Address Newsletter
Our weekly digest on buying, selling, and design, with expert advice and insider neighborhood knowledge.
Boston, MA
Fund-raising philanthropist Susan Hurley, who died at 62, was Boston’s marathon woman – The Boston Globe
And then there was her personal approach to preparing first-time marathoners to toe the starting line. Over the years she took thousands of runners on countless miles of training runs leading up to Boston Marathon day.
“It’s fun,” she said in an interview posted on YouTube. “I mean, this is what I live for. I want to see people succeed. This is life-changing for them to be able to run a marathon and be inspired by a charity and earn their spot at the starting line that way. For them, it’s the Super Bowl of running.”
Ms. Hurley, who helped raise her final millions while running her last two Boston Marathons after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, died Nov. 1. She was 62 and lived in North Andover.
“I always love to be known as Boston’s biggest cheerleader,” Ms. Hurley, a cheerleader in high school and later for the New England Patriots, said in the 2020 YouTube interview with Thom Gilligan, founder and chief executive of Marathon Tours & Travel.
Trading football field sidelines for road racecourses, she cheered on year after year of runners, even while running in the marathons herself.
“In addition to being everyone’s cheerleader, she was everyone’s mom. She really cared about all her runners,” said Sarah Wessmann, team captain and a member of each year’s marathon contingent for Last Call Foundation. The charity, inspired by the heroic life and line-of-duty death in 2014 of her then-fiancé, Boston firefighter Michael Kennedy, funds education and research to advance firefighter safety.
Near the end of each Boston Marathon, Ms. Hurley’s son Ryan McGillivray recalled, she could be spotted with her arm around the waist of another runner — helping a member of her charity team or even a stranger whose strength was fading.
From the beginning of marathon preparations, Ms. Hurley stressed that all runners should have “their Boylston Street moment, hearing the crowd roar and seeing the finish line in the distance, and the happiness that brings,” said Ryan, who lives in Wrentham and is vice president of operations for DMSE Sports, the event management firm founded by his father, Dave McGillivray.
During weeks of training runs, Ms. Hurley helped newcomers prepare for the vagaries of the potentially punishing weather, and for the constancy of Heartbreak Hill.
In February she would hold the fund-raising “Superhero 17” – a 17-mile run along the marathon course in which participants ran dressed as superheroes, their merriment a distraction from the arduous training workout.
And Ms. Hurley “didn’t just run the marathon. She had you learn about the course and the history and why things matter,” said Wessmann, who was among the runners Ms. Hurley helped train.
Ms. Hurley made sure runners knew about legendary Olympian Johnny Kelley, who completed the Boston Marathon nearly 60 times. She led training runs to Kelley’s statue in Newton so everyone could pay their respects.
“It’s a cliché,” Wessmann said, “but she really did put the fun in fund-raising.”
The third of four sisters, Susan Ann Hurley was born on April 8, 1963, and grew up in North Reading.
Her mother, Sylvia Bidmead Hurley, was a real estate title examiner, and her father, James Hurley, was assistant register at Middlesex Family and Probate Court.
A cheerleading squad champion at North Reading High School, Ms. Hurley became a runner early on.
“I started running when I used to miss the bus in high school and I haven’t stopped,” she told Boston Magazine just before the 2013 marathon. “I’m proud to say I am a person who has worked out her whole life and never stopped and rarely missed a day.”
Ms. Hurley, who attended Emerson College, formerly was married to Dave McGillivray, with whom she had two sons, Ryan and Max.
She was as enthusiastic a mother as she was training runners and raising millions, said Max, who lives in Los Angeles.
“Energetic doesn’t even cover it,” he said. “Her energy, her light, her celebratory nature was just infectious. Everyone will say it: she was a cheerleader in every sense of the word.”
Ms. Hurley found ways to make the marathon experience possible for participants facing a wide variety of hurdles, from spinal cord injuries to living without homes.
“The list goes on and on,” Max said, “and no person, in my eyes, was ever turned away from her light.”
