On March 29, 1979, my father, then a 40-year-old movie show proprietor, dodged dying.
It was the day after his fortieth birthday and my dad, Roger Wedge, was partying on the Copley Plaza Hotel with a number of different theater homeowners and one of many largest moguls within the enterprise, Sumner Redstone. Older Bostonians know what occurred subsequent.
Redstone was holding courtroom within the resort bar that night time and a number of other of the opposite theater homeowners had rooms within the opulent resort and spent the night time. My dad deliberate to remain over however had a change of coronary heart and as a substitute made the journey again dwelling to Brockton.
The subsequent morning, he was woke up in horror when he noticed the morning newspaper and realized there was a horrible hearth that tore via the resort and killed two folks. Redstone — in a legendary Boston story — escaped out a third-floor window and held onto the ledge of the burning constructing for pricey life till he was rescued by Boston firefighters. The 56-year-old leisure business titan suffered third-degree burns and his arms had been completely disfigured. He was handled at Massachusetts General Hospital and later donated thousands and thousands to the hospital to create what’s right now the Sumner M. Redstone Burn Center.
It was simply certainly one of many fabulist tales I’ve gleaned from my dad’s unimaginable life. He grew up very poor on Brockton’s East Side, the son of French Canadian dad and mom who moved to Brockton to work within the metropolis’s shoe factories. He was Rocky Marciano’s paperboy. He turned a pairs rollerskating champion at age 11, profitable state and regional titles.
He joined the U.S. Marine Corps after graduating from Brockton High School and served honorably as a machine gunner, together with abroad in Lebanon. After ending his service, he labored on the Walter Baker Chocolate Factory in Dorchester whereas placing himself via night time faculty at Bentley University, incomes an accounting diploma. He and his brother purchased season tickets to the New England Patriots of their inaugural season in 1960 and saved them all through the a long time, attending a whole bunch of video games. Those tickets stay in our household right now.
He went to work for a neighborhood accountant in Brockton however destiny intervened and altered the course of his life when his brother noticed an advert within the Brockton Enterprise in search of franchisees for a movie show chain owned by Hollywood star Jerry Lewis. My dad invested and opened a Jerry Lewis Cinema on Brockton’s East Side. It was the beginning of a reasonably unimaginable entrepreneurial run that grew to him proudly owning a number of cinemas throughout New England, together with in Seekonk, Quincy, Salem, N.H., Hooksett, N.H., and Plaistow, N.H. He additionally ran a second Brockton location in an imposing previous theater downtown that he later become a rock membership known as The Marquee. Aerosmith practiced there for a tour as soon as.
He joined the National Association of Theater Owners and attended their conferences yearly in Hollywood, Las Vegas, New Orleans and different cities. He introduced me and my sisters to a lot of these conferences, the place the celebrities got here out to have fun releases of their new movies. We noticed Sammy Davis Jr. carry out, met Angie Dickinson, Charles Bronson, Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds, Tom Hanks, Jon Candy and the listing goes on and on. At the Las Vegas conference in 1980, he famously received a automobile from the cult basic movie “The Hollywood Knights,” starring Tony Danza, a younger Michelle Pfeiffer, Fran Drescher and Robert Wuhl. It was a vivid orange 1956 Chevy Nomad dubbed “The Pie Wagon.” That automobile turned a part of our household and was a staple for years in parades and automobile reveals in Brockton and southeastern Massachusetts.
When Blockbuster video shops arrived within the Nineteen Eighties, the movie business modified the way in which it distributed movies to film theaters. Because of the brand new competitors from video shops, solely the multiplexes got the massive movies, leaving the independents to combat for second-run movies in hopes they might present them for just a few weeks earlier than they went to video. It was an unsustainable mannequin and it crushed the mom-and-pop theater business. My dad bought off his theaters one-by-one and shortly, a lot of the independents, together with all my dad’s theaters, had been gone.
It was a helluva run although as my dad employed a whole bunch, if not hundreds, of individuals within the ’80s and ’90s. He continued his accounting observe, traveled, performed lots of golf, and spent lots of time betting the horses at Suffolk Downs and touring to Saratoga and different racetracks. He beloved the Sport of Kings and taught me the whole lot he knew about horseracing. I bear in mind as soon as at Saratoga once I was a younger boy he sweet-talked his method into the paddock and we met Hall of Famer Willie Shoemaker.
He was very proud once I went to work for this newspaper in 1999. He was there for me once I was despatched to Ground Zero in decrease Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. And once more, once I was despatched in to cowl the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013, and into the chaos of the Watertown shootout just a few nights later. He was additionally there for me as I wrote my first ebook, with my co-author Casey Sherman, in regards to the marathon bombings, and was by my facet on the movie premiere of “Patriots Day,” the Mark Wahlberg movie primarily based on that ebook.
He was my largest cheerleader and was at each certainly one of my ebook launches. I’ll always remember him casually chatting up Bruins nice Ray Bourque — in French — on the star-studded launch for our ebook “Ice Bucket Challenge” at Fenway Park or capturing the breeze with former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh at LaScala in Randolph, which was dad’s second dwelling in his later years.
One of my happiest recollections although, occurred when he traveled with me to Phoenix once I was assigned by the Herald to cowl the Patriots on the Super Bowl in 2007 in opposition to the New York Giants. We attended a Sports Illustrated social gathering just a few nights earlier than the sport at a nightclub and bumped into Questlove, the long-lasting drummer from The Roots who’s Jimmy Fallon’s band chief. Questlove was greater than variety, talked music with me for a couple of minutes and I launched him to my dad. I walked away to work the room a bit and hit the restroom. I got here again 20 minutes later and there was my dad and Questlove, sharing cocktails and laughing hysterically like that they had been mates their complete lives.
That was him. He had that impact on everybody. That was who he was — the lifetime of the social gathering.
The final journey I took with him was final summer time to Saratoga. He had a tough time getting round, however he hit just a few winners and had a smile on his face the entire time. I’ve an important image of him enjoying a drum with a road performer in downtown Saratoga.
Dad handed Thursday on the Veterans Administration Medical Center in his hometown of Brockton, surrounded by household and shrouded in love, at age 83. The unimaginable hospice nurses who cared for him in his remaining days all had tales about how when he was capable of converse, he was at all times comfortable, humorous and had a smile on his face — proper up till the tip.
Cheers to my finest pal — a Marine, father, husband, grandfather, good friend and a real legend. You made the world a happier place for thus many.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”