The following is an excerpt from the biography ``Mayor Erastus Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma'' (Washington Park Press, 1997, 538 pages, $36) by Times Union staff writer Paul Grondahl.

During the denouement of the dance of death that is cockfighting, the stronger cock, its claw fitted with a razor-sharp piece of metal known as a slasher, begins clawing and pecking and shredding the other animal into oblivion in a crazed whirl of feathers and blood and primal savagery.

This eruption of heart-stopping violence is rewarded with lusty applause from the spectators. This is what they come to witness and to wager on, this ultimate act of aggression. It is considered very bad form for the rooster's owner or a spectator to be so gripped by a twinge of remorse that he would enter the ring to halt the carnage and the losing cock's certain annihilation.

Cockfighting, after all, is a blood sport that is meant to be a fight to the death. Two roosters enter the ring. Only one leaves victorious, and in one piece. The match goes on until one of the birds is maimed or killed. The analogy between cockfighting and politics as practiced in its most ferocious, atavistic form is an obvious one.

The Albany Democratic machine was formed by two families, the Cornings and the O'Connells, whose bond of politics was a link of blood, the blood of the cockfighting ring. Little did it matter that cockfighting was illegal in New York, as was gambling on the outcome. With newly won cash in their pockets and blood still on their lips -- in some instances, quite literally, since maimed gamecocks might anoint those in the front row with their mortal wounds -- the Cornings and the O'Connells would repair to O'Connell's saloon to drink ale and talk politics and cockfighting.

A perennial Albany question has been this: How did the aristocratic Cornings and the working-class O'Connells ever get together and stay together? Pundits and political scientists wanted to find some metaphysical explanation. But the answer seems ridiculously simple. It came down to the inexorable mix of beer, the blood sport of fighting chickens and politics.

O'Connell met Erastus when he was a young boy and Dan kept his eye on Erastus as he grew up -- a bright lad with good breeding, Edwin's eldest child -- the way he might watch a promising fighting cock with winning blood lines. Erastus was hardly in Albany at all between the ages of 12 and 22, away at Groton and Yale with summers spent in Maine. Those were the years that the machine rose to power and solidified its block-by-block control of Albany.

Even though he didn't actively participate in politics in his youth, Erastus couldn't help but absorb an education in that area. It seemed to be in his genes. His great-grandfather had been mayor of Albany, his grandfather had been an alderman and his father was state Democratic chairman and lieutenant governor under Al Smith. He couldn't escape it. ``My father always loved politics, my father loved to talk politics, and I knew political people ever since I was a little kid,'' the mayor told reporter Carol DeMare in June of 1981 for an extensive Times Union profile that was one of Corning's last in-depth interviews. Nonetheless, Corning added he had never harbored ``any longtime vision of going into politics.'' In fact, Erastus seemed to have no longtime vision for himself of anything. Even in young adulthood, he was the wandering boy of his youth, roaming over numerous areas of interest without focusing on any single one in a fashion similar to that with which he meandered through the hundreds of acres of woods at Corning Hill. Erastus was a dabbler, collecting coins and stamps, cataloging ob@@hyphen@@jects from the natural world, studying history and art and literature, pursuing fishing and hunting and the outdoors -- that last being perhaps his most passionate avocation.

In demeanor and personality, Erastus more closely resembled his grandfather, Erastus Corning Jr., the free-spirited orchid grower and butterfly collector with the extravagant mutton-chop sideburns. The free-spirited young Erastus seemed the antithesis of his great-grandfather, the original Erastus, or his father, Edwin, both of whom were driven to attain achievements of the highest order in business and politics with a single-minded purposefulness. In the Corning family tree, broad personality traits seem to skip a generation before repeating themselves.

This intellectual drift and absence of concrete goals in Erastus clashed with the rigid career path his father had mapped out for his firstborn son. Erastus had no choice in Groton and Yale and neither did he have a say about the insurance business in which his father set him up in 1932 after graduation and marriage. It was a source of conflict within Erastus. ``He confided in me he wanted to go to Italy to study art and he yearned to be an artist,'' said close friend John E. Holt-Harris Jr., a former Albany traffic recorder judge. ``But his father had decreed the direction and Erastus was a dutiful son.''

Corning's father never saw the fruits of his labor in shaping Erastus' destiny. He had been an invalid following a heart attack and stroke in 1928, the year Erastus graduated from Groton, and died in 1934 at age 51, after being incapacitated for the final years of his life. At the time of his father's death, Erastus was two years out of Yale, working at the insurance company, married and the father of a son -- as his private life spun out of control. ``He was real wild at that age,'' Holt-Harris recalled. ``He was drinking heavily, his bank account was always overdrawn and he made some big mistakes when he was drunk.''

Meanwhile, Dan O'Connell had been keeping tabs on young Erastus and he didn't like what he saw in the destructive ways of the son of his late friend and political associate, Edwin Corning. O'Connell changed the course of Erastus' directionless life. The political boss asked him to take the seat of his deceased father as delegate to the 1934 State Democratic convention. Erastus was one of those men who have greatness thrust upon them. The political grooming had begun. The Dan-Erastus alliance was born. Dan liked to give his political cronies nicknames based on characters in the novels of his two favorite authors, Dickens and Thackeray. Dan called Erastus ``Pendennis,'' after the title character in The History of Pendennis by English novelist and satirist William Makepeace Thackeray. Arthur Pendennis, known as Pen for short, was spoiled by his mother and breezed through the university, entered upper-class London society, wrote a successful novel, became editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and had many love affairs. He was steered awry by his cynical, materialistic uncle, Major Pendennis (read Parker Corning). After sowing his wild oats, Pen settled down and married his good and true love, Laura Bell.

