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The Best Man. During World War II, O'Brien marked time unhappily as an Army sergeant at Massachusetts' Camp Edwards. His poor eyesight (20/400 vision) redlined him for combat duty. On one ten-day furlough he married Elva Brassard, the daughter of a Springfield house painter. They had courted sporadically for five years—on O'Brien's terms. "It was always going to political rallies, or running over to see what the city council was doing," recalls Elva O'Brien. "That was Larry's idea of a date." Their best man was Foster Furcolo, an old friend of O'Brien's and a political comer.
After the war, Larry O'Brien returned to Springfield to manage the O'Brien Realty Co.—which had grown to include a gas station and a parking lot in addition to the restaurant—and to get back into politics. In Best Man Foster Furcolo, Organizer O'Brien had a ready candidate. Having come up through the wards, Furcolo was ready for the big time, and O'Brien was eager to handle his campaign for Congress. With his usual attention to detail, he gridded the Second Massachusetts District into 60 units, recruited a corps of "secretaries," and kept a swarm of volunteers busy mailing campaign letters to their friends.
During that first Furcolo campaign, O'Brien devised many of the campaign techniques that later became standard operating procedure for John Kennedy's state and national efforts. But 1946 was a Republican year, and Furcolo was defeated by a scant 3,295 votes. As soon as the returns were in, O'Brien went methodically to work on the 1948 campaign. And in the second Furcolo race, O'Brien brought in a winner, with a 15,000 plurality. In gratitude, Foster Furcolo asked O'Brien to come to Washington as his administrative assistant. Two years later, the two friends came to a mysterious and bitter parting of the ways (neither man will reveal the reason), and Larry O'Brien came back to Springfield vowing that he had quit politics forever.