Southie’s ‘Booze Traveler’ deserves applause – and a toast

When Jack Maxwell was a small boy shining shoes on the streets of Boston to help his struggling single mother escape Southie’s D Street Projects, he had no reason to imagine his would be a “local boy makes good” story. Far less did he dream that he would go on to become a television celebrity with a large and loyal national following.

The host for the past four years of the Travel Channel’s “Booze Traveler,” Maxwell has visited over 50 countries, television crew in tow, surfacing in remote locations to share conversation and exotic, often wretched-sounding drinks with locals. He is quick to emphasize that the show has been less about alcohol than about showcas13 ing the connections that can be forged between people of different backgrounds. Its appeal derives from Maxwell, a savant at creating kinship. His tools include a lightning-quick sense of humor and a deep curiosity about others.

Most of all, he is wise about the human condition, a wisdom that began but does not end with his own experience with adversity. His father abandoned his mother shortly after marrying her (“He tried for about seconds,” Maxwell says), skipping out on child support and leaving them destitute. “When you had no money and nowhere to go,” Maxwell reflects, “you ended up in the projects.” At 9, he asked for a shoe shine box for his birthday, to help his mother support them before she moved them out of the projects and to Phoenix four years later.

Maxwell spent high school brooding about finding the father he had never known. “I had a plan in my head that I was going to go live with my father and figure out who I was,” he says. After high school he returned to Boston to find his father, but what he found was a drug addict who scammed pharmacies and had turned his own mother’s home into a drug den. “I was just heartbroken at what he did to my grandmother,” Maxwell says. His father was sent to jail, which devastated Maxwell. “I was a lost soul,” he says. “I was trying to heal from the shock of seeing my father go to prison.”

Maxwell bounced around, first in Boston, then back in Phoenix, then back in Boston, before a gig working security at the Boston Marathon led to a steady security job at a downtown law firm and a period of relative tranquility, leading in turn to a move that had been rolling around in his head for some time: improbably, irrationally, ridiculously, he was going to head back west to try acting.

In Las Vegas he saw a newspaper ad for an acting audition. The only problem was that he had never acted. “They said, ‘Where’s your headshot and your resume, and what have you done?’ I said, ‘I don’t have either and I’ve never done anything,’ ” he remembers. Surprisingly they let him read for a part. Unsurprisingly, it was a disaster. “I was so embarrassed,” he says.

Drawing on South Boston grit, Maxwell returned the next day and asked if he could try again. They looked at him as though he were crazy, and according to Maxwell with good reason, but let him do it. By the time he got home he had a message offering him the job. “It wasn’t because I was good,” Maxwell says, “but because I had the guts to try.”

A series of television and movie roles followed, as did mentoring by acting greats Al Pacino and Estelle Parsons. There was a steady diet of setbacks and hard times before “Booze Traveler” came his way. In the process of beating cancer, launching a podcast and sorting out the future, Maxwell is a grateful man. “For a kid from Southie, I never thought I’d amount to anything,” he says. Jack Maxwell is a very smart guy, but he was wrong about that.