David C. Tierney

My sister was born in 1943, October.  She had a habit of throwing her socks out of the crib, “booties” we called them.  I took to calling her Bootsie, and the name has stuck with her for some 70 years now.  A lot of people on Martha’s Vineyard know her only as Bootsie.   When Bootsie was about 4 years old she had a boy friend who lived just down the block.  Just past the Katanis’ fabulous lawn and brick mansion, slightly down the hill toward the Country Club in Arlington, Massachusetts, 15 miles from downtown Boston.  Andy Anderson was a pilot for Eastern Airlines and his 4 year old son, Andy Anderson Junior, had thick flaming orange hair.  The Andersons had an enormous house with a large and wholly fenced yard and the home was located on a low bluff, bordered by a fast road, beyond which was an 18 hole golf course and the Club.   On a spring day in the afternoon, I was in school and the maid (3 days a week) had the day off.  Dad was at work in the Harvard Club.  Mom was volunteering at the Heart Fund offices in Boston, something which she did from time to time and when there was the equivalent of “day care” that could take care of Bootsie.  My grandfather, Daniel, age 85, was at home.  Bootsie was down at the Andersons, playing in the huge yard with Andy Junior.  Shortly after lunch, the 2 kids found a place where the ground had sunk away from the fence and, out of sight from the porch, they slipped under the fence and went for a walk.   They slid down the bluff and walked along the fast and busy road.  Bootsie was walking behind Andy and she was struck from behind by a 10 ton trailer truck, traveling at about 50 miles per hour.  She flew a hundred feet through the air, landed on her forehead, and lay in a heap.  Drivers then cops collected, Mrs. Anderson came down from the house, and Bootsie went off in an ambulance to the local hospital (where she remained in a coma for months, eventually waking up and amazing everyone by being AOK but with a scar on her forehead to this day).

In Boston, at a time that had to be when the accident occurred, my mother put down her pencil, got up from her desk, went to her supervisor, and stated that she had to go home immediately “because my little girl has been hurt.”  Oh, said the supervisor, “did someone call to tell you?”  Mom said, “No, I just ‘know'”. She drove home, as she had the 1939 Buick convertible with her that day at the Heart Fund Offices.  She arrived to find only Grampie at the house on Falmoth Hill Road and she then drove straight to the local hospital in Arlington. She climbed the stairs, got off at the landing at floor 3, and asked the nurse for Marietta Tierney’s room…   No one could ever explain how it was that she had “known” to just leave work and come home or explain her going to the right hospital and the right floor.  It was just folklore in the family that she had a “gift” and no one made much of it or spoke much of it.

In 1957, I was 16.  I had worked three summers as a Dairy Queen iced-milk maker and soda jerk.  Now,in my senior year of High School, I was working two afternoons a week helping pump gasoline at a service station just across busy Route 3 from my father’s large restaurant, the Country Fare located at 1217 Main Street in Hingham Massachusetts.  It was just a moment after 5pm and almost time for me to quit and go home to supper at the family table in the front of the restaurant.  A drunk in a 1956 Blue Buick four door hardtop was speeding North and, just at the gravel apron driveway to my Dad’s Restaurant,  directly in front of the gas station, he sideswiped a green Pontiac,  hard.  It rolled over and over and across the gravel apron kicking up a huge amount of dust. Traffic snarled and my coworker, Gino, a former policeman from Colorado yelled to me, “get in the car”. Gino ran to his 1957 Chevie Black and White Impala 2 door.  When I ducked in, he swerved out of the Esso gas station, heading left and North, hot on the trail of the Buick’s hit and run driver.  As we headed up the long hill, Gino yelled, “get his number”.  I had no pencil and I had no paper – but I had a jackknife and my wallet.  When we passed 100 miles per hour, I was hard a work carving the number in my wallet.  About 7 or 8 minutes into the chase, we were right close behind the Buick, which was all over the road and doing 90 mph.  At about the border between Weymouth and Hingham, Route 3 takes a sudden and pronounced veer to the left.   The road veered – but the Buick did not.  At the far right edge of Route 3, there was an open and deep granite quarry.  The Buick made it quite far out into space before it went 65 feet down to the bottom of the quarry, essentially flatly pancaking on the rocks forming the bottom of the unused quarry.  We braked and the Chevie skidded to a stop at the edge of the road, up on the verge,  where we stood and watched the smashed Buick just starting to leak smoke.  Cars began to collect behind us.  Gino began to climb down the wall,  the blocks of the quarry where irregular cutting had left ledges. I followed and, in a moment, we were below and at the car. With windows smashed and doors crumpled, it was starting to leak smoke from the engine compartment and through the dash into the car, where two forms were crumpled in the front seat.  Gino hollered that I should go get the extinguisher.  I went up the wall of the quarry then down with the extinguisher and he flushed the small flames from the crumpled front of the car,  and then began breaking the safety glass windows on both sides with a large rock.  Flames began to lick from the bottom of the Buick and Gino reached in and pulled out the male driver, bloody and smelling of smoke and alcohol.  I took the woman.  We inched back up the wall with our “packages” and there were a lot of faces at the top of the quarry, with the sounds of sirens coming closer.  The Buick began to really burn and we struggled up.   And then I saw my mother.

