Those who knew billionaire businessman Tom Flatley recall a man who was generous and modest.
IRISH PRIDE Tom Flatley, Grand Marshal of the St Patrick’s Day Parade in Kiltimagh, two years ago.
Pic: Keith Heneghan/Phocus.
A man unchanged by wealth Those who knew billionaire businessman Tom Flatley recall a man who was generous, modest and private Michael Commins TOM Flatley may have been one of the wealthiest Irish men in America but, in many ways, he was still the same down-to-earth gentleman who left his native Kiltimagh region in the 1950s. News of his death at his home in Milton, Suffolk County, Massachusetts last week fell quietly on the homes around Treenkeel and Cloonmore on either side of the town of Kiltimagh.
The Flatley homeplace lies just a few hundred yards across the fields from where I was born. Tom’s first cousin, Jimmy, and his wife Bridie, farm the land that has been in the Flatley family name in Cloonmore to days stretching back beyond the Famine. Roots run deep in Cloonmore people.
Tom Flatley was the youngest son of John Flatley, Cloonmore Upper, Claremorris (born in 1889) and Margaret ‘Maggie’ O’Brien. Maggie was daughter of Ambrose O’Brien and Mary Conlon and was born 1891 in Treenkeel, Kiltimagh. They were married on February 22, 1923 in Church of The Holy Family, Kiltimagh.
John Flatley, after emigrating from Cloonmore to America, served with the US Army during World War I before returning to his native Mayo where he met and married Maggie O’Brien.
They raised a family of three, all of whom were born in Treenkeel. Mary (Mai) was born in 1924, Ambrose in 1925 and Tom in August 30, 1931.
They were all educated at Lisduff National School. All three emigrated to the Boston region of Massachusetts in the 1950s. Their parents joined them in the late 1950s, a big move from Treenkeel at that stage of their lives. It was also to become their last resting place.
Cousin Jimmy Flatley recalls that Tom always loved to keep in touch with his home area. “The Kiltimagh region and Mayo was always close to his heart. He would often talk about the Cloonmore road and summers spent in his father’s homeplace here in the village during his young years. He never forgot those simple times.”
Wealth was never able to detach Tom Flatley from those roots which were nurtured in the soil of Mayo. Despite all the accolades that came his way (he was an immensely shy man in that regard), his great strength lay in his ability to see through the nonsense and hype, happy and content in the wisdom of the ages which he inherited along the way.
One of the most cherished honours that came his way was when he was made Grand Marshal of the St Patrick’s Day Parade in Kiltimagh in 2006. It was a homecoming which touched his heart, the pulse of the occasion rekindling fond memories of the town and small villages of his youth from where love of faith and fatherland gave him an unshakeable grounding to face the wider world.
Tom was a shrewd businessman whose sound judgement saw him establish the Flatley empire in the Boston region. Though construction and investment, he gave employment to many hundreds of people and he owned and built several hotels, shopping malls, nursing homes and apartments.
Sound judgement served him well. Less than three years ago, in an article in The Irish Times, Tom warned that the Irish housing market, and especially the Dublin market, was grossly over-valued and was heading for a crash. He had been round the course before and could see all the signs well in advance of many of the economists and commentators.
A man steeped in traditional Catholicism, he attended Mass daily. He donated millions to various worthy causes over the years. Tom’s wants in life remained simple. He had no time for posh extravagance and lived in a plain ranch house which he was happy to call home sweet home.
He shunned the limelight and was most content when among family and close friends and supporting the causes which he espoused and were close to his heart. His final wishes in relation to his funeral were, in many ways, reflective of the very ethos of the man who became one of Ireland’s most successful entrepreneurs in the USA.
‘Keep it down to earth’ is a phrase beloved of many people with country roots. The sentiments of these few words rested with ease and serenity on the shoulders of Tom Flatley. Mayo and America has lost a noble son with the passing of the man from Kiltimagh.
He is survived by his wife, Charlotte (nee McLeod), sons Daniel and John, daughters Mary Margaret, Patricia and Kathleen, brother Ambrose and sister Mary Driscoll, 18 grandchildren and extended family.
A special thanks to Nancy Reeb in New York for all her help and assistance in compiling our tributes to Tom Flatley.
‘He didn’t want to be a bother to us’
Lane Lambert and Sue Scheible AS guarded as Thomas Flatley was about his personal life, his friends were every bit as protective of him.
Even as he lost his battle with Lou Gerhig’s disease, they shared nothing with those beyond their own circles. And they respected his wishes to make no farewell visits.
“He was a very private man,” said Boston developer Joe Fallon, who knew Flatley for decades.
It’s a sentiment reflected by the Rev William R McCarthy, a retired priest and founder of Father Bill’s Place, one of the charities Flatley supported over the years.
The Rev McCarthy said that after he opened the Quincy homeless shelter in the 1980s, he often met Flatley for breakfast at Bruegger’s Bagels in East Milton Square, after Flatley attended daily Mass at nearby St Agatha’s Catholic Church in Milton.
