The Good Men Project

"The Good Men Project aims to bring men together. There are stories about love and death, trauma and recover, and, ulitmaely, understanding."

The Providence Journal

April 29, 2009

Guest Blogger: Nick Pray

Filed under: Coming of Age, Guest Blogger — tmatlack @ 6:14 am

hendricksimagesLet’s get Groovy

To me to be a good man is to groove when the music is groovy, shake your hips when the music moves you, and rock out when the music is rockin’. If you do not express what music does to you then you are not a man, or woman for that matter; you are a lifeless soul with nothing to live for. Those who stare, they don’t think you odd or strange; they just wish they were as good a man as you are. They wish they could go out in public, shake their ass in the middle of a crowded place, express themselves freely, just like you are.

It could happen anywhere. A good man and a bad man are listening to the same song on the subway. It’s The Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” The decent man at least bobs his head, but the good man throws down a mean air guitar in front of everyone. They  listen to Matthius Jabs’s rifts, love him, and become him in front of everyone! Bad men and bad people are those who listen to music just so they don’t have to talk to anybody, so the situation is not awkward, and so people don’t feel uncomfortable. They listen to whatever’s on. They don’t care.  They are scared to reveal what they are really feeling! It’s just something to listen to instead of the silence. To feel alive and to be a good man is to BREAK THE SILENCE!!! Break the awkwardness and embrace what the music does to you, what it tells you to do, and rock out like you mean it!

If you started lip syncing to Klaus Meine and mouthed “Here I am, rock you like a hurricane,” who could resist singing that sweet ballard? Who? If you mouthed those sweet words, you would be the greatest man in the world. Truthfully, you would be the envy of everyone.  They would wish they could feel what you feel.  Be the first one, and maybe, just maybe, they will follow.  That guitar solo and that lip-syncing will become a duet or quartet.   It will make others want to join in.  You could possibly start a rebellion against the silence and create a ROCK-A-THON with a subway car full of complete strangers. That is what goes into the making of a good man.

 

April 28, 2009

GOOD MAN: John Sheehy

Filed under: Childhood, Good Men — tmatlack @ 6:30 am

We walk around the mineshaft, poking at things. The ground is littered with the detritus of the work: thickly rusted pieces of heavy machined steel, square-top timbers soaked in creosote and blue with age, old ore cars rusted into orange-black lace, crusted sections of small-gauge track piled waist-high, steam shovels, backhoe buckets, and broken bits from the buzzies scattered about. We poke into the blacksmith shop. It’s still open, and the tools are still there. The dull bits, thick with rust, are still lined up by the grinder for sharpening, as if this were only a holiday and the work might begin again in the morning, when the men return from the Mint Bar, from the old M&M, where the doors never closed. But the M&M is closed now and for good, and the men will not return today, to the shop nor to the sill station nor to the hoist house behind the gallus frame, which still echoes with their absence, and, like the smithy, feels as though they had just left.

It’s hard to believe when you stand here that they were only men. They should have been giants, I think. This is the architecture of giants. Everything is huge and heavy. In the hoist house, 4,000 feet of cable as thick as a big man’s leg is spooled like thread on a drum reel 25 feet in diameter. Behind the reel is a slate board with a giant clock hand on it, pointing at the names of the stops in the shaft scrawled in chalk by the hand of some miner now long gone.

Skeff fingers a piece of metal lying on a dusty, oil-soaked workbench. He tells me two of his older brothers might have worked in the mines a few summers before the war. My mother didn’t want us doing this kind of work. She wanted more. He pauses. And anyway, when I broke my hand, I was 18, and my hand was no good after that, for that kind of work. That was the end of that for me. The end of this. So I went to college.

Skeff watched his father, Con, die, slow and gasping. And then in the same year he watched his mother, Anna, die. An eldest son expects to see his parents die. But he did not expect to watch as his little brother Joe followed Con some years later, fighting for air the same way and even in the same house, only in Joe’s case with a little oxygen bottle on wheels pathetically trailing behind him. But even with the bottle, Joe’s circle, like Con’s, narrowed first to the street then to the yard then to the house then to the bed and then nowhere.

 

April 27, 2009

Daily Blog: For Steve

Filed under: Daily Man, Work — tmatlack @ 6:30 am

steveimages1

With the Globe in a fight for its life and The New York Times the subject of a scathing Vanity Fair article, the subject of newspapers has been on my mind.

In 1996, I was the 31-year-old architect of the $2 billion sale of The Providence Journal to the Belo Corporation (Dallas Morning News). The day my boss, the late Stephen Hamblett, announced the deal changed both the city of Providence and my life in irreversible ways. I had taken our 176-year old private company public just 90 days prior to signing the merger agreement on the promise of buying not selling. But Steve and I concluded that if we could get the right price we would indeed sell. We both saw the writing on the newspaper walls all the way back then.

