Jim Perakis: I grew up in the 1950s in a town in Massachusetts that was a tannery town, a leather city, and my father told me that at one point it was the largest leather city in the world.

My father’s best friend was Mike Butler and Mike was the stereotypical Irishman. He worked in a tannery, was always laughing, red-faced, a grin on his face all the time, a cigarette in his hand, and he carried little nips in his pockets, single shot bottles of whisky. He was a heavy drinker but I don’t think as little kids we understood that. But to us kids he was a hero. He was the nicest guy, really friendly to the children in the family. Some of my best memories of Mike are on Christmas Eve, where he would walk from one house to another. He didn’t own a car, and he would walk through the snow and carry bottles of liquor to distribute to his friends and I remember him coming through the...
Read the full transcript