Codfish Press

A Come-To-Jesus Moment For Gillette Next Saturday

By Greg O’Brien
Providence Journal

Ok, so the Almighty is ready for some football!

Tim Tebow’s Hail Mary pass on Sunday—the Lord’s Day—punctuated a trinity of testimonies: that the Denver Broncos are for real; that the New England Patriots might need some supernatural Ghostbusters on defense next Saturday; and that Tim Tebow can throw for 316 yards, paradoxically a reference to the Tebow’s trademark scriptural verse inscribed on the “eye black” strips at University of Florida to cut glare—John 3:16. For those who don’t have a Bible handy, it states: “For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”—King James version.

In Tebow time, it was a come-to-Jesus moment, indeed; not to mention Internet reports of a “halo affect” above Mile High Stadium after the game.

So praise the Lord, and pass the damn ball again!

From my early parochial days at the knee of the Baltimore Catechism, effectively the orthodox Catholic school text in the United States from 1885 to the late 1960s, we clearly serve a Lord of redemption.

Can I hear an Amen to that brothers and sisters?

Redemption, folks, is now at hand. But while the Almighty may have been making a point about Tebow, the Lord—I believe—is not likely to mess with the point spread on the Pats game. Such an irreverent act would be tantamount to pronouncing that Purgatory and Limbo, like Pluto, have lost their glow.

Weeks ago, Saturday Night Live had it right, proselytizing that Tebow’s righteous genuflecting was fully faithful because Jesus after all is responsible for all seven, now eight, of the streaking Broncos’s wins. But as Jesus, through the on-stage persona of SNL’s Jason Sudeikis, cautions: “ Here's the thing. If we're going to keep doing this, you guys gotta meet me halfway out there. Let's face it. It's not a good thing if every week, I, the Son of God, have to come in, drop everything and bail out the Denver Broncos in the fourth quarter. I'm a busy guy!"

Sudeikis conceded on-camera something New England fans have long harbored about their own divinely stirred quarterback. "This doesn't leave this room, OK?" Sudeikis, aka Jesus, declared, "but if I'm the Son of God, Tom Brady's gotta be (a) nephew. That guy's a miracle worker.”

God’s nephew and His Voice Crying In The Wilderness meet Saturday in Foxboro, and pardon the hype, this ought to be a Rapture to witness. Shame on those who get left behind.

Say what you want about Tebow, the youngest of five children, but he is an honest reflection of his parents, persevering Christian Baptist missionaries who labored in the Philippians. Some of us might not like the candor of his genuflections, the wear-it-on-his-sleeve moralizing like he’s discerning a play for third and long, or the vocal callouts to his savior. Many of us prefer to express our beliefs in more traditional or private tones, but Tebow is true to his beliefs, no matter the fallout. That’s not ego, hype, or disdain for unbelievers; it’s a man following the tenets of his parents. And God bless him for it, in spite of the discomfited candor and heavenly high-fives that make some awkward.

Hey, we seem to give a free pass in public and in the media to the bad boys of sports. Collectively, we often celebrate it—the head butts and all-about-me prancing in the end zone. We have politically correct sympathy for jocks who shoot themselves or aim at others, who father children without a commitment to fatherhood, who sexually harass women, who violate every sense of decency, and yet when a decent guy wants to thank his Lord in public, following the role model of his parents, he’s disparaged, mocked in some circles as if he’s just burned down a convent full of nuns.

Political correctness could use a day in the confessional.

So bring it on Tebow! All the best on Saturday. Genuflect in prayer, lift your hands in praise, and inscribe all the scriptural passages you want on your eye black. We could all use some faith in a world racing toward Armageddon.

But for the record, I’ll be rooting this weekend for God’s nephew—the guy with three Super Bowl rings, completion stats that would impress Michael the Archangel, and a spirited quarterback with a smile, work ethic and innocence that could part the Red Sea.

Now, are we ready for some football?

(Greg O’Brien is a freelance writer and author/editor of several books. He contributes periodically to the ProJoe’s commentary page, and has been a consultant to the Kraft Organization at Gillette and other Boston area firms.)

Nauset High School Freshman Grace Kobold Receives A Gift of Life

By Greg O’Brien

Grace Kobold has the heart of an angel, more than one could ever imagine.

The stunning and spirited 14-year-old freshman at Nauset Regional High School received the gift of life a year ago this month—a heart transplant from a teenager in the Midwest, who died after a long fight with disease.

Like Grace, her donor was filled with life, yet battling limitations requiring the inner strength of a seraph. She was a young woman who wanted to save the world, and in the end, she saved it the only way she could, as her mother said in a heartfelt letter to Grace: “She became the ultimate recycler.”

In a touching exchange of anonymous letters, Grace wrote the donor’s mother that her new heart is a “perfect match; it feels like mine but better.”

Grace desperately needed a new heart. She was diagnosed at birth with congenital heart disease that only skilled cardiologists at Children’s Hospital in Boston could fully comprehend—Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), an often fatal condition in which the heart is weakened and enlarged and cannot pump blood efficiently; and a Ventricular Septal Defect (VSD), medical code for a hole in the heart.

Sister Madeleine, mother Julie, father Jeff and Grace.

“We knew early on that for Grace to live, someone else would have to die,” Grace’s mother, Julie, an advanced placement psychology teacher at Nauset High, said openly in a recent interview at the family home in West Brewster. Julie, the image of Grace, is seated next to her husband, Jeff, a former Navy fighter pilot of F-14 Tomcats over war torn Somalia and Iraq, and now a mortgage lending officer at Cape Cod Five. The lanky Grace—with striking dark black hair, piercing brown eyes, all the innocence of youth and yet articulate far beyond her years—is stretched out on the living room floor, recalling with her parents more than a decade of turmoil, defined by great perseverance, courage and faith.

Her father, a pensive man with military calculation, sits quietly in a sofa chair collecting his thoughts, then speaks from the soul. “I was distraught. We feared we might lose Grace,” says Jeff, noting that with the support of close family and the good counsel of a pastor in San Diego where Grace was born and friends at Brewster’s Cape Cod Bible Alliance Church where the family now worships, “we came to realize that our children are on loan from God, and there’s ultimate peace in the reality of that challenge of trust.” Those are strong words of faith from a guy who on his own gut instinct used to fly fighter jets at speeds of more than Mach 1, and land them at night in heaving seas on wet flight decks the length of two football fields on the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, stationed in the Persian Gulf.  “You only get one life, and you don’t know how long it will be,” he says.

In Grace’s case, faith and fear were stretched to a point of total surrender.

“We realized there were critical medical issues just seconds after Grace was born,” recalls Julie. “Grace, she said, turned purple “once doctors cut the umbilical cord and she went from living off my heart to her own.”

A top San Diego cardiologist quickly diagnosed the symptoms as Dilated cardiomyopathy. Julie promptly inquired of the doctor how many patients he had treated with the disease.

“I was afraid you would ask,” he replied. “I’ve had five, and none of them has made it past the age of five.”

The room stood still, motionless, as Julie and Jeff collected their thoughts—minds racing toward the unthinkable.

Save A Life; Donate A Part Of Yours!

