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The Boston Irish Gang Wars Terrify a City

When a group of hoodlums decided to rent a cottage on Salisbury Beach for a Labor Day party in 1961, they set in motion a chain of events that left dozens of corpses strewn around eastern New England. The Boston Irish gang wars lasted for seven years, until the Italian godfather in Providence helped put an end to them.

The gang wars allowed corrupt FBI agents to recruit informers in a drama that would play out into the next century. The feds’ most famous snitch, Whitey Bulger, spent most of the Boston Irish gang wars in prison and the rest on the sidelines. The gang wars, however, laid the groundwork for his rise to power. They also launched a movie career that began, fittingly, with a role in The Godfather.

Raymond Patriarca, the New England mob boss in Providence, viewed the Boston Irish gangs as useful muscle. His underboss, Jerry Angiulo, ran his gambling operations out of the North End and paid him a cut of his profit. The McLaughlin gang in Charlestown and the McLean gang in Somerville ran loansharking, numbers running, bookmaking and truck hijacking operations. They, too, paid Patriarca tribute.

The Irish gangsters were all friends, “peat from the same bog,” as they liked to say. Until they weren’t.

The Boston Irish Gang Wars Begin

As is always the case with gangster stories, it’s hard to know exactly what happened. Hoodlums in the grip of the law usually have reason to shade the truth. So it’s impossible to say exactly whose attractive wife or girlfriend got groped (or which part of her anatomy) in that Salisbury Beach cottage on Labor Day 1961.

It might have been the wife of Bill Hickey, an associate of the McLean gang. Or it might have been the girlfriend of Bobo Petricone, also mixed up with McLean.

On that fateful day, Georgie McLaughlin, 22, eschewed the clam shacks, penny arcades and carnival rides of Salisbury Beach. He spent all of the day and part of the night drinking, and then he disrespected a woman.

Georgie McLaughlin

That enraged two of the young hoodlums at the party, either Bill Hickey or Bobo Petricone or maybe George “Red” Lloyd. They beat Georgie until he passed out.

The thugs checked if Georgie still had a pulse. He didn’t. So they panicked, knowing Georgie’s two brothers would come after them in revenge. One, Bernie, was a loan shark for the Angiulo gang, and the other, Punchy, was an ex-boxer with a penchant for violence.

The hoods put Georgie into the back seat of a car and drove around the North Shore looking for a place to dump his body. Suddenly Georgie woke up, dazed and disoriented. The gangsters then headed the car toward Anna Jaques Hospital in Newburyport, where they dumped Georgie on the sidewalk in front of the door. Or maybe they left him in an alleyway.

Georgie Remembers

Georgie recovered, and he remembered what happened to him. He told his two brothers, who then searched the neighborhoods of Somerville looking for Georgie’s assailants.

Somerville in the 1960s was on the downward side of the curve. The Ford Motor plant in Assembly Square had shut down in 1958 and highway projects had gobbled up entire neighborhoods. The city was losing population, and its storefronts were growing tired and worn.

The first place the McLaughlin boys would have looked was Winter Hill, a working-class neighborhood of auto body shops, pizzerias, taverns, mom-and-pop food marts and triple deckers.

Bernie McLaughlin

But the McLean associates who nearly killed George McLaughlin had made themselves scarce. So Georgie’s brother Bernie went to see Buddy McLean at his operational headquarters, the Tap Royal Bar on Broadway.

Ironically, Buddy McLean considered himself Portuguese He’d lost his parents at a young age and a Portuguese immigrant family had adopted him. Blond, blue-eyed and big, people said Buddy had a face like an angel but fought like the devil.

Bernie McLaughlin demanded that Buddy McLean give up the two hoods who beat up his brother. Buddy refused, saying he didn’t rat out his friends.

Retaliation

A few nights later, Buddy McLean was asleep at home with his wife and children when a barking dog outside woke them up. His wife went to the window and saw three men doing something to the family car. Buddy got out of bed, still in his boxer shorts, grabbed a loaded pistol and crept outside. Hiding behind a bush, he fired at the men, who fired back and then fled. McLean recognized Bernie McLaughlin as he ran under a streetlight. The three men jumped into a car and sped away.

Buddy McLean went back to his car to inspect it. He found five sticks of dynamite taped to the car’s ignition switch.

Buddy McLean

At noon on Halloween Day, Buddy McLean caught up with Bernie McLaughlin on his home turf.

Charlestown, like Somerville, had its troubles. In the 1950s, it lost 40 percent of its population, helped by urban renewal and construction of the Tobin Bridge. L trains roared above the corner bars. Edward Logue, head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, called Charlestown “a slum, as bad as any I have ever seen.”

Charlestown was the home of the Bunker Hill Monument, the world’s most prolific armored-car thieves and Townies who never saw or said anything.

Townie

On that Halloween Day, Buddy McLean, Bobo Petricone and an off-duty cop named Russ Nicholson drove a black Oldsmobile to Charlestown.

Wearing a “Townie” football jacket, Buddy McLean got out of the car near the Morning Glory Cafe. He walked up to Bernie McLaughlin standing under a Schlitz beer sign and shot him in the back of the head. In front of 100 witnesses. Within sight of the police station.

The Morning Glory Cafe

But when it came time for the grand jury to bring charges, no one had seen anything.

McLean jumped into the Oldsmobile, which sped away. Police had a good idea who had shot Bernie McLaughlin. They arrested McLean, Nicholson and Petricone in a Somerville diner.

Charlestown’s code of silence held, and no charges were brought against the threesome. But they had other troubles. They’d been arrested for attacking a Somerville diner owner after the Salisbury Beach Labor Day party. They’d also gotten caught up in a gambling sting in January. Petricone and McLean went to prison.

