Harrumph!

Does it make us Wake Up the Earth junkies if we’ve been going for about 20 of the 30 years it’s happened? We dragged our sorry, soggy butts there again today.

The people in the parade were having a great time. See some pix below.

Drum was a loose term and the dummers clearly enjoyed their versions.	A variety of stilt walkers had a great time striding, walking, dancing and waving.
Some bugs also played instruments as they paraded.	Others were not content just to talk. Dancing was in order.

Pic Click Trick: Click on a thumbnail for a larger view.

On the other foot, hand and head, the cold drizzle kept the crowds to maybe a fifth of the usual. It wasn’t enough to trigger the rain date of next weekend, but it is not going to be the vendors’ best WUTE day.

At the basketball court just below the Stony Brook T station, the on-court memorial shrine to murdered 20-year-old Luis Troncoso had to be off, apparently not to harsh the festival’s mellow. Yet a hand lettered banner running along the back of the court remained.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Walk Up the Earth, Jamaica Plain, Luis Troncoso

• Leave a comment... (0)

Ah, the Boston-area food quest! The slightly unusual, the ethnic, the seasonal…each and all fall into the you-have-to-know-where-and-when-to-look class.

This is just more of the hazing and initiation that comes from living in a charmingly provincial town.

Let it be known that I bought the last fiddleheads of the season here. Travel to far northern New England or Canada if you want. You won’t find any in Boston or Cambridge.

The last half pound ($4.50 worth) fiddleheads was next to some fresh herbs at the Harvest Co-op in Central Square, 581 Mass Ave. Ha!

I ha a hearty ha because I have learned that luck or hound-like determination provide the best results. I used my cycling time to career from grocery to natural-foods emporia when I realized Stop & Shop, Shaws and Roche Brothers stores I frequent were not laying in fiddleheads this year.

At a church dinner a week ago, I even asked the large table whether they had run across any. One woman had, about two weeks ago at a Whole Foods. And I was off.

I cycled to several Whole Foods, as well as groceries I saw on the way. The veggy manager at the one at Walnut and Beacon in Newton further riled me by 1) not having any, and 2) laughing before saying, “Oh, they’ve been gone for over a week.”

I continued with greater drive. Yesterday, cycling to lunch in Central Square, I stopped by the Whole Foods on River Street. I had intentionally left early enough to check out both the Harvest than then the little Whole Foods on Prospect.

Mirabile dictu! I took every last green coil from Harvest. At $8.99, it seemed a bargain. Chlorophyll at its tastiest was mine.

Sorry. Plan for next year.

What are they and what do you do with them, you ask?

Just in case you have never had fiddleheads and maybe don’t know them, I’ll share. Also, because I have mine this year, I’m set.

The still coiled baby fronds to be of the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) are delicious to humans as the mature fronds are to some butterfly larvae. Many ferns are just plain nasty, but these are a very short-seasoned delight.

The Rush of Danger: Many sites with fiddleheads recipes, like this one and this one, warn that an unidentified toxin in some undercooked fiddleheads have caused gastric distress. I have eaten the lightly boiled and tossed with lemon juice, salt and butter or oil to no ill effect. However, I now buy into the toxin idea and won’t eat them until they cook for 10 to 15 minutes.

As with any green, rinse them, chop off any touch or brown stem ends and cook ‘em up.While some make a cream soup with them, I find they are too easily overpowered by strong flavors. Cream can smother their flavor and strong herbs and spices can disguise the “green” taste.I went a little more elaborate than I usually do this season. I created a lightly sauced side dish, let’s call Fiddlehead Not-Quite Soup. It was along the line of:

½ pound of fiddleheads, washed and trimmed

1½ tablespoons of unsalted butter

1 small yellow onion, peeled and minced

½ cup chicken broth

1 cup of milk

pinch of salt

scant dash of white pepper

1. Sauté the onion in the butter until translucent.
2. Add the fiddleheads and the chicken broth. Then simmer uncovered stirring regularly for 12 or more minutes. The fiddlehead stems should be fork tender.
3. Add the milk, stirring occasionally as it reduces, until moist but not soupy.
4. Add salt and pepper.
5. Serve warm. This makes a good first course so it does not compete with other dishes.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, food shopping, Harvest Co-op, Boston, Cambridge, fiddleheads, recipe

• Leave a comment... (0)

My shrink friends tell me we all have those manageable and managed destructive impulses — stepping off the platform in front of the train or pushing someone else. More powerfully, just living can be relentlessly tough and painful. So suicide peeks in our mental windows or comes in to visit.

