Jack Markey’s one-of-a-kind life

He was one of a kind, Jack Markey.

He got a tattoo from the mailman that said “Jack” when he was just 13 years old. It took him five years to graduate high school, having had to repeat his junior year. He obtained his law degree from the historically Black college Howard University at the height of the Civil Rights era (the only white of 16 graduates).

A culturally and fiscally conservative mayor, Markey, who died Sunday at the age of 89, was also a key part of the single greatest progressive initiative in New Bedford of the last half century — the successful establishment of the waterfront historic district.

“He was unique,” his son John Jr., long a prominent waterfront lawyer, told me. For John, it was kindness and a sense of brotherhood that really made his father tick. “At the end of day, it was stories of love and compassion,” he said, recounting some of the tales of homeless alcoholics and others in trouble that Markey quietly helped on his own, especially when he was a judge.

The Markeys themselves would be the first to tell you that their dad, arguably the most successful New Bedford mayor of the last half century, was a little off the reservation, a guy who was more than comfortable marching to his own very different drummer.

“My father was a goofball,” said his other son, Chris, a state rep from Dartmouth and sections of New Bedford for more than a decade now. Christopher Markey noted that his dad started smoking along with getting the tattoo at 13. Chris was never tempted to do those things himself, he said, but if he had, his parents would have certainly killed him.

Carol Tweedie Markey and John Markey lived an American love story for 64 years. Meeting at the old YWCA gym on Spring Street when she was 15 and he 17, they married seven years later. 

Carol, the straight-A student, moved to Washington D.C. with Markey, the “goofball.” Stonehill College, at the time a startup school in need of students, had given this struggling teenager a chance despite his high school record. He rose to the occasion and earned an undergraduate degree there.

Markey went to work for a Catholic travel agency in D.C., and after dealing with lawyers in that job, he decided he could do that kind of work himself. “They had a court case. He said ‘this doesn’t look that hard,’” said John. He applied and was accepted to three law schools, but Howard was the cheapest, a definite appeal to his frugal nature.

It was 1966, but Markey did not decide to attend the overwhelmingly Black university to make a civil rights statement, John said.

“It was because he thought ‘this is a school I can afford,’” he explained.

Once he got to Howard, his son said, Markey’s Black classmates became his own group, and he remained lifelong friends with some of them.

The Markeys are nothing if not comfortable in what I would call a traditionalist, small ‘d’ democratic way of looking at things.

“If you’re truly trying to be color blind, it’s not about diversity, it’s about treating everyone equally because they are a human being,” said John.

In the course of his long career, and even afterwards, Jack Markey’s values of honesty, self-confidence and open-mindedness resulted in his being a leader who rose to great local success, including a decade-plus as a mayor who engendered tremendous loyalty in both those who worked for him and those who worked with him.

Of those who worked with him, former mayor John Bullard may have been the most unlikely of allies and political teammates.

Bullard, the scion of one of the oldest Yankee whaling families in New Bedford, came of age during the social upheaval of the 1960s, and he was determined to do something to help the city that had made his family wealthy and successful. By the time Bullard emerged from MIT with his degree in architecture, the city had long fallen on the hardest of economic times.

The historic whaling district waterfront was one of the seediest parts of town. What we now would describe as the handsome Whaling National Historical Park at the time was a place of dive bars, prostitution, and empty buildings. Only two people lived in the area.

As good fortune would have it in the early 1970s, there was a large pot of federal money around in the newly created Community Economic Development Program and New Bedford was eligible for a little over $10 million in ’74, its first year. It would be very much under Mayor Markey’s control.

Bullard arranged for a Whaling Museum conference of successful historic preservation developers from Boston, Hartford and Seattle, but he says the whole thing was “for an audience of one,” Markey. After he’d heard the facts, the penny-pinching Irish ethnic chief executive had been convinced to invest $1.3 million in historic preservation. Some $900,000 of it would go to the waterfront historic district.

John Markey Jr. said the Bullard/Markey partnership was very much about the way his father was both a fiscal conservative but also a guy who had an open mind, and a person who didn’t mind giving others the credit.

“Let other people be the stars,” he would have said, according to John, after he signed on to some of the ideas Bullard had first developed in his master’s thesis at MIT.

When the big CDBG money became available, everybody and his brother wanted a slice of the pie, John said. But his father decided he would not devote the money to social services or city payroll spending that would have just gone away after a few years. He put the biggest chunk into rebuilding the waterfront district roads, reestablishing the historic cobblestones and Belgian blocks and convincing the utility companies to spend an extra couple million more dollars upgrading the gas, phone and electric lines at the same time.

“Bullard was the visionary, my father had the guts to say this is a good idea,” John said.

The rebuilding of those roads has enabled the Waterfront Historic Area League (WHALE) and others to set out on a half century of reconstructing the historic structures on the New Bedford waterfront. The area is today one of the hearts of New Bedford’s still burgeoning tourist and entertainment district.

