When he met someone, he quickly assessed where they were from and how they might be connected to someone he knew or someone who was involved in some key interest in your life. It was a cross between quick interview and paternal interest in what kind of person they were. Quintessentially Irish. It was usually a quick process until he settled on a story that he could tell that helped him assimilate them into a place in his mind between similar profiles.
It was hard not to like Uncle Jim. I enjoyed him immensely. The fact that he used the words "SOB" and G.D." in every other sentence was unnoticeable after a while. They were almost compliments, the way he used them. Now that I think about it, SOB was not a compliment, but 'lovable SOB' was. He spoke in either a booming voice, or a muttered voice from the side of his mouth as he leaned in and told you a tidbit about the person that was not fit for public consumption.
Uncle Jim reminded me a bit of Columbo because he wore a rather wrinkled tan trenchcoat - the plain, beltless style. He walked with slightly scrunched shoulders, his head down a bit so that he seemed to peer up at you with those eyes- eyes that were summing you up as his mind quickly retrieving the key facts and connections related to you that he stored away. He drove a station wagon to work and greeted everyone jovially. He and Aunt Roseanne did not live a lavish life. Instead they lived in a townhouse outside the DC Beltway in Laurel, MD.
Jim and Roseanne were opposites. He was a booming extrovert who enjoyed crowds and social events. She was an introverted, nervous lady, prone to worry about her health and many other things. She did not need or want the limelight. She unfailingly supported him and did the behind-the-scenes work of a Congressional wife. Her sweet voice and thoughtful ways softened the brash booming ways of Uncle Jim. She was constantly hustling around preparing for some event of his with her nervous giggle and "oooooh Jimmy, I don't know about that!" Together they were so generous, they'd give you the food off their plates, literally. Their house was packed with photos and memorabilia of his career.
His career. That's a book that needs to be written by someone.
No one who met Uncle Jim would guess that he knew the secrets of the most powerful people in the country. Or that he had the choicest of office spaces in the Capitol Building for 20 years. The windows of his office overlooked the Capitol steps with a direct view across the National Mall to the Washington Monument. In the backroom of his office, many a deal was brokered that helped accomplish the will of the leader-du-jour in the Democrat party for two decades.
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/videoLibrary/blog/?p=949
He was the Doorkeeper of the United States House of Representatives for 20 years. That was him in the first moments of the clip, introducing President Reagan to a joint session of Congress.
It was always interesting to hear his take on presidents on down to the doorman at the local Hill watering hole. He never revealed controversial information about his friends and colleagues except that sometimes his face would sour when speaking of a particularly awful SOB, and you knew there was something bad.
His Everyman style surely disarmed the powerful and the scurrilous (and the powerful but scurrilous) and enabled them to confide in him. I can't imagine the kind of stories and books he could write about the things he observed over the decades. No doubt many an indiscretion was cleaned up with his help. And thus goes the patronage system of our political system.
Uncle Jim oversaw the Congressional Page program. A bunch of connected teenagers bursting with hormones and a sense of entitlement and privilege coming to the Seat of Power in DC to live and work under the supervision of the page proctors. Good kids overall but still kids. Their escapades must not reach the papers and reflect upon their Congressman or Representative.
In a way, he parented them all as a tolerant father who loved to help his children get ahead. Whether President Clinton or the page from California, he had a role in managing the messes that came from human nature being indulged at the wrong moments. As I look back now, I realize that I was blessed to know him as someone he trusted to a good extent. I will flatter myself to think that he saw me as a good person who he could let his guard down with a bit. I never asked him about his views on politics until last year when we visited him because I knew we differed in our politics, world view and the way we each understood how to apply our Catholic values to our jobs. I loved chatting with him and maybe he respected that I didn't get into controversy over the years I knew him. Who knows? I felt that he liked me, and I liked him. Watching the video interview he had about his job that I linked below, I saw how guarded he was and how tense. It was odd to see him speak without cussing, without jokes and without telling stories! He looked nervous to me, and I realized what a different person I had been able to get to know a little bit.
The thing he was most proud of, I think the role that he most identified himself with was South Buffalo Fireman. He seemed to love the blue-collar approach to life. His mannerisms, his walk and his common sense way of thinking most resembled a blue-collar fellow. I recall riding on a Buffalo fireboat for some event that included family and others that he knew. He behaved exactly the same way with the fireman that he did with Congressmen and as Doorkeeper of the House of Representatives. But I think he felt more in his element in surroundings without pretense like that.
I think his greatest gift was that he understood human nature. He probably gained that from growing up in South Buffalo where politics was 'the family business' as he put it. He saw how Politics enmeshed every kind of culture from a hardware store to the fire department to local politics to negotiations on federal budgets. In some way, he enmeshed his undertanding of human nature with his instinctual grasp of Politics, and a career was born.
His career of managing human nature in his extended family of employees and especially Anyone From Buffalo or Upstate New York: flaws and gifts, each person was promoted, sheltered, protected, disciplined, rewarded, berated, even used to serve the larger scheme of things. The Democrat party was like that to him, I think. I don't think he liked some of the positions the party took over the years. And others he rationalized away from his Catholic upbringing so that the mental gymnastics it would take me to believe that "Nancy Pelosi is a grandmother - she's really Pro-Life" were absolutely effortless to him. I could not really detect if he knew that was a far fetched or not. Something about the way he said it, looking away, told me that he knew that was a stretch at best. Maybe that's what I want to believe. I'll never know. In the end, he was committed to all those people, loyal to them like family.
I can't agree with the direction the Democrat party took over the last twenty years. I think it has done immense damage to the foundational moral and family values that enabled our country to mushroom into unmatched economic fertility and the freedom to live one's values according to those values.
However, there was no way to resist the charms of Uncle Jim. He was a lovable SOB. A magnanimous patron of the family and thousands of others from the local fireman to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and President Clinton himself. He did understand human nature and was able to network people together like nobody else.
Rest in peace, Uncle Jim. You are in my prayers and also fondly in my memory. May the Lord have mercy on you and may the angels lead you into paradise.
http://www.rollcall.com/news/houses_last_doorkeeper_dies-207465-1.html?pos=hme
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/former-house-of-representatives-doorkeeper-molloy-dies-at-75/2011/07/20/gIQAsUwTQI_story.html