In 1934, Dan was 49, two years younger than Corning's father when he died, when he tapped Erastus (Pendennis), who was 25. Those who were close to the two men politically and personally have likened their relationship to that of a father and son. It should be noted that Dan and his wife, Leta (nee Burnside), who died in 1963, never had children of their own. Dan brought Erastus into his family and the machine, which were essentially one and the same.

The machine worked as a kind of political farm system similar to that of major league baseball. You paid your dues and followed protocol and executed Dan's orders and maybe one day you'd get called up to the show. Frank Cox, who came up through the ward ranks, was a printer at the Times Union. He finally had paid his dues to the point that Dan ran him for State Assembly in 1959 to fill the remaining term of Mayor Corning's brother, Eddie, who was still in a coma from an auto accident. Of course, Cox won. Harry Loucks, a longtime printer at the paper, recalled the back-shop boys getting together at work to congratulate one of their own on becoming a state lawmaker. One printer piped up: ``Hey, Frankie, now that you're a big-shot Assemblyman, whaddya gonna do?'' Cox replied without missing a beat, ``Whatever they tell me.'' Loucks roared with laughter over a story the printers have retold a thousand times hunched over their typographical work in the backshop.

Dan put Erastus Corning in the state Assembly in 1936, promoted him to senator and let him learn the political ropes. Corning was a minority member as a Democrat and didn't have much to do, but O'Connell watched and waited, wanting to see if the kid did what he was told or if he would screw up.

Dan's instruction of Erastus involved more than political strategy. There was time for drinking at Dan's saloon, for gambling with O'Connell's brother Solly, for the blood sport of cockfighting that brought the two families together. Those and other considerations contributed to the mayor's mother's opposition to her son entering Albany machine politics, a pursuit she considered below her class and stressful enough, at least for her husband, to lead to an early death.

Erastus was torn, trying to play the swell even as he appeased his mother's concerns about class decorum and public appearances. ``Twice while I was a state senator I went to cockfights with Dan,'' Corning told DeMare in her 1981 Times Union profile. ``But he came to the conclusion once I was elected mayor that that was no longer suitable for mayor, and he wouldn't take me any longer.''

Eventually, Dan's age, changing times, and shifting public opinion about what constituted cruelty to animals merged to bring about the demise of Albany's golden age of cockfighting. ``The last main I remember anyone talking about was a big gathering of gamecock owners in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in the 1960s,'' Holt-Harris said. ``I didn't go, but Dan went with a group of local cockfighters. I never heard anything more after that.'' Dan, a shrewd judge of character, had chosen well in Erastus, whose temperament was not afire with ambition. Trained in Grotonian reserve and deference to his father, Erastus would do what he was told politically, would be willing to wait in the wings with unusual patience. Most importantly, Erastus was a man who accepted the strictures of the secret society, various permutations of which he had belonged to since Wolf's Head at Yale. One of the rare personal letters from Corning to Dan O'Connell was written by the mayor on April 21, 1954. They were discussing the management of the New York Central Railroad, founded by Corning's great-grandfather. ``Dear Dan,'' Corning wrote. ``The quotation that appealed to me was the following sentence: `One of the first things I learned is that a man in politics has only his word to sell.' '' The quote is from Tammany Hall operative Jim Farley.

In Erastus, Dan found his perfect political protege, his understudy as a machine boss. The feeling was mutual. ``Dan and Erastus just seemed to fit together,'' said Martin Schenck, a former judge and friend of both men. ``They greatly admired each other.'' O'Connell family friend John Treffiletti concurred, recalling being at Dan's house on Whitehall Road with the two men, and when the mayor left, Dan frequently turned to Treffiletti and said: ``There goes the best mayor the city of Albany ever had and ever will have.''

Even their political rival, Albany County GOP chief Joseph F. Frangella, had to concede Dan and Erastus made beautiful political music together. Frangella said in 1974: ``Erastus Corning is an expert second fiddler to the oldest one-man band in America. He has played the fiddle on Whitehall Road for so many years that even Jack Benny took lessons from him.''

There was a sense of belonging in being Dan's boy that brought comfort to Erastus Corning 2nd, innately shy, a loner by disposition, considered by his closest friends as distant and aloof.

In a hutch in the living room of the mayor's home on Corning Hill, where he stored important papers and mementos, he saved a Life magazine pictorial on cockfighting. The Life spread included glossy photographs of fighting cocks and a political cartoon that drew the analogy between politics and gamecocks. The mayor, who had a penchant for earthy humor, certainly didn't miss the off-color connection between cocks, the slang term for men's genitals, and what it takes to succeed in politics -- although, at least publicly, Erastus Corning 2nd never fit the crude cliche of a ballsy ward leader. Coming Thursday: Corning served a long time, but what did he accomplish?

Long on years, short on accomplishment: The record of Mayor Corning