Curley Cue

"Our friend here will go places--perhaps he will be the next mayor of Boston," rumbled Boston's convivial Mayor James Michael Curley at a wedding party for a boyish, promising lieutenant named Maurice J. Tobin in 1932. Last week as James Michael Curley, fresh from the Governor ship of Massachusetts and an unsuccessful campaign for the U. S. Senate, tried to capture his Boston bailiwick for the fourth time, his prediction came bitterly true.

The strongest ally of "Boston's Original Roosevelt Man" has in the past been Boston's non-partisan election law, which provides for no primary to weed out contenders, and usually produces enough can didates, to split the Curley opposition. Soliciting the anti-Curley vote this time was an ambitious aggregation which by last week had sifted down to Maurice J. Tobin (a member of the Boston School Committee), onetime (1926-29) Republican Mayor Malcolm Ex Nichols and Democratic District Attorney William J. Foley, besides two lesser candidates, one of whom withdrew his name too late to get it off the ballot.

Candidate Foley advertised in the news papers that his three principal rivals, including Boss Curley himself, were only a deceptive front for New England Tele phone & Telegraph Co., which Candidate Tobin until recently worked for as a divi sion manager. Charged with the duty of deciding for his Back Bay votes which among the contestants was the least of four evils, Republican Leader Henry Parkman, Jr., who in the last mayoral election came in a poor fourth with 29,000, finally settled on Candidate Tobin. That many another anti-Curley Bostonian had done likewise appeared when young Maurice Tobin rolled up 105,212 votes to old Jim Curley's 80,376, left Candidates Nichols and Foley trailing surprisingly far to the rear.

Even more stunned by 36-year-old Maurice Tobin's victory over him than he was by his Senatorial trimming at the hands of 34-year-old Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., 62-year-old Jim Curley, his golden voice hoarse, prepared to depart for the West Indies. To reporters who intimated that he had received a second unmistakable cue for his political exit, the old boss parried: "I will decide what to do next when I have had a rest and my vision is clear."

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