The lives of about a half million Americans are saved each year through organ and tissue donations A single organ and tissue donor can save the lives of more than 100 people, according to Donate Life New England.
     Grace Kobold and her mother Julie are now actively involved in the non-profit organization, a joint project of three federally designated organ procurement organizations that serve New England: New England Organ Bank, LifeChoice Donor Services, The Center for Donation and Transplant and the Connecticut Eye Bank. These non-profits have come together to create a fast and efficient way for New Englanders over 18 years of age to register as organ and tissue donors in a secure and confidential manner.
      Visit Donate Life New England online at www.donatelifenewengland.org. It could change your life and offer life to someone who desperately needs it.

At three months, Grace was still a “failure to thrive” baby with a defective heart, burning up more calories than she retained—“literally sweating to death,” as her mother says. Doctors persevered. A successful open heart surgery was performed when Grace was 11 months to repair the hole, but years later, after her heart began another decline, she was diagnosed with E-Coli that quickly morphed into Hemolytic-Uremic Syndrome (HUS), a disease characterized by hemolytic anemia, acute renal failure and a low platelet count that triggers internal bleeding. Again, doctors found a fix.

About a year after Grace was born, the Kobolds moved to the Cape, a relocation that made sense on a number of fronts: Jeff had just been hired as a Delta Airlines pilot flying 737s; Children’s Hospital, the top pediatric hospital in the nation, was nearby; and Julie’s parents lived in Brewster where her dad Richard, a former Navy pilot himself, was longtime principal at Brewster Elementary, then appointed Assistant Superintendent for Nauset Regional School District.

Still there were many heartbreaking adjustments for Grace. She says she first realized she was “different” from other kids at a first grade sleepover when she was the only one who had to take medication.

“My friends didn’t seem to understand, they thought I had ‘Old Man’s disease,’” Grace recalls. “I was throwing up frequently, I didn’t get invited to parties. I was crying a lot.”

So were her parents. “The ‘what ifs’ were scary,” says Julie. “We could only talk about them when the lights were out because it seemed safer somehow.” Grace’s older sister, Madeleine, now a freshman at Azusa Pacific University, was frightened as well, and had to juggle normal sibling rivalry with the cold reality that her parents were consumed with Grace. “Mad,” as her mother calls her, always put Grace first. She often coped by channeling her feelings and fears into her acrylic paintings.

“Madeleine’s high school senior year was very difficult competing for college and writing essays while we drove back and forth to Children’s Hospital every day,” Julie says. “Somehow she managed. Our family activities slowly had to change, as Grace was not able to do much. On the upside, Mad is now a deeper person, more aware of life’s fragility, quick to see the shallowness of things.”

In 2008, when Grace was in the eighth grade, doctors began transplant evaluations. With the disease progressing, she was placed three years later on a transplant list with a rare blood type that made a timely transplant remote at best. Then in October, 2011, the Kobolds received a surprise call at 1:41 am that changed their lives forever.

“We might have a heart for Grace, are you ready?” a doctor said over the phone. Confirmation came an hour and a half later. “It’s a go; pack the suitcases, wake up Grace!”

The family raced to Children’s Hospital; Grace was so anxious and excited that she packed dirty clothes.

But the serpentine path of transplant surgery, a progression of hurry up-and-wait, was bone chilling. With Grace sedated in the operating room, another curve was thrown. The private Lear jet carrying the donor’s heart encountered severe thunderstorms along the route. “The pilot isn’t certain he can continue,” the hospital cardiologist told the Kobolds, who quickly gathered with family and friends in prayer.

“I kept thinking,” says Julie, “what am I going to tell Grace?”

A half hour later, the doctor returned with news that she had informed the Lear jet pilot that the patient’s father was a former Navy fighter pilot. “You tell him,” the doctor relayed the message to the Kobolds, “that I’m going to GET this heart there. He can count on it!”

The rest was miracle clockwork: A race from Logan Airport to the hospital while doctors opened up Grace’s chest cavity; as technicians were hurrying the precious cargo up the hospital elevator and into the Operating Room, doctors removed Grace’s defective heart; and within minutes the donor’s heart was transplanted and beating new life as doctors carefully monitored for signs of rejection, as they still do.

Grace Kobold.

Recovery pain was intense given that doctors had to break Grace’s breastbone, and full blood circulation for the first time caused massive headaches and throbbing leg cramps. “Ouchy!” Grace says in characteristic understatement.

There was another hurdle to clear. After a grateful Thanksgiving last November, one during which Grace rode a bike and cooked the entire turkey dinner, she became terribly ill for 28 days with a fever of up to 105 degrees and symptoms that had the Kobold family collectively on its knees again. After a biopsy that inadvertently punctured a lung, Grace was diagnosed with Histoplasmosis, also known as “Ohio Valley Disease,” a farm-based fungus common to the Midwest, one that had been lodged for a time in the donor’s heart. Grace is still in recovery on medication, but the fungus appears to have run its course.

One could write a medical textbook on Grace, whose medical records caught the attention recently of Nick News on the Nickelodeon channel that featured Grace and others with organ transplants in a Linda Eleerbee segment called “A Gift of Life.” The segment can be accessed online here, and well worth the viewing.

In all ways, Grace's story is a gift of life. A broken heart in one part of the country has led to a new beginning in another.

“Your child’s heart beats on in my child, a steady beat with the promise of new memories, a chance at life,” Julie wrote to the donor’s mother. “Words of gratitude do not begin to convey the depth of our thanks.”

The mother caringly wrote back in a three-page letter that Julie will save for a lifetime, “Love is never wasted…(My daughter) will always have a special place in my heart, and now there is also a place for you.”

Grace, today with the heart of an angel, is back to being a young adolescent—running with friends; scooping ice cream in July and August at Emack & Bolios in Orleans, the first summer job she’s ever held; eating favorite foods verboten on the menu years ago; and forever blessed with new life.  There are some caveats. No contact sports and a regiment of warm up and pull down exercises before activities. In the transplant procedure, all nerves to the heart were cut, as in all such transplants, and only the major nerves reattached. “If I have a heart attack, I just won’t feel it,” Grace says.

But she has an intense feeling for life now. Always on the go now,  she’s off now to a music social. “This has been a painful process, but the ending is good,” she says as she sprints out the door. “Life is a walk of faith. You put one foot in front of the next.”

Greg O’Brien, former editor and publisher of The Cape Codder, is president of Stony Brook Group in Brewster, a publishing and political/communications strategy firm. He is the author/editor of several books, and writes for various regional and national publications.

Confessions of a faltering Sox fan

Editorial note: As Mark Twain once said in his best New York dialect, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” While many of us Sox fans would like to coast down the river of denial, reality is a cold, whitewater shower in that ice hockey will now be played at Fenway before baseball again, Terry Francona is gone—part the scapegoat of a mishandled bunch of indolent misfits, and collectively we are all praying for a new manager like Bobby Valentine who will restore discipline, vision and the hope that we not spend the winter cursing ourselves. Bring him on! The chilling denouement of this season has caused some of us to sin. Born and raised about 20 minutes from Yankee Stadium, I left the New York attitude in spirit and geography for Massachusetts after high school and stayed, but like Lot's wife fleeing Sodom, I've looked back at Gotham, and now fear I'll become a pillar of salt, particularly in light of a spontaneous incident last Sunday in the Bronx, sitting next to my son Brendan at Yankee Stadium during yet another sad Sox loss in the first game.

Bless Me Father, For I have Sinned!