Two recent very public suicides fall into a whole different category. Convicted felons, one I knew, killed themselves before sentencing. They had months to decide. The likelihood of years or a decade in prison, plus the certainty of emerging broke, was more than they were willing to live with, literally.

Both left suicide notes, which are not public. Each used a method that was not a cry for help with a good possibility of rescue. Consider:

• Deborah Jean Palfrey, a.k.a. the D.C. Madam, who actively fought charges related to a prostitution ring. She hanged herself in a shed at her mother’s house in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Her convictions were on money laundering, financial racketeering, and illegal use of the mail.
  
• Edward Paul Mattar III, who spent several years unsuccessfully trying to avoid conviction of bank fraud and related financial conspiracy. He broke his 27th floor Denver apartment window and defenestrated himself.

The Denver Post business columnist Al Lewis got hints of Mattar’s long note. Word from prosecutors is that it was not an introspection nor any type of mea culpa. Instead, it was a list of related details and tasks for others after his death. There’s a bitter irony there for someone ceding his life and ability to act, yet affecting a measure of control on others post mortem.

In contrast, Palfrey repeatedly announced her intention. Author and journalist Don E. Moldea reported that she told him, “I’m not going back to jail. I’ll kill myself first. I’ll commit suicide first.”

Her reference was to the 18 months she spent in a California prison. Her conviction then was for attempted pimping. She did not help herself by fleeing before sentencing. Police captured her in Montana at the Canadian border.

A heavy pointer to her thoughts and feelings on prison was in the Washington Post piece:

Appearing on ABC’s “20/20″ program a few months after her indictment, Palfrey spoke of Brandy Britton, a former college professor who hanged herself in her Howard County home in January 2007 shortly before her scheduled trial on prostitution charges. Palfrey said Britton had once worked for her.

“She couldn’t take the humiliation,” Palfrey said. “Her whole life was destroyed.”

The St. Petersburg Times reports that Moldea “said that her stay in custody stressed her body so much it had impaired her vision and she refused to go back. ‘It damn near killed her.’”

While others connected with such sex and financial scandals emerge to new careers and financial stability — sometimes building on the sensationalism and infamy, Palfrey and Mattar would not, could not take that path.

Both were in their 50s and surely had at least one more new beginning before them. Yet, their suicides show us again the unknowable. We cannot understand what another person simply cannot abide, what is just one step too far for another.

Another exit similarity was the decision to make others deal with their extremely unpleasant details afterward. For Mattar, rather than go up one floor and leap, he smashed a picture window, leaving the detritus and repairs for others. For Palfrey, she hanged herself where her mother was certain to be the one to find the corpse dangling. Those dramatic statements underscore the often self-centered nature of what could be called the most egotistic of acts.

Sadly for me, it brought to mind the suicide of my Boy Scoutmaster when I was in junior high. Tom was a brilliant chemist, who had a gambling addiction. He and his wife were also good friends of my mother. I don’t recall ever seeing two people more in love with each other.

He was so in debt to mobsters that the only solution he could see was to kill himself. He did that with cyanide at home. He knew his wife would be gone for hours. From the calculations he left, the poison would be well out of the air in the bathroom long before she returned. He had even showered and shaved.

I was and still am saddened he came to that. We learned a lot of Scout stuff, outdoor lore and practical methods, on many camping trips and our regular troop meetings. He kept us laughing, kept pace with the strongest and most assured of us, while gently pushing the shy and clumsy. He really taught self-confidence.

He was a thoroughly worthwhile and enjoyable human, with a tragic flaw. Yet there don’t seem to be too many parallels among Tom, Ed and Deborah. Of course, the only one that counts is that for their various reasons, they were sure they could not continue to the only place they saw life leading.

 5/5 Update: The Smoking Gun put Palfrey’s suicide note on its site.  Sure enough, she writes that’s she’d come out of prison in her late fifties “a broken penniless & very much alone woman.”

