Nows and Forevers

This is the first time, I think, that a member of my father’s family ever made the front page of a newspaper. And above the fold!

I got this a few weeks ago from my father, who had gotten it from my aunt who was cleaning out stuff that hadn’t been touched since the 1930s. This is the Boston Daily Record, the front page of June 6, 1929. My grandfather, Edward A. Gough, was the “Newton Boy First Prize ESSAY WINNER!” and, just below the big Rum Trial headline, that’s his picture looking all studious.

The caption: “First Prize Winner in Daily Record’s schoolboy essay contest. Edward Gough, 17, junior in the High School of Our Lady, Newton, shown reading over his prize contribution. Young Gough wins a $500 first year scholarship in any college he may select.”

This was a huge deal. It allowed him to be the first member of his family to go to college. He would later be able to pull his own parents out of poverty, pay for his four kids to go to college (and some graduate school), have a summer house along the Massachusetts coast and travel around Europe with my grandmother. Each of his four grandkids went to college, and his great-grandkids are starting to now, too. All from this.

Not bad for the only son of immigrants from near Belfast, Northern Ireland, and he grew up in abject poverty at a time when Newton was anything but a tony suburb. He lived with his parents and grandparents on Silver Lake Avenue in a house that is, the last time I checked, still there. This helped him pay for his first year of Boston College, which allowed him a foot in the door to his future. The essay, “What My School Means to My Community,” got him a job as a part-time reporter for the Daily Record. He paid for the rest of college by joining the National Guard, taking odd jobs, and, this is impossible but true, boxing.

But this is where I think it began, where a poor Irish Catholic kid could achieve the American Dream. I know he was incredibly smart and industrious. He was fluent in French and German, which would end up being perfect for his Army service after D-Day. He was a magna cum laude graduate of BC, got a master’s degree in social work from BC and then also got a master’s from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Except that it wasn’t the Kennedy School of Government when he was there: JFK was one of his classmates. And he designed and built the summer house three generations of his family grew up in in Marshfield, Massachusetts.

It’s also interesting, the date of this paper. June 6 would end up a crucial day in my grandfather’s life. This, of course. And then, 15 years later, he’d wake up on the morning of June 6, 1944, as a U.S. Army officer about to go ashore on D-Day.