Where I want to start at, Matt, I think would be interesting is what is your earliest memory of growing up with your parents?

Matt: My earliest memory of growing up is being alongside the side of my house and I think I was about four years old and other four and three-year-olds walking by and talking to them about what was going on and what I was going to do or what was going on in the four-year-old world at that time.  And, I had a clear memory of being aware of myself at that time and, you know, being in sort of my own little world.  Prior to that I have a brief memory of being down the street one time in a crib with some relatives, which were relatives on my uncle’s wife’s side and playing there with a couple other kids in a sunny day.  So, that would be the earliest things I could think of.  And, that next, that sort of fast forwards me to probably kindergarten and I remember in kindergarten I didn’t want to go to school. I was happy just staying at home.  Even before kindergarten, I used to – I had two older brothers an older sister, they sort of were their own group and I was sort of a, you know, further out satellite and I would be home with my mom – my mother would be home a fair amount of the time.  She eventually went back to school and taught after I started school, I think, the third grade, and first grade, then eighth grade.  But, she’d be home a lot of the time before that and I spent a lot of time playing alone.  I would play with, I guess army men and cowboys and Indians and I would have these very elaborate games I’d play.  I could really keep myself occupied for long periods of time in an imaginary world or worlds I’d create for myself.  And, I remember that as being fun and my mother being open-minded and helpful in expanding my play ideas – I sort of wanted to create a fort once under the dining room table and my mother got bedspreads to make sort of a roof for the fort and I extended it out.  I had it halfway out to the living room at one point and she seemed to be easygoing with respect to my own play world.  And, I remember watching TV with everybody in the family seeing “I Love Lucy.”  I remember that real well or listening to Boston Celtics basketball team games on the radio, they weren’t televised.  And, when I went to elementary school – we lived on a hill.  I remember the fall, brilliant colors, reds, oranges, yellows, almost surrealistic beyond real, smelling of burning leaves, which they don’t let you do anymore, and apple cider and Halloween and how much fun that used to be and, I’d get a Halloween card and you’d go out and get candy and the streets were dark and it was usually pretty cold and it might snow at that point.  And, you would go around in large groups and it was just like a night that was sort of a night for kids.  A night when the whole world went a little crazy.  I always liked that night.  I thought it was a lot of fun.

I’m picturing back then, parents didn’t walk the kids, right, weren’t you ...

Matt: No.  No, I would go, a lot of times, I had two older brothers, I’d go probably with my older brother Ed, a lot of the time, or sometimes I’d go with groups, myself and some of my friends.  And, we sort of had to be careful of older kids who would, you know – I remember one time there was an older kid with a big, huge sack of candy and he would – basically had gotten the candy from taking it from all the other kids.  But, I remember one house that I would go into and they would give you a glass of apple cider and a dime.  They didn’t believe in candy, but you’d get a dime and a cider glass – and a dime then was, you know, half the cost of a Saturday afternoon movie, so.

Right.  Or at least buy a whole candy bar or something like that.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, a whole big candy bar.

Right.

Matt: I mean, you know, a giant-size candy bar for a dime.  You’d get something really good for a dime.  And, I remember going to kindergarten and – I remember going to kindergarten and going up there and, when I was a kid, there was – it was a really busy household.  We were in, I would guess – both my brothers and I slept in the same room, my sister slept in her own tiny room, which was like a closet, and my folks slept in the other room.  We had a dining room and living room.  But, it was maybe, I’m guessing, 800 square feet.  We had a basement, unfinished, we eventually built a room down there.  We being my two brothers.  And, then, my aunt (my father’s sister) and uncle and my grandmother lived upstairs.  And, there’d be such a swirl of activity in the morning.  I would sort of walk in my pj’s and the next thing I know, I would be dressed by like four different people and be ready to go off to school.  You know, I’d just sort of appear and then, you know, then suddenly I’d be ready to go.  The school Mount Trinity Academy (a Catholic elementary and girls’ high school) was on a hill nearby and it was situated actually on a golf course.  I don’t know, it probably pre-dated the golf course.  Old brick building, big, and the kindergarten was off to sort of a side building, which had probably been used for some sort of storage above it.  And, I remember getting to kindergarten and I remember the nun telling me to take off my sweater and I said I didn’t know how and I remember her being indignant because I didn’t know how to take off my sweater.  And, I remember I was indignant that she was indignant.  That was not a good way to start.  So, I wound up in the storeroom, that’s where she put unruly kids, which was fine when I was there by myself, but another kid came by in about another hour who had done something inappropriate and he was nutty as a fruitcake, so I was afraid of being in the storeroom with that nutty kid more than anything else.  I didn’t mind being by myself.  Didn’t like my nun, Sister Sienna, very much.  I remember brilliant memories about the hill where my elementary school was located on regarding winter and sledding.  We had a big golf course with a lot of hills and you could sled for maybe two minutes, three minutes.  So, that’s a long ride.  That’s a big long ride.  And, walk back up and – sort of being the in winter sun, on a sunny, cloudy day, a winter sky.  It was different than other times.  But, always being a lot of fun and then coming home and having something like my mom’s cinnamon toast.  It was a good feeling.

Keeping in the youth, how do you describe mom when you are a five or six-year-old?  Tell me about your mother.

Matt: I guess the sense I had of both my mother and my father was that they were older.

Okay.

Matt: My mom always, as long as I knew, always had gray hair.

