The Man Who Was Friend to Politicians

Into the public eye last week swam a wealthy, aggressive Bostonian whose fortune brought friends, and whose friends brought him unexpected fame. His name: Bernard Goldfine, 67, textile and real estate tycoon.

Up from Steerage. In the spring of 1897, Bernard, then 7 1/2, landed with his mother from the old Rotterdam's steer age to take up residence in the tenement slums of East Boston. Bright little Bernie skipped every other grade at Lyman Grammar School, put in a year at Mechanic Arts High School before a brother's death made him pick up a bread winner's load in his close, protective Jewish family. To get his first job at the age of 14, he started one morning in the center of Boston's business district and, methodically seeking out each proprietor, worked his way halfway across town by 4 p.m. when Billy Hand the Hatter put up $3 a week for him to deliver hats. "Any young man who would do what you have done today." said Billy, ''deserves a job." On the Way. When his father started up a junkyard, young Bernie lugged scrap metal, stowed away nickels from his own pay for his account in the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank until, at 19, he had $1,200 to start his own business.

He formed a partnership (Strathmore Woolen Co.) with a young Scottish friend who happened to be a nephew of a Maine millowner -- and able to open doors to other mill bosses around the region.

"You have to start small, work hard and do what you can," said Bernie Goldfine who did well enough in World War I to start buying mills for himself. His loose-woven little empire (now grown to six mills employing 1,372 in Maine, Vermont. Massachusetts and New Hampshire) never became a major factor in the industry, but it gave him the funds to begin major investments in real estate in mid-Depression. One day he heard that Western Union wanted to build on a choice block near the financial district, so he bought a corner building as a toe hold, quietly worked out a deal with Western Union to pick up the rest of the property on percentage. His profit: $125,000.

He picked up other choice buys over the years, acquired a pair of real estate companies. East Boston Co. and Boston Port Development Co., and land later to be developed for expansion of the city's tiny airport. As he rounded out his first million, he bought a fashionable home for his wife and four children in suburban Chestnut Hill.

On the Rise. Social connections were harder to make than money, but he worked at it and discovered friendships to be quick and warm among the political officials in the states where he had plants. "You operate in the state and you have problems," he told a TIME correspondent last week.

"Who do you go to? Why. you go to your Congressman or your Senator or to your Governor, not to some schmo." He found the welcome warmest among politicians to whose campaigns he had contributed, and "always supported my friends as I could within my means." A sample of how hard he would work for "one of my very dear friends" came in the Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign of 1952. when Democratic Incumbent Paul A. Dever ("May God rest his soul") was being attacked by the Boston Post. Goldfine's simple effort: he extended a $400,000 line of credit to the paper's owner, capricious Boy Wonder John Fox, on condition that the Post make a last-minute switch to support Dever. (It did, but Dever lost anyway.) "I regarded it as a favor to the Governor." says Goldfine. "How could it be any other way? I gave it at 3%."

In 1951 Goldfine hired a Manhattan pressagent to help him stage an "Anti-Hard Times Conference." Aboard Gold-fine-furnished chartered planes New England's Governors landed at Montpelier, Vt. to be greeted by 19-gun salutes, a joint session of the legislature, tours to nearby Strathmore woolen mills and learned dinner talks on how other businessmen should imitate Owner Goldfine. Among the honored guests was one of Bernie Goldfine's oldest and dearest friends. New Hampshire's Governor Sherman Adams. Other New England politicians whom he warmly befriended: New Hampshire's Republican Senators Styles Bridges ("one of my very best friends") and Norris Cotton (who owns 10% of Goldfine's Lebondale Mills). Maine's Republican Senator Frederick Payne ("I knew him when he was mayor of Augusta"). Massachusetts' Democratic Governor Foster Furcolo. "In picking winners." says Goldfine with a grin. "I've been very fortunate."

In the Swim. Eccentric Bernard Goldfine gets up late, drives around Boston in one of his two chauffeured black Cadillacs and constantly calls on the radiotelephone to the loyal women workers at his garment-district office with the false alarm that he will be there any minute. They know better, do not expect him until 6 p.m. when he usually begins the day's work, winding up with his office callers about midnight. No cheapskate, he hands out $50,000 a year to charities, spends untold thousands on legal advice.

"He doesn't have a lawyer, he's got a bar association." cracks one Boston barrister. Goldfine took considerable pride in having stylish cloth woven at Vermont's Northfield Mills out of the wool from South America's vicunas, getting it tailored into coats for friends such as Adams and Payne. By his standards his was the open, honest hand of friendship, and what he got in return was only the kind of help one friend would render another. Says one of his closest Boston friends: "He's a name dropper and a Scotch drinker, and he has a weakness of talking too much, dropping too many names and things." By last weekend his lavish hand and careless tongue had dropped considerably the name of the best of his friends, Sherman Adams.

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