preferred that it had been a battleship.
The Colonel stood on the bridge of Ajax , smiling with pride while his guests debarked from half a dozen motorized tenders belonging to the ship. He watched with satisfaction as they were piped aboard with the same military formality that might have attended the real battleship Ajax .
The blue-green waters of Newport shimmered in the setting sun. The Colonel resisted an urge to step up to the glistening varnish and polished brass of the bridge panel and begin barking orders down the tube. Too grandiose a gesture even for him, since the captain, second officer, and several of the bridge crew all stood on deck watching the guests board.
The Colonel’s guests for this evening’s formal stag dinner represented the titans of American industry: steel barons, steamship owners, railroad magnates, mining czars, automobile and manufacturing kings, as well as practically every major broker with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
That he could command the attendance of such a stellar audience was a source of continuous conceit for the Colonel, because only one generation earlier his father, Shamus McGill O’Shaughnessy, had stepped off a cheap boat fleeing the Irish potato famine with a handful of royal crowns in his pocket. The timing was perfect—smack at the beginning of the American Civil War. After exchanging his coinage for what amounted to fifty dollars, the Colonel’s father used most of his American money to purchase things he believed U.S. troops might want in the field.
Before long he established himself as one of the most prominent sutlers with the Union Army. Afterward, with wads of greenbacks in his back pocket and after dropping the O from O’Shaughnessy, he became a lawyer, then a United States senator, and the owner of a vast codfish fleet. “Only in America,” the Colonel was fond of saying of his father, old Shamus McGill. And to hell with the so-called Boston aristocrats!
In 1898 that same son of old Shamus, the son who was standing now on the deck of the Ajax , raised a squadron of Massachusetts cavalry and led them hell-for-leather afoot up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. And follow Shaughnessy they did, struggling up as Spanish lead came raining down. Teddy Roosevelt may have ridden a horse, but the rest slogged up the hard way.
That was how he came to be called the “Colonel”—even though Shaughnessy was never officially ranked higher than captain. Nowadays, like all other upstanding industrialists, the Colonel detested Theodore Roosevelt and his Bull Moosers for their suicidal trustbusting and other inconveniences. His former friend and comrade-in-arms Roosevelt was definitely not one of the guests on the Ajax this evening, or any other evening, for that matter.
But the Colonel was still a Rough Rider and always would be. In his younger days he played polo but now contented himself with riding the Myopia Hunt. A crack shot, he went on African safaris for lion, rhinoceros, elephant, and practically every other type of game, large or small—from gnu to eland to dik-diks—and the stuffed heads of all these adorned the remarkable room in his Back Bay home. The Colonel believed in fair play, hard work, bravery, and practical jokes.
Once, from Zambia, he had shipped a friend a pair of live twelve-foot-long crocodiles, with instructions for an accomplice at home to have them placed in the friend’s swimming pool in Newport. When it was discovered that the pool had been drained for repairs, the crocodiles had to be stored in their crates in the basement of the Colonel’s club in Boston. There the stewards washed them down daily with pails of water and fed them raw meat until the pool was finally filled and the joke played out.
And so as this marvelous assemblage of American capitalism marched up the gangplank and onto the decks of the Ajax the Colonel’s breast swelled with pride and authority. If a
The Colonel stood on the bridge of Ajax , smiling with pride while his guests debarked from half a dozen motorized tenders belonging to the ship. He watched with satisfaction as they were piped aboard with the same military formality that might have attended the real battleship Ajax .
The blue-green waters of Newport shimmered in the setting sun. The Colonel resisted an urge to step up to the glistening varnish and polished brass of the bridge panel and begin barking orders down the tube. Too grandiose a gesture even for him, since the captain, second officer, and several of the bridge crew all stood on deck watching the guests board.
The Colonel’s guests for this evening’s formal stag dinner represented the titans of American industry: steel barons, steamship owners, railroad magnates, mining czars, automobile and manufacturing kings, as well as practically every major broker with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
That he could command the attendance of such a stellar audience was a source of continuous conceit for the Colonel, because only one generation earlier his father, Shamus McGill O’Shaughnessy, had stepped off a cheap boat fleeing the Irish potato famine with a handful of royal crowns in his pocket. The timing was perfect—smack at the beginning of the American Civil War. After exchanging his coinage for what amounted to fifty dollars, the Colonel’s father used most of his American money to purchase things he believed U.S. troops might want in the field.
Before long he established himself as one of the most prominent sutlers with the Union Army. Afterward, with wads of greenbacks in his back pocket and after dropping the O from O’Shaughnessy, he became a lawyer, then a United States senator, and the owner of a vast codfish fleet. “Only in America,” the Colonel was fond of saying of his father, old Shamus McGill. And to hell with the so-called Boston aristocrats!
In 1898 that same son of old Shamus, the son who was standing now on the deck of the Ajax , raised a squadron of Massachusetts cavalry and led them hell-for-leather afoot up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. And follow Shaughnessy they did, struggling up as Spanish lead came raining down. Teddy Roosevelt may have ridden a horse, but the rest slogged up the hard way.
That was how he came to be called the “Colonel”—even though Shaughnessy was never officially ranked higher than captain. Nowadays, like all other upstanding industrialists, the Colonel detested Theodore Roosevelt and his Bull Moosers for their suicidal trustbusting and other inconveniences. His former friend and comrade-in-arms Roosevelt was definitely not one of the guests on the Ajax this evening, or any other evening, for that matter.
But the Colonel was still a Rough Rider and always would be. In his younger days he played polo but now contented himself with riding the Myopia Hunt. A crack shot, he went on African safaris for lion, rhinoceros, elephant, and practically every other type of game, large or small—from gnu to eland to dik-diks—and the stuffed heads of all these adorned the remarkable room in his Back Bay home. The Colonel believed in fair play, hard work, bravery, and practical jokes.
Once, from Zambia, he had shipped a friend a pair of live twelve-foot-long crocodiles, with instructions for an accomplice at home to have them placed in the friend’s swimming pool in Newport. When it was discovered that the pool had been drained for repairs, the crocodiles had to be stored in their crates in the basement of the Colonel’s club in Boston. There the stewards washed them down daily with pails of water and fed them raw meat until the pool was finally filled and the joke played out.
And so as this marvelous assemblage of American capitalism marched up the gangplank and onto the decks of the Ajax the Colonel’s breast swelled with pride and authority. If a
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