By Greg O’Brien

The Providence Journal

BRONX, NEW YORK—I simply should have known better; my dad was spot on. Born on gritty Sedgwick Avenue in the shadows of the House that Ruth Built, my late father, Francis Xavier O’Brien, was all New York—a second generation Irish American with roots in County Claire, the father of ten children, the director of pensions in the salad days of Pan Am, and a Yankee devotee once his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers turned tail to the west. Dad persuaded me as a kid that the National League no longer existed; flat DOA on the closing of Ebbets Field. “Gotta fight for a team that fights for you, “he taught me early on. A man of redemption, dad still never forgave the betrayal, and passed it down to me.

Playing high school and college ball in the New York area, and on a Senior Babe Ruth League All Star team that won two New York State Championships and qualified for two SBRL World Series tournaments, I was marinated in pinstripes—sitting in the Pan Am box next to the Yankee dugout in the magical 1950s and 60s eyeball-to-eyeball with Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, Don Larsen, Bobby Richardson, Elston Howard and the like. 

Then came George. I never took to Steinbrenner in his early years—the epitome of New York swagger, a posture that pennants could be bought if not deserved, the genesis of the Evil Empire. And with that, the New York attitude came into full, stinking bloom. New York, once a place defined by genuine working stiffs, gave way, brownstone-by-brownstone, to the upscale arrogant, the cocky nouveau riche whose talents often never quite measured up to the compensation. But this, after all, was New York du jour, a place of big dreams, bigger egos and boisterous bravado. What do I know?

So I checked out of the Big Apple scene, seeking those little town blues on Cape Cod, and ultimately finding a coveted lunch pail ethic in Boston as a beat reporter for the Herald American and as senior writer at Boston Magazine. Assigned to cover politics, social issues and the Red Sox from time to time, I fell in love with my adopted city—its collective pride, perseverance and resilience. The Sox embodied this resolve.

Against my late father’s wishes, I raised my three children, Brendan, Colleen and Conor, to be obdurate Sox fans, to fully hate the Yankees and Bucky Beeping Dent. As a family, we suffered wrenching defeats together, bathed in rousing victories, endured the lacerating extended-family abuse in New York, and forever sought the everlasting promise of another season. All along—in spite, at times, of horrific errors, pathetic pitching outings and a wholesale lack of fundamental baseball—the Sox have never given up in spirit. At least not until now, and in the face of the third highest payroll in baseball at close to $163 million, four times that of competing Tampa Bay. 

 Call it what you must—injuries, thin pitching, choke hitting, bad karma, or a realignment of the stars, more on the field than off—but the wretched truth is that this team retreated in an epic collapse of will, inner discipline and execution from the field to the front office. Such a breakdown has been brewing for seasons with a Sox let-it-be managerial style that is far more cheerleading than performance based. How do you think Bill Belichick would have dealt with the longest season-opening losing streak since World War II and an 80 percent losing percentage in a playoff drive? Wind sprints up the Green Monster perhaps? The Sox need a core attitude adjustment from top to bottom along with key personnel changes beyond a new manager, however agonizing. 

Sure Sox owner John Henry and company are fans, but they are entertainers and businessmen first. That’s what they do for a living, and if they think Fenway sellouts and devotion to Red Sox nation come with a deed to 4 Yawkey Way, they will soon see empty seats as an attention-deficit next generation loses interest in a slow, cerebral game played by overpaid athletes allowed to display the fundamental skills of Little Leaguers with the competitive desire of a convent full of cloistered nuns. 

In the fifth inning of Sunday’s first game against the Yankees, ironically after   breakfast with an old friend, Brooklyn Dodger legend Ralph Branca, to celebrate the publication his new book, A Moment In Time, I did the unthinkable. In the wake of Derek Jeter’s double that drove in yet another Yankee run in a 6-2 win over the Sox, I left my seat on the third baseline next to my son Brendan, then purposefully walked to the closest souvenir stand, and yes, I bought a Yankee cap for myself—the kind my dad was buried with and the first Yankee cap I’ve owned in 38 years. My son was horrified. I put it on to make a point: gotta fight for a team that fights for you.

My Yankee cap, after the Sox 14th inning victory in Sunday’s second game, is now locked in my closet, awaiting the hope of an attitude adjustment—both from me and from my adopted team in Boston.

Greg O’Brien, president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications strategy company based on Cape Cod, is the author/editor of several books and writes for various regional and national publications.

Hurricane Irene, More Spin Than Blow

By Greg O’Brien

The Providence Journal

The sky has fallen in the media many times of late. Pinch yourselves. Embrace the Rapture.

Take NSTAR response poll. How was the Irene response?

Oh, it’s just television news again, with enough Category 4 spin to exhaust the supply of Dramamine. The format works nicely: Blow a story out of proportion, create fear, drive millions to their living rooms to watch every second of the pending apocalypse, along with a bazillion dollars of advertising, declare later that we dodged a bullet, and then climax with isolated or exaggerated footage of damage, just to maintain a little credibility.

What would be do without those brave young, Chicken Little reporters in the Northeast, risking a bad hair day in the name of television ratings and in the face of the fierce tropical winds with all the horror of an updraft on a roller-coaster ride?

These handsome twenty- and thirty-somethings are dolefully lacking in perspective as they hunt to upstage one another. For some, the most suspenseful event they have witnessed, to date, is a Red Sox/Yankee series.

What will they do when a Category 5 rolls into New England, as it likely will some day, packing gusts of more than 200 miles an hour? First, we’ll need to add words to the dictionary. “Yikes” and “killer storm” just won’t fly. Then, we’ll have to scramble these reporters from under their beds. And how do we convince people that now they really ought to take cover in the wake of such false alarms from the Henny Pennys of the media?

That is not to say that Irene wasn’t substantial but it sure was something less than Hurricane Gilbert, in 1988 — the most powerful storm recorded in the Atlantic, with winds of 200 miles-an-hour, or the Great Hurricane of 1785, which killed an estimated 22,000 in the Caribbean.

Sadly, there were several dozens deaths from Irene, an estimated 4 million people lost electric power, and there was horrific flooding in Vermont. Officials were right to warn others. But all in all the facts and media hype did not meet.

Witness, as we all did, the parade of plucky television reporters on deadline.

A national news reporter on North Carolina’s Outer Bank bravely stood next to a concrete storm wall, predicting a momentous crash of waves at any second, then pointed to a puddle in the parking lot as evidence of imminent doom.

A Boston television reporter standing at a South Yarmouth (Cape Cod) motel near a Bass River overflow, declaring that she and her TV crew were almost “trapped!” Of course, she could have waded barefoot through the overflow.

What about the grim Virginia Beach, Va., reporter on camera, sounding like Paul Revere, as three half-naked adolescents frolicked across the camera behind him.

Do you think that this was the first storm in two millennia to threaten Lower Manhattan with a tidal surge?

And how about the Boston television reporter in Falmouth, who spotted “a log” in Buzzards Bay and, with the gut instincts of a 3-year-old, suggested that it could become a lethal projectile.

One veteran Boston news anchor, enticing viewers to watch an hour-long hurricane special, waxed a bit defensively about Irene, “A lot more has happened than you probably think.”

Pity the reporter who stands on the beach in the throes of a storm during live coverage and declares, “Hey, this ain’t so bad!” The poor sap will be covering Junior League luncheons the following week.

