There were other, even more highly personalized elements: Curry's refusal to appoint Councillor Bernard Goldberg's father as city soliciter, and Councillor William Maher's brush with Crane and Curry in a dispute that followed his unsuccessful campaign in 1963. With the deep personality splits and with Crane's deep personal attachment to Curry, the prospect of compromise was slim in the beginning and almost non-existent by the end.

Substantive Issues

To cite these personal frictions, however, is not to deny that there were substantive issues dividing the two groups. The majority claimed that Curry had failed to provide the City with sufficiently energetic leadership. Publically, they criticized his slowness on capital improvements, and privately they complained that he had been reluctant to appoint a top-level assistant city manager to help in the job. They felt that Curry had taken on too much for himself; and, as a result, important tasks were being left either undone or half-done.

On the Council floor, another issue emerged: Curry had kept the tax rate relativly low, and last year actually cut it by $0.60 (from $72.60 to $72). The Curry supporters pounded this accomplishment in session after session, but the majority felt--although they rarely said so in public--that the low rate had only been achieved at the sacrifice of attention to services and slowness on capital improvements. The Curry supporters also emphasized the high pay scales of Cambridge's public employees.

The former manager's philosophy, so strongly lauded by his supporters, may be supplanted when DeGuglielmo takes over. The most important questions of the entire dispute may arise from their contrasting views. For although no one would deny the desireability of improved services or more capital improvements--supported by DeGuglielmo--the nagging question remains: how much more are people willing to pay for them?

Curry's supporters raised other problems. How should a city manager be selected? Should the man seek the job (as DeGuglielmo had done), or should the job seek the man? But these issues, as well as most others, were lost in hours of debate over parliamentary procedure and the details of political dealing. Lost also, it seems, were some of the deeper structural causes of the controversy.