Okay.

Matt: And, she was – I remember she had a lot of friends.  She’d get on the phone a lot.  She participated in a lot of clubs that were offshoots of our local Catholic Church there, Our Lady of Mercy.  There was like a women’s altar club, there was a book reading club (the Literary Club), there was a couple clubs that dealt with cultural kind of things.  I remember ...

In the middle 50’s, too, right?

Matt: Yeah, this would be when I was five, that’d be ’53.

Okay.  Lots of women had gray hair back then, you didn’t dye – it wasn’t as common to dye hair.

Matt: Yeah, no, and she was – and particularly people of Irish descent tend to go gray early.  Fortunately, ours go gray and then they go white.  But, my mother was gray at 23.

Oh, really?

Matt: Yeah, she was totally gray.  So, yeah, I used to go up and get her blue, blue-tinted hair dye – I had to walk up to the Woolworth and get the – get her blue hair tint.  It was sort of a blue – it was a hair tint.  But, I used to get that.  But, I remember her being – all right – she liked to talk.  She had a lot of friends and it was pretty easy to just be visiting with her – and I also got a feeling that I was – I was told later I was a “bonus baby.”  I was a little bit of an afterthought.  I mean, there was, like I say a coherent group of my older siblings in the family and then I was just arrived.

What age difference between you and your youngest brother?

Matt: Five years to the next one.  And, then between that brother and the next brother is a year and a half and then that brother and the sister is another two years or so.  So, they were sort of one group, but I guess I sort of felt like – my sense of being around my mother, she was pretty relaxed, encouraged me to be creative in my play, let me do what I wanted most of the time, and that there was a lot of kids on the street to play with – so, pretty good.

And, your father?

Matt: My father – I remember him – him he used to wear a fedora out to work everyday and he wore a suit.  He was a probation officer.  He – I had a sense – he was older than my mother by – my mother was like 37 when I was born, so when I was five, she’d be 42.  Now, my dad was at least nine or ten years older, so he was, he was 45 when I was born, so he would be 50.  And, I remember – I had a sense that he was an older dad.  He had a really rough, scratchy beard.  I remember that.  I gave him a kiss goodbye and hello when he was leaving for the day.  I remember him as being a sunny disposition, sunny personality, easy to laugh, and I remember him being a physically demonstrative kind of guy, he’d always give you a hug or something.

And, I know you mentioned he was patient man.

Matt: Very patient, particularly with anything about learning – he was a teacher – probably – he actually had a lot of, sort of interesting talents.  I heard this about him later.  He used to put on minstrel shows or plays at the school.  He would be like a drama or arts teacher.  They gave him the most difficult – the toughest – I guess, a combination of being the toughest and the dumbest kids, I don’t now which of the two or if they reinforced each other.  And, he really liked to teach.  He was a very – get basic fundamentals first – if you didn’t – I mean if your assignment, if your assignment was to cover four things that evening and he figured you didn’t get the first one right, he wouldn’t go to the second one with you, because he figured there was no sense there.  He was probably more interested in you learning than you checking off a box and getting something done.  And, I remember he’d just be – and, it was more than just trying to act patient.  He really was patient.  You know, if you didn’t get something, it didn’t matter how many times it took you to get it.  He’d go through it again with you.

And, he called you Matty?

Matt: I was Matty, yeah.  I – it was – my sister’s name was Marianne, which oddly enough was never abbreviated.  And, it was Jimmy, Eddie, Matty.  My mother always used to say, Jimmy, Eddie, Matty.  And, when I went to see my mother’s aunt, my great-aunt, Aunt Anna Barrett, “Anny Barry,” we called her, there were two other – my mother’s sister had two sons and that was Larry, Donnie – so sometimes when I went to see my aunt, I got the five names before my name.  So, it’s Jimmy, Eddie, Larry, Donnie, Matty.

And, did Matty ever get in trouble?

Matt: Let me see.  Most of the time, I didn’t.

Never got a spanking or ...

Matt: No, I was – I ...

If your folks asked you to do something, you were the kid that was going to do it?

Matt: No, they usually didn’t ask me to do anything because they asked the – they would ask the older children to do something, so I got to skip out on pretty much any work.  I would sometimes get a talking to if I sassed my mother back, you know.  I remember my mother, I remember my mother calling for me one day and, you know, it’s best not to say every line you think in your head, and she was calling my name again and again and again and I said, yes, tape-recorder.  Whoa!!  When I got back, boy, did I ever get it for saying tape-recorder.  Now, she didn’t hit me though, you know.  Occasionally, she would get a belt out, I thought she was going to hit me, but she didn’t hit me.  And, I remember – another thing that was interesting about my mother, her being sort of creative.  I remember one day, it was a rainy day, and she let me go out, you know, I dressed up in like slicker, you know, that yellow slicker you see policemen wear.  And, she let me play in the rain for about an hour and a half.  I thought that was pretty interesting.

Sounds fun.

Matt: Yeah.  So, you know, the water was coming down the street and I made little boats in the rain and, you know, I didn’t – after about an hour, it lost its novelty, but for an hour it was a lot of fun.

Once we broke down in the car in western Massachusetts.  My mother got out and calmly and quietly did a lovely sketch of birch trees beside a stream while we waited for the repair truck.

Right.  Christmas tradition?  How did Christmas work at your house?