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Worcester, Edward Mattar, prison, Deborah Palfrey, suicide, D.C. Madam

• Leave a comment... (1)

It’s a beautiful evening in the neighborhood(s). Bloggers from Roslindale, Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury sections of Boston have their first (but not ice cream) social in two weeks.

Wednesday, May 14th, starting at 7 p.m., we’ll meet at Doyle’s to put faces and names to bloggers we read. Maybe we’ll brag and lie to each other too. There’ll be:

• No test
• No lectures
• No entry fee (pay for what you consume)

Doyle’s is a bar and restaurant, famous for it’s many taps, its Irish pizza, and paintings and artifacts of the many Boston and Massachusetts pols who’ve warmed a bar stool here.

The idea is to meet and greet, to order some food and drink, and to indulge in talking about blogging with people who do it and who care about it.

Your blog or blogs may be about politics, history, nature, gardening, family, or whatever. You’re welcome.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Boston, Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, West Roxbury, Doyle’s, bloggers

• Leave a comment... (2)

After walking past three dive-looking bars between my place and Doyle’s for many years, I visited them this week. I have one son of drinking age, but two at home of pizza eating age. So, while the trio of dark and virtually windowless joints was not that foreboding, they did suffer in contrast.

My fellow lover of IPAs, John, agreed to join me in a Washington Street/Hyde Park Avenue stumble one late afternoon. Two are across the avenue from the Forest Hills station. Like being on a moving sidewalk in an airport, Washington Street pulls a Z around the top of Forest Hills Station, for that one block becoming New Washington, while Washington inexplicably dips a full block below the 203 overpass. Stay on the street and it suddenly becomes Hyde Park Avenue — another Boston trick.

Pic Click Trick: Click on a thumbnail image for a larger view.

On the map, the three run from the top, the Drinking Fountain (3520 Washington), Griffin’s (3698 Washington), and J.J. Foley’s Fireside (30 Hyde Park). None calls out or even whispers, “Enter, yuppies!” Of course, that’s a major point, eh? From external, and as we found, internal, appearance, this are purposeful potable places. Drinkers welcome.

Like all good drinkers, I planned logistics while sober. We’d meet at Green on the Orange line and go from a block below Doyle’s south. We’d end up less than a mile walk to my house and across from the T so he could head back to North Station and Winchester. That would also give us the option of a known quantity to finish the session. Dogwood has a decent bar with a couple of really good beers on tap amongst their ordinary ones. If we still had it together and could feign thirst, we could end the afternoon there.

Drinking Fountain

With its stone fortress exterior, the Drinking Fountain was simultaneously the cleanest and coldest looking for the trio. Across from the lower corner of the English High track field, it is cluttered. It is on a corner with a huge laundromat and car wash. Its block has a motorcycle shop, bodega, the Midway Cafe (a music dive in its own right), and a take-out BBQ joint.

Its sign almost disappears in traffic lights. Yet, it has small American flags left and right.

Inside is both plain as dirt and excellent of its type. First, you have a great shot at a seat at the bar, which runs 35 or 40 feet. Plus, the southern wall has some seats and the middle of the room has a long table with many chairs running nearly the length of the bar. They clearly want you to be comfortable enough for a beer or two or more.

The eastern end of the room has two full-sized pool tables, clearly lit. We didn’t shoot, but this looks like a good place to play. In that vein, they are also set up for petty gamblers, with lottery terminal and vending machine, and multiple keno screens.

Now, to the matter at hand, they offer an adequate but uninspired tap selection. A sign read that they had ‘gansett for $2.25 a pint. The drafts we saw included Bass, PRB, Bud, Bud Light, Miller Lite, Sam seasonal (that summer lemony junk this time), and Blue Moon wheat. We got a Blue Moon and a Bass pint for $7.25 — not bad and quite a bargain over downtown or Cambridge prices.

We didn’t want to geek out with questions, but we did find out a few things, like:

• The robust bartender looks like she can knock most men down easily
• The silver helmet above the bar is an artifact of her boyfriend, who recently retired from the Boston Panthers
• The brothers who own the place live a block or two away and have run it for 30 years or so
• Despite the LUNCHEON on their sign, food is limited to bags of chips and nuts, but apparently they don’t mind if you bring in some BBQ from the other end of the block

At a little after 3 p.m., there were six stool sitters. Most seemed to know each other casually. We fell right in and were welcome.

