Galvin serves as the publicity director for the New York-based NORAID, an Irish American group fundraising organization which raises money for the families of Irish republican prisoners, but is also accused by the American, British, and Irish governments to be a front for the supply of weapons to the Provisional Irish Republican Army
Galvin becomes a publisher of The Irish People in the 1980s. He is banned from Northern Ireland because of a speech he gives that seems to endorse terrorism. In August 1984 he defies the ban and enters Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland. The following year he returns to Northern Ireland to attend a funeral for an IRA member killed when a makeshift grenade launcher he is trying to fire at a Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks explodes. In 1989 Galvin is arrested and deported for violating the exclusion ban yet again.
Born to an Irish immigrant family on July 10, 1897, in Philadelphia, Diamond becomes a leading figure in organized crime during the Prohibition era. He establishes liquor-smuggling enterprises in New York City and upstate New York, where he lives for a time after shooting and killing men in his Hotsy Totsy club.
After his mother’s death, Diamond moves with his father and brother to Brooklyn, New York. Growing up impoverished, he turns to street gangs and becomes involved in theft and violent crime as a teen. He later begins to work for gangsters Arnold Rothstein and Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen.
The Prohibition era begins in 1920. With alcohol smuggling a profitable underworld enterprise, Diamond organizes truck heists to seize liquor for his speakeasies. In 1923, he orders the murder of mob boss Nathan “Kid Dropper” Kaplan and usurps power in the world of organized crime for himself, aligning himself with mobsters like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz. Diamond and Schultz would later become rivals.
Diamond sets up shop as an extremely violent and murderous figure. He earns his “Legs” nickname either due to his quickness when running from a scene of larceny or because of his prodigious dancing skills. He also marries Alice Schiffer in 1926. She remains devoted to him through his strings of crime and mistresses, which includes a notable affair with Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Kiki Roberts.
After a 1929 incident where Diamond publicly kills men in his Hotsy Totsy nightclub, authorities are unable to make the case stick due to the harassment and murder of witnesses. Looking to lie low, Diamond moves to Acra in upstate New York, where he sets up a huge beer-smuggling business.
During the course of his mob career, Diamond is shot on many occasions, receiving hospital treatment and recovering each time, earning the nickname “Clay Pigeon.”
In April 1931, near Catskill, New York, Diamond and colleagues hijack a truck with applejack liquor driven by Gordon Parks, whom they kidnap and torture. Parks survives and manages to reach the police. Diamond is arrested for the attack but later is acquitted in a December trial.
Diamond celebrates his acquittal days later with Roberts and returns drunk to his Albany residence. Early that morning, on December 18, 1931, he is shot and killed. He is buried at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens on December 23. There is no church service or graveside ceremony. Two hundred family and spectators attend Diamond’s interment, however no criminal figures are spotted.
The mystery remains as to who is behind the killing. Biographer William Kennedy speculates that Diamond was taken out by Albany police via an order from political leader Dan O’Connell. Others say rival gangsters were behind the murder.
On July 1, 1933, Diamond’s widow, Alice Kenny Diamond, is found shot to death in her Brooklyn apartment. It is speculated that she is shot by Diamond’s enemies to keep her quiet.
(From: “Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond Biography” by the Editors of Biography.com, April 2, 2014)
James Michael Curley, American Democratic Party politician and one of the best known and most colourful big-city Democratic bosses, dies in Boston, Massachusetts on November 12, 1958. He dominated Boston politics throughout the first half of the 20th century.
Curley’s father, Michael Curley, a juvenile petty criminal, leaves Oughterard, County Galway, at the age of fourteen. He settles in Roxbury, an Irish immigrant neighborhood in Boston.
Curley never forgets the needs of new immigrants, and he owes much of his political success to serving those needs in exchange for votes. He enters politics in 1899, winning a seat on the Boston common council. In 1904 he is imprisoned briefly for impersonating a friend at a civil service examination.
Curley serves in a succession of elective capacities—as a state legislator, alderman, city councilman, and U.S. representative—before winning the mayoralty in 1914, resigning his congressional seat to assume the municipal office.