Matt: At our house, we usually – a number of different things – we usually got a tree at the last minute because we’d try and get the cheapest tree we could and it would be a live tree and the tree usually looked crummy by the time we got it.  My brother’s birthday was on December 24th and we never seemed to get organized enough for his birthday, so we were trying to get the tree up and get cards for him, maybe get a last minute present and get a cake.  It was chaos.  

You guys open presents Christmas Eve, Christmas morning?

Matt: Yeah, always Christmas Eve.  I had an aunt and uncle upstairs, Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Bill, plus my grandmother (my Dad’s mom) – also my aunt and uncle, Uncle Matt (my dad’s brother) and Aunt Eleanor – the uncle who I was named for – our Uncle Matt from Washington, would always come up with his wife, Eleanor.  And, we would open presents always on Christmas Eve, open all of them and my – we – the children had to go in the back room and Uncle Matt would imitate Santa and then my Uncle Matt would say, oh, hi, Santa, how you doing?  I’m glad to see you.  This is great.  And, then, someone would come back and say, Santa’s here, come see him and my Uncle Matt would be on the front steps and say, see ya Santa.  And, then as we ran around the corner, he’d say, oh, you just missed him, he was just here, you know.  One time, my brother Eddie actually thought he saw Santa flying over the roof of my neighbor’s house on his sleigh.

Right.

Matt: And, then we’d open the presents.

Back then, presents weren’t like today.  You probably – did you get a lot or just one or two or something, or ...

Matt: You know, I think it ...

Cause money was tight.

Matt: Yeah, money was somewhat – I mean the presents seemed to be pretty good.  I, you know, I remember you’d get, you know, a fair amount of clothes and then a couple of really nice toys.  But, I’d usually get – if I wanted one – I wouldn’t get everything, but if there was one thing I really wanted, I often got it.  Sometimes it got confusing when I got older because my uncle and I – there was a book on the Civil War I really wanted and people thought it was my Uncle Matt’s book, so – and, once he got it, my mother didn’t want to tell him it wasn’t his, so he got the book and then, you know, my mother had planned on giving the book to me, so – but, it was, it was a fun time.  My mother got me my own copy of the book again after Christmas.  We usually went to church, Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church (it was torn down in 2010) – we all went to church at midnight and then we had breakfast afterwards and I remember the Christmas holidays being a lot of fun.  Sometimes we’d have a lot of snow.  But, I remember it being – actually a lot of my memories of winter is just being a fun time.  Snowball fights, going sledding, doing things.  I remember I used to go Christmas shopping with my Aunt Kathleen Conners (born Kathleen McGuire, my father’s sister), who was – I think she was all of 4’10” or something.  She would dart through the crowds – and, that would be one day I would spend with her shopping for the rest of the family because I didn’t want my – you know, my mother and father and siblings to know what I was getting.  I used to go into Boston and, it’s sort of like a mini-New York, but they would have model train displays that would be huge.  I mean they would be – they’d cover half a floor of a department store, I mean really elaborate and they would have in-store Santas.  It would be crowded, everybody would be in coats.  You would – they had sort of an enchanted village which was sort of like a, you know, all these motorized wood sculptures of elves in Santa’s workshop.  And, you would take the trolley and then the subway – the trolley and the subway.  And, I remember the sun going down in the winter on Boston Common.  It was nice.

Any, family meals that come to mind or favorite fixings or desserts or when – do you remember?

Matt: Yeah, on my – we would – we sort of lived paycheck to paycheck, but when my father got paid, we always had strawberry shortcake.  And, we always – my mother would always make biscuits.  So, like – and, we never had sponge cake, always biscuits, get the strawberries, and we would put whipped cream on it and, you know, and usually it was out of a can.  And, as a young kid, I always wanted to spread the whipped cream and, you know, I couldn’t – I’d never get to do the whipped cream because I was too young to do it.  And, finally, one day, one of these times, I really want to spread the whip cream.  My father’s saying, be careful, be careful, I’ve got a new tie on and I don’t want you to hit the tie.  And, I’m, I’m thinking – you know, I was a kid and I was so, so convinced that I’m sure I can do it, I can do it.  So, I start, the whipped cream comes out of my hand, I spray my father’s new tie, all over him and my two brothers and my sister and my mother laugh hilariously.  My father is mad as hell, but – and he doesn’t think it’s funny, but everybody else thinks it funny.  So, I remember that.  He simmered down after a while.

You mentioned once about going for donuts or something like that.

Matt: Yeah, well, the – there was, I don’t know, gee – no wonder I like to eat.  We would get –my father, they had a men’s group at the church, the Holy Name Society, and they would bring donuts with them every Sunday.  Well, my father was president, so any leftover donuts, he’d bring back.  He would bring in like a dozen donuts or maybe two dozen.  But, with my two brothers and I, that was not a goal that we couldn’t reach, you know.  A couple dozen donuts, I could eat three or four donuts a piece, no problem at all.  Or, you know, eat a lot of bacon.  We used to eat fried bologna and peanut butter sandwiches and  grilled peanut butter.  Just stuns me to think of the stuff I ate.  Stuns me.

Bologna fried with the peanut butter?

Matt: Yeah.  Have to try it sometime.

Yeah.  You surprised me with talking about some of the fights you’ve been because you’ve got a kind heart now, but you must have some steel in you that’ll stand up to people or something, too, so when’d that spunk in you start to show, to stand up to people?