“He talked about everything,” said the Rev McCarthy, a friend of Flatley’s since the 1960s.
But close as they were, he hadn’t spoken with Flatley since his disease worsened last fall. “He didn’t want to be a bother to us,” the Rev McCarthy said.
An intensely private benefactor
Lane Lambert HE was an American success story: an immigrant who came to the United States with $32 in his pocket and built a business empire. Behind the scenes, Thomas J Flatley was a deeply religious man and generous benefactor of countless causes aimed at making life easier for the most vulnerable among us.
A native of County Mayo in Ireland, Flatley built a Fortune 500 real estate empire as a longtime South Shore resident. He lived in Randolph for several years in the late 1950s before he and his family moved to Milton in 1961.
Hard-driving, devoutly Roman Catholic and deeply patriotic to his adopted country, he made a $1.3 billion fortune building hotels, shopping centers and thousands of apartments from New England to Florida among them, the Sheraton Tara in Braintree and the Quincy Marriott.
Along the way, he quietly gave away millions of dollars to Catholic charities, Boston College, Africa relief and Irish causes, as well as to local programs such as Father Bill’s Place, Quincy’s homeless shelter, and My Brother’s Keeper in Easton. He was also a generous and anonymous benefactor of The Patriot Ledger’s Lend a Hand program. A lot of people never knew what he was doing to help others, said the Rev William Leahy, the president of Boston College, where Flatley was a trustee.
He was intensely private about his personal life, he was known in the Boston real estate industry for his relentless, competitive drive, and praised by fellow immigrants. He was known as a good Irish boy who didn’t drink or smoke and was a daily communicant of St Agatha’s Church in Milton.
Dissatisfied with selling insurance for his father’s agency in Ireland, Flatley arrived in New York City in 1950 with $32 in his pocket. He worked at a Bronx delicatessen, served two years in the Army, then enrolled at Boston’s Wentworth Institute of Technology on the GI Bill. He dropped out of Wentworth, and instead got training as a plumber and electrician. He went into business for himself in 1956, and married Charlotte McLeod of Quincy the same year. They had five children.
In 1959 he built a four-apartment unit in Randolph. By 1996 he owned and operated 12 malls and shopping centers, 56 office buildings, 15 hotels, seven nursing homes and 14 apartment complexes with 6,000 units an empire that some compared to that of New York mogul Donald Trump’s.
His heart was far larger than his fortune Joe Fitzgerald PERHAPS the most amazing part of Tom Flatley’s story is not that he arrived here from County Mayo with just $32 to his name in 1950, but that, more than $1 billion later, he remained basically unchanged.
Indeed, to the moment of his death at 76, his life continued to be defined and informed by his faith.
“Tom would call me sometimes,” Fred Van Brundt reminisced, getting ready to leave Ohio to attend his friend’s funeral this morning in Milton.
“He’d say, ‘Fred, I was just talking to Jesus and He told me to give you a ring. What do you need?’ ”
Van Brundt, now retired as the Salvation Army’s Massachusetts state commander, laughed, telling story after story of staggering generosity, but always with a caveat.
“Just don’t quote me on the dollars,” he said. “There were so many things that were never told and shouldn’t be told, because that’s the way Tom was.
“After Katrina hit, we were bringing survivors up to the Cape. My cell phone rang and I heard: ‘Fred, where are you? What are you doing?’ I told him I was at the Wal-Mart in Falmouth and that these people needed towels, underwear, fresh clothing. He said, ‘I own that plaza. Whatever you need, you have a blank check.’
“Imagine, a blank check from Tom Flatley. I can recall occasions when he’d read something in the paper, then call me: ‘Fred, do you have somebody in that area who can take care of that family? Just give them whatever they need, then let me know.’ He had such a huge heart.”
For more than 40 years Flatley shared an abiding friendship with Dave Farrell, a top-notch newspaperman here and at the Globe, who died from a lingering illness two summers ago.
“He came to the house to visit Dave right up to that final week,” Dottie Farrell recalled. “And I watched him leave in tears. Considering all the wealth he had, he was such a low-key guy. Money never changed him.”
Those are the stories they’ll be telling about this man who built towers, malls and hotels, yet dwelled in a simple ranch house.
“Tom knew what real success meant,” Casey noted. “He always understood we can’t take the material stuff with us.”
Van Brundt, reeling off stories of rampant benevolence, paused to recall a poignant conversation.
“We were talking about that line in the Sermon on the Mount where the Lord says it’ll be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Tom was concerned about having too much money.
“So I tried to explain the simplicity of that message and told him, ‘Don’t worry, the Lord will have His trumpets waiting for your arrival. You are one of His special saints.’
“He looked at me as if I were nuts and said, ‘Fred, I’m just hoping to get in.”
Van Brundt laughed, warmed by the memory. “If there’s one thing I’m pretty sure of,” he said, “it’s that Tom Flatley got in with no problem at all. I have absolutely no doubt about that.”
From ‘The Patriot Ledger’, a daily newspaper in Quincy, Massachusetts
