6/6/24

  REMEMBERING TOM MULLIGAN

TOM MULLIGAN - In the Providence Journal newsroom, probably in the 1980s.

I’M PRETTY SURE that Tom Mulligan did not know everything.
     He might have come up short on particle physics; and maybe he hadn’t heard that “there are always several meanings of each word in Urdu,” a factoid I saw in a recent Google search.
     But you wouldn’t have wanted to bet that Tom Mulligan didn't know something about physics and Urdu. Or, that if necessary, he wouldn’t have quickly ferreted out the critical information, then explained it all, clearly and simply, maybe with a dash of humor.
     He had an incisive, inquisitive mind. He read; understood what he read; remembered what he’d read. And he talked to people; understood what they told him; and remembered what they told him. After which, he came to informed, confident conclusions.
     This made him perfectly suited to cover business and financial matters, both as a reporter and editor.
     I worked with him at the Providence Journal, where he spent more than 11 years, leaving in 1989 as the paper’s business editor; he spent the next 19 years at the Los Angeles Times, where one of his  titles was “senior financial writer.”
     Tom died June 3 after being diagnosed a few months earlier with esophageal cancer, which doctors told him and his wife, the equally talented journalist, Irene Wielawski, was probably incurable, but, with treatment, might be staved off for a considerable period of time.
     So, they decided to live as normally and vigorously as possible. Indeed, a few weeks ago, Tom and Irene were at the luncheon that former Providence Journal staffers hold every month in Warwick. And the morning of his death, Tom played pickle ball.
     Later that day, he had to be rushed to a hospital, where he died. That was only part of the shock that spread quickly across Tom’s and Irene’s national network of colleagues, friends and family.
    Tom, after all, was only 73, and you wouldn’t have guessed he was even that. Also, unless you’d been told, you would not have suspected that he now was confronting a life-threatening illness that had intruded so cruelly, too soon, and so unfairly.
     Which was not how Tom saw it.
     “I’m still adjusting, but I don’t in any way feel cheated or ill-used,” he told me in an email after his diagnosis. “At our age, something’s going to get us, and there’s a weird species of relief in seeing the options narrow to exclude (more) horrible things.”

WHEN TOM WAS AT THE JOURNAL, he was part of an actual dynasty that included some of the newspaper’s most talented men and women.
     Irene, whom Tom met at the paper, was the Journal’s award-winning medical writer; Tom’s brother, John E. Mulligan, was the paper’s Washington bureau chief. The circle was completed when Tony Lioce, the paper’s legendary columnist and music writer, married Janet Cusick, and John Mulligan married Janet’s sister, Nancy.   

TOM MULLIGAN (center), Irene Wielawski, his wife, and John Mulligan, Tom's brother, at Salve Regina University in 2019, where John spoke about the late Senator Claiborne Pell

 Explaining a journalist's talent is difficult without describing a little of what the practitioners do.
    It’s worth noting that “business” is a subject that intimidates a lot of reporters, who otherwise wouldn’t give a second thought about confronting a bombastic politician or a violent mobster (in Rhode Island, they're  sometimes the same person).
     The trick is to master the off-putting business jargon and the sometimes mysterious math – Tom earned a masters in business administration from the University of Rhode Island – and then remember that, just like any other subject, business reporting eventually comes down to stories about people.
     One article I found online was Tom’s description of Martha Stewart, America’s home-life advice goddess, when she was on trial in 2004 for securities infractions. Here’s how he started the piece:

      Her posture is perfect: head high, shoulders squared, never slouching in her chair during even the most tedious hours of testimony. She never has a bad hair day.
     Yet the courtroom artists find Martha Stewart hard to draw. Her face, lively and beautiful on TV and in her magazine, emerges as taut and severe in their drawings. It isn’t a question of poor draftsmanship. On trial, with her freedom and fortune on the line, Martha Stewart looks like a different person.
     Today, Stewart’s top lawyer and the lead prosecutor will paint their opposing portraits of the media entrepreneur and her actions between her now-notorious sale of ImClone Systems Inc. stock on Dec. 27, 2001, and her interview with federal investigators the following April.
     Is Stewart the victim of a trophy-hunting U.S. Justice Department, or a shrewish multimillionaire who thinks the rules don’t apply to her?

      In four paragraphs, Tom wrapped together the business background of the alleged crime, the legal arguments and of course, the intriguing woman at the center of the story, seen not only through his eyes, but those of courtroom artists.

 AFTER CAREERS ON TWO COASTS, Tom and Irene retired to Providence, to the delight of friends like me and my wife, who had remained in Rhode Island.
     Still, we didn’t see enough of them, even though we lived in Newport, just 40 miles away, not hundreds or thousands.
     People our age should know better than to squander time and opportunity.

     After Tom’s diagnosis, we were in better touch.
     Selfishly, I peppered Tom with emails about business subjects that baffled me but about which I was sure Tom had the answers, like Elon Musk’s vast wealth and the absurd stock market success of Donald Trump’s puny social media company. And I remembered how scornful Tom had been about state lotteries.
     “I like lotteries better than sports betting, which I think has much greater potential to wreck young people’s lives,” Tom wrote back, “not to mention that it’s already coarsening and even adding violence (hostility, death threats) to the atmosphere of pro & college sports.”
     As to Musk’s billions, Tom noted that his income at least was tied to remarkable success of companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal. Trump’s ventures mostly were “black holes of failure or frauds or both. The main point is no investor ever made a dime on Trump; only he did.”
     We talked about the couples getting together at a Newport restaurant, with Tom joking whether his New York-based toll pass would bill him and Irene $80 for crossing the Newport Bridge.
     He ended one email this way:
     “Thanks for your friendly thoughts. I’m sure we’ll see you in Newport before long.”