Matt: I was, and, not now, but I was probably the biggest kid in my class until about the sixth or seventh grade.  I was a big little kid.  I have a picture of myself with my best friend, Frank Connolly, from when I was a kid and I was like twice as his size – wide – and because I was the biggest kid, the law of natural selection is there would be typically fights between the biggest kid of one class and another and I would wind up getting into fights, I mean, and it was just – and, I remember, I didn’t win all of them.  I remember my first pretty good fight in the third grade where I had a couple of friends who came up to me and said, you know, it’s about time to hang it up.  You don’t win at this thing.  And, I had two really good friends in the third grade, Richard Mazocki and Mark Haley, and they helped me out.  And then I remember when I was in the sixth and seventh grade, I remember getting in fights with the kids on the playgrounds and it would usually be some sort of challenge and I was usually pretty easy going and then I had this sort of streak that if somebody really bothered me the wrong way, you know, I’d thrown down and get in a fight with them.  Fist fights, hitting people, and I would usually hit people in the faces, as hard as I possibly could, and I’d aim for the nose and, no matter how many times they hit me, and usually they’d start bleeding and end the fight, so you know, they were pretty bloody.  Bloody affairs.  And, you know, got in fights in the – pretty much it was seventh, eighth, and ninth grade.  And, there’s one kid who actually got in a fight with me (David Gavin) – he came – he took boxing lessons so he could beat me in the next fight and he was waiting for me outside of my house, saying he had taken boxing lessons, saying I’m really going – you know, I’m really going to, you know, win the fight now.  And, I remember the guy bothered me so much, I just thought he was such an irritant.  I was having a good day and it just really, really bothered me that he had gone to – I hit him three times as hard as I could and the fight ended immediately.  It was just over.

And, he was done with you?

Matt: He was done.  He was permanently done. So, yeah, I don’t why – but, I think one of the things about going to school, you know, it was idyllic in a sense.  I remember summers being long.  I remember playing lots of games of Monopoly or Sorry or something else like that.  I remember having a lot of free time.  I remember the weather being nice, but there was also an element of you could run into other kids and if you wanted to – much bigger kids – you could get in a fight or they’d give you a hard time or something like that.  That was, that was always sort of in the background, so, you know, when I was going someplace with my older brothers or something, I usually felt – my brother who is nearest to me – very strong and could be imposing, so I always felt pretty safe when I was going with him.  But, there was always that edge to things.  There was always, you know, people, you know, if you wound up – and the town I was in was in was sort of a bedroom town, so.

So, it’s an all-boy school?

Matt: This was before I – I went to a Catholic elementary school taught by Dominican nuns, up through grammar school, through eighth grade.

Okay.

Matt: And, then when I went to high school, I went to an all-boys Jesuit prep school, which is Concord, Mass.  I had like an hour bus ride there and an hour bus ride back.  And, three or four hours of homework every night, you know.

So, how would you – cause high school age is kind of a nice time to meet girls or date some, so how could you make something happen if you’re going to an all-boys school? 

Matt: Poorly.

Right.  But, you must’ve had some interest – girls in the neighborhood, girls working at the store or what?

Matt: You know, it’s sort of unfortunate and yes to all of the above.  It was sort of unfortunate that I was just getting to meet some girls in the eighth grade and then everybody spread out and went to high schools.  I mean we were all sort of from, you know, neighboring areas – but, even that with the Catholic school, it’s not necessarily a coherent neighborhood.  You would get people from, you know, maybe two or three towns coming to your school.  But, that just exploded out further when we went to high school.  But, I would – they would have dances.  They would have Catholic Youth Organization.  You meet girls in church or from – or you would meet them at dances that the school would have, but that was basically – but, it was awkward because, you know, you just didn’t see any – in one sense, being an all-boys school, it’s easier in that in one sense you can focus on your studies and you’re not – you know, you really didn’t worry, I mean, whether you had soup stains on your tie or not, you weren’t worried about that and you could, you know, play football or basketball or something with the guys.  But, you didn’t really get used to – and, I actually dated some girls from public school and they were pretty nice.  Pretty nice.  And, I met those through my friends, but it was – it was always – I remember it was never quite natural, you know, I think it was just harder to meet people and I remember, there was a girl who worked in the delicatessen near where I lived and I wanted to get up the courage to ask her to go out, but I was waiting until there no customers in the store and it just never happened.  And, I was with my brother, my brother Ed being a long-suffering type says, well, you know, you should just go ahead and ask her.  And, I was saying, well, no, I don’t want anybody hearing.  And, he was patient enough so when I didn’t, he didn’t even say anything.  He didn’t say, you should’ve done something or not.  He just, you know, just walked out with me.  And, I started to go out with girls from all-girls schools and they had the, you know, the opposite problem of not being around boys, so it was just not the best of – best of situations, but my friend, Frank Connolly, got very serious with a girl when he was in high school.  She went to Concord High, a public school.  Her name was Patricia Callahan.  I never got really serious with any girls while I was in high school, which probably worked just as well because, I don’t know, some people would do that and then not go away to school.  And, I always wanted – I was really itching to get out of – I was itching to get out of suburban Boston.  I really wanted to go away to school.  Because I saw that as a real opportunity.

Did you work in high school at all?

Matt: I worked for the County at Walden Pond during the summers and I was a – basically somebody who used to rake out fire lanes or pick up trash on the beach or something like that.

Summer jobs the, just ...