Curley centralizes the powers of patronage in his own hands and distributes public-works jobs in such a way as to retain the loyalty and support of his working-class electoral base. As mayor, he nearly brings the city to bankruptcy by spending enormous sums on parks and hospitals to satisfy his various constituencies. He is a gifted orator and a resourceful political campaigner. He loses his bid for reelection in 1918, wins in 1922, loses in 1926, and wins again in 1930.
Unable to win a seat in the Massachusetts delegation to the 1932 Democratic National Convention in 1932, Curley contrives by means he never explains to be elected a delegate from Puerto Rico. He supports the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but national party leaders look upon the controversial Curley as something of an embarrassment. As governor of Massachusetts from 1935 to 1937, he spends New Deal funds lavishly on roads, bridges, and other public works programs. He is out of elective office from 1938 to 1942, during which period he loses bids for the United States Senate, mayor, and governor. He wins a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 1942, however, and is reelected two years later. He follows with another tenure as mayor of Boston (1947–50) but spends five months of his term in federal prison following a conviction for mail fraud. President Harry S. Truman secures his release and, in 1950, grants him a full pardon.
Curley, who has foiled an attempt by the Republican Party to have him replaced while he is in prison, retires from politics after losing reelection bids in 1950 and 1954. His career inspires Edwin O’Connor’s popular novel The Last Hurrah (1956), and the next year Curley’s best-selling autobiography, I’d Do It Again, is published.
James Curley dies in Boston, Massachusetts on November 12, 1958. His death is followed by one of the largest funerals in the city’s history. He is interred in Old Calvary Cemetery.
Allgood joins Inghinidhe na hÉireann (“Daughters of Ireland”), where she first begins to study drama under the direction of Maud Gonne and William Fay. She begins her acting career at the Abbey Theatre and is in the opening of the Irish National Theatre Society. Her first big role is in December 1904 at the opening of Lady Gregory‘s Spreading the News. By 1905 she is a full-time actress, touring England and North America.
In 1915 Allgood is cast as the lead in Peg o’ My Heart which tours Australia and New Zealand in 1916. She marries her leading man, Gerald Henson, in September 1916 in Melbourne, however, her happiness is short lived. She gives birth to a daughter named Mary in January 1918, who dies just a day later. Her husband dies of influenza during an outbreak in November 1918. After her return to Ireland she continues to perform at the Abbey Theatre. Her most memorable performance is in Seán O’Casey‘s Juno and the Paycock in 1923. She wins acclaim in London when she plays Bessie Burgess in O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1926.
Allgood is frequently featured in early Alfred Hitchcock films, such as Blackmail (1929), Juno and the Paycock (1930), and Sabotage (1936). She also has a significant role in Storm in a Teacup (1937).
(Note: Many accounts give October 31, 1879 as her date of birth. Her headstone also gives 1879 as her year of birth. However, her sister Margaret is born on August 1, 1879, meaning she could not have been born in that year. Sara Allgood may have been born on October 31, 1880 but her parents may have been late registering her.)
Brennan enters private practice in New Jersey and serves in the United States Army during World War II. He is appointed to the Supreme Court of New Jersey in 1951. After his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court by Eisenhower in 1956, he wins Senate confirmation the following year.
On the Supreme Court, Brennan is known for his outspoken progressive views, including opposition to the death penalty and support for abortion rights. He authors several landmark case opinions, including Baker v. Carr, establishing the “one person, one vote” principle, and New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which requires “actual malice” in libel suits brought by public officials. Due to his ability to shape a wide variety of opinions and “bargain” for votes in many cases, he is considered to be among the Court’s most influential members. Justice Antonin Scalia calls Brennan “probably the most influential Justice of the [20th] century.”
Sullivan is born on September 28, 1901 in Harlem, New York City, the son of Elizabeth F. (née Smith) and Peter Arthur Sullivan, a customs house employee, and grows up in Port Chester, New York. He is a gifted athlete in high school, earning 12 athletic letters at Port Chester High School.
Sullivan lands his first job at The Port Chester Daily Item, a local newspaper for which he had written sports news while in high school and then joins the paper full-time after graduation. In 1919, he joins The Hartford Post. The newspaper folds in his first week there but he lands another job on The New York Evening Mail as a sports reporter. After The Evening Mail closes in 1923, he bounced through a series of news jobs. In 1927, he joins The Evening Graphic as sports writer and eventually sports editor. In 1929, when Walter Winchell moves to the New York Daily Mirror, he is made Broadway columnist.