Early in 1962, the McLaughlin gang bombed Petricone’s wife’s car. His wife wasn’t in it, but she divorced Petricone anyway. He left town.

The Boston Irish Gang Wars Get Started

The McLaughlin gang swore revenge on Buddy McLean for killing Bernie. But they’d have to bide their time, as Buddy was doing a two-year stint in prison. So they took their wrath out on a member of his gang, George “Ox” Joynt. He disappeared in the summer of 1961. A year later, a work crew discovered Joynt’s bones while breaking ground for a shopping center in Medford, Mass.

Georgie recovered from his beating and continued his heavy boozing. On March 15, 1964, he got drunk at a party in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood and argued with another partygoer. He then left, returned with a gun and shot William Sheridan between the eyes. Sheridan, however, wasn’t the person with whom he’d argued. Georgie would go to prison for the murder – the only leader of either outfit to survive the Boston Irish gang wars.

The body count climbed.

Punchy McLaughlin

On May 12, 1964, Russ Nicholson paid the price for his role in killing Bernie McLaughlin. Punchy and Georgie McLaughlin bundled the big cop into a car, drove him to a woods in Wilmington, Mass., and shot him twice in the head.

The McLean boys retaliated. In August 1964, the bodies of two members of the McLaughlin gang, Harold Hannon and Willie Delaney, were fished out of Boston Harbor. McLean, now out of prison, had lured them to a South Boston apartment with the promise of sex with a pretty woman. Instead, Harold Hannon had a date with a blowtorch, used to burn his genitals before his merciful death. Delaney, who just happened to be a friend of Hannon’s, was given Seconal and whiskey so he could pass out before they shot him. Or maybe they just threw him in the harbor unconscious and let him drown.

Love Triangle

Booze, bad judgment and women fueled the escalation of violence between the Irish gangs.

For example, one of McLaughlin’s hoodlums, Ronald Dermody, shared a mistress with a member of the McLeans, a thug named Spike O’Toole. Dermody wanted to get rid of O’Toole. So he pitched an idea to Georgie McLaughlin, yet to go to trial for murder.

Dermody offered to kill Buddy McLean if Georgie would kill Spike O’Toole. The police wouldn’t suspect either of them, he argued. It would be just like the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Strangers on a Train. Perhaps Dermody didn’t watch the movie until the end.

Dermody wasn’t entirely sure what Buddy McLean looked like. He shot someone who looked like Buddy McLean.

Realizing his blunder, Dermody suspected correctly that Buddy McLean would try to kill him. So he decided to give himself up to an FBI agent, H. Paul Rico. The unfortunate Dermody picked the wrong FBI agent. Rico had recruited Buddy McLean as an informant.

Rico agreed to meet Dermody on a street corner at the border of Watertown and Belmont. He then called Buddy McLean to tell him where to go. McLean drove to the rendezvous spot and put three bullets in Dermody’s head before he got out of his car.

Providence

More than a dozen bodies had piled up in Greater Boston by then, and down in Providence Raymond Patriarca started to worry. The killings had sent many a hood into hiding, making it hard to run their business enterprises. That meant less money for Raymond Patriarca.

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

“If the killings don’t stop, I’ll declare martial law,” the FBI recorded Patriarca` saying on a wiretap that happened to be illegal.

Patriarca asked his right-hand man, Henry Tameleo, to call a peace conference. Tameleo called both sides to meet at the Ebb Tide Lounge in Revere in January 1965. Buddy McLean, willing to negotiate a truce, came with a few associates.

Punchy and Georgie showed up carrying small paper bags with loaded guns inside. Tameleo, furious, then yelled at them to get out and kill each other.

Returning to Providence, Tameleo told Patriarca he’d have to choose sides. Patriarca chose the McLean gang.

Hitmen

By 1965, McLean and the McLaughlins had both enlisted accomplished assassins in the escalating Boston Irish gang wars.

Buddy McLean had a special bond with Joe “The Animal” Barboza because of his Portuguese ancestry. Barboza, a hit man, hoped to be the first non-Italian “made” member of the Mafia. He had formed a close friendship with Jimmy “the Bear” Flemmi, who aimed to be the mob’s No. 1 hit man. Jimmy’s older brother, Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi, would later earn notoriety as an FBI informant along with Whitey Bulger. An associate, Kevin Weeks, said Stevie “always enjoyed a good murder.”

Joe “The Animal” Barboza

So the McLean gang had the Italian mob and the FBI on its side. Punchy and Georgie McLaughlin had the Hughes brothers, Connie and Stevie. But since Buddy McLean had shot Bernie to death, the McLaughlins suffered from a deficit of brains and sense. “Punchy was just as crazy as George,” wrote Vinnie Teresa in his mob tell-all, My Life in the Mafia. Punchy, a leg breaker for the longshoreman’s union, “was a cuckoo and as hotheaded as they came.”

On May 3, 1965, Stevie Hughes and Punchy McLaughlin shot Jimmy Flemmi as he walked out of his home in Roxbury. At least that’s what Jimmy Flemmi said. He took eight bullets but survived. Stevie Hughes and Punchy McLaughlin disappeared.

Vengeance

It took a couple of tries, but Stevie Flemmi finally avenged the attack on his brother. In August, he and Cadillac Frank Salemme climbed a tree along a rural road. They expected Punchy to come into view. He did, and Flemmi shot Punchy in the hand. Doctors later amputated it.

