Reading Greg Levinsky’s story about the Kellehers brought back a flood of memories.
Once upon a time, my wife and I bought a two-family home on Elm Street in Belmont. I had commuted from Brooklyn for several years during the late 1980s, but when an old college friend asked if I wanted to join him and his wife in buying a two-family, the commuting ended.
I started my own firm and began to have some success. I met the love of my life and we married. When another two-family became available down the block, we bought it and moved our things in garden carts.
As it turned out, our new house came with a plumber, Dan Kelleher, who showed up out of the blue to service the boiler.
Dan filled our house with sweet-smelling pipe tobacco smoke and our hearts with affection. He said to call him if we needed anything, and boy, did we! We were new to the home ownership game and everything about it seemed mysterious. Dan came whenever we called and never made us feel stupid as he jiggled the handle on the toilet to make it stop running. We took to calling him “Dan the hero plumber.”
Once, as our first son was about to be born, our pipes froze. We called Dan and spoke with his wife – we always spoke with Mrs. Kelleher; Dan was never actually home when we called. (We called her “Mrs. Dan”). Hours later, after what must have been a very, very long day, a visibly exhausted Dan appeared and solved our problem.
We thanked him profusely but he brushed it off. Later, when we called Mrs. Dan to thank her as well, she said it was nothing. “I told him, I don’t care what time it is, you get right over there and fix their pipes. That lady’s having a baby!”
We sent our kids to Burbank and Chenery and Belmont High. Through Dan we followed the achievements of his and Mrs. Dan’s brood. We weren’t hockey fans, but we were Dan fans, and we gloried in the family’s success. We grieved for ourselves when Dan retired, and we grieved for and with our entire community when he died.
Today we still live in half of that two-family. Our kids have grown, and the scent of pipe tobacco smoke has, sadly, long since faded. But when I turn off Grove Street onto Grosvenor Road and see Dan’s name on the fence behind home plate there, I smile and feel privileged to have had the opportunity to know Dan, the hero plumber.
Tevere MacFadyen, Elm Street