Jack Welch, the chairman and CEO of General Electric who died last Sunday, may have had his funeral celebrated at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York — by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, no less.
And Patriots coach Bill Belichick and former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle may have been among the pallbearers.
“That goes with the territory,” said Bill Cullen, perhaps his oldest childhood friend. “He traveled in some pretty important circles. I’m sure he knew cardinals, popes, presidents …”
Yet friends such as Cullen, George Ryan and Larry McIntire paint a different picture. Welch may have been the captain of captains of industry in his role at GE. But a piece of his heart always remained in Salem, in places such as The Pit (now known as McGlew Park), where they all played baseball and football after school.
There, they say, he was “just another guy.”
“He was like the rest of us,” said Cullen. “We played at the Pit, which was a little dirt field. We made the diamond ourselves. I guess you could say it was like ‘The Sandlot.'”
They all played on the Salem High baseball team, with Welch pitching, Cullen catching, McIntire in the outfield, and future Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justice Samuel Zoll at first base.
“North Salem produced a lot of great people,” said Cullen. “We had the CEO of a major corporation, an SJC judge … we had a guy Sidney Shacknow. He survived the Nazis and the Holocaust. He ended up as a major general in the Army. And we had my brother-in-law, Mike Tivnan, who was a war hero in Vietnam, and later, as a helicopter pilot, flew Lyndon Johnson.”
McIntire also says that there were few indications that Welch would someday end up as arguably the most important person in American business.
“He was one of the smartest guys I knew,” said McIntire, who was the director of parks and recreation in Salem. “But other than that, he was a regular guy. At least with us. Nobody ever thought he was anything that special, or that he would end up as one of the top CEOs in the world.”
As part of his job, McIntire played a big role in having lights up at Bertram Field in Salem, home field for the Witches.
“I made one call to him to see if there was any way he could help us, and the next day he had an engineer up there looking at it,” McIntire said. “The rest is history. The lights … the poles … GE donated everything. They (GE) were marvelous.
“He did a lot of good things,” said McIntire. “He was a good man. He never forgot where he came from.”
Ryan said Welch was his best friend in high school.
“He was a good guy,” Ryan said. “We stayed reasonably close all through life. He was always pretty much on the ball.
“He turned GE into one of the largest companies in the world, at one point.”
When it came to socializing with his friends, Welch spared no expense, his friends said. He flew them down to Connecticut simply to play golf, and flew them down again when he had his retirement party. Cullen and Ryan were among those invited to Wednesday’s funeral at St. Patrick’s.
Ryan said one of Welch’s apartments was in Trump Tower in New York, and that “he and Mr. Trump knew each other.”
As a child, Welch and the rest of his North Salem friends went to St. Thomas Church in Peabody. He was raised primarily by his mother, and when she died, Welch donated the money for a new altar and fonts in her memory.
And, said McIntire, he took a piece of Salem all the way to GE headquarters in Fairfield, Conn.
“The main conference room, where he’d meet with all his department heads, had a big sign above the door,” McIntire said. “Know what it said? It said ‘The Pit.’ Imagine that.”