My Uncle Jack, whom I have written about in this blog many times, passed away on February 20, 2013. He meant a tremendous amount to me and had a huge impact on my life, as I hope I have been able to share through writing about him. One of the things I often heard from readers after publishing a new Uncle Jack story was how they felt like they knew him after reading the blog, even if they had never met him in real life.”I wish I worked for your Uncle Jack!” they would tell me.
Because so many of you made these comments to me, I wanted to share excerpts from Uncle Jack’s eulogy with you. He was an amazing guy who taught me so much, and the wonderful eulogy given by his eldest son, my cousin Jack, beautifully illustrates the things that made him so special as both an individual and a businessman.
So first I just want to say thank you to all of you for being here today, and thank you to all of the over 600 people that attended my Dad’s wake last night. As I said to a number of you last night, for most people that live to be 81, their lives tend to get smaller as they get older. But for my Dad, his life just got bigger and bigger with each passing year. And for that reason, his passing is going to leave a huge hole for all of us to fill. But this big life that he leaves behind for us is also part of his legacy. So many of you, who form the foundation of our lives today, we wouldn’t even know if it wasn’t for my father and the way he connected with people.
Personal Qualities
My father had a gift. He touched people’s hearts, and he made a real and enduring difference in their lives.
He didn’t do it in a grandiose way. As you all know, the grand gesture was not his style. Rather, he did things simply and quietly. He would offer a small word of encouragement or a pat on the back. He was always interested in you, and quick to say how proud he was of you for some accomplishment or another. He had this way of making you feel better about yourself and life in general just for having been around him.
My father didn’t offer a lot of unsolicited advice and when he did he kept it short. On parenting, he once told me, “There is no substitute for being there.” One reason he was able to touch so many people, is because he was always there. How many of you can recall chatting with him on the sidelines of some game, or after church, or over coffee at Zi Pani, or maybe in the hallway at work, dinner with old friends, or golf at Maple Run (Congressional North as he called it). My Dad was there. He seemed to be everywhere. He was fully present for life every day, and we – you and me – we are better off because of it. .
My father made friends easily. But most importantly, he made friends continuously. He did not stand still. He was a man in motion and that motion carried him in one direction and one direction only –FORWARD.
In his 50’s he decided to take up skiing. In his 60’s it was racquetball. In his 70’s it was golf. Just a couple of months ago, my 81-year-old father was looking to join a new fitness club – but only if it had racquetball courts. All this and he continued to come into work virtually every day, mentoring us all with one eye on the future.
His love for and faith in people were on full display during his business career. I’m reminded of the young salesman that my Dad wanted to hire when his first company, Atlantic Telephone, was just in its infancy. This young man had not attended college and he had no business experience. But he was eager, enthusiastic and a hard worker and, most importantly, my Dad saw something in him. The sales manager was against it. He cited all the obvious objections. My father’s response, one I heard many times over the years, was simple, to the point, and resolute: “He’ll figure it out”. Nine months went by without a sale. My father remained steadfast, “Once he gets his first sale, gets his confidence, he’ll be fine”. Of course, he did get his first sale and he had a long and successful business career. All he needed was a chance and for someone to have confidence in him. My Dad believed in people, and he believed in giving people opportunities.
Accomplishments
As simple and uncomplicated as he may have seemed outwardly, my father was a complex person, full of contradictions.
He wasn’t a particularly attentive student, but he was one of the smartest people I knew. He retained information quickly and seemingly forever. He was a voracious reader on all manner of subjects.
He grew up in an unstable environment with no financial security and a father that fought alcohol addiction his entire life. You would think such a person would opt for the safe and secure route. Instead he became an entrepreneur. At his core, he was a risk taker.
He struggled always to keep his own fears and insecurities at bay. And yet, he was the one that always encouraged others.
He was an introvert by nature, but he had so many friends. He wasn’t so comfortable in a large group. But nobody was better one on one.
In 1953, the big accounting firms weren’t exactly knocking down the doors of Southeastern Business School looking for recruits. He once told [his second-oldest son] Tim that he didn’t really think that the good firms would hire him, so he always ended up going with smaller companies. Companies on the brink. Companies that needed someone, as he liked to say, to figure it out. These experiences would come in handy when he would later start his own companies from scratch.