Griffin’s

My snootiness in walking past these bars cost me and experience, albeit perhaps an unpleasant one.

On the way up to Green Street, I had snapped the bar exteriors. The open door at Griffin’s was not inviting. It was dark inside, with the light on the bar stools coming from the open door out the back. A single patron sat bent to his task. It looked like a tough joint.

Moreover, it played to my childhood memories with its glass block on the front. We always called that VFW brick for the common decor of the vets’ and men’s animal bars. They favor dim, diffused light and drinking early, long and in private.

Apparently that Griffin’s of my imagination is gone. The place is fairly bright once you sit inside. The bar, maybe 15 feet, is a newly refinished wood. The long mirror is a pretty impressive Art Deco piece with rounded corners on top.

Griffin’s smelled strongly of shellac. We asked the bartender, Jerry, and sure enough, it had recently gotten an overhaul, which was still in the works. The owner had died last October and the place was closed for several months, just reopening a few weeks ago.

“If you’d come in here before,” Jerry told us, “you wouldn’t have come in a second time.”

When the work finishes, the plans include a working kitchen to spit out meals. There are six round, tall tables away from the bar.

On tap were only a few good brews. We each got a pint of Smithwick’s Irish ale. John pronounced it much better than the bottled version. It was $8 for the pints, still a relative bargain.

The inside didn’t offer much yet, no games, for example. Also, like the other two, it has a fairly sparse selection of basic booze beyond beer.

Customers were mildly remarkable. There were four, including two Black men, who weren’t together. I hadn’t thought of it, but as it turns out the other bars didn’t have any Black patrons. The Drinking Fountain got a couple of Latinos while we were there. The Fireside appeared to be middle-aged Irish American men. I suspect the demographics of the bar had to do mostly with the local mix and the fact that we were drinking about the time when blue-collar workers end their days. Sociology may require evening visits to all three.

I seem to have missed Griffin’s in its bad times.

Fireside

As the other two Foley’s bars, the Fireside has its fans, lots of them. It also looks like a real dive outside, but is modestly better behind the door.

The exterior is in the class that the Irish American realtor who sold us our house called Irishized. That’s vinyl siding and a stark exterior with fake wood paneling as required.

The substantial horseshoe bar was the busiest of the afternoon. There were eight to start and they kept arriving. The guys knew the barkeep and each other by name. It was not their first visit. You can’t say they were jolly, but this clearly was a socially important part of their day.

A little visual joke is the Fireside’s fireplace. The tiny electric fake fire is a non-functional symbol. It’s been a lot of years since the clean bricks have felt any flames.

The bar had an odd frieze. I thought it was some fancy wallpaper, but John figures it was hand-painted bad Western art. We’ll have to ask on the next visit.

Another question will be why there’s a cuspidor on the counter next to the cash register in the well of the horseshoe. Maybe I don’t need to know that story.

No one was playing the single game, Silver Strike Bowling. That must be what substitutes for pinball nowadays.

To the important business, we found Guinness, Harp, Bass, PBR, Bud and Bud Light on tap. We had pints of Bass and Guinness. The latter was a well drawn and slow pint of the right temperature. That was in the right price range again, $7.75.

This was the most clannish of the three, but still a pleasant enough experience. The other bartenders chatted us up and made up welcome, as did some of the patrons. These guys knew each other and let that color the intrusion of newcomers. That’s fair enough. It’s their local.

Home Again

We certainly had no harm from our slight broadening experience. For me particularly, I don’t have to wonder what’s behind the doors and feel vaguely bad about not trying local places. I think I’ve been to every bar and restaurant on Centre Street. Now my mental map includes more from home to Doyle’s.

I suspect there’s more reason to visit the Drinking Fountain in particular. After all, it’s in the Mutiny (oops, consolidated into the Boston Militia) season and it will be the Panthers‘. Both play at the English field. I suspect the barkeep has good stories for both.

We did end up at Dogwood for a final. It has a lot more taps and two pints ran $9, more typical. The bartender was also inventing, so she gave us samples of her raspberry/latte cocktail she was refining. It was surprisingly not too sweet and fairly good, the sort of soft drink that could sneak up on you.