For the uninitiated, the list of devastating hurricanes is a matter of record. Go on-line at www.hurricaneville.com, and see for yourself: Christopher Columbus wrote of the ruinous Hurricane of 1502; the Storm of 1609 was the source of William Shakespeare’s play, “The Tempest”; the Hurricane of 1938, which slammed Long Island and New England, had a 17.6-foot tidal surge; Hurricane Easy, in 1950, dumped 38.7 inches of rain in two days in Yankeetown, Fla.; Hurricane Camille, in 1969, hit Gulfport, Miss., with 180 mile-an-hour winds; Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, devastated South Florida with 165-mile-an-hour winds. And who could forget Hurricane Katrina?

Yes, it could happen here, but not this time. Get a grip. We will always face assorted crises. But TV news ought to stop selling exaggeration and fear for ratings and ads, and do its job, for which it is positioned better than most in the frontline media: Inform in an emergency. “Just the facts ma’am, just the facts!” — as Sergeant Friday used to say on the old “Dragnet” cop show in the ’50s.

Greg O’Brien, the author/editor of several books, has written and reported for national, regional and local media for 38 years. He is president of a publishing and political/communications strategy company based on Cape Cod.

John Hay: A man of enduring gifts and wisdom

John Hay's palette is rich in hue for those who care to listen

By Greg O'Brien, Codfish Press

John Hay could paint brilliant word pictures with the stroke of a typewriter key as a master does with a brush. He fully absorbed the rhythm of the language, the art of creative flow, perhaps as much as anyone on a blank canvas of life.

"Listen and you touch on light twisting through the shallows; you sense a speech within a time eluding it, ripples on stone. It has no answer," Hay, the renowned Cape Cod naturalist, wrote in his classic work, Bird Song. "Music follows, music falls, with its magicians. With birds, we hear what we could be, never what we say we are."

The Company of Light and The Way of the Salt Marsh were both published in 1998. See all of John Hays books here.John Hay spent a lifetime touching on light, always hearing what he could be, never what the world said he was. At 95, that light has been extinguished, but his spirit and his wisdom in words will survive an eternity. The author of 18 books on nature, a Harvard poet laureate, a recipient of the celebrated John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, and co-founder of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, Hay-early on a mentor to me and a neighbor in Brewster's ancient Stony Brook Valley-has been compared in many ways to the venerable Henry David Thoreau. "He (Hay) is probably a better naturalist than the son of Concord," the New York Herald Tribune once wrote.

To say that Hay had a way with words is to suggest that Hemingway was a journeyman writer. Hay captured the fragile beauty of Cape Cod as if drafting in the palm of the Lord's hand, and he taught us, often against our secular instincts, that nature in its purest form is the essence of all. If we lose the natural blessing of the world around us, we lose a part of ourselves. In that lesson, Hay has left behind an abiding gift to a fast-foot, drive-by, attention-deficient nation that is beyond his eloquent words.

"He is probably a better naturalist than the son of Concord." - Herald Tribune.

In writing about nature, he was often reflecting on the fight for survival in all of us. "The fish kept moving up," he wrote in his first book, The Run, an acclaimed chronicle of the annual alewife migration, thousands of them, up the stone ladders of Brewster's Paines Creek to spawn upstream in the mill ponds, responding each year to a biological clock at the strike of spring. "I watched the swinging back and forth with the current, great-eyed, sinewy, probing, weaving, their dorsal fins cutting the surface, their ventral fins fanning, their tails flipping and sculling. In the thick, interbalanced crowd there would suddenly be a scattered dashing, coming up as quickly as cat's-paws flicking the summer seas. They have moved by ‘reflex' rather than conscious thought, but what marvelous professionals they were in that!"

Just another day on the job for all of us, fighting the downstream currents of the moment.

The son of noted archaeologist Clarence Hay and the grandson of John Hay, secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt and a private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, the reclusive and pensive Hay published his first collection of poetry in 1947, the year he moved to the Cape. Surrounded by an awe-inspiring setting, he turned to nature writing with a perspective wider than an aerial view.

"There has been a pronounced detachment, and pulling away from, our land, primarily thought of as an area of what may falsely be called ‘improvement.' We do not see our nature or natural history as a necessity or food for our well-being." - John Hay.

Other celebrated books soon followed, among them Nature's Year, The Season of Cape Cod, The Great Beach, Sandy Shore, In the Company Of Light, and A Beginner's Faith In Things Unseen. The New York Times Book Review has termed Hay "gifted and perceptive." The Christian Science Monitor has said he "dramatizes our isolation from the rest of life." And Publisher's Weekly once described Hay as "a man with an almost religious sense of nature."

In a call to arms many years ago, Hay warned, "There has been a pronounced detachment, and pulling away from, our land, primarily thought of as an area of what may falsely be called ‘improvement.' We do not see our nature or natural history as a necessity or food for our well-being. We need to involve people in the process of seeing-innate, natural sight-not substitutes for sight...We need help from people, young and old, who will participate in its vision. We are nothing about the life we are given to share."

Hay has shared passionately, and I will always treasure the talks in his living room up the street and in his snug writing studio about observing nature and crafting the language. He taught me and others to think and how to feel.

"It may be surprising, in our age of information, to hear that nothing in nature is finally known," he writes in a Guide to Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands. "There is always more to be discovered about the most commonplace of things we see around us, or pick up, like colorful stones or shells on the beach. The novelty lasts for every individual and for generations to generation... The practice is as old as the world and as new and exciting as any child seeing things for the first time."

As an old friend once said, it is the dabs of color applied by others in great wisdom and in love over the years that joins the dots in one's life.

John Hay's palette is rich in hue for those who care to listen.

(Greg O'Brien, a freelance Cape Cod writer, was a neighbor to John Hay and the editor of some of his writings. O'Brien worked closely with Hay as a longtime trustee of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History.)

Tom "Red" Martin: From Cape Cod To California, A Talent Of Olympic Proportions

By Greg O’Brien, Boston Irish Reporter

Tom Martin took to ice as a young boy as cod takes to the sea. It was his lifeblood. In high school, he used to run home backwards from Harvard Square, practicing the art of a pivot so he could perform the difficult maneuver without hesitation on ice.

“I was just a dog,” he says of his workouts that led to star status at Boston College and on the 1964 Olympic Team at Innsbruck.

The 71-year-old founder of the award-winning Cramer Productions in Norwood, a second generation Irish American, who at a lean six foot one, 205 pounds is just ten pounds off his college playing weight, still has that canine drive—a focus on the moment and the verve to succeed at every level in the face of challenge.

“As a kid, I worked my ass off,” he says. “While others were at the beach, I needed to be at the gym. I had God given talents, and wanted to make the most of it.”