She had been at dinner with my father at 5:15pm.  As he told it, she put down her fork.  She said:  “David is in trouble.  We have to go, right now”, and got up from the white table, walked ten steps to the doorway out of the restaurant, and walked out toward the car, standing looking North then South then North…  My Dad followed, his keys in hand.  They got into the old red 1948 Mercury 4 door that my Dad drove and she told him to go North on Route 3 (instead of South out the other driveway to Route 128.   They drove for about 15 minutes (at a sedate pace) till they came across the knot of people and police cars.  When I came climbing up over the lip of the quarry with the bloody form of the woman passenger in my arms and hands reached out for that woman, my Mom was standing a few people back, arms crossed, saying not a word.  I rode home with my folks an hour or so later.  My mother never talked about the incident – and but there were two other occasions which gave her a chance to exercise “the gift”, though the incidents involved less events, and both times involved my sister.  It didn’t always work.  When I was almost killed in 1981 December by a drunk driver in Phoenix, she had no “vibes” back on the East Coast in Hingham and she learned of it a day later on the phone.

The woman passenger lived and the male driver went to prison, as he had sideswiped more then one car driving drunk out of Plymouth, heading for Boston.   Gino came to a bad end after some events with a woman.  The quarry is still there and the road still has the bend to the left in it, as it did in late 1957.

In 1915, just after the start of the War to End All Wars, the one in which my father served in the Navy, a second child was born to Frank and Bessie Twining in the City of Torrington, Connecticut.  They had a small farm just 30 blocks from downtown. Frank delivered the U.S. mail but soon started at the brass mills operating a lathe.  The mills had poured and ladled, then ground, sanded, and polished metal parts for a hundred years.  Most of the guns used in the French Indian Wars, the Revolution, the War of 1812, and those used by the Union side in the Civil War had come from the towns and Cities up and down those small river valleys in Connecticut.  Rivers provided torque for gears and belts then lathes.  The forests provided endless wood for furnaces to melt the ore found in mountains from Kentucky to upstate New York. Grandpa Reynolds lived with the family of four, Bud having been born two years before Virginia.  Grandpa hunted and fished.  Bessie worked as a saleswoman in a small department store in the town of 4000 folks. By 1920 Frank had bought a big touring car. The family went on long twenty mile trips, hiked, Picknicked, boated.  Grandpa Reynolds could craft and make anything and once built a clock which kept good time when I visited in the mid forties.  Virginia was an avid reader, bright, appeared in school plays, went to Methodist church socials, and on turning 18 went off to school.  Torrington was a small Protestant community, almost no immigrants and almost no Catholics in town. Virginia went to Boston University and her brother Bud was at Babson Institue, also in Boston.  It was a long auto ride to Hartford, then a long train ride up to Boston.  Virginia graduated in the Class of 1937, having starred in school plays and earned top grades.  She applied for a secretarial job at Leverett House in Harvard University’s administration office.  Nearly 4 months later, a former Harvard football star who was managing the Harvard Business School dining halls across the Charles River came by about some payroll issues.  The paper landed on Virginia’s desk and pretty soon the Irish catholic fellow asked her out.  Her school friends didn’t really approve as he was 21 years older than she.  He changed jobs later in 1937, leaving the Harvard Business School dining halls to manage the Harvard Club in downtown Boston.  The club had purchased a large building at Commonwaelth Avenue and Marlborough, ten minutes away from the best homes on Beacon Hill.  Harvard guys ran the Banks, insurance, food supply companies, importing firms, and just about anything that made money in Boston.