So, when the boys want pizza or burgers, none of this week’s visits to new-to-me bars will do it. Then again, all three are for real drinkers.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Boston, Jamaica Plain, Drinking Fountain, Griffin’s, Fireside, bars

• Leave a comment... (7)

Squeamishness comes with city life as surely as an urban provincialism.

A lot of years ago, a dear friend from high-school days and I used to walk Manhattan. That’s 14 miles tip to top, and about 10 miles from my West Village hovel.

Some days we walked…and drank…and walked. The sordid oases of McCann’s bars gave us a tad of rest, the sense of adult pleasures, and more personal contact than swapping gazes on the avenues.

Then, a shot of well whiskey was 60¢. We’d walk three or so miles (the rule of foot was 20 blocks of streets to a mile, and 10 blocks of avenues). Like leprechaun magic, a McCann’s would be in always in the middle of a block. It has a green sign and shamrock images. The bar was pitted but clean and okay, as were the johns.

The patrons knew each other but not us. The moment we took a stool though, we were fair game for chats. When they heard we walked up from the Village, everyone had a story from any of the past five decades about our neighborhood. As we had gone to high school in New Jersey, there were more stories.

We’d walk, talk, toss back a shot or two of bourbon and walk some more.

By the time Paula and I got to Washington Heights and the Cloisters, we were ready to see some filigreed fingers (relics) and hop on the A train for a stop at Victor’s (when it was still up on Columbus) for some black bean soup.

To my admitted failing, I have passed three JP dives for nearly 20 years, never entering. During that time, a friend from our Inc. magazine writing days, John, and I have met ever week or two to regale each other with wisdom and lies, and always beer.

I’d think as I’d walk by the locals that I had to try them, but did not until this week. Instead, we did the predictable. When we first moved to JP, we asked where to eat and drink. The strong consensus was invariably, “Doyle’s,” and “Doyle’s,” and “Doyle’s.”

I admit feeling uncomfortable there only twice, both times when I arrived after a died-in-the-line-of-duty cop’s funeral. Our boys in blue were there en masse. They were angry. They were armed. They were drunk.

Years later, Centre Street was pocked with yuppie food palaces and the Forest Hills Stretch of Hyde Park Avenue got fancy pizza/beer joint Dogwood Café. Meanwhile, at the request of various of our boys, we went to Doyle’s or Dogwood frequently.

I continued to bypass Foley’s Fireside, Griffin’s and the Drinking Fountain…until this week. John agreed to join me in likely the first of several pub staggers to the neglected stools of Washington Street/Hyde Park Avenue.

The first door we opened with the Drinking Fountain’s (above). More in the next post.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Boston, Jamaica Plain, bars

• Leave a comment... (1)

There’s a lot of JP, both in length and diversity. Maybe I misdirected my comfort yesterday.

I walked with a newly met woman about 10:30 a.m., assuring her that the Lallement bikepath on the Southwest corridor — tracking the Orange Line — was safe. At the Forest Hills end, she asked whether it was okay to walk then. I told her that yes, in the daytime, but maybe not at night.

She had eyed the seedy sitters and I recalled the late-night bike bandits who’d knock riders down and take their wheels.

I tend, not surprisingly, to bike on that bikepath. When I do walk it, I like to follow the stick figure signs, keeping the bike side for cyclists, even though they are few. I recall the many oblivious strollers often blocking the whole bike side while risking their infants or looking and listening to phones. Don’t be that guy, Mike.

Oddly enough, I was on foot because of my road bike. I finally admitted that those scraping sounds meant I could no longer pretend my brake pads would last forever or regenerate. The Shimano 105/Ultegra pads are hard to come by. International over in Newton had sold me the wrong type already. I was delighted to call at 10 a.m. on Patriots Day and find that Community Bicycle Supply at the far reach of the South End would be open.

I headed up, both to get the right pads and to do a cardio session. That’s about five miles. We live at the very bottom of JP, kind of the pendant on the chain of the long, narrow neighborhood. We’re a mile below Forest Hills in the last couple of blocks of JP.

The woman walker, Wanda, and I headed north. She had dropped her car off in Dedham for repairs, taken a bus to Forest Hills and figured to get a warm-up for her workout at Mike’s gym, a mile or so up the corridor. She is bookkeeper for the Mass Public Health folk and works in JP. She was just not used to walking over to Mike’s.