No doubt, the Almighty is pleased with the result. A three-sport standout at the old Cambridge High and Latin (hockey, baseball and football), Martin, “Red” to his friends, went on to Boston College where he played defensemen on the BC hockey team that won the Beanpot in 1959 and 1961—a year he was team captain and named Beanpot MVP. Martin also was named to the 1960 and ’61 college hockey All America teams, and was the ’61 recipient of the Walter Brown Award as the nation’s outstanding college hockey player. In addition, he was a steady left-handed first baseman on the BC baseball team that played in the College World Series of 1960 and ’61, was named to BC’s Hall of Fame in ’68, represented the United States in the 1962 World Ice Hockey Championship, and was Assistant Captain on the ’64 U.S. Hockey Olympic Team where he roomed with the legendary Herb Brooks, coach of the Miracle-On-Ice ‘80 team that defeated the Soviets in the thick of the Cold War. Martin was later drafted by the Boston Bruins, and offered a $6,800 contract that he rejected because an accounting job paid more. His retired BC hockey jersey hangs from the rafter at Conte Forum.

But this is just the beginning of Tom Martin’s story. To pigeonhole him in the vernacular as a Man for All Seasons, is to say that Tudor writer and statesman Sir Thomas Moore was a jock. With the discipline of athletics as a foundation stone, Martin has succeeded in all areas of life—as a businessman, a renowned creative force, and most importantly to him, as a husband and father.

The early years were difficult for Martin and his younger sister, Anne Marie; their father, Tom Considine, died shortly before her birth. A devout, hard-working Irish Catholic, Considine had close family ties to Galway where his parents were born. Martin and his sister, both of whom later assumed their stepfather’s surname, were initially raised in Somerville, then Cambridge by a dutiful mother, Anne (Norton), whose family came from the south of Ireland. She remarried when Martin was 12.  His stepfather, Bill Martin, then a custodian in the Cambridge school system, adopted the children, and they lived in church housing in St. Peter’s Parish in Cambridge. He was a caring surrogate father.

“It was a humble beginning,” Martin recalls in an interview at his state-of-the-art, 70,000 square foot design and production facility. It is headquarters for a full-service, integrated marketing communications company offering services worldwide in event and video and digital production, interactive media, webcasting, and print and direct marketing. With $35 million in annual sales, the company today employees 180 people, including six of his seven children, and has a client list that includes: Bayer Diagnostics, Boston College, CVS Pharmacy, EMC, Fidelity Investments, Gillette, Jordan’s Furniture (for which Cramer Productions has produced the trademark “Barry and Eliot” Tatelman television commercials), Coviden, General Electric, Reebok, Raytheon, Ocean Spray, Serono, Michelin, Motorola, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Boston Red Sox. Cramer Productions also has produced critically acclaimed sports videos and documentaries.

Martin built the company creative brick by creative brick with the benefit of a Boston College Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration, a CPA certificate secured during his five-year tenure of analyzing balance sheets and income statements with the Boston office of Arthur Anderson & Co, and just plain old pond ice smarts.

“I don’t want to sound cocky, but I had confidence in myself,” he says, sitting his office appointed with sports memorabilia and sounding like an able defensemen. “If it didn’t work out, I knew that I’d bounce back.”

Martin has been resilient throughout his life, learning at a young age to cope with the ups and downs and the sure direction of a disciplinarian mother, who worked as a waitress and collected “Mothers’ Aid,” now called Welfare, at Cambridge City Hall. “I had to mop the floors on my hands and knees before I could go out on a Saturday morning,” he recalls. “My mom was terrific, and had an incredible work ethic that was instilled in us.” 

Sunday church attendance in the Martin family was as mandatory as school, and after Mass—from the third grade to his senior year in high school—Martin sold newspapers—The Boston Globe, The Herald, Boston Post and New York Times. He learned the worth at a young age of walking around money.

Always on the run, Martin after college joined the Arthur Anderson staff, then played in the Olympics, returned to the Big Five accounting firm, then was hired in 1966 by Cramer Electronics in the Boston area as a corporate controller, shifting gears later to become national sales manager in the multi-national company—a move that sparked a career change. When the company was acquired in 1979, Martin on a hunch purchased the firm’s budding video production division and retained the Cramer name, calling the new venture Cramer Productions, a cutting-edge marketing medium.

“I thought this new technology had great promise as a marketing and communications supplement,” he says. “I saw an opportunity and went with it.”

But not without the support of his wife of 47 years, June, whom he met many years ago on a blind date. “ We went through some struggling years as any start-up does,” he recalls. “It was in the early ‘80s when interest rates were close to 20 percent. That almost choked companies like ours that were capital intensive. My financial background allowed me to weather the storm and calm the bankers down. It all worked out in the end.”

Today, six of the couple’s children help run the business: Thomas, as sales manager; Timothy as internal operations manager; Christopher as external operations manager overseeing large events around the world; Gregory as chief financial officer; Patrick in a training program; and daughter Julie as major accounts manager. Son Shawn is a partner with the hedge fund Convexity Capital Management. Larger than life in so many ways, Martin has 20 grandchildren.

In his spare time, he is an avid golfer, pushing a four handicap, and notes that all but one of his children are single handicap golfers. “God has been good to me; I can still compete with them,” he says with competitive vigor. A member of the Charles River Golf Club, Martin has won the Senior Division of the Ouimet Memorial Tournament and was twice runner up in the Massachusetts State Seniors Championship. In 2003, he won the New England Senior Amateur Golf Championship.

One simply wonders if Martin was born on Krypton. 

Back to earth in Norwood, there is plenty to do at Cramer Productions in the   collective coordination of scores of marketing strategists, creative directors, production managers, producers, account managers, designers, developers and support personnel. In addition to corporate marketing, branding and events, Cramer has built an impressive reputation in sports producing, notes a company profile. The company produced the comprehensive Boston Red Sox: 100 Years of Baseball History, a three-hour video documentary that covers the entire history of the Red Sox organization and became one of the fastest- and best-selling New England sports documentaries. Cramer won acclaim, including a prestigious Emmy Award, for its documentary, Story of Golf, that documented more than 700 years of the venerable game, aired on PBS nationally and was featured on CBS during the broadcast of the 2000 Masters Tournament. Cramer Productions also has produced such documentaries as the Banner Years (a Boston Garden retrospective), Home Run Heroes (a tribute to legendary Red Sox hitters) and Ray Bourque: The First 20 Years, which was produced for a Symphony Hall performance and subsequent television broadcast.

Not one to forsake his roots, Martin and his company are generous contributors to non-profit and charitable causes. There is a framed quote in his office from Danny Thomas, the late television personality and humanitarian that underscores Martin’s compassion for others. It reads: “All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don’t discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It’s what you do for others.”

Martin is a major contributor and advisor to the Mass Hospital School, Caritas Christi Hospital, Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) and the Francis Ouimet Foundation. Cramer Productions serves a wide variety of charitable organizations by staging events and producing videos and other communication programs that assist with fundraising. In the past few years, the company profile notes, Cramer has contributed time and talent to such organizations as American Kidney Foundation, Big Brother/Big Sister, Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Carney Hospital, Easter Seals, Franciscan Children’s Hospital, Greater Boston Food Bank, Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly, March of Dimes, Mother Caroline Academy, Rosie’s Place, Second Helping, South Boston Community Health Center, The Cardinal’s Appeal and The Jimmy Fund. 

Martin is quick to note that Cramer’s success is the result of the dedication and creative talents of key longtime associates like Executive Vice President and Creative Director Rich Sturchio, who will be become President this month, and Ann Cave, Senior Vice President, Strategic Services & Marketing.

