'The Dude'

The political juggernaut did not start auspiciously. Before he was 11 years old, Michael Andrew Sullivan had lost both his parents.

His mother died of an illness. His father was killed in an accident. A brother also died, drowning in the Charles River.

His aunt, a widow with six kids of her own, took young Mickey and his three siblings in. She supported them by running a boarding house at the corner of Plympton and Mt. Auburn Street, the location of the new Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel.

Sullivan's formal education ended in the fifth grade, and he got his first job at age 12 driving a six-horse team. In his early teens, Harvard students hung his nickname on him. Undergraduates dressed Mickey up in a tuxedo, and called him "the Dude." It stuck.

Sullivan worked hard, and by the time he was elected to the city council, he had built his own small trucking business.

On the council, he was natural, except for one thing. He suffered from asthma, and often had to use an inhaler before getting up in front of the council.

Despite his lack of a formal education, Mickey "could debate anyone on the council floor, no matter who he was," his son Edward says.

"The Dude" had a devious sense of humor. In 1948, when the councillors were struggling to elect a mayor, Sullivan created a moment of levity by placing an egg in fellow councillor Hyman Pill's pocket, hoping that it would break when Pill sat down. The egg story made the pages of Life magazine.

Mickey would also routinely joke about paving over Harvard Yard and melting down the John Harvard statue for the World War II effort.

It was during Sullivan's first days of service, during the Great Depression, that Mickey began practicing the brand of patronage politics that would become a family hallmark.

In the Depression, people used to line up outside the Sullivan house to seek city jobs from his father, Edward Sullivan recalls.

Fred R. Cruickshank, a longtime friend of the Sullivan family, says his mother used to tell him a story about a lady who had met "Mickey the Dude" in city hall outside the welfare office.

Mickey did not know the woman, but when she told him that the welfare man wasn't doing anything for her, the city councillor said he'd take care of it. Sullivan then "laid the welfare man out in lather," according to Cruickshank.

Cruickshank also says the family frequently took in people with no place to sleep for the night. "There was always someone living in their house," he says.