Wednesday, May 20, 2009

"Honey" Fitz on Brookline

Boston Mayor John F. Fitzgerald had this to say in a November 1913 State House speech welcoming the City and Town Planning Conference to Boston:

"[I]f you meet a citizen of any of these towns [Somerville, Everett, Malden, Medford, Arlington] abroad you will always find that they claim to come from Boston; the same is even true of our aristocratic sister Brookline, for, charming as Brookline is, it is unknown in Berlin, except perhaps as a suburb of the great city which so nearly surrounds it."[1]

Just a few months later, Fitzgerald's daughter Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and her husband Joseph would buy a house in Brookline where their son, the future president John F. Kennedy, would be born in 1917.

[1] from Letters and Speeches of the Honorable John F. Fitzgerald, Mayor of Boston, 1906-07, 1910-13, p. 161

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