Punchy had already survived one shooting the previous fall. Two men, possibly Stephen Flemmi and Frank Salemme, dressed as Hasidic Jews and lay in wait for Punchy in the parking lot of Beth Israel Hospital. One of them fired a shotgun at Punchy, ripping off part of his jaw, but witnesses showed up immediately and Punchy got away.

In the fall of 1965, Georgie McLaughlin went to trial for murder. Without the use of his hand, Punchy couldn’t drive to the courthouse to support his brother. So on Oct. 20, 1965, he decided to take a bus to Suffolk Superior Court in Pemberton Square.

Punchy never made it. Salemme and Flemmi shot him to death as he stood on the pavement with six other commuters. He had carried a gun in a brown paper bag but never got to use it.

Buddy Meets His Maker

Buddy McLean had lived to see Punchy and Bernie McLaughlin dead and Georgie in jail. But he wouldn’t live long.

On Oct. 30, 1965, Buddy McLean and two bodyguards left the Peppermint Lounge on Winter Hill. Or maybe it was the 318 Club. They walked past an abandoned movie theater, where Stevie Hughes lay in wait. Hughes shot them with an automatic rifle. McLean tried to duck behind his car but Hughes shot him in the back of the head. Buddy McLean fell to the pavement, and Stevie ran to a getaway car driven by Connie. McLean died 30 hours later at Mass General Hospital. Three hundred people attended his funeral Mass.

The main antagonists of the Boston Irish gang wars were now all dead or behind bars. But as one police officer put it, punks kept turning up dead all over town.

Scared

Nov. 16, 1965, ranked as the bloodiest day yet in the Boston Irish gang war, according to the Associated Press.

McLean allies Barboza and Flemmi had killed Ray DiStasio, a McLaughlin associate, in cold blood. His body was discovered inside the Mickey Mouse Lounge on Revere Beach Boulevard, along with the body of John O’Neil, a shoe factory worker. O’Neill chanced to be in the bar with DiStasio.

That same day, police discovered the body of Robert Paladino under the elevated highway near Boston Garden. Palladino was murdered because he had seen Jimmy Flemmi commit another murder and Flemmi feared he’d talk. It was the first of Johnny Martorano’s 19 hits.

By then, fearful Bostonians wouldn’t go outside of their homes after dark, Life Magazine reported. The body count had reached 44, including McLean and the two McLaughlins. One body turned up headless in the trunk of a car. Another had been cut up and stuffed into three suitcases, then left in a vacant lot.

Adding to the panic, the Boston Strangler had killed 13 women in their homes from 1962 to 1965. He wouldn’t stand trial until 1967.

“The recurrence of corpses sprawled on sidewalks and the everyday repetition of lesser acts of violence have changed the lives of a lot of Bostonians who are not in the least involved,” wrote Richard B. Stolley for Life. “They are, quite bluntly, scared, and not seeing friends and not going to movies or plays is the price they feel they must pay for their own protection.”

The Hughes’ Turn

With the McLaughlins out of the picture, Stevie and Connie Hughes ran the Charlestown gang.

On May 25, 1966, the McLean gang got word that Connie was inside a Charlestown bar. Members of what was now known as the Winter Hill gang positioned two cars outside the tavern.

Past midnight, Connie Hughes got into his car and drove toward the Mystic River Bridge. He didn’t notice his tail and paid the toll. The Winter Hill cars blew through the toll booth, drove up on both sides of Connie and fired 60 times at the car. Two bullets hit him in the head, fatally. Joe Barboza probably pulled at least one of the triggers.

Stevie Hughes knew he was outnumbered. So Stevie Hughes reached out to the gang to make peace. It was too late.

On a late September day in 1966, Stevie Hughes and a loan shark named Sammy Lindenbaum had just finished lunch after collecting money in Lawrence. They were driving along Route 114 two miles from Middleton when a black sedan suddenly appeared. The passenger side window slid down and a gun peeked out. The gunman — either Stevie Flemmi or Cadillac Frank Salemme — fired and hit Lindenbaum in the hand. He lost control of the car, which headed toward an embankment. Stevie Hughes reached for his gun, but a hail of bullets stopped him. The car slid down the embankment into a swamp. Hughes and Lindenbaum died, but Lindenbaum’s two little dogs survived by hiding under a seat.

End of the Boston Irish Gang War

The death of Stevie Hughes didn’t end the gang warfare. Patriarca’s thugs would finish off other gangs that didn’t pay tribute, and squabbles broke out among various young hoods. But the death of the Hughes brothers finished the McLaughlin gang

Howie Winter took over the McLean gang. When he died, Whitey Bulger succeeded him.

Bobo Petricone

After Buddy McLean killed Bernie McLaughlin, Bobo Petricone got out of town. He flipped a coin – heads Miami, tails California – and it came up tails.

He went to Hollywood, lost weight and took acting lessons from another Bostonian from a tough neighborhood — Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy taught him to get rid of his Boston accent. Petricone lost a lot of weight and changed his name to Alex Rocco. He then auditioned for the role of Moe Greene in The Godfather.

The Godfather’s director, Francis Ford Coppola, liked what he saw. He said, “Great, I’ve found my Jew.” Petricone – soon to be Alex Rocco — said, “But Mr. Coppola, I’m Italian.”

He played Jews ever since, he once said. He died in 2015 of natural causes.

Discover the history of Irish people through the lens of food with this captivating book. Filled with recipes, stories, and traditions, readers will gain a deeper understanding of their heritage and culture. An Amazon #1 New Release, available in paperback and as an ebook.

This story last updated in 2023.

Moe Greene By https://godfather.fandom.com/wiki/Moe_Greene, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60892600. Buddy McLean By https://www.flickr.com/photos/somervillepubliclibrary/44879116402/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65373904.

