Dunfey
of landmines in Angola.
“I would like to say those brothers were saving the world one phone call at a time behind the scenes,” said Eleanor DunfeyFreiburger, his youngest sister. “… The real satisfaction was to see something happening and to see the people who were really on the ground who deserve the credit become leaders.”
In his business, his personal life and his work through the nonprofit organization his family founded, Global Citizens Circle, Jack Dunfey’s loved ones say he lived by the phrase that was framed in his office: “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
The respected businessman and human rights advocate died June 22 in Hampton, N.H. of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He was 96.
Jack Dunfey was born in 1924 on Cross Street in Lowell’s Acre neighborhood and spent much of his childhood living in Pawtucketville.
The fifth of 12 children born to Irish Catholic parents, he worked in his family’s tiny luncheonette on Broadway Street from the age of six and attended Saint Patrick School and Keith Academy in Lowell.
After serving as a pilot instructor for the U.S. Air Force in World War II, he went on to grow his family’s business from a few luncheonettes and a clam stand in Hampton, N.H. to the Dunfey Hotel Corporation, which later acquired Omni Hotels International.
After the company acquired Boston’s historic Parker House Hotel, it became a base for the family’s humanitarian and social justice efforts, and in 1984, he was appointed a commissioner founder of the U.S. Institute for Peace by President Ronald Reagan.
“He along with his siblings have this incredible work ethic. But I think he, because he was such an excellent student and a very adventurous child, that’s the kind of man that he was too,” Will Dunfey, one of Jack Dunfey’s nephews, said of his uncle.
“That he was adventurous, he was thoughtful, he was very strategic in his thinking about building the family business really from virtually scraps.”
When it came to family, “there was nothing but family in Jack’s life,” Dunfey-freiburger said, and he was seen as the family’s “go-to guy.”
She pointed to the siblings’ upbringing living among other immigrant families in Lowell, as well as the humor and values their parents instilled in them to be accepting of everyone, as factors that drove his entrepreneurial and peacemaking spirit.
“He never forgot his roots, and the love that he got from his parents and his family always showed and made him a very, very special person,” Jack Dunfey’s wife, Lisa Timpé Dunfey, said.
Dunfey-freiburger remembers him as “a risktaker from the time he was a kid,” with a penchant for mischief that the other youth in the neighborhood often followed him into headfirst.
She recalled the time growing up in Pawtucketville when he discovered a steam roller that the city had left parked behind his family’s house. For Jack, it was an opportunity.
“He got the thing going and all the kids were lined up along the sidewalk on the curb watching. And he went over my cousin’s toes, but not to any seriousness — except my cousin then had a hero’s badge,” she said, laughing.
He and Timpé Dunfey met later in life on a double date after a mutual friend suggested they meet — though she was not actually Jack Dunfey’s date for the evening. But he smiled at her and asked her where she’d traveled, and she said she knew from that night that he would change her life.
“I got out of the cab and before I knew it Jack was out of the cab and he gave me the biggest hug. And literally, the building swayed. My 16-story brick building actually swayed. And I thought, ‘Oh my god, what hit me?'” Timpé Dunfey said.
“I’m from earthquake country, but there was no earthquake,” she said.
The couple had a whirlwind romance, marrying about two years after they met, and traveled often together for ski trips to New Hampshire, Colorado and Europe. Timpé Dunfey said her husband remained active for the majority of his life, skiing through his 80s until he took a nasty fall and fractured his neck.
She described him as a “very affectionate, wonderful, loving guy.”
They were married for 21 years.
“We were best friends and husband and wife. It was just — he was my best friend. I could talk to him about anything and everything,” she said. “God, I miss him. What a hole in my life now.”
In his last years, Jack Dunfey struggled against Alzheimer’s disease, and though he could still use all of the vocabulary from his years as a businessman, his relationship to reality had changed.
But Dunfey-freiburger notes that he would still sing with her, remembering the words to the songs the tight-knit family often used to sing together even in the days leading up to his death.
“It’s hard to see somebody who’s been larger than life — it’s a sad, sad way to go,” DunfeyFreiburger said.
She said she’s grateful that the disease affected him for only a short period of his long and accomplished life. From his human rights work to his business acumen, his family agreed he was a natural born leader — and that he used that gift for the benefit of mankind.
“I think that what I’ll miss the most is that sense of him being kind of the quiet and generous leader in our family, and also, the generous spiritedness of him as someone who had a larger vision than just building a business,” Will Dunfey said, “but wanting people to connect with one another in positive ways and see our common humanity.”