By 1967, at the age of 36, he was the President of the Riviere Real Estate Investment Trust in Washington, D.C., when he read a small article in the Wall Street Journal about a Supreme Court decision called the Carterphone decision. The Carterphone decision allowed businesses to buy their own phone systems from independent equipment providers for the very first time. Prior to this, companies could only rent equipment from Ma Bell.
My father saw an opportunity. Others weren’t so sure. His own father advised against it, saying “What makes you think you can compete against the Bell system?” A friend who worked for Western Electric, a Bell subsidiary, was blunt. He said, “Jack, they are the biggest company in the world. They will crush you.” And so, with this advice in hand, he did what you might expect. With little money of his own, no financial safety net, no real knowledge of the industry, and many of those closest to him advising against it, he plowed ahead.
He did so, because there were three people that did believe in him. The first was an elder business associate who had been a mentor of sorts over the years. The second was his mother-in-law, Collette, who so many years before when he was just another kid hanging out at the house, said she saw something different in him. And the third, and most important, was my Mother. Yes, my Mother who had a perfectly fine house, and four kids to feed and whose husband had a good job that paid the bills; my mother, who seemingly had very little to gain and lots to lose. She told him she believed in him and that he should go for it.
I don’t think my Dad ever forgot the power of having someone believe in you. He later said that if anyone of those three people had expressed even the slightest iota of doubt, he was sure he would have abandoned the idea. But they didn’t, and so Atlantic Telephone Company was born.
There were plenty of ups and downs along the way. Moments of crisis when he was sure he had failed. He wasn’t even able to join the company on a full time basis himself until 1974, when he had 40 employees and he felt it was time to either fish or cut bait. By 1980, just six years later, Atlantic had 350 employees, and five offices, and he sold the company to Contel (now Verizon). He had been a pioneer in the deregulation of the communications industry and the breakup of the Bell monopoly. He was one of the first leaders of the North American Telephone Association. He was 49 years old.
You’d think that might be enough for one lifetime, but he had to keep moving forward. Three years later, it was back to his real estate roots, when my brother Tim, my Dad and I started McShea & Company. It was much the same story as Atlantic…started small, lots of ups and down, lots of figuring it out. We also had our own early struggles. In the early 1990’s the Savings & Loan Crisis was causing properties everywhere to be devalued. Banks began calling loans, including ours, even though we had never missed a mortgage payment.
I remember clearly the advice we received from others at the time. We should give the keys back to the bank and walk away…Cut our losses. Of course, this would mean our investors would lose their entire investment. My Dad would hear none of it. Rather, he pushed all of his chips into the middle of the table. As they say, he went all in, using all of his own financial resources to pay down loans and prop up ailing properties.
Ten years earlier, at 49 years old, he was financially set. At 59, with the odds stacked very much against him, he risked everything. He did it because it was the right thing to do and because he just couldn’t bring himself to “walk away”, to admit failure, to abandon those that had trusted him.
During this period, Tim and I learned things about my Dad that most sons don’t normally get a chance to see. We learned that despite his own insecurities, when you needed somebody to count on, when the situation was most dire, he was absolutely, positively FEARLESS.
For Tim and me it was hard to see the way forward. But I remember so clearly my Dad telling us, “If there is one thing I have learned, it is that what is true today, may not be true tomorrow. Things can change quickly. Let’s get through the next 30 days, and then after that we’ll get through another 30 days”. He was a ROCK. Despite what I’m sure must have been many a sleepless night, I never saw him waiver. And things did change. We survived. And after we survived, we began to get our legs under us and, eventually, it seemed as if we had a future again.
For my father, business success was never solely about financial success. I once asked him why he was so intent on starting his own company and he told me that he had worked lots of places where the bosses tried to motivate by fear or saw an employee as a means to an end. He said that by owning his own company, he got to set the tone and create the working environment. This was the real joy for him. To all those people here today from Atlantic and McShea, thank you so much for being here. It would mean so much to him.
So now it’s time to say goodbye. My dad had this thing that he did whenever he was parting ways. Often, instead of goodbye, he would say, “Proud of you”. And so today I say to him, “Proud of you Pops”.