Russell Hoyt, president and chief executive of Team Hoyt and the Hoyt Foundation, said Ms. Hurley was instrumental in helping the family organizations expand their reach and ensure their legacy after the deaths of his father, Dick Hoyt, and brother, Rick Hoyt, who had pioneered duo wheelchair road racing.
Russell said Ms. Hurley helped the organizations reach beyond the Boston Marathon to other major events, and to launch the Dick and Judy Hoyt “Yes You Can” inclusion grants, named for his parents, to assist families in getting their children with disabilities included in activities alongside non-disabled peers.
“Sue helped us do something new and more powerful,” Hoyt said, adding that “she was the type of person who made you want to be a better person yourself, just by spending time with her.”
A service has been held for Ms. Hurley, who in addition to her two sons, mother, and former husband leaves three sisters, Lisa First of Alvin, Texas, Mary of Norfolk, and Cheryl Cuoco of Wrentham; her fiancé, Barry Foland of Owings Mills, Md.; and three stepchildren, Elle, Luke, and Chloe McGillivray, all of North Andover.
In August, Ms. Hurley spoke at the opening of Gronk Playground on the Charles River Esplanade, which was funded by her friend Rob Gronkowski, the former star New England Patriots tight end.
Gronkowski was overcome with emotion more than once, speaking a few feet away from where she sat next to Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
When it was her turn to speak, Ms. Hurley thanked Gronkowski for his philanthropy and floated an idea: “Can we just make it official and sign him for a day so he can retire a Patriot?”
Several days after she died, Kraft and Gronkowski announced they would honor her wish.
On Instagram, Gronkowski wrote that “her strength and resilience were truly inspirational,” and added that “without Susan, there would be no Gronk Playground.”
In a CBS Boston interview posted on YouTube in 2023, a year after she was diagnosed, Ms. Hurley was back to her energetic pace, managing 500 runners and pushing that year’s fund-raising past the $4 million mark.
The cancer diagnosis had come as a shock, she said. A doctor broke the news a day after she had completed a 17-mile training run. In that interview, she was grateful for a reprieve treatment had brought.
“It is a miracle. I believe it’s God’s hand,” she said. “I really, truly, truly believe that there is a plan for me and I’m not ready to leave this planet and leave this earth. There’s work for me to do here.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
Surprise: Another weekend and there’s more rain on the way. It’s bad enough we’ve had to post a First Alert.
For now, we’ll watch as clouds thicken today. We’ll squeeze out some drops later this afternoon and evening.
A weather maker is winding up in Canada, wrapping in cold air. All of that is going to dive down to New England.
We’re in the thick of it tomorrow. Rain will be coming at us in bursts with some dry time in between. Winds will likely push past 50 mph in Boston.
Those winds will eat away at temperatures; with wind chills barely above freezing. And no – not just in the morning – but the afternoon, too!
It’s so cold there’s the threat of snow as that rain bumps into colder air over the Berkshires, Worcester Hills and southern New Hampshire right up to Mount Washington.
The snow isn’t going to pile up but just know there could be some flakes flying over our highest hills.
The blue on our Futurecast map marks the spots where snow could mix with rain.
Rain spins out by Saturday evening but not before dumping about half an inch over Boston.
We’ll try to salvage the rest of the weekend with temperatures in the upper 60s by Sunday. Still, there’s the threat of bits and pieces of rain.
By the way, this isn’t any weekend, it’s the last weekend of spring. Meteorological summer starts on June 1.
The first day of summer remains drab and dreary with more rain chances and temperatures in the low 60 on Monday.
Federal immigration demands are once again centered on Massachusetts.
The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday sent three letters to Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox, Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins and Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden demanding, among other things, information on how many ICE detainers BPD has received and declined to honor from 2022 to 2026 and any communication between the three departments related to immigration.
House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said in a statement that “releasing repeat criminals back to the streets solely because of their immigration status is crazy, and that’s exactly what Boston is doing.”
But Democrats push back on that framing.
“You’re familiar with Jim Jordan and his antics,” said Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey. “This is more circus, it’s more theater and it’s not making our community safe.”