It was remarkable that the the newer members of the club had voted to have an Irishman run the club, even if he had been a star football player and a well known coach at Harvard.  Club politics ebbed and flowed but it was a challenge twice a year to fend of the old guard Brahmins who wanted to throw the Mick out and revert to one of their own. The Harvard Club was where you stayed when in Boston if you were a Harvard guy, up from New York or Philadelphia.  In August of 1940, Virginia ( my mother) married Charles Tierney (my father).  Her parents were dubious and concerned for the age difference and especially for the religious difference.  My father bought a 1939 Buick convertible, a four bedroom house in Arlington, Massachusetts at 27 Falmouth Hill Lane, where his father Daniel would live with them, and the newlyweds went on honeymoon to Mexico City.  Entranced with the floating gardens of Xochimilco, they went boating day after day, failing to get to some sights North of Mexico City which they had meant to go visit.  I was born one year later, four months before Pearl Harbor, on August 18, 1941 in Cambridge at Mount Holyoke Hospital.

Grandfather Daniel had raised several siblings in the North End of Boston, as both his parents had died when he was 15.  Those siblings all had large families.  Daniel ran the candy store in the basement of Fanieul Hall, near the Centers of power in Boston.  He was friend to many Irish politicians and, in particular, Mayor Michael Curley.  Curley went in and out of power and once for three years he went to prison in Danbury, Conecticut.  He was always welcome Chez Tierney.  When I was a child, he would come in a huge shiny black car, sit in the living room, drink, and sing with my grandfather at the top of their lungs as my father played the piano in the living room and I watched from the second floor bannister.  In 1940, my father’s best man had been Dan H., a big beefy red faced irish fellow.  Dan H. had been a Boston College footballer with Dad in 1916, had a knack for mastering foreign languages, and had become an accountant.  In early 1940, he received an official looking letter which instructed him to appear at the US Post Office in Boston at a certain room.  When he complied, he met two men  from the OSS and the FBI.  They requested that he take a job in Chicago, join the German Bund, pass on information to them about Germans being brought into this country as spies, and eventually go overseas.  Dan told no one, as ordered, went to Chicago and rose fast in the Bund.  When World War 2 commenced, he was in Germany, working with the Nazis at the highest levels, and was labelled a traitor by his former neighbors in Boston.  My father alone resisted the rumors.  When Dan H. eventually  testified at Nuremberg and it was revealed that he had been a spy in Germany, people in the Irish community in Boston were amazed.  My father was not.

My father was drafted in 1941.  He reported (age 47).  The recruiting office allowed as how there had been an error in paperwork.  They were desperate for machinist mates ( his World War 1 status) but had missed his age in the files.  He ran the Harvard Club during World War 2, coping with shortages of meat and butter and gasoline.  My mother saved tin cans, raised a garden in the backyard,  hunted earnestly for metal toy cars for her son ( which could not be found anywhere), and kept house in Arlington with folks from the Club coming by any hour of any day.  They entertained often in the evening.

Grandfather Daniel Tierney travelled often to Boston by bus then subway.  He had friends working in the boats along the several piers off Atlantic Avenue in downtown Boston.  He would take me with him at age four or five, dressed in short pants, and a matching jacket and cap.  We would walk down T wharf and he would chat with the men on every trawler tied up to the pier, then take me though Haymarket Square to what used to be Scollay Square ( now Federal Centre and Quincy Market).  He would drink coffee with old friends then take the MTA back to Arlington, the bus to the foot of our street, then slowly (he was in his middle eighties) up the long hill to our house.

Dan H. Was given the rank of Commander in the Navy because of his OSS service during the war.  He stayed in the OSS til it became the CIA, then went on in the CIA til the mid sixties.  I visited him and his wife and son (who was in the Navy) in the early sixties in Virginia.  He spoke 20 languages, had run posts in Africa, and East Berlin, was on many lists written in hostile foreign languages.  I read his unpublished manuscript with secrets from dangerous post war years. He never forgot that, when his friends in Boston dammed his eyes as a traitor, my father had said to all who would listen it could not be so and there was something everyone was missing.  It was a lesson taught to me in the very early forties in my house:  you choose your friends by character.  If they have it, then you give them loyalty through all that then comes to happen.  Those choices, if well made, are to last for all time.  The war ended in 1945.  I remember my mother on her knees, picking rhubarb to make a pie, telling me slowly and gravely that the war was over – and that life was about to change.

