a New York Times interview on Dec. 24, 2008. He said he really wanted to ranch in Montana, and would have preferred a tasteful, dignified hotel to the Trapp family tourist resort.

Johannes was horrified when he discovered the gift shop sold a stuffed goat that sings The Lonely Goatherd. The staff hid it from him, and when he found out about it he let it stay because it sold well.

 

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

 

Images: The Sound of Music poster By May be found at the following website: https://www.etsy.com/listing/125297296/the-sound-of-music-movie-musical-poster, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6639403. This story last updated in 2022.

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A Fake Priest Gets a New England Mob Boss Out of Prison

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Ray Patriarca ruled as the New England mob boss for 25 years from his Coin-O-Matic “vending business” on Atwell’s Avenue in Providence. He was a friendly guy but fatal, known for his ruthlessness and his political clout.

He rose to the top of organized crime in New England in the 1950s with the help of Dan Coakley, a Boston politician on the take. Coakley freed Patriarca from prison by inventing an Irish priest who pleaded to let the nice young man go home and take care of his mother.

patriarca

The New England mob boss on his way up

It’s a classic tale featuring vivid characters: a New England mob boss called El Padrone, a Boston Irish pol named Dapper Dan, a governor nicknamed Chowderhead and a fictional Father Fagin, as in the Dickens character who led children into crime.

The pardon that Dapper Dan Coakley got for Ray Patriarca turned out to be a turning point for both men. It ruined Coakley, and it helped Patriarca’s rise in the mob.

Ray Patriarca, New England Mob Boss

He was born Raymond Loreda Salvatore Patriarca on St. Patrick’s Day, 1908, in Worcester, Mass. His father, Eleuterio, had immigrated from southern Italy; his mother, Mary Jane DeNubile, had Italian ancestry.

Five years later the family moved to Providence, where his father ran a liquor store. Raymond left school at age eight to help support the family, shining shoes and working as a bellhop. Then Eleuterio died when Ray was 17, setting him adrift. He discovered that Prohibition offered upward mobility for a young man on the make—through smuggling, hijacking and armed robbery.

He had a pleasant manner, but he could order a hit on a wayward underling with an abrupt, “Do it.” Stealing, however, was his first love. “The happiest days of my life were when I was on the street clipping,” he once said.

In 1929 the Mafia (called “The Office” by Rhode Island mobsters) inducted him into its ranks. From Rhode Island, he forged ties with the New York Profaci and Genovese families, who began to view him as their “can-do” guy in New England.

genovese

Vito Genovese

Caught

As he approached 30 he had a reputation and a rap sheet as a gunman, gambler, pimp, thief, extortionist, bootlegger, hijacker and murder suspect.

On Feb. 12, 1938, Patriarca and his accomplices held up the Wallbank Jewelry Company in Brookline, stealing $12,000 worth of gold and gems along with an employee’s car. Five nights later, they pulled off another heist at the United Optical Plant in Webster. A barking dog alerted police, who found Patriarca hiding under a bench. They arrested him.

In August he pleaded guilty to the Brookline robbery and, in a separate trial, a jury found him guilty of the United Optical break-in. A judge sentenced him to three to five years in Charlestown State Prison.

Dapper Dan

Dapper Dan Coakley preferred a more genteel form of crime–the graft, blackmail and bribery kind.

coakley

Dan Coakley

He was born to Irish immigrant parents in Charlestown, Mass., in 1865. He won acceptance to the bar after studying law at his brother’s law firm. In 1910 he defended Big Bill Kelliher, who’d robbed the National City Bank of Cambridge. Kelliher got 18 years in jail, and from prison he claimed he’d given Coakley $23,000 to bribe the U.S. attorney and the jury.

Coakley’s later attempts to bribe district attorneys succeeded. He became the fixer for anyone who wanted an unpleasant charge of larceny, theft, prostitution or fraud to go away.

