It's Been A Great Ride

By Michael D. Sullivan with Bill Tamulonis

This is about my life story growing up as the son of Irish immigrant parents; my childhood on the southside of Chicago, attending Catholic school for sixteen years, and graduating from Loyola University, Chicago; and my business career through a series of companies and positions with ever-increasing responsibilities. My story outlines the good opportunities that came my way and the wins and losses we all experience on life's journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887930169

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It's Been A Great Ride

Michael D. Sullivan with Bill Tamulonis

Copyright © 2023 Michael D. Sullivan

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

ISBN 979-8-88793-007-7 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88793-016-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

O'Sullivan to Sullivan

Learn, Work, Play

The Launch

On Our Way

Family Ties

Glory Days

The End of the Ride

Never Look Back

You Can Do It Too

About the Author

To the two great women in my life: my wife, Jeanne, and my mother, Eileen.

To the entrepreneurs who molded my career: Harry Mangurian Jr., Norman Brinker, Harold Goldsmith, and especially Boogie Weinglass, who gave me the opportunity to fulfill my dream of being a CEO.

To my dedicated and talented colleagues at Merry-Go-Round, who were the key to my success and proved that working hard and building a successful company can be fun.

To my grandchildren, so you'll know how I got to where I am and to help you get to where you want to go.

Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.

—Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes

1

O'Sullivan to Sullivan

Like most boys growing up, I dreamed of playing major league baseball. My father, Patrick (Paddy), never missed my games. He might have been blind drunk and barely able to walk, but he showed up for me. My mother, Eileen, was a saint to put up with that kind of behavior, but she lived that old-country Irish faith—if you need something, ask God; trust him and he will take care of you.

Both my parents grew up on dairy farms in little towns in Ireland, County Limerick. My father, one of four children, lived in Feena on a farm called Callahow. It still has its original thatch roof, the kind they rarely make these days, and is protected for historical preservation. He had a reputation as the town ruffian, a strong man who loved to fight. My mother, the second youngest of twelve children, lived about five miles away in Dromcollogher.

Something else my parents have in common is what might be the most prominent family name in County Limerick—they were both O'Sullivan. In elementary school, the nuns would ask me for my mother's maiden name. I said, O'Sullivan, and they said, No, Michael, her name before she got married.

O'Sullivan, I repeated. By the third time they figured, this kid is just stupid.

But the two O'Sullivan families were on opposite sides of the war for independence from Britain. My father joined the Irish Free State Army, which was willing to compromise by taking twenty-six counties to form the Republic of Ireland and leaving six counties in Northern Ireland under British control. My mother's brothers were all in the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which wanted all thirty-two counties for Ireland. Michael Collins, the leader of the Free State Army, signed a peace treaty with the British, but the IRA assassinated him and continued fighting until 2005.

Because of the families' political feud and because my father constantly butted heads with his own dad, when my parents decided to get married in 1923, they eloped to London. My oldest sister, Mary, was born later that year. Seeking greater job opportunities a year later, they emigrated to Toronto, when Canada was still a Dominion of the United Kingdom. That's where my sister Kathleen was born.

My parents, Patrick and Eileen Sullivan.

In Canada, my father dropped the O from the family name. There weren't many Irish in Toronto, and I did not want them to know that I was Irish was how he explained it to me.

You really tricked them, Dad, I teased.

Everyone knew that Patrick O'Sullivan was Irish, but Patrick Sullivan? Nobody would ever guess! He admitted that he probably didn't fool anybody.

After a couple of years in Toronto, my parents decided they had to move because, as my mother put it, There's nothing but Orangemen in Canada. That's what the Catholics in Ireland called the Protestants. My parents discovered the huge Irish Catholic population in Chicago and moved to a southside neighborhood near Ninety-Ninth Street in St. Margaret's Parish and later moved farther south to Mt. Greenwood.

The spacing of my brothers and sisters forms two groups. My four older siblings—Mary, Kathleen, Lenny, and Eileen Patricia (Patsy)—are twelve to sixteen years older than me and were more like aunts and uncles because by the time I turned eight years old, they were all married and some had their own families. My baby sister Bernadette is six years younger than me.

There are also two groups of surnames. Mary and Kathleen were born before my father dropped the O, so they were baptized O'Sullivan. Lenny and I were born in Chicago after the name change, so we are Sullivan. My older sister Patsy and younger sister Bernadette were born after the name change, but my mother wanted the girls to be baptized O'Sullivan. The nuns at school did not realize for a long time that we were all related.

A dairy farm mentality

Though 3,500 miles and many years removed from Ireland, my father never lost his dairy farm mentality. When I was about ten, he stumbled home drunk one day with a terrible toothache. He called me into the kitchen and handed me a pair of pliers. You got to pull this tooth out, Mike, it's killing me.

My hands trembled. I can't do that!

You've got to, my father insisted.

I pulled and pulled but didn't have the strength. My mom ran into the kitchen. Mike, get out of here! she screamed. When I peeked in a few minutes later, I saw Dad holding the pliers and spitting blood into a cup.

After he bled for a few hours and sobered up, I asked, How did you do that?

We always pulled our own teeth on the farm.

We have dentists here, I said. But he lived like it was 1910 in Ireland.

