John – attached are Peter’s remarks… enjoy (again)… Have a great Thanksgiving. Take care, Tom
Thomas A. McCarthy (MC2006)
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I’m deeply honored to be invited to address this gathering of my fellow Jaspers…
But as honored as I am, I’m not deceived.
I know the primary reason I was invited.
Joe Dillon wanted to get a humongous-selling, internationally famous novelist who was also a Manhattan College graduate.
Unfortunately…since my classmate James Patterson was otherwise engaged…he had to settle for an obscure writer of long historical novels whose annual book sales reach into the high double digits.
Yet, despite some obvious differences, Jim Patterson and I share a good deal in common…
While Jim was an English major and I was a history major, we were in the same rhetoric class with Professor Ronald Christ in 1966…
We both graduated in 1969…
And we both publish an average of two books…
Jim averages two books a year…
And I average two books every twenty years.
Like Jim, I didn’t start out to be a novelist.
After college, Jim pursued a hugely successful career in advertising.
After college, I failed at several careers.
First, I failed at advertising.
I got a job as a media buyer at Compton Advertising the old-fashioned way—my girlfriend (now my wife) had a sister who worked in the personnel department.
I was gone in six months, having set a standard for feckless ineptitude that remains unmatched to this day.
Next, I tried teaching.
I spent a year as an adult education instructor in VISTA and then taught for another year at Paramus Catholic High School. At the end of that brief career, Brother Anthony, the principal at Paramus, assured me that I had set back secondary education by at least a decade.
After that, I continued to add to my unbroken string of illustrious unsuccess as a Wall Street messenger, a court officer in Bronx landlord and tenant court, and the archivist at the New York Botanical Gardens.
Finally, at age 28, I did what lost, desperate people have always done…
I went back to school to get a Ph.D.
I chose an obscure institution in a remote backwater that most of you have probably never heard of…
It’s called Fordham University.
Given the school’s low standards and the extremely limited intellectual abilities of its student body, I was finally in an environment where even I found it impossible to fail…
Well, almost impossible.
Having completed all the requirements for a doctorate in modern European history except the dissertation, I was able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and achieve another unsuccess.
The credit, however, belonged more to my parents than me.
Whether out of a lack of foresight or sheer carelessness, they brought me into the world at a point that guaranteed my academic plans would end in a cul-de-sac.
I was one of those baby boomers who was ready to leave graduate school just at the point where an ever-increasing glut of professors met head on with a rapidly diminishing supply of students.
In his writings on the labor theory of value, Karl Marx describes such a situation as, quote, “among the inherent contradictions in the relationship between the intrinsic worth of labor and the extrinsic demands of the market.”
My uncle Joe O’Brien, former night clerk at the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street, put it more succinctly…
“Peter,” he said, “you’re screwed.”
I was thirty-two and facing permanent underemployment as an adjunct or, worse, the daunting prospect of finding yet another career at which to fail.
Then, whether through luck, or fate, or the grace of God—call it what you will—I fell into a career as a speechwriter.
Please note my choice of language.
I said fell because in my experience no one has ever consciously set out to spend their career as a speechwriter.
As far as I can tell, the only other highly skilled professionals of whom this can be said are hookers.
Speechwriters and hookers share other similarities as well…
Both professions involve highly personal acts performed for pay…
And both are legal in Nevada.
Hookers, of course, are in far greater demand in Las Vegas, unless there’s a convention of presidential hopefuls in town.
I spent the next twenty-seven years as a speechwriter, working for two New York governors, Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, and five chairmen of a company known successively as Time Inc., Time Warner, AOL Time Warner and once again—at least until the next acquisition or break-up—as Time Warner.
For a time I inhaled the sweet—and unfamiliar—smell of success.
But unsuccess wasn’t finished with me yet.
Before you could say “Titanic” or “Von Hindenburg”…
Along came the AOL-Time Warner merger.
In the ensuing debacle of what has come to be routinely described as “the most disastrous merger in American business history,” Time Warner vice-chairman Ted Turner went from a net worth of nine billion to one billion dollars.
To paraphrase the late Everett Dirkson…
“a billion here, a billion there…and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
Although my raw totals for net worth were a shade or two less than Ted’s, I made the same proportional decline.
I can’t say I wasn’t forewarned…
Not by any of the visionaries, consultants and unindicted co-conspirators who swarmed everywhere as the dot-com bubble swelled ever larger…
But by my wife, a level-headed Irish-American girl from 163rd Street and Clay Avenue in the South Bronx, who said to me, “Let’s sell all the stock and all the options and go away and enjoy life.”