Consummately camera shy, Martin is always acknowledging the notable contributions of others, but he has received numerous awards and honors for his community service.  He was the 2007 recipient of the Richard F. Connolly, Jr. Distinguished Service Award from the Ouimet Fund, and three years ago, the New England Chapter of the National Television Academy inducted him into its Silver Circle, which honors individuals who have made significant contributions to television in the last 25 years. He also has been honored by the National MS Society, Mass Hospital School and Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) for his faithful patronage.

So is Tom “Red” Martin really faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive? We know, at least, that he can leap tall challenges with a single bound. Look, flying high in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s just Tom. And that’s the way Martin likes it. Understated.

As the years count down, Martin is sanguine about the future. “I have a strong faith and that keeps me going,” he says in a moment of reflection at the end of yet another long day. “My kids,” he jokes, “are always rehearsing what they are going to say at my funeral. We have some laughs about it.”

The key to a long, productive life, he insists, is an exceptional attitude and a great work ethic. “You never pout,” he says. “There’s always another day.”

(Greg O’Brien is president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications strategy company based in Brewster on Cape Cod. The author/editor of several books, he contributes to various regional and national publications.)

Whale-rescue program in trouble

Whale-rescue program in trouble

by Greg O'Brien

This article originally appeared in the Providence Journal on Sunday, August 31, 2008

It is 5:30 P.M. on a stunning late August day here, and the sun is low on the horizon, presaging the end of summer with an inky blue sky and a golden reflection on the water. Not far from MacMillan Wharf, just down from Town Hall in a stately clapboard home on Bradford Street once owned by renowned industrialist and art collector Walter B. Chrysler Jr., Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies Executive Director Rich Delaney sits at his desk, pondering the future of this world-class scientific research and public-education center and its expanding vision. Its vision, he notes, has morphed beyond the center’s foundational study and preservation of endangered right whales and humpback whales. But today, he’s all about whales.

“We’re a nexus between good science and proper management,” declares Delaney, no stranger to either, given his previous tenures as former Massachusetts assistant secretary of environmental affairs and former director of the Massachusetts Coastal Zone program. “It’s science with a deadline!”

The deadline that most concerns Delaney, named last year as head of the coastal-studies center founded 32 years ago, is the pending depletion in December of $450,000 in federal grants for the center’s distinguished Whale Disentanglement Program. This program covers a wide swath of ocean, from the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, to Key West, Fla.

The deadline that most concerns Delaney, named last year as head of the coastal-studies center founded 32 years ago, is the pending depletion in December of $450,000 in federal grants for the center’s distinguished Whale Disentanglement Program. This program covers a wide swath of ocean, from the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, to Key West, Fla.

In partnership with the National Marine Fisheries Service, under the domain of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the center oversees a network of more than 800 scientists and volunteers called the Atlantic Large Whale Disentanglement Network (ALWDN), which responds to whales caught in debris and fishing gear — the mammals’ prime cause of death, along with ship strikes. Since 1984, when the highly publicized effort began, the not-for-profit Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies has freed more than 97 large whales from life-threatening entanglements, as it has such other marine animals as dolphins, porpoises, seals and sea turtles. It is the only organization federally authorized to disentangle large, free-swimming whales.

“Without an infusion of additional monies now being sought, the program is in jeopardy,” says Delaney, noting that most, if not all, of the surviving 350 North Atlantic right whales, up to 56 feet long, will have migrated to Cape Cod Bay by January, and will remain in local waters until May, when migrating humpback whales, up to 50 feet long, arrive and stay through October.

“On their migration up from Florida in the fall, the right whales will run thorough an obstacle course of entangling fishing nets and debris, ” says Delaney, noting that coastal-center teams disentangled eight right whales last year, most from January through April. The right whale was so named in 18th Century days because it was the “right whale” to catch — “slow, right for the picking, plenty of whale oil and they floated after being harpooned,” says Delaney, noting that the species is now closely monitored under the coastal center’s Right Whale Habitat Studies program.

“The principle disentanglement technique,” adds Delaney in a reference to the center’s Web site ( www.coastalstudies.org), “is a modification of an old whaling practice called kegging, involves attaching large floats, or kegs, to the gear entangling the animal. The floats add buoyancy and drag to the animal, making it difficult for it to dive, eventually tiring it out. The desired result is a relatively immobile animal that is safer to cut free.” The kegging system, he adds, is designed for swift release should the rescue attempt fail; in those cases, a transponder or small buoy is attached to track the whale for a more appropriate time to disentangle.

In early July, for example, a Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies team responded to a nine-year-old female humpback whale that was reported severely entangled with one-inch line. After seven hours of fighting strong southwest winds, the rescue team succeeded in removing much of the life-threatening entangled rope, but the whale’s long-term health will not be known for months. The young humpback, known to researchers as Estuary, had been identified earlier as part of the center’s Aerial Photo Identification Program and catalogued in a research consortium with Boston’s New England Aquarium.

Such rescue efforts — often splashed on front pages of newspapers across America or on the evening news — are in as much peril as the whales themselves, if additional funding is not obtained by December.

The pending funding cut in the whale-disentanglement program, representing close to 25 percent of PCCS’s annual operating budget and half of its federal grants, would deeply damage the program. Additional private funding and/or an emergency federal supplement are being urgently sought.

“Hopefully with our congressional delegation’s help, money will be allocated in the ’09 budget, but with a new administration and a new Congress, next year’s budget won’t take affect for least three months, and perhaps six to nine months,” says Delaney, noting that Congressman William Delahunt, of the 10th Congressional District, and Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy were working diligently to restore the funding. “At the moment, no money is available for this program in January, and we don’t want to be in the position of having to dismantle it, even temporarily.”

Concedes Delahunt’s chief of staff, Mark Forest, “We’re facing a crisis for the disentanglement program. Congress has significantly cut funding while demands have grown.” Forest, however, is hopeful that the funds ultimately will be restored. Delahunt, he said, has won initial approval for a $500,000 disentanglement-fund earmark in the House Appropriations Committee’s draft of the fiscal ’09 budget. But earmarks — appropriation requests outside the line-item federal budget — can be politically contentious, particularly in an election year when the divisive topic of such earmarks is sure to be debated again. Meanwhile, Delahunt is also speaking with top NOAA officials about “reprogramming” funds for whale-disentanglement efforts while the federal budget is being vetted, Forest said

Acknowledging the uncertainty of politics and a new presidency, Forest noted, “The coastal center’s disentanglement program is highly regarded, and we are confident that in the long term we will resolve the problem. Unfortunately, the budget will not get resolved until some time next year. Meanwhile, we need to throw out a lifeline to keep this program alive.” Let’s hope they get it.

Greg O’Brien is editor and president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications strategy company based in Brewster, and the author/editor of several books about Cape Cod and the Islands.  Read Greg's blog, Codfish Press here on CapeCodToday.com.

George K. Regan: A Man Of The City With A Heart For The Cape

Editor's Note: George K, Regan, who broke his teeth on Boston politics as chief aide and spokesman for former Mayor Kevin White, is notably a man about town with a heart for the Cape. Head of one of New England’s most prestigious public relations and crisis communications firms with a presence on Cape Cod, Regan spends much of his off time in the region and its environs. He was profiled in a recent issue of the Boston Irish Reporter, showing a kinder, gentler side to the hard-driving, street-smart field commander that he is.)

