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One Place to Go. Inevitably, the O'Briens encountered and bitterly resented the anti-Irish feelings that gripped western Massachusetts—the Yankee-bred hostility toward immigrants, the Puritan suspicion of Roman Catholics, the NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs on the factory gates. "My father ran into bigotry," says Larry. "It made him a strong Democrat. It was one place for him to go. He wasn't wanted elsewhere." O'Brien Sr. became a Democratic Party organizer deep inside a Republican fastness. "It was the old story of the Irish immigrant becoming a citizen, a first voter and a politician at the same time," says his son. "I can remember my father coming back home from the '24 convention. He brought us hats in the shape of teapots."
The O'Brien kitchen became a political headquarters, and Democratic leaders from Boston made their way there—notably, flamboyant James Michael Curley, archetype of The Last Hurrah breed, and smooth-tongued David Ignatius Walsh, first Irishman ever elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. Walsh was some times a trial: whenever he paid a call, he insisted on quizzing Larry on his American history and catechism. But Curley was another, headier cup of tea: as a bug-eyed boy, Larry listened spellbound as his father and Curley conspired like Sinn Feiners about the ways to break the hated Yankee Republican grip on western Massachusetts. And always there was a recurrent theme: "Our kitchen used to be the place where some of the boys would meet, and my father would say: 'All right, now we'll get the signatures.' It was organizational politics, signatures on petitions, door-to-door canvassing. He was a great one for planning—all the things I wound up being involved in myself."
In 1932, when Larry was a part-time helper in Springfield's Democratic headquarters and his father was a state committeeman from western Massachusetts, the O'Briens defied their Irish Catholic neighbors and supported Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, instead of Al Smith, who was the local favorite. O'Brien Sr. was denied a seat in the Massachusetts delegation for his heresy, but history proved that Father knew best.
When he was 20, Larry started taking night-school courses at the Springfield branch of Northeastern University (Jack Kennedy was a Harvard sophomore that year). He graduated in 1942 with an LL.B., but he had never had any real notion of practicing law: "If there had been a course in practical politics, I'd have taken that." He was, in fact, getting all the practical politics he could absorb—accompanying his father around the state, stumping for Curley and every other Democratic candidate in sight, and chinning with ward heelers over the mahogany bar in his father's restaurant. At 22, Larry was a rush-hour bartender in O'Brien's Café and Restaurant and chairman of his political ward. That same year he ran for office for the only time in his life—and was elected president of the Hotel & Restaurant Employees Union.