If you spoke to Jim Hughes over the phone, which is to say you couldn’t see what was behind that deep, booming voice of his, you couldn’t get a true measure of the man.
“He could come across as gruff if you didn’t know him,” said his longtime friend, Arthur O’Neil, Sunday upon contemplating the life of Hughes, who died last Thursday at the age of 87. “But he was a Cadillac of a man.”
That’s an opinion that was shared by another one of his friends for decades, Frank DeFelice.
“He was very positive, and very loyal,” said DeFelice, a coach in the town for a half century. “He was a person of very strong ethics, and of very strong loyalty. I can’t say enough about him.”
Hughes was not born in Swampscott, didn’t go to high school in Swampscott, and was a true son of both St. John’s Prep and the College of the Holy Cross. But in every other aspect of his life, he was all Swampscott. He ran his insurance company there for 55 years, ran both the boys and girls CYO basketball programs out of St. John the Evangelist’s Church, coached sub-varsity football and helped coach Stan Bondelevitch with countless other tasks.
He also served as co-head coach of the varsity golf team with his good friend, the late Bob Jauron.
His work on behalf of male athletes in the town was more inspiring, said O’Neil, when you consider he had three daughters. Yet Hughes turned out to be a major figure in the life of the O’Neil family.
When he first arrived in the town, having moved from East Boston, O’Neil was looking for an organized basketball league for his daughter, Kristin. Problem was there weren’t any. He asked then girls coach Jack Hughes (no relation) if he could help, and “Jack told me to talk to Jim.”
By then, Jim had already established the CYO boys program and had it running remarkably well.
“I went to see him in his office, and asked whether he thought we could start a girls program,” O’Neil said. “And he said he was all for it. He talked to Monsignor (John) Carroll, and we started it. And he was always there from then on.”
Both their daughters, both named Kristin, went into play both for the CYO league and later for Swampscott High. Kristin Hughes is currently the athletic director for Smith College in Amherst in Northampton.
“He was a friend,” said DeFelice. “I did business with him personally, with my insurance, but we’d sit in his office and talk sports. He was a devout Prep guy, devout Holy Cross guy — very loyal to both — and he was a devout Catholic. He saw him at Mass often. He used to go to Mass every day until, I suppose, he just couldn’t anymore.”
DeFelice said Hughes was “a fixture around town. A pioneer. Everyone knew who he was. He wasn’t any stranger.”
He said that “if Stan needed something, whatever it was, Jim was probably the guy he went to,” DeFelice said.
Paul Halloran was an Item sportswriter when he first met Hughes, which led to a 30-year friendship.
“Jim was among the most loyal people I’ve ever met,” said Halloran, managing editor at Grant Communications Consulting Group and executive director of the Agganis All-Star Games. “When he found out I was a Holy Cross guy, he called to take me to lunch. Happy to say that repeated itself hundreds of times. Many of those lunches included Bob Jauron, and listening to those two talk about sports was entertaining to say the least. Jim was an old-school, tough, good guy. I will miss him greatly.”
Hughes, born in Brockton, moved to Swampscott when the family was a year old, and lived on Humphrey Street, across from the former Temple israel. He played football for St. John’s Prep, graduating in 1950, and then went to Holy Cross. For several years, he was chairman of the O’Melia Award committee that recognized the best player in the Boston College-Holy Cross game, DeFelice said.
“He did whatever he could for the kids of Swampscott and, I guess, Nahant, and for the programs in the town,” O’Neil said. “He’s the reason I got involved in girls basketball. He was always interested in our program. He was big with the boosters. Always took out a good-sized ad in our book.
And he was the golf coach at the high school, twice, and never took a penny. I loved the guy. He did so much for the town. A real genuine guy.”