Matt: Summer jobs, yeah.  Or I’d work on County road crews painting guardrails or, you know, working on shrubbery or something like that, you know, and that was like a summer – and, it would be not the whole summer, it would be six to eight weeks or something like that.

When did you start thinking of a career and what you wanted to do?  Did the lawyer just happen or was it a conscious decision and a plan in life that “I’m going to be a lawyer”?

Matt: I thought about actually being a lawyer when I was about the third grade.

All right.

Matt: My Uncle Matt, who was – my uncle and aunt (Aunt Eleanor) didn’t have any children and anytime we had any financial problems, I think what really happened behind the scenes, is they financially underwrote anything.  So, my father was never, you know – my uncle was my father’s oldest brother.  They got along well.  They were very different personalities, curiously enough, but they seemed to get along very well, which I wouldn’t have guessed they would, but they did.  And, I thought of being a lawyer or a history professor when I was in high school.  I thought of being a writer for a while, but I guess I’m a slow reader still to this day and the idea of being a writer was great, but the exercise of writing, writing, again and again, didn’t hold my attention.  And, I didn’t do debating in high school, I was trying to focus on just getting fairly good grades, not that many outside things.  I used to go to movies.  I liked movies a lot.  I liked listening to music.  Played touch football, but I never liked to be in organized sports like, you know, uniformed sports.  But, I’d do a lot of things that were just fun.

You graduated from high school what year?

Matt: Graduated in 1966.

Okay.

Matt: And, probably one of my biggest experiences in high school was, my brother – my oldest brother, Jim, who is, let’s see, he is about six and a half years older than me – in 1965, I met him in Buffalo, New York, and we drove in a 1962 Rambler.  We drove from Buffalo, New York, across the country to Seattle down to San Francisco and back again.  We did it in three weeks.  Drove about 500 miles a day.  That really changed – that was a totally eye-opening – sort of – changed my whole life experience.  When I – and I still remember the thrill of just driving and, you know, driving to a new state.  You know, going from one place to another to another that I’d never been before.  Seeing it – just seeing the breadth and expanse of the country, getting to the Midwest for the first time and being able to stand – and, you know, I actually had a diary and I didn’t write in it.  I almost wish I did, but I didn’t, at that time, write in it because I thought, I can’t explain this.  I can’t describe this.  This is such a “wow” experience, seeing for 50 miles in every direction.

You were talking about not writing in a diary?

Matt: Yeah, I, you know, I wish I wrote in the diary in one sense and then, you know, it’s part of me would like to record it and then in another sense, I remember when I was in that moment, I thought, this is – you know, I remember I saw the TV show “Route 66.”  My sense was this was as good as it could get and I just wanted to stay in the moment.

Um, huh.

Matt: Which was – and I thought, wow, to travel across the country, how neat it would be.  And, I remember when I was doing it, it was like living the dream, I’m going, wow, this is, this is, this is unbelievable.  And, we didn’t have much money.  And, my brother is sort of a more of a free spirit and I’m more like, you know, do we have enough money for dinner tonight.  And, so, we slept in the car most of the way and we had a National Park pass.  You’d go to any national park in the U.S. at that time.  So, we had to drive from national park to national park to find a place to stay.

This was a four-door Rambler then?

Matt: Uh, let me see, did it have four doors or two?  Yeah, I think it was a four-door.  Yeah.  And, about half way through the trip, the car started overheating.

Uh, huh.

Matt: So, we tried to keep it between 55 and 60 miles per hour.  We went on a lot of county roads and state roads instead of interstates, so it was a really interesting drive and we’d have to put the car in park and keep it running to avoid overheating when we changed drivers.  So, my brother would have to run around the side of the car – I’d have to run around the back.  All of our food was in the back of the car in cans and I slept in the backseat on top the cans with the sleeping bag of top of the cans.  My brother slept in the front.  And, that’s the way we went.  We finally got out to – I remember something – I remember hitting the Midwest and wide open spaces because, you know, it’s very heavy foliage in the east, and thinking, wow – and I remember hitting South Dakota and thinking this is fantastic.

Um, huh.

Matt: And, hitting the Black Hills and thinking – actually, when I was coming across, South Dakota was one of the prettiest states I thought I had come to and then we went out to Yellowstone Park in Wyoming and we put our food on the table and a bear came by and ate most of our food because we put it on the table.  To start a fire, my brother would put more charcoal starter on the fire and it would drive me crazy.  And, I’m telling my brother to get away from the bear and he thinks its so interesting, he’s taking as many pictures as he can.  I remember driving and seeing Mount Rainier come up in Washington State.  I remember driving through the night and wondering whether what I was seeing was clouds or a real mountain.  And, then when the sun came up and we got in to see my sister in the morning – she was out in Seattle at the time – we stayed a couple days with her so, that was like three squares, a nice bed to sleep in, etc.  And, then I remember going through the Redwood Forest and just being amazed.  Going through California, we went to San Francisco and I remember sitting a room – and I was sixteen at the time – and I think people were smoking marijuana and they sort of were trying to communicate non-verbally with each other, sitting around sort of, I don’t know, doing whatever, and I thought, man, this is really weird.

Um, huh.

Matt: And, then, running out of money on the way back and having to stop in Denver and my uncle knew a judge there and they put us up there and gave us enough money to go home.

Really.

Matt: Yeah, yeah.  It was fun.

This is – your sixteen?