PR Pro looks like an Irish Boy Scout

By Greg O'Brien, Boston Irish Reporter

George K. Regan, who looks more like a Boy Scout leader than he does one of the most successful, hard-charging public relations and crisis communications connoisseurs in the country, is the essence of Irish in so many ways: bright, passionate, reflective, an artist in his trade with superior political and media instincts. But looks are deceiving.

While some critics even suggest that a caricature of Regan might bear resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman, the fictional mascot of Mad Magazine, Regan’s “what me worry” persona is more imagined than real. “He’s a real character,” Bob Sheridan, SBLI president, CEO, a friend and client of Regan’s, and a “no-nonsense” guy himself, writes in an e-mail. “People either love him or hate him.

”I’ve been stabbed in the back so many times, I’m like a porcupine.”   -Regan

I fall in the former category.”

No doubt, Regan’s public relations maneuverings over the years have gotten people’s dander up and have been the subject of columns and industry babble, his triumphs at the Boston-based Regan Communications Group and his notable contributions to charitable organizations are celebrated.

"I’ve been stabbed in the back so many times, I’m like a porcupine,” Regan concedes in a wide-ranging interview with the Boston Irish Reporter. Does it bother you? “Of course it does,” he says, “but it’s part of the business and part of life. You have friends, you got enemies and you have people waiting for you to fall or fail. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether people like you or not, so long as they respect what you do. That needs to be the focus of our efforts.” Regan is sustained by the sage advice of his late father, George, who labored in the Charlestown shipyards. “You grow up fast,” his dad once told him. “But you come down faster.” It was counsel reinforced later in life by then Boston Mayor Kevin White, a surrogate father type to Regan, who instilled an unrelenting work ethic, problem solving and zeal for politics during his tenure as White’s Director of Communications and most trusted advisor.

The namesake or his company—New England’s largest privately-held public relations firm and the ninth largest privately-owned public relations firm in the country with branch offices and associations in Florida, New York Connecticut and Cape Cod and a killer client base the likes of the New England Patriots, Boston Celtics, Dunkin’ Donuts, Bank of America, New Balance, Boston Herald, Boston Magazine, Mohegan Sun and Suffolk University, to note a few of the more than 200 clients—isn’t coming down any time soon, and you can be certain of that. So why is Regan subdued on this bright day in early December with all the promise of Christmas, surrounded in his office at 106 Union Wharf, overlooking a world class city that his mentor built, with testimonies of his accomplishments—photos with the business and political elite, citations, news clips and other memorabilia? “It’s the eighth anniversary of my father’s death,” he explains. “I was up thinking about it all last night. He was my best friend, and a man of great virtue.” Particularly reflective this morning, Regan adds in candor and humility, “My father was everything that I am not: patient, sensitive and compassionate. He believed in me, and I have never forgotten that. He taught me that there are things more deeper and critical in life” than the day-to-day striving for secular achievement.

Clearly, it wasn’t a natural segue from Regan’s working class roots in the Wollaston section to Quincy to the privileged board rooms of Boston and New York. Nonetheless, Regan’s father, born in South Boston, and his mother, Ann (Kowalski), who was raised in the South End and still lives in Quincy, made sure that their son and his two sisters (Marianne and Patti, now deceased, who helped jumpstart Regan Communications in 1984) were primed for the real world. A third-generation Irish American, Regan’s paternal grandfather was born in Cork, then immigrated to Boston—“a man,” Regan says, “who worked hard with his hands’ and fortified through his father fundamental Irish Catholic principles.

“The bond between my dad and me was tight,” he notes, offering that he frequently took his father as his guest to key sporting events and through connections with Suffolk University President David Sargent had the university’s gymnasium named after his dad. “(Patriots owner) Bob Kraft and (Boston Herald) owner Pat Purcell spoke at the dedication,” says Regan, acknowledging that it’s nice to have friends in high places when it comes to honoring family.

Regan’s feminine side is equally dominant. “I’m more like my Mom,” he says of his mother, who worked part-time in the airline business, recruiting stewardesses. “She was the disciplinarian of the family and much more aggressive.” A forceful young Regan was a good kid, as neighborhood kids go, no lingering embarrassments. He attended Wollaston Elementary School and North Quincy High School where he played soccer and baseball. “I wasn’t a bad catcher,” he proclaims. Asked if could hit, the spinmeister adds, “I want to say ‘yes,’ but I think my coach would say ‘no.’” He insists, though, that he could hit a good fastball—an assertion borne out by a rough-and-tumble career in the media, politics and business. After high school, Regan attended Sufffolk, majoring in journalism, and upon graduation earned a masters degree in communication from Boston University.

During and just after his university years, he had a brief career at The Boston Globe, working for a day as a runner for the ad department, then as a copy boy in the editorial department and as a correspondent who earned his first front page byline at the age of 18. His ad work at the Globe was unremarkable by his own account. “I was dropped off at the Downtown Crossing to pick up ads at the various agencies and banks. In those days, there were no faxes or cellphones. I didn’t realize I had to get the ads back to the paper for deadline. When I returned at 8 pm, I was hastily informed there was a search party out for me, and was diplomatically told that I probably belonged over in the editorial department. They showed me the door.”

Following a stint in the newsroom, Regan tried his hand briefly again in the ad world, then responded in his early 20s through a well-connected friend to an opening for a deputy press secretary position in the Kevin White Administration. “My interview with Kevin was the worst of my life,” recalls Regan. “It was awful. I was paranoid. I was awestruck. Here was this guy of national stature, the mayor of a prominent big city, and I whiffed at the interview.” White, he says, didn’t suffer fools gladly. “You had to be passionate, hard working and smart. He couldn’t stand stupidity.”

But Regan is no fool, as White could see, and soon he was traveling the country as an advance man for the mayor’s foot-in-the-water political outreach, then became the city’s spokesman on the bruising issue of busing. In an ironic case of mistaken identity, Regan says his father took heat from his South Boston buddies, who assumed “that the George Regan quoted in the paper defending busing was him.” Regan’s White years have been well documented in the press as his admiration for the mayor, now struggling with Alzheimer’s. “The night before Kevin left office, I had dinner with him and his wife Katherine at Pier 4,” says Regan. “I was honored to be with him at his moment, after an inspiring 16-year-term, the longest consecutive term of any major in America.” He recalls that White was “very reflective” that night. “He felt there were things he could have done better, and gave himself a B plus for performance. He’s like the Bill Belichick of politics. Whatever you accomplish, it’s never good enough.”

Regan remains in awe of White and recently had dinner with him and Katherine at Toscano on Charles Street. just before Thanksgiving. “I still learn from him,” he says in the deepest respect. “It has helped me tremendously in my business.” In starting up a new venture, the exit from city hall and the limelight of a celebrity mayor can be jarring, as Regan found the day after White left office. No one had prepared him for the abrupt landing. “We had an inauspicious start,” he says with understatement. “I hadn’t realized that ATT and New England Telephone had actually broken up at this point. So when I went to my new office at 75 Fulton Street, all I had were wires hanging out of the walls. We didn’t have phones for about a week.”

