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A Rare and Beautiful Gift – Tom Curren
I often thought that Joe would make a great college president; he did, after all, convene a faculty of colleagues that he knew and loved and constantly referred to. It is an honor and a blessing to be with his family and among you all tonight.
I grew up in a place not far from here – you could get there on the train for a Liberty half and a buffalo nickel in those days – when a boy’s life was a collection of part-time jobs: second baseman, paperboy, inspector of freight trains, custodian of baseball stories. I was an altar boy, too, one of few in an outlying parish, and so I was assigned to serve a lot of funeral masses. And one of the songs that our people sang when the good died young was called “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ya”.
But you could never sing a song like that about Joe Breiteneicher. I imagine that, of all of us gathered here tonight, there’s not a one who would have referred to Joe as a “casual acquaintance.” Joe didn’t have any casual acquaintances that I know of: if he had any time for you at all, he had a lifetime to give you, and as we all know well, Joe Breiteneicher’s lifetime was one of the rarest and most beautiful gifts that the universe could bestow upon us.
I first met Joe in 1983, when I was working for a residential school for emotionally disturbed children in New Hampshire. I’d just been demoted from Farm Manager to Director of Development. One of our trustees was a member of the Bird family; she took me to meet the executive director of the Bird Charitable Foundation, whose office was in, as it turned out, the East Walpole Library. Joe Breiteneicher was gracious, charming, witty – and non-committal. He seemed genuinely interested in our cause, heard us out on our request for funds, regaled us with stories, and showed us to the door. “Come back next week” he said to me, as if I’d just bought a suit at Filene’s and left it with him for alterations.
When I returned a week later, Joe greeted me warmly, fetched coffee, and offered me a seat under one of Walker Evans’ photographs from “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” He smiled benevolently and said to me “I can’t give you any money.” “Why not?” I asked. Joe smiled back and said “Nobody ever asks me that question. Well, there are 3 reasons: your trustees have recently invaded your endowment for operating purposes; there are people on your board who don’t give to your annual fund, and too many of the kids in your care end up back in trouble after they’re discharged. You need to go back and tell your board that you can’t expect to raise any money until these things are attended to.” And he smiled the all-knowing and all-benevolent Joe Breiteneicher smile. “I can’t tell them that,” I said, “…but you could.” Joe stared at me for a good 30 seconds with a half-lidded gaze I came to think was X-ray vision. “OK,” he said, “you guarantee me 80% participation in a special board meeting to address the future of your school, and I’ll give you a workshop on the subject.”
What eventually followed was a 4-hour Joe Breiteneicher tour-de-force. He paced around the boardroom – fourteen heads swiveling to follow his every move as he strode back and forth, choreographed by inspiration, writing as if his flip chart were stone tablets, speaking as if the mission of the school was the closest thing to his own heart, introducing his most important points to his audience sotto voce, and with the throwaway phrase: “of course, you know as well as I do….” It was the Full Joe. He was magnificent. King of Night Vision; King of Insight.
I thanked him afterwards, and hit him up again for $100,000. No way. $50,000? No. How about $25? Nope. What he did do was offer to buy me a beer, and extend a $5,000 challenge grant. Within a week, I had lined up a $5,000 in new donations. I called Joe and gave him the news. “Do you still need $100,000?” he asked. “Yes.” “Well, I haven’t paid out the challenge, so don’t stop now.” Joe didn’t send me the $5,000 until I had raised $95,000 and we had met our goal. The campaign was completed. The board was energized. And my life, much like your lives, had been transformed.
So I came to know Joe Breiteneicher, a lifelong friend, mentor, and as Albert Ruesga put it so well, a Great Soul of Philanthropy. I often dropped in on Joe when I was in Boston. He moved from East Walpole to Center Plaza, then to Rowe’s Wharf, then on to TPI and the Columbian Life Building. We talked a lot about music (he loved Carl Perkins and Sam Cooke) and about baseball (he loved, among so many others, Ozzie Smith, the Hall of Fame shortstop who on big days did a backflip on the field, out of sheer love of the game). As I got to know him better, I began to see that he was at the center of a network of extraordinarily dedicated professionals and philanthropists. It seemed that the hackneyed phrase “the best and the brightest” had an actual incarnation in the not-for-profit world, and that Joe was central to its dedication to purpose, rigorous standards, and meaningful outcomes. And it was through this, in Paul Simon’s words, “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” that, against all odds, Joe orchestrated miracles and wonders for the homeless, for the sick, for the arts, for the environment, for victims of poverty and discrimination—his business card at TPI could well have been written by Emma Lazarus. Or by Thomas Jefferson.
For as well as we knew Joe as a philanthropist, he was also a patriot soldier in the everlasting American Revolution, a general officer in the Grand Army of the Republic. He believed passionately in the promise of America, and he labored ceaselessly to keep our oldest and most sacred commitments, even when our leaders squandered principle, ran up debt, and wallowed in injustice. For Joe, patriotism was not a matter of land mines or bazookas – it was about neighborhoods that took care of each other, and cities that worked, and a country that stood for good and great things. And it was certainly about bravery, the bravery of Mary Dyer, or Robert Gould Shaw, or Martin Luther King, the people who stood up in their time when frightened persons sought to build a fence around this country to keep out the Quakers, or the blacks, or the Jews, or the Catholics. And Joe’s patriotism was all about integrity: I suspect he’d feel that the homeland would be better secured if our public buildings were furnished with lie detectors as well as with metal detectors.
He wasn’t just a patriot, he was a Boston Patriot. He believed in this city on a hill; he believed in its idealism and its grace and its excellence and its smarts. He believed that great things could begin here that would flourish across the land and bear fruit throughout the world. You cannot walk around this town without seeing the evidence that he left this city a better place—on the outside as well as within the hearts of its neighborhoods and its institutions.
When Joe gave me the great gift of the chance to say goodbye, I said to him, “It looks like we’ll have to straighten out the country without you.” And Joe answered simply: “Yes. You will.”
So I would submit to you that the greatest tribute we could make to Joe Breiteneicher’s memory is that we resolve go forth from this place and do our best work—as fearlessly, as effectively, and with as much grace and good humor as Joe did his. And when we encounter the inevitable outer shocks and inner doubts that are the cost of doing good work, we should remember the heritage of this Old South Meeting House, which now includes Joe’s celebration, and gather together our doubts, our fears and our inertia, truck them down Congress Street and across the Central Artery, and dump them into the channel like so many chests of unwanted tea.
I bet that, every time we win a victory for virtue, somewhere, on the edge of the grass of some celestial infield, Joe will slap his baseball glove and do a backflip, just like Ozzie Smith. And he’ll thank us, for letting him help.
Tom Curren, based in Danbury, New Hampshire, serves as Project Director of the Northeast Land Trust Consortium for The Pew Charitable Trusts.
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