A man less acquainted with unsuccess might have listened to such a siren call…
Not me.
I listened attentively to the chorus of certainty that insisted today’s hundred-dollar share price would soon be—was destined to be, had to be—two hundred, three hundred…the sky’s the limit.
In the end, I have no one to blame but myself…
I hung in there when the share price dropped to eighty…and from eighty to sixty…and from forty to twenty…all the way down to nine.
To make a short story even shorter, I was rich once and I was young once…
And will never be either again.
My purpose in telling you all this is not so I can pass the hat and collect enough money to buy groceries for myself and my family.
As Evita Peron put it, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina.”
Thanks to my old friend, steadfast financial advisor and fellow Jasper, Kevin Stapleton—who’s here this evening—and to generous pension and profit-sharing plans put in place in that now-vanished, never-to-return time when corporations imagined there was a benefit in retaining employees for their entire careers and rewarding their hard work and loyalty, I face a most comfortable retirement.
After twenty-three years, I will leave Time Warner at the end of this year with the assurance that I’ll never be reduced to eating cat food and, if I am, it will be premium cat food.
For me, the point is that while it’s crucially important to be able to provide for yourself and your family, the final determination of success—of not just how much money you have but how happy you are—is this: Are you doing what you want to do? Are you doing what you feel you were put here to do?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that question.
Each of us has his or her own answer.
In my own case, as long as I can remember my deepest ambition—although at times only vaguely felt and often seemingly out of reach—was to be a writer, to put my own stories down on paper.
That I was able to fulfill it—to write and publish my own books—is in no small measure due to the De LaSalle Christian Brothers and Manhattan College.
My association with them goes back fifty-six years…to the fall of 1951, to be precise…when my father took my brother and me to the 25th reunion of his engineering class of 1926, which is the first time I remember being on the Manhattan campus.
Four years later, in 1955, when I left the second grade in St. Raymond’s and passed from the Sisters of Charity in the new school building on Tremont Avenue to the old school on Castle Hill, I had my first encounter of a close kind with the Christian Brothers.
There’s been plenty written and said about parochial education in those distant, pre-Vatican II days.
At one extreme, they’ve been romanticized in “Going My Way” fashion as idylls of piety, tranquility, and obedience.
On the other, they’ve been criticized to the point of parody as educational concentration camps that would have done the North Koreans proud.
They were far from perfect, that’s for sure.
At St. Raymond’s, the smallest class I was in was 45 kids.
We came from a wide range of economic backgrounds and represented a spectrum of abilities that went from gifted to what today would be diagnosed as learning disabled, and even mentally challenged.
Some of the teachers I had didn’t belong in a classroom; others were dedicated and incredibly hard working.
I remember one in particular, Brother August—we knew our teachers only by their religious names in those days—who was probably all of 24 or 25 when he was put in charge of 48 or 50 seventh-grade boys.
Brother August taught us math.
I was—and am—terrible in math.
Brother August was endlessly patient, understanding and encouraging.
He was a living embodiment of the concept of “no child left behind,” and by the time he was finished with us, we all had skills we didn’t have before we entered his classroom.
From the brothers at St. Raymond’s, I went on to the brothers at Manhattan Prep.
In some ways it was the worst of all possible worlds…
A two-bus, hour-and-fifteen-minute trip from the east Bronx to the west Bronx, to a school with no girls and a small overall enrollment but class sizes of 35 to 40 students.
Manhattan Prep was a no-frills, no-nonsense, no-excuses kind of place.
Yet if I had a few lemons for teachers—and one layman who was a certified sadist—I had some truly amazing men whose influence has stayed with me the rest of my life.
The most influential was Brother Aquinas…or “A.Q.” was always referred to him.
As I would later discover, A.Q. was born John McNiff.
He was from a large working-class Irish family (as many of the Brothers were in those days) and was the first in his family to go to college.
In his early thirties when I encountered him, A.Q. was incredibly well read, wonderfully open minded and absolutely down to earth.
He was a teacher of extraordinary ability who like all truly great teachers didn’t merely convey facts or explain theories but instilled in students his passion and love for the subject matter and for the process of learning itself.
Not insignificantly, he only used force as a last resort, which—to put it mildly—wasn’t the case with all the Brothers.
In my senior year, for instance, as well as teaching me English, he supervised study hall. His usual practice was to stick his head in a thousand-page Russian novel and warn us not to talk and, if we did, to do so softly and not disturb him.
Unused to lax supervision of this sort, some of us would almost invariably push the noise level to the point where A.Q. would look up from his book and, in a half-pleading, half-minatory tone, issue a final warning.