I’ve biked and walked that path for many years. Quickly she and I got past any thought of evil en route. We spoke of our teenagers, school, sports and gyms.

So that evening, my JP-ness got a jolt reading about Luis Troncoso, the 20-year-old gunned down on a basketball court on the corridor at about 4 p.m. yesterday. That would be the court next to where JP Wakes Up the Earth, the court one half block beyond where Wanda and I parted.

I don’t think I lied to her, not intentionally. I still know the bikepath is safe. It appears his murderer targeted him specifically, so the place and time of death have little implication for the rest of us. The young father is dead still.

I also know that, geographically, fancy folk Pond Side and even Brookline are closer to this violence than we live. Somehow though, as disparate as the various JPs are one from another, the neighborhood link is powerful. I might well have led Wanda right into a scene of death, had timing been slightly different. That’s not what any of us want in our neighborhoods.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Troncoso, Jamaica Plain, Bike Path, murder

• Leave a comment... (0)

Hmm, a fine name for a comic detective or perhaps a ballad singer might be Moody Bonsai. Instead, I dubbed this opportunistic tree-to-be in a Waltham garage.

For centuries, a preferred Japanese method of finding naturally dwarfed trees, bonsai, was to visit cemeteries. Such volunteer plants might grow from a seed in a mausoleum roof or cornice. With just enough blown soil and rainwater to barely survive, those trees became stunted, without human torture to their miniature ideal.

A form of this has been occurring in the city parking garage behind the Watch City Brewing Company (I recommend the FNA, a very hoppy ale). A seed insinuated itself in a seam on top of a wall and the resulting evergreen shows the sculpting by the wind off the adjacent Charles River.

Pic Click Trick: Click on a thumbnail image for a larger view.

Alas, some city worker may decide to save the granite from this interloper and pull it. Otherwise, it may simply die on its own from lack of nutrients. We can’t say it didn’t try.

If you have reason to visit either the pub or plant, be aware that the ticket dispensers are still hosed. The garage provides the noble service of enough space for the lunch crowds at the many and varied Moody Street eateries.

It’s cheap at 25¢ an hour and allegedly self service. You:

• Enter the garage or parking lot
• Walk up to the ticket dispenser
• Push a button for one, two, three hours or all day ($1 for the works)
• Insert your coins
• Put the resulting ticket on your dash so the constabulary can see what you pay for and fine you if necessary

Last month, the dispenser would just eat the quarters and offer nothing in return. Yesterday, it produced this ticket, which as you can plainly see…nothing.

Actually, if you want to the booth on the far side of the open lot, the dispenser in the shelter there may be more functional, but less amusing.

I had a long lunch meeting and had put in 75¢, not so you could tell that. I really doubt the enforcement agent will bother until they fix the box. I’m sure I could have used a single quarter and saved an entire 50¢. I hope Waltham uses my largess to help with repair.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, bonsai, Waltham, Watch City, garage

• Leave a comment... (0)

Time to call the FBI special agent or U.S. Attorney in Denver, as I have every six months. I won’t have to anymore. My guy leapt to his death.

Twenty-seven stories to the concrete, breaking a small tree on the way down, don’t belong in the cry-for-help class. Edward Paul Mattar, III, J.D. had something more definitive in mind on Friday, November 2, 2007.

Ed is left in this picture and I’m on the right. That was inside the jacket of the book we did together 22 years ago. It was McGraw-Hill’s Handbook for Corporate Directors. He was editor-in-chief, which in this case meant that he identified 61 subject matter experts and topics for his assistant to acquire a chapter from each for the book. I was coordinating editor, which meant that I edited, wrote or ghosted the chapters. Also, I am an absolute freak about indices, so I indexed it, a task that generally falls to a contractor who knows little or nothing of the contents.

I, Me, Mine

The Ed I knew was always working the edges and middle simultaneously. He’d do anything to ensure an advantage and a favorable outcome…for himself.

A college chum of mine who had moved to Worcester called me up laughing about Mattar a lot of years ago. Ed was the lead on the front of the local paper’s business section. The article featured the handbook, but did not mention me. The accompanying staff photo showed Ed sitting at his desk holding the book. He expertly covered my name without obscuring his own at all. I too thought it pretty funny, as well as classic Ed.

