To try to ascertain how Father Drinan and the Bulger family may have got to know each other in the 1953 to 1954 period I looked at what the family was doing around that time. Whitey’s next younger brother was Bill. He finished up his first year at Boston College in 1953. He then volunteered for the draft. He served in the Army from September 1953 to August 1955. He was stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey and the last eighteen months at Fort Bliss, Texas. It is difficult to see any relationship developing between him and Drinan in the months July and August of 1953.
The matriarch of the family was Jean Bulger. She and the children were actively involved in St. Monica’s Catholic Church across from the John A. Andrew School in South Boston. The oldest of her children was a girl named Jean. Whitey was the second oldest. It seems to me that because of the tragedy suffered by Jean who was born in May 1928 Father Drinan became close with the family. As noted earlier, Father Drinan included in his ministry during this time period “military bases.”
Jean married six-foot-six inch Joe Toomey who was also from South Boston. He graduated from South Boston High School in 1945 and went on to graduate from West Point in 1949. He was commissioned a second lieutenant. He would go to Korea where he led an infantry platoon. On October 20, 1950, the Korean Casualty list put out by the Army reported that he was wounded. The Boston Globe reported on November 6, 1950, that he had received the Silver Star for carrying a wounded man 300 yards while under enemy fire near Waegwan, South Korea. On December 13, 1950, he was reported as missing in action.
On August 14, 1953, it was reported the Army had “identified 121 American soldiers reported by the Communists to have died in Red prison camps.” Joseph Toomey was listed as one of them. He died in captivity in 1951 of malnutrition. A funeral mass was said for him at St Monica’s Church on October 24, 1953. It could very well have been that brought Father Drinan who may have heard of this to minister to the family to ease their pain and offer comfort.
Whitey was arrested several months after Bill came home from his military duty on March 4, 1956, by a score of FBI agents at a Revere nightclub. A federal warrant had been issued in January charging him with bank robberies. The Globe article discussing the arrest noted he was previously arrested in 1948 for attempted criminal assault and in 1952 for attempting to steal a beer truck. The outcome of those arrests did not result in an incarceration nor does it appear a conviction.
The Feds had him cold. His fellow robbers had turned state’s evidence against him. He worked out a deal with them where they would not charge his girlfriend who was with him during the robberies. He would plead guilty. He did. At the age of 26 he was hit with a sentence of 20 years in June 1956.
According to one article, “Two days after Bulger was sentenced to 20 years in prison, while locked up at a local jail while awaiting transfer to a federal penitentiary, he wrote to Drinan, congratulating him on his recent appointment as dean of Boston College Law School and thanking him for visiting him recently.” If true, then it is clear Father Drinan knew Whitey prior to that time.
Abe … Comes reeling in !!!
What a Constitution .
Like Rasputin this guy !!!
“Like Rasputin this guy !!!”
He’s in the gene pool. Nothing I can do about it. I had no say.
Wa-llahi! Nobody pushed you guys into the Trump clown car. You jumped in of your own accords. Kick yourselves in the ass, and, enjoy the ride. It’s all down hill from here on. I’m hoping Glorious Leader’s demise is not a drawn out affair. Problems overseas could reach in, deus ex machina, providing him with an escape from the trap. The closer Trump draws to justice, the more pressing will be his need for war. Considering the risks attendant to attacking N Korea, and/or, Iran, my bet is, he’ll dream up an excuse to invade Venezuela. It’s been fairly well established that Trump’s a blustering coward. He picks on the weak. Not that the people of Venezuela wouldn’t fiercely defend their soil, they would. Unfortunately, the military resources of America far out weigh those of Venezuela. The USA would invade from Colombia, one of our Latin American puppet states. Glorious Leader covets Venezuelan oil wealth. He’d think it an easy score. Trump’s the kind of guy who’d shoot somebody just to see if his gun works.
I understand that someone recently proved with absolute certainty that Ted Kennedy is innocent. Mary Jo apparently was driving alone when the car went into the drink.
I had a friend that always called Attleboro “Glorious Attleboro”. Thoughts?
He never reels it in !!!
Zippity do dah, zippity day, my, my, my, what a wonderful day! Manafort convicted, and, Cohen rolls. Glorious Leader is sweating bullets. His bonds are tightening. The trap is creaking. Glorious Leader anticipates the weightless moment before “Trump” is yanked out of existence . I’ve been most impatient, worse than a Trot, to see the fall of Trump, but, witnessing the first sparks of an impending social revolution is worth the enduring the endless, deplorable, delays.