Matt: Sixteen, it’s 1965. 

And, that was a summer?

Matt: Right. 

And, then, did you go to college right after high school, or did you take a break?

Matt: No, I went right after high school, I went to Georgetown University 1966.  Real interesting time in Washington, you know, it was like – you know, there was penny loafers and oxford shirts and, you know, singing old college tunes meets the psychedelic age.  I mean, there was enormous change for people who came in fairly conservative from their, wherever home areas they came – by the time they were in their junior year of college, you know, they were smoking dope, they had hair down to their shoulders, long beards, and really, you know, very, very different.  I remember college being – I remember it being – and then the draft, the Viet Nam war, people protesting in Washington, DC.  Martin Luther King getting shot, the riots in D.C.  Going up to the top of one of the school buildings at Georgetown University (White-Gravenor Building) and seeing a wide swath of the city burning.  It was a very intense – there was nothing idyllic – college started out sort of, you know, standard cookie-cutter and then it really changed very quickly and permanently.  So – and then I remember just partying.  I went to an all-boy Jesuit high school, three or four hours of homework every night, four or five hours of homework on the weekends, nose to the grindstone, I got to college, you could drink beer at 18, I just went nuts.  And, got very poor grades my first year and then gradually worked my way out of it, but I finished college in three and a half years and the half year I had off, I went in the National Guard for active duty – for basic training.  And, then I started law school in the fall of 1970 at night for four years.

In the National Guard, you were a nurse or ...?

Matt: Yeah, I was a medic, sort of like one step down, a couple steps down, I’d say it’s more akin to maybe a licensed practical nurse.  

Was that by choice, or how does it work as what position you get?

Matt: There are only – in D.C., there were only two options, you could be military police and they really used the military police as an auxiliary police for crowd control in D.C., that’s why they had mainly military police units in the D.C. Guard.  Or, they had a Combat Surgical Hospital.

I see.

Matt: Which is like a one-step closer to the field than a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) Unit.  And, I did so poor in the math and mechanical skills, that I sort of defaulted into the hospital work because I did so poor in the mechanical stuff.  But, you know, you basically went to medic training and then – not all the time – but, a lot of the time, I would go into a local military hospital in the D.C. area, DeWitt Army Hospital in Virginia or Kimbrough Army Hospital in Maryland.  And, I would work the hospital shift for my National Guard weekend.  I would go in there and I’d work two days.

Now, did they call up Guard people for Viet Nam or how did that work?

Matt: They didn’t at the time.

So, you weren’t worried about it or anything?

Matt: There was always threats of that happening.

Okay.

Matt: I think the worry was is they were concerned about demonstrations in D.C. so they didn’t want to send that Guard unit over there because they want to have the extra M.P.s and people in D.C.  But, if it happened again, who knows?  And, there was one time when I was in basic training that somebody said, as a practical joke, that our unit had been called up and we were going right from basic training to Viet Nam.

Um, huh.

Matt: But ...

So, you were did that for two years or how did it work?

Matt: It’s a six-year deal.

Oh, is it, okay?

Matt: Yeah, yeah.  

So, then you go to law school and ...

Matt: Went to law school at night and worked with the – my first job was working with emotionally ill people during the day for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington.  I ran a sheltered workshop where people did simple assembly work and, you know, letter shop work (folding, collating) and they got paid for that on a piece-rate basis.  I did that for a couple years and then I got a job with an insurance company and the rest is history.  I got typecast after one year with an insurance company.

Did you continue to go to church when you were in college?

Matt: Yeah, was pretty – when I was in high school, I got the theology award.

Okay.

Matt: For – and I was raised Roman Catholic and when I went through college, I continued to go to church and then in law school, you know, I would go occasionally.  I sort of dropped off a fair amount and ...

Kind of due to just how exhausted you were from college or whatever, like Sunday morning sleep in?

Matt: Yeah, I just – part of it was more like just laziness and getting it together when you went to law school, at night – I would go to work, and I’d take a bus into Washington, D.C.  I was – where I worked was a block away from the White House.  So, I’d take a bus into Lafayette Square, which is across from the White House.  Then, I’d take a bus home, just have enough time to get dinner, get to school at 6:30 p.m. and I’d go to 9:30 p.m. and I’d do that four nights a week.  Then, the fifth night I would study until about 12:00 a.m. or 1:00 a.m. at night and then I would have one night a week, I’d play cards or something, then I’d study the next day.  But, it was a – it was a just incredible grind.  

You’ve got pictures of you with LBJ.  How did that picture happen?

Matt: When I was in college, my uncle who was a judge presided at an immigration and naturalization ceremony at the White House and I met LBJ.

Okay.