Throughout his career as a columnist, Sullivan dabbles in entertainment, producing vaudeville shows with which he appears as master of ceremonies in the 1920s and 1930s, directing a radio program over the original WABC (now WCBS) and organizing benefit reviews for various causes. In 1941, he is host of the Summer Silver Theater, a variety program on CBS radio, with Will Bradley as bandleader and a guest star featured each week.
In 1948, producer Marlo Lewis gets the CBS network to hire Sullivan to do a weekly Sunday night TV variety show, Toast of the Town, which later becomes The Ed Sullivan Show. Debuting in June 1948, the show is originally broadcast from the Maxine Elliott’s Theatre on West 39th Street in New York City. In January 1953, it moves to CBS-TV Studio 50, at 1697 Broadway in New York City, which in 1967 is renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater. The theater is later the home of the Late Show with David Letterman and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Television critics initially give the new show and its host poor reviews.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Sullivan is a respected starmaker because of the number of performers who become household names after appearing on the show, including Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Dave Clark Five, B.J. Thomas and the Jackson Five. He has a knack for identifying and promoting top talent and pays a great deal of money to secure that talent for his show.
By 1971, the show’s ratings have plummeted. In an effort to refresh its lineup, CBS cancels the program along with some of its other longtime shows. Sullivan is angered and refuses to do a final show, although he remains with the network in various other capacities and hosts a 25th anniversary special in June 1973.
In early September 1974, X-rays reveal that Sullivan has an advanced growth of esophageal cancer. Doctors give him very little time to live and the family chooses to keep the diagnosis secret from him. Sullivan, still believing his ailment to be yet another complication from a long-standing battle with gastric ulcers, dies five weeks later on October 13, 1974, at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital. His funeral is attended by 3,000 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, on a cold, rainy day. He is interred in a crypt at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
Embury’s parents are members of the colony of Germans that emigrate from the Palatinate to Ireland early in the eighteenth century, and in which Methodism co-founder John Wesley labors with great success. The colony forms from refugees from the War of the Spanish Succession. Embury is educated at a school near Ballingrane and learns the carpentry trade. He is converted on Christmas day 1752, becomes a local preacher at Court-Matrix in 1758 and marries Margaret Switzer that fall.
In 1760, due to rising rents and scarce land, he goes to New York City and works as a school teacher. In common with his fellow emigrants, he begins to lose interest in religious matters and does not preach in New York until 1766 when, moved by the reproaches of his cousin Barbara Heck, sometimes called the “mother of American Methodism,” he begins to hold services first in his own house on Barrack Street, now Park Place, and then in a rigging loft on what is now William Street. The congregation thus forms what is probably the first Methodist congregation in the United States, though it is a disputed question whether precedence should not be given to Robert Strawbridge, who begins laboring in Maryland about this time. Before this, he and Barbara Heck worship along with other Irish Palatines at Trinity Church in Manhattan, where three of his children are baptized.
The first Methodist church is built under Embury’s charge in 1768, in association with Thomas Webb and others, on the site of the present John Street United Methodist Church. He himself works on the building as a carpenter and afterward preaches there gratuitously. In 1769, preachers sent out by John Wesley arrive in New York City, and Embury goes to work in the vicinity of Albany at Camden Valley, New York, where he continues to work at his trade during the week and preaches every Sunday. He and several others receive a grant of 8,000 acres to develop for the manufacture of linen. He organizes among Irish emigrants at Ashgrove, near Camden Valley, the first Methodist society within the bounds of what becomes the flourishing and influential Troy Conference.
Philip Embury dies suddenly in Camden, New York in August 1775, in consequence of an accident in mowing. He is buried on a neighboring farm but in 1832 his remains are removed to Ashgrove churchyard and in 1866 to Woodland cemetery, Cambridge, New York, where a monument to him is unveiled in 1873, with an address by BishopMatthew Simpson.
(Pictured: Portrait of Philip Embury by John Barnes, Salem, 1773)
Martin J. Galvin, Irish American lawyer, publisher and activist, and former director of NORAID, is born on January 8, 1950 supposedly in Long Island, New York, although he may have been born in the Republic of Ireland as he once, during an interview with 60 Minutes, refers to the “partition of the country of my birth.”