Coakley wasn’t above committing the odd crime himself. He once got hold of railroad magnate H.H. Hunnewell’s love letters to his mistress, and charged him $150,000 to get them back.

arbuckle

Fatty Arbuckle

In 1917, the film star Fatty Arbuckle came to Boston for a Copley Plaza dinner held by a group of movie producers. Afterward, they decanted to the Mishawum Manor, a house of ill repute run by one Brownie Kennedy. Brownie’s ladies accommodated the men in what the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court called an orgy of drink and lust… a debauch in a bawdy house … a stench in the nostrils of common decency. A photographer happened to be there, and a few days later Dan Coakley’s then-ally Mayor James Michael Curley called them to say they faced morals charges. It cost them $100,000 to make law enforcement forget the party.

Pardon Me

Coakley’s antics eventually got him disbarred. But in 1936 he won election to the Executive Council, which soon began recommending pardons to juvenile delinquents and notorious criminals. Gov. Charles “Chowderhead” Hurley signed them.

hurley

Gov. Charles Hurley

As historian Francis Russell put it, “the quality of Massachusetts mercy grew so strained that more convicts seemed to be leaving prison than entering.”

Most of the pardon petitions came from the hand of Councilor Dapper Dan Coakley.

The Fix Is In

Coakley filled his pardon petition for Ray Patriarca with lies. For starters, he called the future New England mob boss “a virtuous young man eager to be released from prison so that he might go home to his mother.”

A “Father Garneri” of Quincy signed a statement that he was anxious to express his opinion to the governor. Patriarca’s Providence pastor, “Father Fagen,” did the same. So did the Rev. Sixtus Brambilla of East Boston.

The Executive council granted the pardon and Patriarca was out the next day after serving 84 days of a three-to-five year sentence. Though he served for three different crimes, the pardon petition mentioned only one.

Leverett Saltonstall

On Election Day 1938, Massachusetts voters, tired of Chowderhead Hurley’s shenanigans, voted to replace him with a straight-arrow Republican, Leverett Saltonstall. Saltonstall appointed a commission to look into the paroles and pardons granted over the last 10 years.

Ironically, Patriarca’s wife Helen’s sister worked for Saltonstall.

Findings

On Dec. 20, 1938, Joseph Patriarca, Ray’s brother, checked into Boston’s Parker House, saying he wanted a room as near as possible to Dan Coakley’s suite, room 978, the commission found. Joe Patriarca got room 944.

A number of meetings followed between Coakley, Joe Patriarca, witnesses and priests. Money exchanged hands.

parker-house

The Parker House in 1910

The commission found that Father Garneri of Quincy was actually the Rev. Philip Guarino of Waverly. He didn’t know Ray Patriarca, never discussed his pardon and had never authorized his signature. Father Fagen didn’t exist, except in Dan Coakley’s imagination. Coakley said he couldn’t think of the priest’s name but was thinking of Fagin, the character in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Father Sixtus Brambilla said he signed the petition as a favor to a donor, who’d told him Patriarca had just committed minor juvenile delinquencies.

The petition also asked to pardon Patriarca for one crime, though he served time concurrently for three.

Coakley also told Governor Hurley that no one had identified Patriarca in the Brookline jewelry theft. They had, but recanted, like many witnesses to Patriarca’s crimes.

The commission recommended Dapper Dan Coakley’s impeachment.

agin

Fagin. He didn’t exist in real life, either

Mud Bath

Reporters dubbed the Senate trial the “Mud Bath.” It took the entire month of September 1941.

During the Mud Bath it came out that Patriarca didn’t even take care of his mother—his brother Joe did.

The trial also exposed Coakley’s Statehouse trickery. One executive councilor had told Coakley he would not vote for Patriarca’s pardon. But during the meeting to issue pardons he left for 15 minutes to take a phone call. The Patriarca pardon passed, and the councilor read about it in the newspaper the next day.

Patriarca even failed to give the customary thanks to the governor for the pardon.

mass-statehouse

Massachusetts Statehouse

Coakley offered a spirited defense, but the state Senate voted 33-6 to remove him from office.

As the senators filed out of the chamber, Coakley stood in the doorway greeting his supporters and glaring at those who voted against him. “I can say ‘forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do’,” he then said in a statement to the press.

New England Mob Boss

Getting out of prison won Ray Patriarca new respect from the mob because it showed he had political clout.