My father worked as a common construction laborer when he first came to Chicago but somehow picked up a job unloading nine-hundred-pound rolls of paper on the docks at The Chicago Tribune. This was in the mid-to-late 1920s, the era of Prohibition and gangsters like Al Capone. Every time the paper ran a story about Capone or the Mafia, they threatened to kill the publisher, Colonel McCormick of the McCormick family that ran International Harvester.

When the people at the Tribune realized that my father was tough as nails, that if you were walking toward him on the street and he scowled at you, you'd better cross over to the other side because there was a good chance he would punch you; they hired him onto Colonel McCormick's bodyguard detail.

Protecting McCormick turned out to be a tremendous break for my father and our family because when the Great Depression hit in 1929, my father had job security while a lot of unemployed people went hungry.

Not that he always came home with a paycheck. Irish laborers in 1920s Chicago were known for their propensity to drink and gamble, and my father indulged in both to excess. Sitting around all day on the security detail, waiting for something to happen could be boring, so the guys had time to study the racing form and bet on the ponies. If he had a bad week, my father would come home on Friday with nothing left from his paycheck.

After Al Capone landed in jail, the Tribune dismissed my father from his bodyguard duties, and he went to work laying sewers for new homes.

Though he had only the equivalent of an eighth-grade education at the most, my father could figure out how to do anything and was always the hardest-working man on the crew. In those days, there were no backhoes; they dug trenches with shovels. My father was a workhorse who could dig ditches and lay sewer pipes all day long.

*****

He could not control himself

But I felt bad for my father because he could not control himself. He and his buddies would meet at a tavern at 7:00 a.m. for a shot and a beer before work. On evenings and weekends, he sometimes took me to the bar with him when I was little. I liked the bar because it was the only place that had a TV. I'd sit on a barstool watching the great Irish boxing champions—John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney—drinking a Coke while my father threw down shots and beer.

When my father got drunk, he looked for a fight. My mother told me that when they were young, it was a foregone conclusion that when they went to a party, there would be a fight, and my father would be in it. At the bars, if somebody said something he didn't like, he wouldn't argue with the guy, he'd punch him in the face. Most of the fights ended then because my father's fists were hammers, and the other guys thought twice about taking a chance on getting clobbered again. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Paddy, and most of them were afraid of him.

He brought his violence home also, against my mother and older siblings.

When he reached his late forties or early fifties, he picked a fight with somebody who split his lips wide open, and we had to rush him to the emergency room. From then on, he carried a little pipe wrench on his work pants hammer loop. This is the equalizer in case I'm losing a fight, he said. But I don't think he ever used it. He stopped looking for fights after the night his lips peeled apart.

My childhood bar experiences with my father ingrained one sure thing in me: I would never become an alcoholic.

Often my father drank to the point of nearly passing out. The cycle was predictable. Something would trigger him to drink—some incident or maybe just despair—but he started with beer. I would see him drink seven or eight quarts of beer on a Sunday, fall asleep, and wet his pants. He craved more alcohol but couldn't get enough from beer, so he'd switch to whiskey. We would find empty bottles in the clothes hamper and other places around the house. By this time, he would lose his job and run out of money and start on cheap wine—a pint of muscatel for fifty cents. That was probably the worst kind of drunk because that rotgut melts your brain. He'd go on like that for a couple of years until he got so sick from the cheap wine and not eating; he would kick the habit, clean up, and attend Alcoholics Anonymous for two or three years. He called it going on the wagon.

When sober, my father was a wonderful, friendly guy. He remembered everybody's name and could talk to anyone for hours. His friends loved him, especially his best friend, whom I called Uncle Jim. He grew up with my dad in the same town in Ireland and lived a block away from us in Chicago. Frick and Frack people called the two of them because they were always working on some insane project together—like rebuilding a car engine. Uncle Jim didn't drink at all. They were bosom buddies when my father was sober. Uncle Jim stayed away when my father drank but never abandoned him as a friend.

A couple of times, my father started his own construction company. He would hire me and my brother Lenny—who had moved in with a friend's family at age fourteen when he couldn't take it at home anymore—to help dig trenches. I was a teenager, and Lenny was in his twenties. When Dad would come around to check our progress, he'd yell, Get out of there! I'll do it! Lenny and I would stand back and laugh because it was like watching a whirling dervish; Dad would have the trench dug in no time.

My father hired other helpers—my brother and I called them winos. They were just guys that hung out at the bar, and all they really wanted to know was whether Paddy had a bottle for them.

His business ethics left much to be desired. On one of our residential plumbing jobs, he told Lenny and me he was going to get the toilet to install. We figured he would pick one up at the hardware store, but we saw him walking back a couple of minutes later, carrying a toilet on his shoulder. He swiped it from another house under construction down the block. He figured that at nighttime, that might have looked suspicious, but in the middle of the day, everyone would assume it was his toilet. My brother and I could only shake our heads and imagine that if we tried something so brazen, we'd get arrested.

His companies would operate for six or nine months, then my father would go on a bender, and that would be the end of it. He would go back to work for the same construction company where he had started—his boss always took him back because my father was his best laborer.

He treated me differently

Watching my baseball games was one of the many ways my father treated