Most of us recognized that as the red light it was intended to be.
But occasionally, there’d be some foolish soul who’d drive right though and soon discover A.Q. could also stand for “annihilation quotient.”
Along with awakening in me a love of literature and helping me understand better than any teacher before or since what goes into making a sentence come alive, A.Q. told me two things that influenced the rest of my life.
First, he told me that he thought I had the makings of a writer and that if I had the persistence to pursue it as a vocation—and that’s what he called it, a vocation, not a career—I had a chance of success.
I wasn’t the only one he encouraged this way.
I know for a fact he encouraged Mike O’Hara in the same fashion.
Another graduate of the Prep and College, O’Hara went on to write a number of successful made-for-TV movies, form his own hugely profitable film-making company—O’Hara-Horowitz Productions—and is now living in Malibu, rich and happy and trying his hand at novel writing.
Second, at one point when I’d broken my wrist in gym, A.Q. let me give an oral book report. I forget what the book was. All I remember was that instead of reading it, I read the classic comic version or skipped over the Cliff notes confident I could do a sufficiently convincing snow job to skate by.
A.Q. listened to my presentation without comment or interruption.
Several of my classmates gave me thumbs up when I was through. They were certain I’d pulled it off, and so was I.
After a few seconds of silence, A.Q. looked at me and said five words I’ll never forget…
“Quinn,” he said, “you’re full of shit.”
He ordered me to go back and read the book.
Talk about an “ah-ha moment”…
The shock of hearing that unadorned, down-to-earth pronouncement from a black-robed authority figure with a collar in the shape of the tablets of the Ten Commandments was like the voice Paul heard on the road to Damascus.
It cured me at an early age of the illusion that I could fake it…that I could get by without doing the necessary work…that sounding like you know what you’re talking about is just as good as really knowing what you’re talking about.
How many times over the ensuing years, in countless meetings and corporate retreats, seminars and pow-wows, listening to the latest theories on the future of the media or the next sure-fire, can’t-miss business notion, have I wished A.Q. was in the room to puncture the pretense and bring the proceedings back to earth?
In fact, it seems to me that in his blend of scholarship and street-wise intelligence…in his freedom from intellectual snobbery and love of great literature…in his religious commitment and sophisticated appreciation for creative expression, A.Q. was representative of the best traditions of the Christian Brothers and Manhattan.
Over the years, I worked with any number of graduates of the so-called elite universities. Most—but certainly not all—were intelligent and good at what they did. But never once did I feel that I was put at a disadvantage by having gone to Manhattan.
More often than not I felt the opposite…that I had the advantage.
The great books curriculum in place during my years at the College offered me a grounding and context for the study of history and literature that few other schools provided.
Teachers like Harry Blair, Brother Patrick Stephen McGarry, Alfred De Lascia, and Fred Schweitzer were as commanding, demanding and knowledgeable as could be found anywhere.
It’s been said, of course—most recently in a New York Times piece about a certain Jasper running for president—that Manhattan in those days lacked diversity.
It is true that we were disadvantaged by a lack of women but many colleges in those antediluvian days were single-sex institutions.
It’s also true that a majority of us were the descendants of Irish-Italian immigrant families, but the differences between those two groups were still pronounced—to the point, Irish-Italian nuptials were often referred to as “intermarriage.”
Yet if we weren’t exactly a United Nations of human variety, still, we represented an astounding geographical diversity.
It was at Manhattan that I first shared a classroom with people from Queens…
from places that sounded like they could have been Shirley Temple’s hometown …Woodside…and Sunnyside…and Forest Hills…
I had classmates from as far south as Staten Island, which I had formerly thought was an unpopulated wildlife refuge.
We even had a contingent of international students from the Left Bank of the Hudson, from Edgewater, Fort Lee, and Jersey City.
Previously, everyone I’d gone to school with was from the parishes of the Bronx, Yonkers and upper Manhattan.
Now I got to interact firsthand with people from Albany and Brooklyn, to hear their strange accents and watch as they struggled to adjust to the demands and expectations of higher education as well as to master the use of a knife and fork.
Despite our differences, we were united by the experience of Manhattan, by the challenges it posed and the opportunities it offered.
Manhattan was a place of no illusions.
It didn’t fashion itself as a training school for a self-referential elite or pump us up with notions of our own self-importance…it left that to Jesuit institutions…
But it changed us.
It engaged our intellects, opened our minds, and grounded us in the essentials of what it means to be an educated person.