With thanks to Animal: The Bloody Rise and Fall of the Mob’s Most Feared Assassin by Casey Sherman.

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The Outrageous Comical Brown Comes to Town

If you live in a New England town with town hall, a school, a church or an opera house, chances are good it was visited at least once by the outrageous showman William B. Brown, better known as Comical Brown.

Comical Brown

Born in 1833 in Lancaster, Mass., into a Quaker family, as a child he prepared to become a shoemaker. But at 16 his musical talent took him in a different direction. He began performing small concerts on the violin to help support his blind father. It set the direction for the next 45 years of his life.

At first he took small parts in minstrel shows and regularly performed in the stage play Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the book of the same name. By the mid-1860s, however, he hit the road as a headliner. An advance man would work the towns on Brown’s calendar, appearing a few days in advance to plaster the town with fliers and newspaper notices for “That Comical Brown!” show.

His act consisted of a number of humorous monologues in which he took the role of cranky, old Yankee or warm-hearted Irishman. He joked with the crowd while spinning yarns and songs designed to draw laughs or groans. Mixed in, he played the violin and turned the stage over to other members of his small troop.

His other acts included Frank Hayden, boy soprano; E.A. Marsh, contralto, singing the Star Spangled Banner; or a trained dog act featuring Scottie and Prince Charlie doing tricks.

As Brown traveled from town to town, he updated his material each year or two so it was fresh whenever he rolled into town. He brought the fun of the vaudeville stage to the small towns of New England and beyond for a remarkable 45 years.

Comical Brown Makes ‘Em Laugh

In 1885 Brown compiled some of his best material and published it as Comical Brown’s Songster – equal parts cornball observations and slyly racy songs. Male/female relationships, man’s personal foibles, the temperance society and other timely topics were staples of his comedy. This number, Of Course It’s No Business of Mine, surely raised the rafters when he belted it out:

Now, for instance, at Mrs. Montgomery’s,
Every afternoon, just about three,
When her husband is out at his business,
A gent with moustache comes to tea.

He stays till half-past eight o’clock,
For the husband don’t get home till nine;
Now I’d like to know what he does there!
But then it’s no business of mine.

Across the way lives dear Miss Baxter,
A nice, dashing, handsome young girl;
Who, for the last twelve months or so,
Has been flirting with Mr. Fitz-Furl;

They say she is going to be married,
Well, I must say I think it is time;
For, if she’s not married, she’d ought to be,
But then it’s no business of mine.

I met Lucy Bell t’other evening,
With her nephew going out for a walk,
And, of course, as soon as she saw me,
She stopped and began a long talk

All about her dear little nephew,
Who she said was between eight and nine,
But some say it isn’t her nephew,
But then it’s no business of mine.

At Mrs. Fitz-Snooks’, round the corner,
Last evening I heard such a din,
And found that she’d not paid her rent,
So the Sheriff they quickly brought in.

I don’t know what she does with her money,
Though her nose always redly does shine,
I think that she spends it for brandy,
But of course it’s no business of mine.

Comical Brown Hits a Sour Note

Contralto E.A. Marsh costumed for The Daughter of the Regiment. (Library of Congress)

The indignities of the comedy circuit were many. The show had to go on each night in a new town, regardless of weather. Comical Brown’s critics suggested there was good reason he never played the same venue two nights in a row: because once the audience heard his act they would warn their neighbors not to bother.

One particularly joyless stop came in Charlton, Mass. where Brown was forced to play in a church rather than the town hall, which had burned. He churned out his music and jokes to a stone-faced audience, whose members were too intimidated by the church sexton glaring from the rear of the church to even crack a smile.

Over the years, Comical Brown moved around New England, living in Somerville, Mass. and Rutland and Barre in Vermont. As he grew older there were hints that he was slipping, though he was still much loved. The Saint Johnsbury Caledonian reported in 1891, “Comical Brown played to a large audience at the Opera House Thanksgiving night. Everybody was kept in good humor and though Brown is not as good as he used to be, he still makes folks laugh.”

Comical Brown’s career finally ended in 1893. At the age of 60 he was found unconscious at a Boston train station, possibly headed for his next concert. He died at the nearby hospital leaving behind a widow and two daughters. His death was reported as far away as California.

The Afterlife

The Comical Brown act lived on for more than a decade after Brown’s death in the form of the “Comical Brown Concert and Comedy Company.” It was also “billed as Comical Brown’s Old Show with a replacement cast.” Finally, his act became synonymous with outdated, stale jokes. Into the 1920s, if someone told a particularly unfunny, old joke, the proper response was, “That’s a great one. I think I remember Comical Brown using it.”

In 1909 Brown’s career was eulogized by Broadway playwright Stanley Rosenfeld in the comedy-drama The Barnstormer, about the star of one-man show traveling to backwoods towns in the waning days of his career. It was not a hit.

This story was updated in 2022.

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How the Mark Twain Library Started With Books He Defaced

The Mark Twain Library in Redding, Conn., started with 200 books donated by local resident Mark Twain – books he’d scribbled over with comments, praise, criticism and corrections.

Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens

He read widely, which you’d expect from a writer, and his books include novels, biography, poetry, history and adventure.

He donated books he liked, books that didn’t belong to him and books he hated. You might wonder why someone who started a library in his own name would want to fill it with lousy books. But Mark Twain, never short of words, had a reason:

“The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good,” he wrote. “Only the mediocre is unendurable.”

The Mark Twain Library

Mark Twain left his house in Hartford in 1891 when he suffered financial reverses. He and his family traveled in Europe, where he raised money lecturing and lived more cheaply. He didn’t return to the house after his 24-year-old daughter Susy died because he couldn’t bear the reminders of her.