A spokesperson for the City of Boston wrote, “the city has provided this information many times…” going on to say “…these policies are part of keeping Boston the safest major city in America.”
The letters call for the documents to be sent to the House Judiciary Committee by June 10th at 5:00 pm. District Attorney Hayden’s office told NBC 10 they are reviewing the letter, neither Commissioner Cox or Sheriff Tompkins responded to requests for comment.
On the Market
Ted Kennedy Jr. speaks on the importance of his late mother’s Boston home, now for sale.
At first glance, Joan Bennett Kennedy’s Back Bay home may not appear all that unusual, but the endless stories held within its walls illustrate how a sacred space became one woman’s shelter from the storm.
After divorcing Ted Kennedy in 1982, Bennett Kennedy returned to Boston and moved into 250 Beacon St. #10, and remained there for more than four decades until her death at age 89 in October. Now, her three-bedroom, three-bathroom home, which measures 2,075 square feet, is on the market at $2.59 million.
“Her home really played an important part in the transformation of her life,” her son, Ted Kennedy Jr., told the Globe. “She was a newly divorced woman coming back, trying to reestablish her roots in Boston, and she had her music, which was part of her unique identity, apart from being married to my father. She was seeking to reinvent herself and live on her own terms.”
It was there at 250 Beacon where Bennett Kennedy restarted her life. She earned a master’s degree in music education at 44, and became a staple on the Boston classical music scene, thanks to her lifelong dedication to the piano. But it was also where she faced significant struggles, ranging from depression to alcoholism. She didn’t hide her battles at a time when they weren’t commonly discussed.
“She paved the way for many other women who were suffering in silence,” said Kennedy Jr. “The Boston community just took her in and provided her with friendship and support.”
The circa-1925 building features an elegant lobby that leads to the elevators. Inside the fifth-floor unit, a foyer flows into a hallway and into the spacious living room, where hardwood floors run throughout and a wood-burning fireplace sits under a unique carved mantel surrounded by marble. But it’s the windows that capture the eyes, with views of the treetops and the Charles River in the distance.
“She would sit at her piano in the condo every afternoon for hours,” said Kennedy, who noted that the home later served as the spot where his mother penned “The Joy of Classical Music,” a guide for introducing classical music to families. Prominent musical figures, including John Williams, Seiji Ozawa, and Arthur Fiedler, were frequent guests.
The open floor plan continues in the dining area and library, filled with built-in bookcases and oversized windows.
The living room fireplace is two-sided; on its opposite side is the primary bedroom suite, with built-in bookshelves and a massive bay window with beautiful views. The primary suite features an en-suite bathroom with a pink vanity.
“These front rooms, all three of them, the amount of glass and the size of these windows are just magnificent,” said Linda Barrett of Douglas Elliman, who has the listing and knew Kennedy for years. “Being on the fifth floor, she sat right at the tree line, looking at the Charles River.”
A second of three full bathrooms has elegant marble tiles and a step-in shower. Across the hallway are two closets for storage and the galley kitchen with green/blue cabinetry and stainless steel appliances.
There are three bedrooms, one with teal carpeting and ample built-in storage.
The home has central air, and the building has a live-in superintendent. The fee is $1,725.39 per month. The piano is not included as part of the sale.
-
Los Angeles, Ca1 hour agoRescued sea lion pups released in Manhattan Beach
-
Detroit, MI2 hours agoSunda New Asian brings bold flavors to Detroit
-
San Francisco, CA2 hours agoDriver Arrested After Pedestrian Killed, Three Injured In Mission District Crash
-
Dallas, TX2 hours agoMcAllen Welcomes Texas Hockey | Dallas Stars
-
Miami, FL2 hours agoPair arrested in connection with armed home invasion robbery in Miami, cops say
-
Boston, MA2 hours agoSaturday storm will bring bursts of rain, strong winds, and… snow?
-
Denver, CO2 hours agoVon Miller lobbying Broncos to bring him back (here’s the latest update)
-
Seattle, WA2 hours agoSeattle travel alert: Massive road closures, light rail shutdowns this weekend