Ed had earned a solid reputation there for turning around Worcester College. They brought him in as a consultant in 1977 to close it down. Instead, he convinced local businesses to send employees there and rescued it financially. He became president of the renamed Central New England College.

That seems to have been his career’s high water mark. The Rocky Mountain News published a litany of his failures, replete with multiple accusations of fraud and swindling. They cite a trail of educational then financial institution collapses attributed to him in Maine, Rhode Island and Colorado, as well as Worcester. He resigned from Central New England, which somehow was suddenly $14 million in debt and described kindly as having financial irregularities.

People who dealt with him in Denver had unpleasant eipthets for him — a total jerk, abrupt and rude, very arrogant, strange in a lot of different ways. A bank consultant said, “He gave you this gut feeling that something wasn’t right.” Likewise, our mutual McGraw-Hill project manager said, “I don’t know what it is. He always makes me feel like I just peed in my suit.”

College to Court

On that handbook, we got along fine, largely because his assistant did the actual acquisitions work that he credited himself with doing. As a former newspaper reporter doing his first book, it never entered my mind that we would miss any deadlines. I had a full-time magazine job, but did this work evenings and weekends. When I turned it in to McGraw-Hill, Bill Sabin, the head of the division said that he had never gotten or heard of a handbook coming in on schedule. These are honking big books. I suppose if you don’t know any better, you can just do something.

In the two-year project, I did not become attached to Ed, but did and do feel an emotional tie to the handbook.

I saw a news article that briefly mentioned Mattar’s being under indictment in Colorado for bank fraud and conspiracy to do all manner of nasty things. That inspired me to ask around and connect with the U.S. Attorney’s and FBI offices there.

I was amazed at the timeline. See the BestBank history in brief at the Boulder Daily Camera’s Banker commits suicide. Accusations started in 1995, a $30 million mystery loss and forced bank closing in 1998, a grand jury investigation in 1999, federal indictment in 2005, convictions in 2007, and sentencing for Mattar last November.

According to the agent and attorney, this is not unusual in fraud cases involving large amounts of money. Lawyers know how to drag things out and just maybe get a better deal or a reversal.

That was not in the works for Ed. He had escaped from the Northeast, but not Denver. He and his convicted co-conspirators were found guilty of 15 of 95 original counts. Two got 10 years each in federal prison; another two got 7½ each.

Ed was forever the big shot and this time he was the centerpiece. He could plan on 14 to 30 years in prison. Prosecutors asked for the 14 years for the 68-year-old. In addition, while he likely still had a few million, they asked that he forfeit $4.7 million, plus make restitution of $134 million.

He did not have that kind of money and had no way to get it. He was looking at possibly whiling the rest of his impoverished life in prison.

Scrubbing Ed

In what is apparently a standard sentencing procedure, prosecutors are certain to drop his charges eventually. The concept seems to be that even though he was convicted and cut deals on some charges, he would no longer be able to help in any appeals. So the others will have criminal records and likely never be able to work in finance again. Because he died between conviction and sentencing, he would be the only one with a clean record in the end.

Instead, 11 hours before his sentencing, at about 3:30 a.m., he took a sledgehammer to his window. I immediately wondered whether he bought or stole that for this purpose or perhaps had a sledge for work in some vacation home. It is an odd image to think of the always business-suited Ed lugging such a blue-collar implement in the elevator of his rich folk’s high-rise in the middle of Denver.

He had no spouse, but his older brother, Norman is an attorney in Buffalo. Apparently no family members attended any hearings or trial sessions. However, his brother defended Ed after the fact:

He thought he was wrongly accused because he had hired all kinds of people from the banking industry to be present and make sure they were following all the regulations. He wasn’t really a banker himself. He thought everything was perfect.

Ed was singularly nonathletic and grew increasingly eggplant shaped. There’s a bit of drollery in his using a sledgehammer to break his picture window so that he could leap. The intensity of sensations he had to feel in his last instants was not what I would have imagined for him. He seemed to have been more a sleeping-pill sort. Then again, in a bizarre way, throwing himself from the window must have given him a sense of control at the very end.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Worcester, Edward Mattar, Central New England College, McGraw Hill, suicide, Denver, bank fraud, BestBank

• Leave a comment... (3)