The staff at first included Regan’s sister Patti, his redeeming Aunt Mary (now deceased) who emptied her personal bank account to make payroll when checks were late or revenues were lax, Earl “The Pearl” Marchand, a former Boston Herald American reporter who wrote like a dream and had worked in Regan’s city hall press office, Dennis Sullivan, another city hall recruit, and Regan’s secretary. “The early days were very discouraging,” says Regan, noting that many of his old Boston connections were missing in action. “I thought I had all these friends.” But taking a cue from advisors and falling back on the Tip O’Neill axiom that “all politics are local,” and recognizing that this then applies to marketing and media strategies, Regan was off and running with a mission: “The right message delivered in the right way,” as his firm’s website declares.

A baseball player at heart, like his father, and confident in the Field of Dreams claim that “if you build it, they will come, “ Regan and his new firm were soon stretching singles into triples and building an extraordinary list of clients looking for services that range from messaging, to marketing and collateral pieces, to crisis communications, to cutting-edge websites and new or rich media. “We call ourselves a full service, non-traditional public relations company. We have some clients who couldn’t care less if their name was ever in a newspaper. They are more interested in what is the best message for their product.” Regan is quick to credit a young, talented staff for the firm’s growth—a recruiting technique he learned from White. “I’m not a good manager,” he admits. “I’m a visionary.”

Regan’s admirers would add that he has an excellent skill set for problem solving and clearly understands the bridge between the media and politics. And that’s gold in the PR business. Days later in a follow-up interview, Regan, who was engaged twice but still is single, is asked if he has any regrets about life. “There are a lot of things I wish I did differently. I’m trying to get more balance in my life. I think that I—and we as a company—sometimes have been a little too harsh, that we might have overdone it, probably been a little to tough.”

Is this a kinder, gentler George? Yes, if his on-going contributions to charities are any indication, including The Arc of Greater Boston, The American Liver Foundation, Carroll Center for the Blind, Beth Israel Hospital and the Franciscan Children’s Hospital. His father, indeed, would be pleased. “We all have thrown sharp elbows in life, and many of us are trying to make up for past sins,” he says as he darts from meeting to meeting. “I’m a very lucky man. I’ve been blessed in life, and I don’t ever want to take that for granted.”

Greg O’Brien is editor and president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/strategy company based in Brewster. The author/editor of several books, he is a regular contributor to regional newspapers and magazines, a political columnist for Boston Metro newspaper and a contributor to New York Metro and Philadelphia Metro. He covered Mayor Kevin White and George Regan during his years writing for the Boston Herald American and Boston Magazine.

Last Words From A Son: Virginia B. O?Brien Defined Motherhood

Virginia Brown O’Brien defined motherhood, and in an age today when worldly accomplishment is all too often the mark of achievement, her selfless devotion to her late husband, Francis Xavier O’Brien, and her ten children are testimony to a higher standard.

She died last Wednesday at Epoch Senior Health Care of Brewster. She was 84, and had lived in retirement in North Eastham for many years after raising her family in Westchester County, New York.

A woman of considerable artistic talent and achievement as a schoolteacher, she forever put her family first—whether it was a sacrifice of her time, her resources or her considerable emotion. She was dutiful beyond all measure, and in an era when we honor the Greatest Generation, as we should, Virginia O’Brien stands out among the Greatest Generation of women of her day—mothers who helped shape and define their spouses and children in diverse ways, both in what they were in life and are today in our memories.

Surviving O’Brien family members—her children and a score of grandchildren—will live in her shadow, a wide swath of grace that comforts extended family households from Cape Cod to California. 

Born in New York City in 1923, Mrs. O’Brien was the daughter of the late George and Loretta Brown, and was the sister of the late Donald Brown and Gertrude Brown. She grew up in Manhattan on the West Side where she played hopscotch on the sidewalks and attended a private French convent school. She was graduated from the College of New Rochelle in New Rochelle, N.Y., and worked briefly at Bankers Trust in New York City.

Raising her family in Rye, N.Y., she was an active parishioner at Resurrection Church in Rye and was active in church and civic activities. For almost 20 years, she taught second grade at the parochial Most Holy Trinity in Mamaroneck. N.Y. and St. Gregory the Great in nearby Harrison.

In retirement on Cape Cod, she was a member of St. Joan of Arc parish in Orleans and volunteered at the church’s thrift shop.

Mrs. O’Brien is survived by eight children: Maureen Maresca of Mt. Kisco, NY; Greg O’Brien of Brewster, MA; Lauren Anderson of Bradford, MA; Justine O’Brien-Holmes of Loveland, OH; Paul O’Brien of Pleasanton, CA; Bernadette Thompson of South Burlington, VT; Tim O’Brien of Guilford, CT; and Andy O’Brien of Rye, NY; and 21 grandchildren. Two of her sons, Gerard and Martin O’Brien predeceased her at an early age.

A wake will be held 6 pm to 8 pm Wednesday at the Nickerson Funeral Home in Orleans. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated 11 am Thursday at Our Lady of the Cape on Stony Brook Road in Brewster. 

In lieu of flowers, pleases send donations in memory of Mrs. O’Brien to the VNA at www.vnacapecod.org and click donations, or mail a contribution to Lower Cape Outreach Council, P.O. 665, Orleans, Ma. 02653.

Wither Males: Are We Headed The Way Of The Dinosaur?

By Greg O’Brien, Codfish Press

In some circles, the question of men universally asked is: If a man speaks in a forest with no woman to hear him, is he still wrong? Today, the query has a new twist: If a man is not needed to reproduce, will he be missed in the bedroom?

Thanks to the British, of all people, the answer may be a resounding: no!

British scientists at the University of Newcastle announced recently the creation of sperm cells from a female human embryo. “British scientists who had already coaxed male bone marrow cells to develop into primitive sperm cells have now repeated the feat with female embryonic stem cells,” science editor Roger Highfield writes in the Telegraph. “It raises the possibility of lesbian couples one day having children who share both their genes as sperm created from the bone marrow of one woman could be used to fertilize an egg from her partner.”

Consider also the potential opportunities for all women who at times have no use for us men, and we’re suddenly flirting with “Homo erectus extinctus,” as The Sunday Times ponders. “Senior scientists believe that woman may evolve as humanity’s sole representatives—and social and political trends are lending weight to their theories,” the paper suggests.

“A world without men,” contemplates About.com. “The story is a familiar one…No men are needed, even in the creation of children. While once relegated to the world of fiction, the possibility of an all-female society may soon become a reality.”

Yikes, say it ain’t so! It’s enough to keep males up at night watching reruns of “Father Knows Best.”

The biology books tell us that men and women differ over sex chromosomes—men and women both have an “X” chromosome, but only males have the “Y,” carrying the required codes, scientists have long suspected, to create sperm. Perhaps us men have been spending too much time wandering aimless about life without asking for directions that we’ve taken our collective eye off the “Y.”  Are we now on the verge of irrelevancy?

“The Y chromosome has scant function other than the production of sperm, and in many men it is not performing well,” The Times reports. “Male infertility is already surprisingly common.”

Back to the gym, boys! Parthenogenesis (virgin birth), an asexual form of reproduction in certain plant and animal life, is also on the rise, and occurs now in water fleas, aphids, some bees and scorpion species, parasite wasps, certain fish, birds and sharks. Expect the list to grow.

Moral and family issues aside, before men toss in the towel on self-worth, consider the following: Who’s going to take out the trash, who’s going to rent the shoot-‘em-up movies, who’s going to buy the beer, who's going to overreact? and who’s going to be wrong all the time?

Relax. There is still a place for us! For now.