In 1954, New England mob boss Philip Bruccola returned to Sicily, helped along by an IRS investigation into tax evasion. Patriarca stepped into his Italian footwear and ran the mob for the next 25 years.

patriarca

Ray Patriarca, R.I. police I.D.

From his Coin-O-Matic building in Providence’s Italian section, Patriarca insisted he ran a legitimate vending machine company. Actually, he ran loan-sharking, gambling and pornography operations from Maine to Connecticut as well as real estate interests from Las Vegas to Florida.

Between 1962 and 1965, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had the Coin-O-Matic bugged without a warrant. FBI agents heard talk of bribes to lawmakers, judges and governors’ appointees in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island. But the FBI couldn’t admit the evidence in court.

Over his lifetime, Ray Patriarca was arrested or indicted 28 times, convicted seven and imprisoned four for 11 years. But he honored the code of silence — omerta –and he never snitched to law enforcement.

He died of a heart attack in 1984 at the age of 76. Dan Coakley died in 1952 at the age of 86. He never finished his autobiography, The Sparkling Past.

Images: Ray Patriarca By Rhode Island State Police – http://www.wrko.com/whitey-watch, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40688140the impeachment]. Massachusetts Statehouse By King of Hearts – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94906441.

With thanks to The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill and The Knave of Boston by Francis Russell for American Heritage August 1976. This story last updated in 2022. 

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Nora Saltonstall to Her Dad in WWI: ‘I’m Staying in the Fight’

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The day after her 24th birthday in war-torn France, Nora Saltonstall begged her Brahmin father to let her stay in Europe with her generation — the Lost Generation.

Nora Saltonstall in her Red Cross uniform.

Nora Saltonstall in her Red Cross uniform.

Richard Middlecott Saltonstall, a well-to-do lawyer, wanted the second of his four children to come home from France during World War I. Nora had volunteered with the Red Cross in Paris a year earlier. She had moved up from housekeeper and secretary to chauffeur as part of a mobile hospital unit. Her brother Leverett had enlisted in the U.S. Army and also served in France.

Nora Saltonstall

She was having the time of her life in France. Even the death of a maid from the Spanish flu epidemic created an opportunity for an adventure:

The Saltonstall siblings would survive World War I. Nora Saltonstall would earn the Croix de Guerre, but she would die of typhoid at the age of 24 while on a trip to the West Coast. Leverett would have a successful political career as U.S. senator from Massachusetts and governor of the state.

On Oct. 20, 1918, Nora Saltonstall wrote a letter to her father, who she addressed as “Pa.” She’d written him once about staying, but now she had new information. Leverett’s unit was on the move. “Surely you would not want me to come home if I could be of any use to him over here,” she wrote.

Setting that reason aside I feel as if I were just coming into my usefulness & that now having learned the ropes I am far more valuable than a year ago. Anyway the war will probably be over soon so let’s not worry for a little while yet. Do you mind very much my staying?

Belonging

If you knew how much I am getting from this Experience I am sure you would let me finish it out. If I had not come over I would have felt not to have belonged to this generation & would have felt all my life as if there were something lacking to make me on a level with all the up & coming crowd of my own age & thereabouts. I have to admit that there is a lot of fun combined to the work — Simple sort of fun in which Everyone joins because we are all playing the same game & we all look at things in the same way.

Nora Saltonstall

Nora Saltonstall

There is much less worry over here because you are near Enough to action to get the result of all the worries of all those behind the lines. It is much more pleasant to receive orders, [&?] [than?] To do what you are told without thinking much one way or the other than have to decide yourself upon the move. Even at this moment we are awaiting orders & are hoping for a big move forward.

Advancing has none of the Excitement of retreat because you can take your time, which we certainly have to do, because the country is so wrecked that it is no Easy job to install a hospital — no water, buildings without windows & roofs etc. — just like the hundreds of pictures you have seen for the last four years.

The Flu Pandemic

Nora reported to her father that they’d had some “gripe” — meaning “grippe,” the colloquial term for influenza, which killed millions during World War I.