Stormfield, Twain’s house in Redding

Two years before he died in 1910, Mark Twain moved to a villa he built in Redding, Conn. He called it Stormfield because his book, Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, paid for it.

Five months after he moved in, he and his neighbors formed the Mark Twain Library Association. He raised money for it by charging his houseguests to retrieve their luggage. He also prevailed upon them to donate books as well. His daughter Clara, an opera singer, held a benefit concert for the library.

The Mark Twain Library

In classic fashion, Twain announced that a local farmer, Theodore Adams, would donate the land for the Mark Twain Library. Theodore Adams hadn’t actually agreed to donate the land yet, but he did anyway.

Twain’s youngest daughter Jean lived with him in a farmhouse on the Stormfield property. When she died tragically – most likely of an epileptic seizure – Twain sold the land and gave the $6,000 proceeds to build the Jean L. Clemens Memorial Building.

His daughter Clara donated several thousand more books from the family library after Mark Twain died in 1910.

Marginalia

Mark Twain couldn’t keep his opinions to himself, and recorded them in the margins of his books. He disagreed with President William McKinley’s imperialism in a book called The Philippine Problem. The author wrote McKinley became convinced that ‘it was the will of the people’ that the United States “should acquire the Philippines.’ Twain would have none of it. He scribbled, “If McK had opposed it, these empty heads would have applauded that. He put imperialism into them, and they responded.”

Twain mocked a book called Saratoga 1901 by Melville Landon. Calling it ‘The Droolings of an Idiot,’ he noted the stolen jokes throughout and on page 104 wrote, “Hear this humbug, this sham, deliver himself.”

Twain carried on a running debate with a woman named Mary Somerville throughout her memoits. On page 125, the author described how she smuggled some antiquities out of Pompeii. Twain wrote, “Evidently Mrs. S. thinks there are kinds of immorality which are not immoral.”

Grammar

Mark Twain was a stickler for good grammar, and even rectified his friend Rudyard Kipling’s grammatical errors in his books. Robert Louis Stevenson stood corrected by Twain, as well.

He criticizes an author for writing, “A long procession of angelic beings move in procession” by noting sarcastically, “of course a procession moves in procession.”

Lew Wallace, an Autobiography, by the Civil War general who wrote Ben Hur, did not impress Twain. In the inscription, he wrote, “The English of this book is incorrect & slovenly & its diction, as a rule, barren of distinction. I wonder what “Ben Hur” is like.”

What Did He Like?

Not every book donated to the Mark Twain Library contained the author’s acerbic comments. He admired the poet Robert Browning, for example, and he marked up the poems with cues to help him read them for the most dramatic effect.

Twain also liked The Arctic Traveller by Hans Hendrik, an adventure story. “A very valuable book – and unique,” he wrote.

Books that belonged to his daughters had loving inscriptions in them. His daughter Jean loved animals, and his library includes her books about wildlife. Birds of Eastern North America, is inscribed, “To Jean Clemens with her Father’s love.”

The books are still at the Mark Twain Library, but you can see some of his comments here.

The Mark Twain Library can be found at 439 Redding Road, Redding, Conn.

This story last updated in 2022.

Image: Mark Twain Library By Aab254 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71297666.

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When the Pickwick Club Collapse Killed 44 in Boston, the Charleston Took the Blame

At 3 a.m. on July 4, 1925, 50 couples crowded onto the dance floor of the Pickwick Club in Boston’s Chinatown, kicking their heels while dancing the Charleston. They were tripping the light fantastic ‘like folks gone mad,” a club singer later said.

Moments later the Pickwick Club came crashing down, killing 44 and injuring scores more. It was the worst disaster to strike Boston until then.

Though fire, rain and an excavation next door weakened the Pickwick Club, many believed the Charleston caused the building’s collapse.

Workmen clearing debris from the collapsed Pickwick Club.

City officials, including Mayor James Michael Curley, thought the old five-story building couldn’t withstand the unnatural pounding of the dancers’ feet. Some cities banned the Charleston altogether, going so far as to post signs saying, “This Building Cannot Withstand the Charleston.”

The Charleston got the nickname ‘Dance of Death.’

The Pickwick Club Disaster

The boisterous crowd at the Pickwick Club in Boston’s Combat Zone celebrated the Fourth of July in exuberant Jazz Age style, drinking (illegally–Prohibition was in effect), eating and dancing the Charleston. It was a revolutionary dance, a break from the past because it allowed partners to separate from each other.

The Pickwick Club was located at 6 Beach St. in Boston’s Chinatown. Here’s how it looks today. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

A fight had broken out earlier, and police arrested one of the belligerents. Men lit little firecrackers to make the women jump. Patrolman Benjamin Alexander had gone into the club, looking for a jewel thief. He would not come out alive.

The four-piece orchestra just finished playing The Twelfth St. Rag, when one of the musicians spoke up.

“Aren’t these lights getting dim?” he said. The porter then pointed out sand sifting down from the ceiling.

The lights went dark, what sounded like fireworks crackled, a women cried out and the floor suddenly dropped. There was an awful crash and a huge gap opened in the floor.

“With a roar that was heard for blocks, the second and third floors were carried down into the basement with their cargo of dead and dying,” newspapers reported.

Two patrolmen heard the roar, and looking back saw dust rising from the ruined building. They pulled several people from the building as the walls and staircase still quaked.

The Dead and Dying

Help came immediately. Within 15 minutes flood lights were trained on the wreckage. Police officers and firefighters searched the timbers and flooring amid the wrenching cries of injured people trapped under beams and bricks. A fleet of ambulances raced back and forth, carrying the injured from the ruined building to nearby hospitals.

