Furcolo Residence

792 Grand Avenue (DEMOLISHED)

Photo: Foster Furcolo and his wife Kay shake hands with female supporters while campaigning for governor in 1956. Courtesy of *Boston Public Library*.

In the early 1900s, 792 Grand Avenue was the abode of two prominent Italian-American politicians, including a future governor of Massachusetts who began his career as a friend and ally of John F. Kennedy and later became a noted rival.

Future Massachusetts Governor John Foster Furcolo was born at 792 Grand Avenue, near Jefferson Street, on July 29, 1911. At the time his father, Charles Lawrence Furcolo, who as a young boy immigrated to New Haven from the Avellino region of southern Italy, had recently graduated from Yale Medical School and was living with his wife Alberta and other family members, including brother Lorenzo, at the family home on Grand Avenue. Shortly after John Foster's birth, Dr. Charles Furcolo would move his family and medical practice to the Springfield, Massachusetts area, though John Foster would return to New Haven after his mother and father separated in the 1920s, and he attended high school in New Haven where he met his future wife Kathryn "Kay" Foran.

A gifted athlete as well as student, John Foster would go on to attend Yale College, where he played basketball and football, and was captain of the boxing team, followed by Yale Law School, where he took his law degree in 1932 before returning to western Massachusetts to practice law and begin his venture into electoral politics. In the 1940s, as his political career took off (he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts in 1946, the same incoming congressional 'class' as John F. Kennedy, with whom his political ascent would overlap for the next decade before a falling out in 1954), he dropped his first name and became known in his public roles simply as Foster Furcolo.

In 1957 Foster Furcolo became the 60th governor of Massachusetts and the first Italian-American to serve in that office. He served two terms until 1961. Furcolo was also an unsuccessful candidate twice for the United States Senate. In later life he resumed the practice of law and also authored several books of fiction and nonfiction. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1995.

John Foster's uncle Lorenzo Furcolo (1873-1950) continued to live at 792 Grand Avenue for many years. Lorenzo was a grocer and amateur inventor (he received a patent in 1908 for a type of non-refillable bottle) as well as a politician who represented New Haven in the Connecticut State Senate in the 1920s as a Republican. He died in 1950 and is buried in Saint Lawrence Cemetery in West Haven.