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The plan depended on Marblehead resident Tony Shea not looking out his window. A little after 5 p.m. on June 16, a green-and-red trolley packed with his family and friends pulled up to his Barnard Street home, and the man who had spent much of his life showing up for other people found a crowd showing up for him.
"I couldn't believe it," Shea said of the moment the trolley arrived to carry him to his own surprise 90th birthday party.
Guests had been told to park at Widger Road by 5:15 p.m. and board the "Tony Shea party trolley," which ran first to his house and then on to Mission on the Bay. The surprise carried extra weight this year. Shea had recently been seriously ill, said his nephew Dave Brocher, and reaching 90 was something he wanted badly.
"He does what he says he's going to do. He's honest, he is kind, nice to everybody," Brocher said. "I've never seen him have a cross word."
Brocher said the milestone fit the man. "Ninety is a milestone for anybody when you figure how many people he'd seen go before him," he said. Shea, he added, was always the one who turned up for others. "He'd go to their service."
Shea was born at Mary Alley Hospital and has lived in town since. He went to Northeastern, worked briefly in the leather industry and then spent decades at the town's electric light company, where he became meter superintendent. Much of the job was talking with residents about their bills, work he described as a lesson in patience.
"I learned to accept things and talk to people," Shea said.
Ask him the secret to a long life and the answer comes back plain. "Getting plenty of exercise," Shea said. He swam for years and rode long-distance until about three years ago.
He had an analytical mind and a creative one, said his niece Susan Shea, who grew up in the house across the street. An electrician by trade, he made figure sculptures and a wall of clay masks he molded and painted himself. He absorbed Marblehead history until he could tell you, she said, "every little thing you'd want to know about it."
What stayed with people, though, was not the range of his hobbies. It was his attention. "I think it's his genuine care and interest in what's happening with the person he's a friend with," Susan Shea said. Even seeing her nearly every day, she said, he still wanted the details. "He really wants to know what's up with you."
Shea never married and had no children. Instead he became the uncle who worked like a second father to a crowd of nieces and nephews. Susan Shea remembered him dressing up each Christmas as a character the family called "Elfie Dumas," a homemade spoof on Santa the children saw through and he never admitted to.
She also remembered him as someone who simply did not have a bad word for anyone. "My uncle insisted on speaking in a kind and respectful way," she said. "Always."
To Beth Shea and Laurie Gardella, he was simply "uncle," the way other kids say "dad." He took them swimming at the Village Green, drove them to miniature golf in Danvers, played Parcheesi and loaded them into the back of his pickup truck for rides around Marblehead Neck.
Brocher said his uncle handed down whole lives' worth of interests. Shea introduced him and his brother to skiing, made Brocher his first pair of skis, bought him boots and later gave him a set of golf clubs. Brocher still skis, still golfs and runs a landscaping business. He traces all of it back to his uncle.
The friendships run just as long. Joe Cerra met Shea through a masters swim group at the Village Green in Danvers in the 1970s, pulled in by a coach who noticed him using the pool alone at night. The two became friends through swimming, then through camping, movies and meals out. Cerra called him "salt of the earth," a quiet man whose reading and history made him good company. "Nice conversation," he said.
That reach showed up everywhere he went. Walk into a restaurant with Shea and someone behind the counter knows him; once, his niece Darlene Minincleri recalled, a friend leaned out a window just to shout his name.
Margo Steiner, a longtime friend, said Shea’s kindness is the first thing people learn about him.
“To know Tony Shea is to know infinite kindness, a gentle wit, a deep intelligence, a sincere interest in all things and all people, and a generous soul,” Steiner said. “To know Tony Shea is to know real goodness, plain and simple.”
She said Shea is rare in that he does not turn conversations toward himself. His attention stays with the person across from him — what they think, how they feel and what matters to them.
“One never leaves a morning coffee with him without feeling better — about the day, about the world, and about oneself,” Steiner said.
For years he and Elisabeth and Britt Winer's late mother, Birthe, a friend from the Marblehead Arts Association, kept a standing Wednesday dinner, often at the Barnacle for double-lobster night. The sisters still laugh about the night a woman at the next table asked them to turn their lobster the other way because, she insisted, "it's looking at me."
“They always cracked each other up when they told that story,” said Elisabeth Winer.
The trolley was due to bring everyone back to Widger Road around 8:30 p.m. For one night, the man who had always driven the outing got to ride in it.
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