Soon, Bill, soon.
Crime don’t pay. As in ‘pick up the check’. This is nothing for Trump. Nothing.
Abe: It’s more than picking up the check. Trump’s clearly implicated in a felony. Glorious Leader didn’t look too well at his last rally. I’m surprised he didn’t call on his followers to arm themselves, and, save him from his just desserts. How many neo-fascists will take up the gun to defend their Glorious Leader? Do any of you guys believe he’s worth saving? Why?
Trump, and, his minions, will look natty in horizontally broad striped suits. They’ll make marvelous celebrity inmates. The BOP should start designing their luxury suites, immediately. No time to waste. I’m thinking some red, white, and, blue bunting, hung on the facade of the intake building at Lewisburg PI would make an appropriately patriotic welcome.
Ha ha !!! …. Yes, more cowbell !!! Abe
“We have to use curse words, or call them curs, or worse.”
MUSIC !!!
More cowbell!
Please send refreshments to the man in the red sweater presently holding forth in the Speaker’s Corner !!!
JOHN BULL
Fascinating history.
It fits well into the true history, the big picture, which, of course, the MSM liberal-leftists at the Globe, and other biased “reporters”, namely the calumniating columnist and radio-talk-trash-show host, the harlot-howlette, who mocks the dead and dying, Howie Cur, Mr. Smear, Mr. Schadenfreude himself, and his Globie pals Cullen and Lehr, two other Mr. Smears, who all now disavow and smear each other as they have blithely smeared many over the years and falsified and distorted the record, the true facts and history over the years.
Good research and writing, Matt.
P.S. Note Bene: I confess to the sin of DETRACTION (saying bad things, even if true, about others) and I will try to amend my ways and moderate my pen in this regard . . .
…but sometimes someone has to call a spade a spade and speak out against character assassins and stand up against bullies and give the Smear Artists a taste of their own medicine. Don’t we all? Or do we decide to still our pens, remain silent, and let the false hoods rule the airways and presses. Do we take up pens and arms and end the tyranny, as the Bard asked?
Yes, it seems to me, we have a duty to set the record straight and oppose the mendacious merchants of menace, the manipulators of prose, rhyme, reason and logic, the biased leftist-liberal editor-columnists (or biased rightists), the ingenious linguistic gymnasts who spin fabrications “no hunger in the Ukraine” or “weapons of mass destruction” or “rogue agents” or who like judges who cite precedents then refuse to follow them or like Florida Judge Rosenberg who thinks she’s Alice in Wonderland where statutory words are infinitely malleable to mean whatever she wants them to mean and Statutes of Limitation don’t matter and whether evidence is not presented at trial on a crime’s essential elements (as the Trial Judge stated) doesn’t matter to her and whether someone is 1,500 miles away from where a crime is committed doesn’t matter to her and her ilk. . .nothing matters but her twisted sister opinion, and she like so many judges and editors and columnists and reporters in this day and age twist and spin and whirl like the whirling Dervishes . . .and the malefactors who muddy waters, the malevolent who murder reputations, the malicious who pillory and prosecute for kicks . . .
Yes we must oppose them . . .we must oppose them and call them out, the high and the mighty, too . . . .the powerful too, for the sake of the powerless, too, but also for the simple sake of telling the truth, the facts, like it is, like they are and like they were . . . “to present our true account, lest He returning chide. Doth God exact day labor light denied? And Patience to prevent that murmur soon replied: God doth not need Man, nor his works; His Kingdom is stately; Thousands at his bidding speed and post o’er land sea with haste. They also serve who only stand and wait.” John Milton, On his blindness. And we also serve by putting pen to paper, even from our humble guard posts, and posting here, there, hitherto and yon.
But . . .to finish this thought, this stream of consciousness as James Joyce might define it . . .perhaps, in doing so, in opposing the errant, the wrongful and hurtful and blindly erroneous, and in opposing the worse: the egregiously willfully erroneous and the maliciously malevolent , perhaps in opposing any and all in error, we don’t have to use curse words or call them curs or worse. Perhaps, if we can’t refrain from detraction, we can detract without vilifying those in error, unless those in error truly are villainous, as some are.
Well, Bill, you could just say that as a Christian Man you favor the Good and reject the Evil. We know that about you and that is fine. But as Jung pointed out it can become a dismemberment of Mankind into either valuable or worthless beings. Is that sort of why you want to reel it in a bit?
Many years ago I got stoned and read Faust and got scared shitless.