A Charleston contest in St. Louis, 1925.

Doctors arrived on the scene. Dr. Michael McGarty amputated a man’s finger to free him, but only after lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke into the victim’s mouth. He had begged for a cigarette before the doctor cut off his finger.

Priests came to provide conditional absolution to the dead and dying as firefighters took off their helmets and kneeled. Rescuers found most of the bodies 15 to 20 feet below street level.

Rescuers heard the cries of Edith Jordan, a 28-year-old newlywed from Somerville buried under four feet of brick and plaster. A beam lay across her chest and two dead people on her legs. Hours later, rescue workers managed to dig a tunnel to her and take her out on a stretcher. She died soon after arriving at City Hospital. Her husband also suffered injuries in the collapse, but survived.

Patrolman Alexander and another police officer died in the Pickwick Club disaster. So did several popular boxers and a man indicted for gas bombing the Rhode Island state Senate Chamber the year before. Most of the dead had only reached their 20s or 30s.

Charleston Blamed

At the time, dance halls were linked with Satan. Reformers like the Rev. John Roach Straton argued that dancing led to immorality.

Newspapers reported the PIckwick Club collapsed because ‘the newest crazy dance step causes vibrations which give the stamping heels of an average couple the destructive force of a giant twenty times their weight.’

Boston city officials tried to shut down two other nightclubs where people danced the Charleston.

Local officials then banned the Charleston across the country. In Kansas City, officials pronounced, “The Charleston dance may shake the foundations of public morality all it wants to, but when it weakens the foundations of buildings housing dance floors, it ought to be stopped.”

What Caused the Pickwick Club Collapse

The real cause of the collapse was a dangerously weakened building undermined by excavation for a garage in the next lot.

A fire had broken out in the Pickwick Club building in April, and only a thin board and tar paper comprised the roof. Rainstorms had weakened the often-overcrowded building.

Three days before the building collapse, a rainstorm blew off part of the roof and a hole was chopped in the floor to let water drain into the basement.

The next day, Boston’s building inspector inspected the building and pronounced it safe.

A grand jury charged 10 men with manslaughter, including building contractors, building inspectors and the president of the Pickwick Club.

During the trial, witnesses testified the collapse was caused by a lack of bracing and the pressure of excavated earth against one side of the wall. The engineer who supervised the construction of the Panama Canal testified a collapsed pier was made of the ‘rottenest concrete’ he had ever seen. Another witness said the fire damaged 50 supporting timbers and a side wall

The jury acquitted all 10 accused men.

The tragedy inspired a ballad, The Pickwick Club Tragedy, much asthe Wilton Meetinghouse Collapse inspired a ballad 150 years earlier. (You can listen to it here),

The collapse is credited with inspiring two H.P. Lovecraft short stories, The Horror at Red Hook and He, written within three months of the Pickwick Club Tragedy.

Images: Chinatown Today By Ingfbruno – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27497701. Charleston contest courtesy Missouri Historical Society Photographs and Prints Collection via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Frederick Small Commits the Imperfect Murder of 1916

Frederick Small, an awful little man, thought of himself as an astute businessman. He wasn’t.

An abusive husband, he thought he committed the perfect murder when he killed his third wife in a remote lakeside cottage.

He didn’t.

Florence Small, 3rd wife of Frederick Small

His sister-in-law was afraid of him. She said he used to stretch out his hand and say, “There is a hand capable of anything.”

Except getting away with murder.

Frederick Small, Serial Husband

Frederick Small

He was born in 1869 in Portland, Maine, and attended local schools.

At 20, he married Nettie Davis of Minot, Maine, and set up a grocery business. Nettie died in childbirth and his business failed, so he moved to Boston to try his luck there.

The Boston Globe later described Frederick Small as undersized, crippled in one leg and altogether inconspicuous — but also noted he had figured prominently in the newspapers over a score of years.

Throughout his checkered career, Frederick Small had filed a sensational divorce case and fallen victim to three mysterious fires.

When he first came to Boston he took a series of lowly jobs — as a hotel clerk, a waiter and a chef. In 1893 he finally found his calling and began to dabble in real estate. After he made some commissions, he opened an office and played the stock market with some success.

On July 31, 1899, he married Laura Patterson of Everett, Mass., and moved to the Boston suburb of Somerville.

The next year a farm he leased in Hudson, Mass., burned down after two fires mysteriously started on the premises in one day. Small had insured the property heavily, but investigations found nothing.

Sensational Divorce

In 1909, Frederick Small’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. His real estate debts caught up with him, and to make up for his deficits he sued his wife. Laura Patterson Small had carried on an affair with Arthur Soden, president of the Boston Braves, railway magnate and ex-president of the Boston City Club.

Boston City Club

Frederick Small sued Soden, and after a three-year trial he got his divorce and a $10,000 settlement. The judge excoriated the Smalls from the bench.

The judge said Laura Small needed “no great inducement to be led astray.” He called Frederick Small “an indifferent husband” who knew his wife was cheating on him but didn’t care because he could profit by it.

Smooth, Suave, Agreeable

In 1913, Frederick Small took a rest cure at a farm in Southboro, Mass. Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Curry and her two daughters ran the big old place.

Mrs. Curry called him “smooth, suave and agreeable,” and he won the heart of her daughter Florence.

Two weeks after he arrived in Southboro, Frederick Small married Florence Curry. He quickly seized control of the family’s property, turned Mrs. Curry and her other daughter out of the house and took Florence to a lonely cottage in Ossipee, N.H.

The day they left Massachusetts, his Southboro property went up in flames. He was accused of leaving a delayed-action incendiary device behind, but no one ever proved it. Small collected $10,000 in insurance money.

