14 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
made his mark as a tough little prize fighter. By the time Gorton was dis-
charged, he had acquired some self-discipline to match all that energy.
theonso g Rt of gLoucesteR found themselves in dire straits in 1923
when Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Blackshirts gained control of Italy. For
the greater good of the new Roman Empire, Il Duce’s government confis-
cated a huge shipment of salt cod and refused to pay the bill. Gorton-Pew
Fisheries had a major cash-flow problem. State Street Bank & Trust Co. of
Boston snapped up the company. William Lowell Putnam, a well-known
Boston lawyer, became its president.^13
“My grandfather kept his job for life,” Senator Gorton says, “but my fa-
ther, who thought he was going to inherit the business because he was the
only male child, was sorely disappointed.” He became a mouthy junior
manager under the new ownership. (When he was finally able to move
back to Boston, successful in his own right, the senator’s father refused to
do business with any bank or business related to the Putnam family, the
old-line Massachusetts investment bankers and lawyers he blamed for his
fate—although, truth be told, they’d done him a backhanded favor.)
Gorton’s father—“Tom” to his friends and “Slade” in the trade—knocked
around the fish business for Gorton-Pew for several years. He managed
the New York office and took
night-school classes in business
and economics. He also met the
senator’s feisty Louisiana-born
mother, Ruth Israel. His relation-
ship with Gorton-Pew, however,
was heading for the rocks. Man-
agement grew weary of a whipper-
snapper telling them they were
making an expensive mistake by
not applying for duty drawbacks,
the refund of Customs duties.
They shipped him off to Chicago.
Tom and Ruth’s first child,
Thomas Slade Gorton III—a slen-
der boy with inquisitive blue-gray
eyes—was born there on Jan. 8,
- He was always called Slade,
Slade as a toddler, 1929. Gorton
family album