Wow. Unexpected and invited gift – and a new challenge. I mean, what if I make typos and what if it is not that interesting? So, here is a start, an old story about my dad, Charles, born 1894 in the North end, then the Irish ghetto near where Logan airport is in Boston today. The Irish had just become so numerous by the end of the 1800’s and so organized that they were getting close to taking over the apparatus of the City of Boston – but it was still nearly 2 decades before that would occur. One by one, they were taking over the wards. As of 1916 my father enrolled in the only college that would accept the Irish, Boston College. He attended nights as a freshman. In the afternoons, he played football for B.C.His position was tackle and he was really good. They played with no pads and skintight leather helmets.
President Wilson gave in. The U.S. stopped just supplying shells and guns and meat to the Brits. Our army was tiny and essentially all on the Mexican border. The Navy was puny. Everyone enlisted. Training was minimal. My dad went into the Navy as a seaman, and promptly was selected for training to be a machinist’s mate on a hundred foot boat. He knew nothing about machinery. The boats were hastily mass produced and were crude things, designed to hunt subs in the North Atlantic. No aspic. No sonar. The plan was to cruise endlessly and spot a periscope (the other side didn’t have sonar either)… At that point, using signal flags, one rushed the boat to the site of the spotted periscope and four of the crew went to the stern. Depth charges were ashcan sized metal drums, packed with TNT, sealed tight and weighted. You wound up the ticker- fuse (setting it for 400 or 500 feet depths) then kicked the ashcan off the back of the boat. The boats had a crew of 18-20 and crude crew compartments. There were two 16 cylinder motors and they ran on gasoline and spewed out fumes.
Two years after the Halifax disaster ( where 5 munitions ships blew up in a Canadian harbor and flattened everything for 25 miles around) dad’s boat and a hundred others sailed for a Bermuda rendezvous with another hundred of the same. You fueled when a launch loaded with fifty gallon drums of gasoline pulled alongside and a pump and hose was inserted in a drum and some sailor turned the eggbeater handle and pumped gasoline up, cross deck, and into your tanks. With 200 boats in harbor, all needing gasoline to go to the Azores then North to Cobh (now Cork) in Southern Ireland, sloppy work on the fueling lanches led to a thick film of gas and oil on the harbor in Bermuda. Fire started late one afternoon and the slick burned furiously with choking smoke. All the boats were loaded with ashcan depth charges lashed to the decks. Every captain made haste to get out of harbor.
In Cobh (the Irish were still ruled by Britain and were giving the U.S. A Naval base there) the boats were three weeks out then I week at the base. Wherever they docked the boat, when the crew got liberty, my father was a favorite. He played the piano by ear and could play anything and could play for hours without repeating his repertoire. He did not drink so the others got free drinks while he played in bars in Ireland and in England. The usual duty was to sail East then North up through the Irish Sea, East again over the top of Britain, til on station in the Baltic, near Kiel, from which German submarines left to hunt merchant ships in the Atlantic which coming to supply the Brits and our tiny army, newly in France in the trenches. The boats operated in extreme cold with no insulated crew quarters. The Navy paid the Captains a sum to provision the boats so the crew could eat. The Captain of my dad’s boat was a drunk and a womanizer. He used up the food allowance for the crew on other pursuits and the crew was always short of food. Often, the duty was to minesweeper, as mines were sowed everywhere and were a constant danger. They were just a few feet below the surface, carefully weighted, attached to long chains with anchors below. Two of our boats would attach a chain to the stern, spread out a quarter mile apart, then proceed carefully into a minefield, spotters on the bow. The long chain would drag, then sever, the mines’ chains. The mines would bob up on the surface, floating free and pitching in the waves. A dozen boats would enter the wave-swept quarter mile full of bobbing mines. In ten degree weather, wearing pea coats, watch caps, and a mitten with one hole in it three of the crew were issued Winchester rifles and a box of ammunition. Standing on a pitching deck, they shot mines. When you hit a plunger on the mine, it exploded and a geyser of water went up.