Ossipee

The Small cottage before the fire

In Ossipee, Frederick Small presented himself as a successful retired stockbroker. He spent much of his time tinkering in his workshop, trying to come up with an invention that would make him a fortune.

Florence led a lonely and miserable existence. Her husband cut her off from her family and her religion. Her sister visited once and said she feared him so much she slept with a paper knife under her pillow. Florence told her Frederick Small drugged her.

He once beat her with a bootjack and threatened the doctor who came to tend her wounds. Their neighbors grew accustomed to hearing her screams across the lake.

Ossipee Lake

Florence Small was 12 years younger, three inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than her husband. Still she put up with his abuse.

Once, while boating on Lake Ossipee, Florence fell into the water. She felt certain her husband would let her drown until another boater came along. Frederick Small then made a great show of rescuing her. To top it off, he tried to get a Carnegie medal for saving her life.

On Sept. 28, 1916, Frederick Small summoned a coachman, George Kennett, to pick him up at 3:30 pm and take him to the railroad station. Frederick Small said he had to go to Boston to check on his investments. He waited outside for the coach. When Kennett arrived, Frederick Small yelled goodbye to his wife and climbed into the coach.

At the station, Small joined Edwin Conner, a local schoolteacher and insurance agent who had sold him a $20,000 life insurance policy on him and his wife. Conner had insisted that both Florence and Frederick Small sign the policy. He also sold Small a $3,000 policy on the cottage.

Fire

The two men checked into a Boston hotel and Frederick Small mailed Florence a postcard at 8:40 pm. Then he and Conner saw a movie. At midnight they returned to the hotel. The desk clerk told him his cottage was on fire and he should call right away.

Small and Conner raced back to Ossipee in a hired car. When he reached the smoldering ruins of the cottage, Small broke down, apparently inconsolable.

A search party found Florence Small’s head and torso in the basement. The flames had spared them because she fell through the burning floor into several inches of lake water in the basement.

When told, Frederick Small responded, “You mean there’s enough to be buried?”

A Person of Interest

People from Ossipee heading to Small’s hearing

Someone had made sure Florence Small died. The murderer strangled her, shot her in the head and bludgeoned her face into a bloody pulp.

The medical examiner, George P. Magrath, noticed a strange substance on her body that ultimately explained the unusual intensity of the fire. It was slag left by thermite, a welding compound used by railroads. When investigators searching through the burned cottage found a Colt .32 that belonged to Frederick Small, he became a person of interest in the murder.

Arrest and Trial

Small protested he’d been a hundred miles away when the fire broke out. But further investigation produced an alarm clock with wires and spark plugs attached, and the grocer reported he’d delivered five gallons of kerosene to Small’s cottage just before the fire.

Small, hoping the power of suggestion would work on George Kennett, insisted the coachman had seen him kiss his wife goodbye. Kennett firmly maintained he had only seen Small shout goodbye into the house.

Examination of Florence Small found her lunch in her stomach, which indicated she died hours before the fire.

Small was arrested and tried at the brand-new Carroll County Courthouse in Ossipee. On Jan. 8, 1917, a jury found Frederick Small guilty of murder.

Insisting on his innocence, Small sought a new trial. New Hampshire’s attorney general reported, “the facts were too plain and abhorrent to be misunderstood.”

Frederick Small was hanged on Jan. 15, 1918 in Concord Prison.

Photos courtesy Tamworth and Ossipee Historical Societies except for Ossipee Lake, By Ken Gallager at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17976952.. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Heroic Last-Minute Rescue of the Old South Meeting House

Of all the dramatic events that took place at Boston’s Old South Meeting House, the battle to save it from destruction in 1876 was one of the hardest fought.

The Old South Meeting House in its early days as a museum. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

The odds against saving the revered building seemed impossible. The very concept of historic preservation hadn’t taken hold in New England yet. Old South sat on very valuable land, though it had fallen into a shabby artifact, the sidewalk in front of it crowded with peddlers and hawkers.

And time ran very short.

At the last minute, Boston’s 19^th century leaders stepped in to save the legacy of their 18^th century forbears. They used the same tools to save the Old South Meeting House as those that had made it historic: rhetoric, organization, patriotism and civic action. And they couldn’t have done it without the ladies.

It was the first successful effort to preserve a historic building in New England – and one of the first in the United States.

Old South Meeting House

The Puritans built Old South Meeting House in 1729. Judge Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for taking part in the Salem Witch Trials there. Benjamin Franklin was baptized on the site. Phyllis Wheatley thought about freedom while attending services at Old South.

Samuel Adams by John Singleton Copley.

In the run-up to the American Revolution, colonists often gathered at the Old South Meeting House to protest British rule. At a time when only 20,000 people lived in Boston, overflowing crowds came to hear James Otis, Joseph Warren, John Hancock and Samuel Adams denounce the tea tax, impressment and the Boston Massacre.

On Dec. 16, 1773, 4,000 angry colonists showed up at Faneuil Hall to discuss the tea crisis. Faneuil Hall couldn’t hold them all, so as many as 6,000 gathered at Old South. Then they adjourned to Griffin’s Wharf for the Boston Tea Party.

Samuel Adams understood the historical importance of the old Puritan meeting house. “The transactions at Liberty Tree were treated with scorn and ridicule,” he wrote, “but when they heard of the resolutions in the Old South Meeting-house, the place whence the orders issued for the removal of the troops in 1770, they put on grave countenances.”