Matt: As background to get the judgeship, my uncle ran a successful U.S. Congressional campaign for a Massachusetts politician.  I can’t remember the guy’s name.  And, to be rewarded for that, my uncle was a lawyer at that time, the congressperson introduced him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and FDR said, you know, thanks for doing this, getting so and so elected.  You can get a judgeship.  And, my uncle says, well, I’d like a judgeship in Massachusetts and Roosevelt said, don’t have one in Massachusetts, but do have one in the District of Columbia.  And, so, I think at something like 35, my Uncle Matt became a judge for life in the District of Columbia, Federal system.  And, he got to know politicians overtime and I think he knew LBJ when he was a congressman, so my uncle did an immigration and naturalization event at the White House and my aunt invited me to come.  I remember, I didn’t know what I was thinking, I didn’t shave that day and my aunt was upset, but I had a coat on.  She said, gee, I wish you had shaved before you came.  And, you know, I think now how insensitive, you know, that just seems totally foreign to me now, but when you’re – and you always have, you know, I never got a college yearbook picture taken.  I remember my folks wanted me to – but, I had this sort of, I don’t know, somewhat negative attitude towards school and the grind that it represented.  But, I remember I went and after the ceremony, my uncle said, here, you know, let’s come meet the President.  I saw LBJ and LBJ says, hi, Matt, how you doing?  He was a very sunny, tall, powerful man.  I remember he said, let’s get a picture, son, and I remember him taking my back and turning me and he was a powerful strong man.  Very different from anything you saw on TV.  A very magnetic personality.  And, at my uncle’s retirement, Chief Justice Warren Berger, who was then the U.S. Supreme Court Justice, came to his retirement and said, you know, I want to thank Matt for all the work he did so – my uncle was the big wheel.

And, didn’t you say, you have pictures with J. Edgar Hoover?

Matt: Yeah, when I was – I always wanted to visit my uncle in Washington.  I finally went in around Easter time when I was in the eighth grade, so that’d be ’62 and, my uncle says we’ll get you a tour of the FBI and I thought, oh, okay, you know.  And, they dropped me off, I think it’s something like 10 o’clock in the morning.  They assigned an FBI agent to be with me all day and the guy was from Missouri.  And, at the end of the day, I met J. Edgar Hoover and shook hands with him.  And, he was a personal friend of my uncle’s.  And, my uncle always called Hoover by the name Edgar – hey, Edgar, how you doing?  One other story is, when Watergate was going on, they have a Lawyers Club in D.C., sort of an “inside baseball” place, it’s about four or five blocks from the White House.  And, of course, they had the Watergate trial of Nixon’s staff going on and Judge Sirica was the presiding judge.  As background, my uncle, when he was the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court from the District of Columbia, so the Federal Court in D.C., and he had some important trials, like the Bobby Baker scandal about, you know, about Baker taking bribes.  But, the judges would only sit for a year or two as Chief Judge and then they would  retire and still come in to work as a Senior Judge.  Because if they didn’t all retire, if they all just had held on to the position, because they get the pay grade, then the guy behind them wouldn’t be able to come up the food chain to attain that highest grade.  So, there were a whole bunch of Senior Judges.  My uncle was a Senior Judge and I’m in the Lawyers Club, Watergate is going on and, I mean, that is a big – and, the atmosphere in D.C. around – it was electric, I mean, it was – there was such a charge every time you’d get the morning paper, it was like, what’s going to happen next?  And, you’d almost wake up early and wait for the paper to come.  And, I remember being there and my uncle says, why don’t meet me for lunch at the Lawyers’ Club.  I said, well, fine.  Now it’s a couple blocks away from my work, so I came in and so I’m seeing we may have a special guest and I’m there in the Lawyers Club and the next thing I know is John Sirica, who’s the Judge in Watergate, and my uncle says, “Johnny, come over here, Johnny.”  So, I had lunch with Sirica while he was sitting on the Watergate case and never mentioned word one about Watergate.  I talked to him about gardening and tomatoes.

He probably appreciated the break.

Matt: Yeah, he did.  The interesting thing about living in D.C. was you never talked about politics with anyone.  You never asked them where they worked because a lot of people would work for the CIA, or the Defense Intelligence Agency, or other sensitive government job, and you never asked them about religion.  So, you didn’t talk about politics, religion, or their employment.  So, consequently, you get sort of a skewed view of people.  You would talk extensively about sports, you would talk extensively about any restaurant you had been to, or any recipe you had for any kind of food.  So, you talked about food endlessly.

Um, huh.

Matt: Or favorite T.V. shows, favorite movies or favorite books, but none of those other topics.  It was a strange place because if somebody worked for the CIA, you say, gee – and you didn’t stay to the guidelines.  You’d say, gee, where you do work?  I work for the government.  Oh, that’s interesting.  What branch do you work for?  I work for the government.  Well, can you tell me where you work for the government, I mean, where’s your office located.  I work for the government.  So, with the third “I work for the government” answer, they in essence told you they worked for the CIA in Langley, Virginia.  Interesting stuff.

You worked in Washington, D.C.  Got married and had your boy, David, all in Washington, D.C., right?

Matt: Yeah, I ...

... when you first got married and ...

Matt: I met my first wife, Judy Frabotta, around November of ’66 and dated her all throughout college.

Okay.

Matt: We got married the summer after college (August 1970) and I started working during the day with law school at night and then two years later had my son, David, who’s now 39, was born, and after law school, Judy went back to school to get an advanced degree.  Everybody I know who went to law school at night – everybody I knew, got divorced.  No exceptions.  Out of a class of about 80, everybody who was married was not married when they finished.  A lot of pressure, lot of work, always – you didn’t have enough time to study, you didn’t have enough time to do your work, you didn’t have enough time for your kids, you didn’t have enough time for your marriage, it was always fighting one of those things and you thought you could multi-task and do it all, and you couldn’t.  And, so we went through about a year of counseling to get help and we separated in March of ’78.

March of ’78?

Matt: Yeah.

You were together quite a long time, for meeting her in ’66?