“We have had some gripe here but I should not say as badly as at home,” she wrote. “We had a maid die of it & one or two of the others have been sick but not dangerously so, & there has really been no general contagion.”

The maid had a military funeral & I was responsible for getting some flowers. I never knew before what high wire fences I could climb — we looted freely & might Easily have been court martialed for our behavior but the final result was worth it, for we made a large wreath of ivy & roses, a bouquet & wreath of dahlias & some white shrubbery & a cross of roses & ivy — Pretty good for this season in the pouring rain, don’t you think so?

Leverett Saltonstall

Leverett Saltonstall, later

You need not worry too much over my nursing because we are short chauffeurs just now so that I cannot leave that service. I am not sure whether you would approve of my doing that work either because it is decidedly unladylike. One cannot stand on ceremony when it comes to oiling & greasing Fiat 1 1/2 ton trucks, changing tires & doing all the rest of it. I am clean once a day & that is immediately after my bath in the rubber foot tub — the rest of the time I belong in the stable. I have developed a most enormous muscle in my right arm & I am really rather ashamed of it because it literally stands out.

I’ll have to try to direct it into a tennis stroke after the war.

Much love from

Nora

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Leverett Saltonstall Worries About Nora Seeing Men in Pyjamas

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Nora Saltonstall got a chance to visit her brother on the Western Front during World War I. She, for nearly a year had served as a Red Cross volunteer. Her brother Leverett Saltonstall served as a lieutenant with the 301st Field Artillery Regiment in the 76th Division of the U.S. Army.

As young Boston Brahmins, they belonged to the Lost Generation that flocked to Europe during World War I out of a sense of patriotism and adventure. Their parents, Richard and Eleanor Brooks Saltonstall, reluctantly let their daughter go.

Nora Saltonstall in her Red Cross uniform.

Nora Saltonstall in her Red Cross uniform.

After the war, Nora Saltonstall took a trip to the West Coast with friends. She contracted typhoid fever in Portland, Ore., and died on Aug. 2, 1919 at the age of 24. Leverett would win election as Massachusetts governor and U.S. senator.

Leverett Saltonstall

U.S. Sen. Leverett Saltonstall

On Sept. 15, 1918, Nora Saltonstall wrote a letter to Leverett’s wife, Alice, from the Hotel de Bordeaux in Bordeaux France:

Dearest Alice

I don’t know whether it will make you too jealous when I tell you that I have just been seeing Leverett. He looks very well, tremendously tall for some reason, & I should say that his clothes were of the most perfect cut. In other words I was quite proud to be his sister. It is so long since I have seen a lot of Americans, particularly ones whom I know, that it seemed to me like a class day or boat race.

She wrote that they “swallowed their Unitarian pride” and ate fried eggs, white bread and butter at the YMCA. Then they went on a shopping spree, Leverett speaking French. He “declaims in a loud & impressive voice, uses many gestures & usually manages to make himself understood.”

 

Men in Pyjamas

Nora reported to her sister-in-law on the young men she and Leverett visited in the hospital. The 1918 flu epidemic felled them, rather than the enemy. “All the boys seem interested & [brave?] — they most of them are a trifle homesick but that is natural,” she wrote. ” I saw Dunbar & Jimmy Lowell in the hospital — neither seriously sick but down with the local epidemic of Spanish flu which Everyone has over here.”

She thought Dunbar glad to see her. “[B]ut Leverett of course was Embarrassed at having me there & rushed me off as hastily as possible. He made me laugh to myself because he wondered whether I ought to go into the hospital on account of convalescents walking about in pyjamas. I hate to admit that I am not affected by any costume or lack of such that any man can wear. The French hospitals get you accustomed to that & the poor convalescents have to wear pyjamas because no one will give them anything else….

This letter is not nearly as interesting as I meant it to be — I don’t know when I will see Leverett again but probably not for several months.

Much love,
Nora

With thanks to “Out Here at the Front”: The World War I Letters of Nora Saltonstall, edited by Judith S. Graham. This story was updated in 2022. Image of military hospital By https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/28/0f/a75787318c29d98f16fde2891ae1.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0026323.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-23): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/hpkq3zqc CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36011644.

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