If you want to know why Jack Markey was open to such new ideas, or why he spurred devotion and hard work from his staff, a guy like former City Planner Richard Walega is a good example.

Bullard says that Markey was able to attract a whole bunch of talented young professionals like Walega to work in New Bedford. Another former city planner, Ben Baker (who also died this month), historic preservation expert Tony Souza, administrator Tenney Lantz and others were among a whole group of energetic young folks who worked for Markey during his long mayorship.

Walega said he was an assistant planner when Baker let him know he would recommend him to Jack to be the next planner. He said Markey told him he was going to advertise the job, but after talking to him he never did. Walega finished up his master’s thesis and worked for the city for six years, helping to realize many of the original visions of Bullard and Ben Baker.

Markey was just a wonderful man to work for, he said.

“He was a good boss, a very good boss,” he said. “He always had my back. He never tried to interfere with what we were doing.”

The professionals’ plans for infrastructure, the waterfront, housing all went through, he said.

Markey engendered loyalty because of the respect with which he treated people, Walega said.

“The team we had was very much influenced by Jack. Our attitude was we’d go through a wall to help him realize his goals,” he said.

There are so many astonishing stories about Jack Markey.

He was a shrewd man, a savvy man, a mischievous man.

One of the best stories was the time he dropped his pants in front of reporters in order to illustrate how the firefighter union’s contract demands were stripping the property taxpayers of all their money.

Markey was wearing a bright yellow bathing suit underneath and the photographers clicked away.

At an impasse in negotiations, the contract had gone to arbitration and the arbitrator, by Massachusetts law, had to rule in favor of one side or the other. He ruled for the firefighters, and Markey proceeded to cut checks to them with the photo of him with his pants down, a picture of the Beacon Hill State House dome and the following words: “A full House beats a pair.”

There were different kinds of stories about Markey when he was a judge. John tells of him giving alcoholic men that he’d grown up with, or knew from other places, a choice of 90 days of a warm bed and food at the House of Correction or drying out at the Bridgewater hospital prison. He was letting them decide if they weren’t ready to get sober, they could still get out of the weather at the county jail.

Another time, he had his wife Carol, herself a well-known advocate for the group Voice of the Faithful during the Catholic clerical abuse scandal, accompany him as he drove a prostitute to rehab services in Fall River.

The down-and-out folks he helped loved him. He got Christmas cards from some of the guys at the county lockup, John said. “Dear judge, wish you were here with us,” one card said.

John said he told that story to some of his father’s grandkids this week.

Former mayor Bullard said he always thinks of Markey as a guy who was brutally honest, “He was just as candid a person as you would ever find,” he said.

When asked about making patronage hires of family and friends, Bullard said he didn’t dodge. His response was: “Yeah, I’m gonna hire my relatives. I trust my relatives.”

“He was honest,” Bullard said. “He didn’t see any problem with hiring his relatives because he trusted them to be honest.”

Among the Markey family relations, blood and by marriage were well known New Bedford names like the Finnertys, Longos, Tweedies, Hodgsons. He was well connected to the Irish-American clans that have dominated the city’s politics for decades.

“He wasn’t going to be phony in any way,” said Bullard. “He was going to be honest. And I loved that about him.”

His father took an unorthodox approach to his judgeship, said Chris.

“He mentored a lot of young lawyers in a pivotal way,” he said. “He might not have known the law all that well but he knew humanity.”

He was compassionate but firm.

His father had enough confidence in himself to do what he thought was the right thing to do, Chris said. “In politics, you can make a better decision or you can cover your (rear end) on paper. If you have an idea you think can really take off, you have to have the courage to do that.”

That helped his father make the decisions like commiting to the historic district, Chris said. But his compassion helped him with his decisions on the bench. The mayorship was the challenging job but the judgeship the rewarding one.

“If my father was a coach, he’d have been one of the greatest coaches ever. He let people reach their potential,” Chris said.

Peter Kavanaugh, a politically active guy who owned La-Z-Boy Furniture in Dartmouth for many years, was one of Markey’s many friends.

The last couple years of his life Markey had a steady stream of visitors at his home out near the Mattapoisett water. They came to his garage and they had coffee.

One of those visitors was Kavanaugh, every six to eight weeks or so.

At Christmastime, Kavanaugh had been talking to Ben Baker’s wife Deb and they decided to get Markey and Baker, the influential city planner during those historic district days, back together.

He feared Markey was beginning to fail, though not Baker at the time.

They were both dead a few weeks later, passing within a week of each other.

The photo that accompanies this column was taken at the meeting at Markey’s house. It was not a logistically easy photo to take, Kavanaugh said. Jack did not hear well and was attached to an oxygen tank, and Ben is very soft-spoken.

But it was a poetic wrapup to their public careers.

“They had not seen each other in a long time, but they spent years and years together making the city what it is today,” Kavanaugh said.

Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org

Editor’s Note: This column was amended on Jan. 18, 2024, to add information about Jack Markey’s relationship with his Howard law school colleagues after he made the decision to attend the school.

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