So I met with my counterpart, the Belo CFO Michael Perry, in an Atlanta hotel room. I demanded top dollar and, after hours of discussion, Robert Decherd Belo’s family CEO called to agree to the deal in principal. That set in motion a top secret ProJo board meeting at the Boston Four Seasons where I revealed the offer to a standing ovation by one board member and angry stares from the rest. In the end, greed and reason won out and the board approved my deal.

When Steve took the stage on September 25, 1996 to announce to employees, and the world, that we had sold the company to a bigger, stronger business that was “a mirror image of ourselves” the assembled crowd literally gasped. That night Mayor Buddy Cianci, along with every other public figure in town, bemoaned the fact that we had “sold the joint.”

In the deal I had negotiated a mixture of cash and Belo shares. Each Journal shareholder could elect cash, stock or the mixture. Most of the family took shares. I made $2 million on the deal and took cash. This was a matter of public record in the shareholder proxy to vote the deal. I became public enemy #1 in a state known for the use of cinder blocks to sink dead bodies.

The day of the shareholder meeting there were full page ads from the largest family shareholders pleading for others to vote against the deal and save the independence of the oldest continually published newspaper in the country. The meeting itself was a circus until Steve, having taken pot shot after pot shot, called for a vote. The deal passed by a slim margin.

Thirteen years later, I am left to ask how and why we sold when no one else would. The best I can come up with is that unlike the Times or Belo or any number of other papers who have lashed themselves to a sinking ship, Steve was not born into his job. A freak accident tragically killed Michael Metcalf, the last family member to run the Journal, and thrust Steve into a job he never really wanted. He was a humble and soft-spoken man who felt profoundly uncomfortable in the spotlight. But he had balls.

As a freelance journalist myself these days I believe that free press is essential to democracy. But I also believe that a press that relies on print ads and gives away the crown jewels on the web is doomed for sure. I know that Steve struggled in the years between our deal and his death with the legacy of having pulled the plug on nearly two centuries of history. He told me many times if felt like a bone stuck in his throat. But I am here to say Steve, we did the right thing. You were courageous where so many others were not. And look what would have happened if we had not sold when we did.

 

April 25, 2009

Daily Man: Live from the Muse

Filed under: Daily Man, Good Men Book, Work — tmatlack @ 1:20 pm

I sat across a desk from one of the publishing industry’s leading editors of men’s nonfiction at the speed-dating event which is Marketplace & the Muse in Boston, which attracts the best and brightest of the literary world for a weekend of networking. I had submitted a chapter from my memoir, “It’s Not How You Fall,” ahead of time.

He asked me to tell him a little about my myself. Impatiently I gave him the 15 second version, “grew up on a Quaker commune, went to business school, run huge company at 29, sold same two years later for billions at the moment I got kicked out of house leaving two baby children for being a drunk 13 years ago now…got sober while learning to be a dad on my own, re-married on my 6th sobriety anniversary, had a third child and decided to be a writer four years ago…”

Soon he was talking about Robert Bly and we have moved on from my chapter (which he didn’t like) to Good Men.  My voice began to increase in volume, an unfortunate habit on mine when I sense my conversational partner just doesn’t get it (warning: do not try at home).   I told him about the mass of men starving to hear something real and true they could relate to. He shirked and started lecturing me on “conventional wisdom,” about how memoir had come and gone, as had men and books.

At that point I burst into a list of the things Good Men would accomplish. I was now leaning over the table resisting the temptation to grab the object of my attention by the throat.  I had given up the activity I had signed up for, sucking up to some semi-famous editor, pretty much as soon as I sat down.  But now I was getting dangerously close to physical violence.

Homicide was averted by a little bell. The speed date was over.  He stood. I frankly can’t remember if I shook his hand. I think I did but I was in mid-sentence, explaining why conventional wisdom is exactly what had gotten publishers in trouble to begin with. I was yelling as masses of aspiring writers swept in and out of the room around me like tide, too caught up in the critique they had just received to notice. I just wandered out, more convinced than ever that we are onto something important with Good Men.matlack1

 

Daily Man: Burial at Sea

Filed under: Death, Video — tmatlack @ 6:30 am

I was sitting with my buddy at Fenway Park freezing my ass off on opening day and the topic of crazy business plans came up. He had a high school friend with a bunch of websites and a boat. His most successful business turned out to be a web service promoting burial at sea. Mostly ashes but he had gotten a special request a few weeks back: take uncle Mike’s body and bury him like a man, at Sea.

After doing some research the captain determined that he would have to go 70 miles off shore, enclose the body in a canvas bag with 50 pound weights. But a burial at sea was in fact possible. The video is something pretty unique I would say.

 

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