Matt: I knew her for a good four years before we got married and we were together 10 or 11 years.  Yeah.

How old was David when you get divorced?

Matt: He didn’t quite hit his sixth birthday.  I remember his birthday’s on July 25, mine’s July 22, too.  So, it was just before he turned six.  And, I lived at that time in Crofton, Maryland.  I had a long commute, I had like an hour and fifteen minutes to work one way.  And, we spent about a year in counseling before we got separated, but it just – Humpty-Dumpty couldn’t be put back together again, that’s the best description I can give and it just wasn’t going to work.  

Now, you’d just have David on weekends or how did that ...

Matt: Then, after I separated from my wife, I would have him three weekends out of four, so that’d be Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  And, I first lived at my uncle’s place for free because he sat as a judge from like September to May and then in June to August, he’d go up to Cape Cod.  He didn’t sit in the summer, so I stayed in his place, turned out I stayed in his place for a couple months, stayed with a friend, Dave Shinn, but for the next six years, I had that joint custody arrangement until he was twelve and then his mother and he moved out to California and he went to high school and college there.  And, now, he’s back in D.C. again.

When he was gone at that time, summertime is when you’d see him, or ...

Matt: I would see him occasionally when he was gone out at the West Coast – you know, later I had a job that I would go out there some, I would visit him a few times, but when he first went out there, I’d only see him probably once a year.  And, I’d see him at Easter time and then I would see him at my mother’s house.  When we would have sort of a family reunion, I’d make sure he came then.  Didn’t see much of him in high school.  Talked to him some.  It was – you know, it was never an easy relationship.  When you get into the dynamics of that, you know, it’s never easy.

And, your meeting Barb at what time?

Matt: I separated from Judy in March of ’78.  Maybe a couple months after that, I started a relationship with a lady from Germany.  I had a relationship with her for about a year.  And, then I met Barbara in probably May of ’79.

You met her at a discotheque?

Matt: I met her at a disco dance studio, which is sort of like sawdust and the old record player, you know, but focusing more on the dancing, which was where you went for a tune-up before you go to the discotheque.  And, I wasn’t supposed to be there that night and I went in and I saw her and her friend.  Barbara looks sort of Eurasian, exotic and very pretty.  She was sitting beside her friend who is from Ethiopia, who was just beautiful.  And, she asked me to dance and I lost track of her and when we were walking out of the dance studio. A dance instructor stopped and talked to me who never talked to me and she was from Argentina and the instructor finished talking to me and then a split second before she had finished talking to me, Barbara started walking out, so I walked out behind her on the stairs and I said, well, I’m going to go play the pinball machines now.  Because I am still, but was then also, a pinball enthusiast.  I had actually gone to pinball machine convention in Chicago.  And, Barbara said, well, I play pinball, too.  And, I said, why don’t you come with me so I took her to a bar nearby in San Francisco and we played the Playboy Bunny pinball machine (made by Bally and _____ Classic) and the rest is history.  But, I never dated anybody from that dance studio because I didn’t want any entanglements.  I would rather – but, she was the exception.

But, you’re in D.C. and eventually going to be in Kansas City or somewhere?

Matt: Yeah, what happened, I mean, the dynamic of that is I was in D.C., but I had joint custody of my son and I was sort of in a dead-end job.  I’d grown up with the company, but, you know, sometimes it’s hard to get recognized if you come up through the ranks.  I’d been like a, you know, a junior attorney and then regular attorney, etc.  My son went out to the West Coast, then there was a chance to leave D.C.

Okay.

Matt: I was looking for work and there was an opportunity for a job in Kansas City and I almost – the day I was supposed to go out there, we had a snowstorm in D.C., I couldn’t make the interview, so they had to reschedule and they almost didn’t reschedule it.  But, I went out again and I got the job and the job paid a third more than or maybe 40 percent more than the job I had and the cost of living was maybe 10 to 20 percent lower.  So, I had like a 50 percent or more positive change in my cost of living overnight.  And, Kansas City was great, it was like a really bright, beautiful afternoon of your life.  It was ...

Was Mandy born in Kansas City?

Matt: Mandy was born in D.C.

Okay.

Matt: And, she was maybe – we left there in ’91 and she was just, I think, ready for kindergarten.  So, she’s like kindergarten, first grade in Kansas City.  And, we were there for four years.  Had a great time.  Loved where I worked.  Liked the people.  I did a lot of road races, like 10k’s.  Started doing mini-triathlons, played Pictionary, board games, had a group of people we used to play cards with.  Went to local theater and just – I just really liked – and when you’re kids are younger and you’re doing things with people, so it was just a great run.  It was a great run.  But, then the company got sold out from under us and I had to take a job in North Carolina, but four years, I was – there are times when you’re hitting on all burners in life and that was one of those times.

Then you go to North Carolina?

Matt: Yeah, I was in North Carolina for two years, working for – probably that was the worst job I ever had, I mean; 16 operating companies, 600 lawsuits, all kinds of other problems, the work was, I mean – I went to lunch once for 15 minutes, I came back, I had 18 voice mails.  So it just – the velocity of stuff was unbelievable.  The guy I worked with who was in the financial area had a nervous breakdown, so – the company eventually went bankrupt, but after I left, so then I came from there to Rapid City.  So, yeah, Rapid City was a great deal and a great place to be.

[end of tape 1]

 

[Transcribed by Karen M. Rayman late January 2011, revised June 27, 2011.]