The British Got It

The British understood its importance, too. During the Siege of Boston, the British vandalized symbols of the patriotic cause. They stole William Bradford‘s 1620 manuscript Of Plymouth Plantation, hidden in Old South’s tower. And they turned the Old South Meeting House into a riding school for Gen. John Burgoyne. They gutted the interior, burned the pews and dumped loads of dirt and gravel on the floor. It took eight years to restore the building.

Lowell Warren, once president of the Old South Association, said, “My wife swears she can still smell the British horses in the stairwell.”

Old South Meeting House, American Revolution interior in Boston. Licensed under PD-US via Wikipedia.

A century later the Old South Meeting House narrowly escaped destruction when the Great Fire of 1872 swept through Boston. The conflagration burned 65 acres of the city, destroyed 776 buildings and killed 30 people.

“I heard the Old South clock strike,” said an eyewitness. “I don’t know what hour, and I know the thought came into my mind that perhaps it would never strike again.” Only the timely arrival of a fire engine from Portsmouth, N.H., saved the old building.

Old South Meeting House Sold

After the Great Fire. The Old South Meeting House is in the background. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

Snobbery almost destroyed what a raging inferno could not. By 1877, the neighborhood had grown crowded and noisy. The congregation decided to build a new church in the fashionable new Back Bay neighborhood. They moved historic artifacts, including the bell, into the New Old South Meeting House and put up the land under Old South for sale.

The building itself sold at auction on June 8, 1876 for $1,350 – the value of its parts. The spire was covered with copper, and the building contained a lot of lead. Removal was to be completed within 60 days.

All seemed lost. The clock had been removed, the masonry was under attack and copper was being taken from the building. Then George W. Simmons & Son, prominent Boston businessmen, stepped in and bought the right to hold the building uninjured for seven days. Simmons posted these words on the clock tower:

The Eleventh Hour!

Men and Women of Massachusetts!

Does Boston desire the humiliation which is to-day a part of her history since she has allowed the memorial to be sold under the hammer”

Shall the Old South Be Saved?

Simmons bought just enough time so others could organize the fight. On the sixth day, his son helped arrange an extraordinary public gathering at the old meeting house. Every seat was filled, and in the gallery sat the ladies of Boston.

They had a daunting challenge. They needed to raise $400,000, an enormous sum, to buy the land on which the meeting house stood.

Wendell Phillips

Several people spoke, and then abolitionist crusader Wendell Phillips took the platform and gave the speech of his lifetime. An eyewitness reported on the remarkable oration:

Wendell Phillips, by Matthew Brady

The memories of the past crowded to his mind, and he spoke as if pleading for the life of one condemned unjustly. The mantle of the Revolution seemed to have fallen upon him, and he appeared to be the natural successor of Samuel Adams.

(Read the speech here.)

Then and there, the people of Boston started a fund to save the Old South Meeting House and collected several thousand dollars on the spot.

20 Ladies of Boston

On July 13, 1876, the congregation’s leaders agreed to postpone the sale of Old South for two months, but the buyers had to come up with $420,000 and ask for no further delay.

It seemed an impossible task, as Boston’s wealthy citizens were in the country or at the seashore during the summer. What’s more, there was no precedent. No historic building had ever been saved from destruction in New England.

Then the ladies stepped in.

Twenty wealthy Boston women bought the building for $3,500, more than twice what the owner had paid for its scrap value. They proposed to restore Old South, and to move it somewhere if the land couldn’t be purchased.

The Old South Meeting House in 1898

For a while nothing seemed to happen. Then one summer day the fire department put the old clock back in the tower, but the public couldn’t understand how or why. Then on Oct. 18, 1876, the papers passed for the preservationists to buy the Old South Meeting House. They paid a down payment of $100,000, and took a first mortgage of $225,000 and a second mortgage of $75,000.

Eventually the donor of the $100,000 down payment was revealed: Mary Tileston Hemenway, the wealthiest woman in Boston. Her husband had died in July on a trip to Cuba.

A Look at History

“American history is to us the most interesting and the most important history in the world, if we would only open our eyes to it and look at it in the right way,” she said. “I will help people to look at it in the right way.”

Still, the hawkers and peddlers had to be thrown out and the building had to be cleaned and restored. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes,Sr., and Louisa May Alcott took to the meeting house stage to plead for support. Others plunged into a frenzy of meetings, crafts fairs, balls and poetry-writing to raise money.

Membership on a committee to restore the Old South Meeting House became a status symbol. “Not to have been a member of some committee, proves you to be of the common people,” commented a newspaper writer.

Mary Sawyer Tyler, then living in Somerville, sold bits of wool for the cause. Sixty years earlier she had been a Massachusetts farm girl whose little lamb followed her to school one day. Mary Had A Little Lamb was by then a well-known poem. Mary still had two pairs of stockings knit from the lamb’s fleece. So she unraveled them, cut them into short pieces, attached them to cards with her autograph on them and sold them.

Old South Meeting House Saved

On April 9, 1877, a great ball was held in the Boston Music Hall. It was ‘one of the most extensive and elegant balls ever given in Massachusetts,’ and it raised $2,500.

The Old South Association formed and opened the Old South Meeting House as a museum in 1877. It then launched an educational program in American history and citizenship. It also published primary documents from American history as Old South Leaflets. Students from all over the country and the world came to “Children’s Hour” activities, Young People’s Lectures and essay contests.

Old South clock being painted, early 20th century. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Painting the Old South clock, early 20th century. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

They’re still coming. The Old South Meeting House is open daily from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm. For more information click here.

With thanks to History of the Old South Meeting-house in Boston, Volume 50; Volume 282, By Everett Watson Burdett. This story about Old South Meeting House was updated in 2022.

Images: Old South interior By Daderot – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76947597.

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