John J. Curry

John J. Curry '19 looks more like a watchmaker than a city manager. He likes precision, but is neither a scientist, nor even a politician, student of government. For Curry, the new top man in Cambridge's government, has been for 28 years of his life a school teacher and tutor.

Curry's appointment materialized swiftly after a majority of the city councillors banded together to oust the aging reform manager John B. Atkinson who began bitterly fighting council policies. "As a matter of fact," recalls Curry, "when a councillor first suggested that I take the job, I thought he was joking. It was beyond my wildest dreams of fancy." Now the man who once tutored undergraduates in languages is the $20,000-a-year manager of one of the largest cities in Massachusetts, a position nationally respected and studied by students of government everywhere.

"I was born in Cambridge, I've lived all my life in Cambridge, and I'll probably die in Cambridge. Period." That, he will tell you, is his life history. He went to Harvard after graduating from local public schools. His education was interrupted during the First World War. He enlisted in the army as a private, leaving as a buck sergent, but he never heard the noise of battle; instead he hastily taught soldiers the fine points of the supply corps.

After five months of this, he returned to College and graduated with a cum laude in Romance Languages. Even though he never planned to be a municipal administrator, he devoted much of his curriculum to courses in government and economics; he had enough courses in economics to get a degree in this department. In his second year, he competed for the Baldwin Prize in local government and submitted a paper entitled "Country Government in Massachusetts" in which he concluded that "it simply should be abolished."

After his appointment as City Manager, some city councillors issued a press release to reporters outlining Curry's past career which for some reason, accidental or otherwise, ommitted the five years of his life from graduation in 1919 until 1924 when he became a Harvard Square tutor. He quite frankly admits that these years were not successful. "A group of men had a good idea," he says. "What they wanted to do was to set up a market along the lines of the present super markets. But after a short time we found we didn't have enough finance to continue so I gave up and went into teaching."

Following this unsuccessful foray into business, Curry received a permanent appointment in the Cambridge public school system and there he remained until this year. On the outside he tutored students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in foreign languages. "I would spend the first ten minutes of each session explaining to reluctant engineers why they should study a foreign language."

Until the late '30s he tutored at the New Preparatory School. "I did a tremendous amount of tutoring. Very frequently I would teach mornings in the public schools, tutor all afternoon at New Preparatory, and instruct individuals in the evening so when you find me working in City Hall at 9 o'clock at night, it's not unusual."

But while reviewing his life Curry broke off for a moment. "But this is all boasting. After all, we're all pretty simple fellows and there is no sense glorifying ourselves."

During the Depression years, he changed jobs quickly: 1929, head of the Spanish and French departments of the local high school; 1930, junior master of Boston Latin School ("Since everyone there was called a 'junior master' the title didn't mean anything"); 1931, master (one of 15) of a grammar school; 1936, transferred to Roberts Grammar School, where he remained until this summer.

All the while he continued tutoring, and one of his pupils later became a city councillor and the man who nominated Curry for City Manager. He was Edward A. Crane '35. "As far as he was concerned," Curry remembers, "it was merely a question of whether he was going to get 94 or 98 in his college entrance exam." In 1930 he received a Master of Education degree from Harvard and would have obtained his Ph.D. here also if it were not for the University's requirement that a student must spend half his time in residence. So instead he went to Boston College for the degree. "I think it was a good idea to go to a school like Boston College," he states, "because then you hobnob with people of different ideas."

Although his main love is teaching, he likes the administrative side of education, and even has built himself a snug philosophy to justify his dual role as teacher-administrator. "When you're an administrator," he contends, "you tend to think of yourself as the best teacher in the school, but if you do some teaching at the same time, you can deflate yourself quite easily. You find that you can put a class to sleep as fast as anyone else."

Curry stopped tutoring at the New Prep about four years before the College made it illegal for students to receive outside assistance during the college year. From then on he devoted his main energies toward running the Roberts Grammar School.

Although he told newsmen after his election as manager that he was "politically inexperienced," he showed that he possessed quite a bit of political intuition or at least political instinct. He salved one of the major irritations produced by his predecessor: the lack of laison between manager and council. With fond memories of his tutoring school days, he told the councillors that he would gladly devote as much time as necessary toward informing them about everything in the city administration and simultaneously he warned the heads of the different city departments not to become wary or frightened by his prying because "I'm an eternal questioner."

But his main ambition is to "work in a businesslike way. I have no desire to play with Cambridge politics," he states, "and if I have to bend with the political winds, I'm going to have tough sailing." So far, these political winds have been faint rustlings, but observes Curry with a shrewd grin, "maybe I'm on an enforced honeymoon."