James Michael Curley, the legendary rogue mayor, was O'Neil's idol. In a 1995 photo, O'Neil, with his trademark fedora, sits with the Curley statue near City Hall. As a teenager in the 1930s, O'Neil dropped literature for Curley's campaigns and nearly 20 years later Curley endorsed him in his first run for office, a Roxbury-South End state legislative seat, which O'Neil lost. The moment was memorialized in a photo that has long adorned a wall at Amrheins, a favorite O'Neil restaurant and watering hole in South Boston.