My dad’s boat got lucky with a depth charge run. The U32 was damaged, came up onto the surface, and commenced a life or death deckgun duel with a half dozen of our boats. U32 had a 3 inch gun. Our boats had 2 inch guns each and ineffectual machine guns. My dad’s boat was hit. He worked down in the engine room which filled with choking fumes – but ceasing to man the engines was not an option. The black gang worked on in darkness and fumes to keep the boat operating and moving until U32 sank.
The boat then came down the English Channel and put in at a French port where there was a huge field hospital near the shore. Several sailors and my dad went ashore and checked in at the hospital, gassed by the fumes in the engine room from the boat having been damaged in the encounter with U32. Days passed. Bored, and feeling restored, the several crew members conferred then forged passes and went off base from the hospital to see the earlier and now emptied battlefields. The War was entering its close in 1918. The field hospital was immense and the crew members figured they would never be missed for few days.
Meanwhile, my father’s father (Daniel) operated a candy and cigars store in the basement of Fanieul Hall, equidistant from the Boston City Hall and the State Legislature, about five blocks from each. He was friends with Martin Lomasney, Honey Fitzgerald, and other Boston pols, later with Mayor Curley, who was not yet on scene. President Lowell of Harvard was debating on the front page of the Boston Globe with an unknown young law professor at Harvard Law School, one Felix Frankfurter. The dialogue was whether Harvard should admit Jews and Irish “on quota”. Debate was intense but then Lowell yielded and ’twas done. Daniel went to Lowell’s office and told Lowell that he had a great tackle that Lowell could have for the asking… producing some clippings raving about my father’s prowess on the gridiron. Lowell bit – and called a young under-secretary of the Navy, one Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt signed orders that Charles Tierney, as a matter of National security, was to be returned by ship immediately to the the Naval base in North Boston and discharged. The telegraphed orders reached France and hospital staff searched for Tierney, who could not be found for several days. When he was found, the Navy decided to make no issue of his having gotten lost for a few days… They simply shipped him home – before a hundred thousand doughboys waiting for their travel orders.
Charles Tierney’s paybook was lost but orders from Roosevelt resolved the snafu and he was discharged in time to report to the football squad in late 1918, class of 1922 at Harvard. It was a famous class at Harvard. On my wall in my office at home hangs the team picture from the 1919 Harvard Yale game. In white on the ball in front of the team, it says Harvard 9, Yale zero… In the top row, third from left is a clear eyed smiling Charles Tierney, starting a three year storied career as a star tackle. He later became the line coach at Harvard, and there is a fat book of rotogravure clippings to attest that he was a successful coach.
By the way, Frankfurter, Lowell, and Roosevelt went on to do pretty well in their own right. Charles Tierney finished at Harvard Football in 1929, went to Venezuela in ’29 on a venture involving buying Panama hats in bulk for resale to the U.S. , managed the Commander Hotel in Cambridge til 1933, managed the Harvard Business School dining halls til ’37, managed the Harvard Club in Boston from ’37 til ’51, owned and managed the Country Fare Restaurant in Hingham Massachusetts til ’62, died in 1988 at 94 years of age. In all the years after he left the Navy, he had difficulty whenever sitting in a darkened movie theatre, remembering a frightful few hours working on the engines in smoke and darkness, while his boat chased U32 around the surface of the Baltic hoping to survive a three inch deck gun’s pounding.
I saw the movie Unbroken today. It was a good account of young men doing difficult service in war. This is a story with some of the same content, just a little earlier in time.

Dave Tierney

UPDATE 12/26/14 by Sean: I haven’t taught my Dad how to use the multimedia features of WordPress yet so I’m appending these primary source materials. Below is a scan of the actual furlough order from Roosavelt that he mentioned.

And a few other awesome news clippings involving my grandfather:

• Charles Tierney has a life story like a story book
• Harvard begins to put its football fences in order
• Pic of Charles Tierney as sub center for Harvard
• “CT has exciting experiences in service – possesses unusual strengths”
• Bob Fisher names Charlie Tierney for coaching berth
• “one of the most dependable of the Cambridge forwards”