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better than the stockyards or a South Side sheet-metal
     union hall. She always dressed Daley more formally than his contemporaries, in suits with neckties, which made him look like
     a little adult — an extravagance made easier by the fact that the family had only one child to clothe. Young Daley often sported
     a handkerchief and he was, according to one family friend, the only child in Bridgeport at the time who owned pajamas. Whether
     it came from his parents or from somewhere within, Daley had a strong work ethic from a very young age. His first childhood
     job was selling newspapers at the corner of 35th and Wallace. Daley also made the rounds of the city’s streetcars, riding
     to the end of the line as he walked up and down the aisle selling papers. These early jobs provided Daley with spending money,
     but they also trained him for his future career. “I think selling newspapers is a good thing for kids,” Daley would say later.
     “They learn how to handle themselves with people.” Daley also worked Saturday mornings, starting at 7:00, running up and down
     stairs to make deliveries for a peddler who sold vegetables door-to-door from a horse-drawn wagon. Bridgeport was a neighborhood
     in which many parents expected nothing more of their children than for them to match their own modest achievements. Lillian
     Daley, however, always made it clear she wanted more. This pressure to succeed was a constant in Daley’s life as long as his
     mother lived. Shortly before her death, after Daley won the Democratic nomination for the powerful post of Cook County sheriff,
     Lillian Daley made it clear that she was unimpressed. “I didn’t raise my son to be a policeman,” she told a friend. She also
     had another reason for opposing his run for sheriff. Gilbert Graham, a priest and a friend of the family, recalls that she
     complained to her son: “You’re going to have to put people to death.” Earl Bush, Daley’s longtime press secretary, suspects
     Mrs. Daley had an entirely different career path in mind for her only child. “I don’t think [Mrs. Daley] naturally thought
     of her son as being a politician,” says Bush. “I think she would have preferred him to become a priest.” 19
    Daley attended parochial school at Nativity, where he became an altar boy and stayed through graduation. In that era, the
     Catholic Church expected its parishioners to send their children to parochial school, and most complied. By one estimate,
     as many as 90 percent of Bridgeport’s Catholic children attended church schools. The Daleys, like many Catholic parents, probably
     feared the non-Catholic world around them. The Catholic press of this era was filled with cautionary tales of Catholic parents
     who had entrusted their children to Protestant-dominated public schools. An article in the
Irish World and American Industrial Liberator,
extreme but not entirely atypical, told the tale of a ten-year-old child whipped “black and blue” in a Boston public school
     “for refusing to read the King James Version” of the Bible. The story all but omitted the fact that the incident had occurred
     fifty years earlier, but it reflected the deep mistrust many Irish-Catholic parents held for the public school system. 20
    Daley’s parochial school education emphasized the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic, and the catechism. But as much as
     anything he learned in the formal curriculum, his eight years there helped instill in him many of the Irish-Catholic values
     he would carry with him throughout his life. Parochial school education was a prolonged education in submission to authority.
     Daley’s patronage coordinator, Matt Danaher, who grew up in Bridgeport, once told of serving as an altar boy for a monsignor
     at Nativity of Our Lord Church. “I said to him one morning, ‘We’re all set, Father,’” Danaher recalled. “He walked over, looked
     at the clock and said, ‘It’s one minute to 6.’ And then he said,