It didn’t shove religion down our throats, but gave us the chance to gain a greater appreciation of our heritage and deepen our faith, or reject it.
So much of what is good in my life, of the success that I’ve enjoyed and the unsuccess that I’ve endured, learned from and gotten past, I owe to Manhattan and the Christian Brothers.
Along with a first-class education, they gave me the understanding that the meaning of life isn’t in just doing a job, playing out the clock and filling the time between the womb and the tomb with whatever toys and distractions are most readily available or pleasurable.
From the perspective of a professional writer, they helped me develop the one asset that separates people who talk about writing from people who actually do it…
Discipline.
Outside those whose tastes run toward S&M, discipline doesn’t appear to enjoy much currency these days, and the reasons aren’t entirely regrettable. Too much discipline can be as bad as too little. The latter can engender license and aimlessness, while the former can stifle creativity and lead to numbing conformity.
But the job and vocation of writing is impossible without the capacity to isolate yourself in order to sit for long periods of time, to grind out sentences and paragraphs, to write and re-write, day upon day upon day, and to stick with it despite distractions, depressions, heartaches, headaches and hangovers.
How the idea that being a writer is a glamorous profession ever arose, I don’t know, but I didn’t come from writers. As the great sportswriter Red Smith remarked when someone told him how “effortless” his writing seemed, “Sure it’s effortless, all I do is slit open an artery or two and bleed on the page.”
Early on, I discovered that if I wanted to write my own books, I had to face these facts.
I was working a hectic schedule as the chief speechwriter at Time Inc. with one child in hand and another in the works, and I had this idea for a novel rolling around in my head but no time to write it.
I turned to the one friend I had who worked fulltime as a novelist and playwright, and spilled my guts.
After listening politely to the same refrain several times, he said, “Make the time.”
I was annoyed by that reply—pissed off, if you want to know the truth.
My friend was divorced, his children were grown and he had no responsibilities except his own writing. The very smugness of his words—make the time—kept rankling me until the third or fourth time he repeated them to me and the truth of what he said penetrated my cast-iron Irish skull.
He was right.
If writing my novel mattered as much to me as I insisted it did, I was going to have to carve out the space I needed to make it not something I did when I felt like it or could steal the time, but an obligation as basic and routine as eating or getting up in the morning.
Although I’d never been an early riser, I became one.
I started getting up at 5:30 A.M.—the same time that in my bachelor days I’d often went to bed—and arrived at work two hours early.
There were days when I was ready to give up.
I was writing without an agent or a book contract.
There were mornings it was dark and cold, my back was out, and I wasn’t sure where the story was going, when I thought to myself, “I’m spending all this time and energy worrying about people who never existed in a book that may never be printed. Maybe I should give up writing and try psychotherapy instead.”
I discovered, however, that my years at Manhattan and the instruction I’d received at the hands of teachers like A.Q.—their insistence on doing the work and not trying to skate by—had developed in me a capacity for disciplined endeavor far deeper than I’d ever imagined.
I stuck with that schedule of getting up at 5:30, five days a week, and working at my own writing for two hours for the next 17 years…
And it made all the difference…
It allowed me to write and publish two historical novels, Banished Children of Eve and Hour of the Cat—a total of a thousand pages of fiction—and a long list of personal essays and historical pieces which became the basis for Looking for Jimmy.
I am entirely indebted to Manhattan for the life I’ve had and the immeasurable satisfaction that comes from having done—and continue to do—what I want to do, and what I feel I was put here to do.
Obviously, Manhattan has changed a good deal in the nearly forty years since I graduated…
It went co-ed a few years after I left, a change I’m sorry I missed.
“Foreign exchange students” is no longer a term applied to arrivees from Long Island and Connecticut…
where the ratio in my day was 80% commuters and 20% boarders, it’s now the exact opposite.
More and more, the student body reflects the magnificent range of colors and cultures that is making this city of ours the global capital of the 21st century.
Yet some things haven’t changed…
Manhattan is still a place of unpretentious learning, a school of no illusions that does it’s best to turn out graduates who are neither elitists nor nihilists…but women and men who along with valuing material success know the importance of creating meaning in their own lives as well as seeking some measure of improvement across this wounded planet of ours.
Jaspers come in all hues and genders…
Some are young…and some not so young…
Some are pretty…
and the rest…well, we do the best with the little that we have…
On a personal level, Manhattan is part of who I am, and I’ve been part of it for a third of its 150 years.
To that old and often asked question, then, “What the hell is a Jasper?…
I can say with great pride and gratitude, I am a Jasper.
Thank you for listening.
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