Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
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Check shirt, Black Fleece ($195). Brooks Brothers, 75 State St., 617-261-9990; brooksbrothers.com of moving forward but never really arriving, no matter what his personal Q rating might be. "It's an actor's fantasy to be in my position," says Slattery, who, prior to Mad Men, played occasional featured roles in mov- ies (Mona Lisa Smile, Flags of Our Fathers) and guest shots on TV series (Will & Grace, Desperate Housewives). "You work hard to get to a certain place, then you get there, and it's not quite what you expected. That implies a certain dissatisfaction, which isn't exactly right, but failure can be a lot easier to rationalize than success. Maybe it's an Irish thing." That skeptical attitude toward success, says Slattery, was cultivated in a large middle-class household—two boys and four girls—led by his father, Jack, who was a leather merchant, and his mother, Joan, now a retired CPA. While the actor feels he acquired his "stubbornness" in part from his mother, he accrued a solid set of values, including a strong work ethic, from his father. "We had to do chores and take jobs—I was caddying by the time I was 10 and later worked in a gas station—but my father never really pushed us at anything, never stressed over it," Slattery says. What the family did stress over was the fate of their beloved sports teams, especially the Red Sox, whose fate they assiduously followed. His mother's cousin was married to Jack Rogers, the Red Sox's traveling sec- retary at the time, and the family enjoyed many perks at Fenway Park. "We'd take the Rattler [the trolley] into town for almost every home game," Slattery says, adding that for sheer drama nothing beats observ- ing world-class athletes in competition. "It's so heightened, so intense," he says. "It's do-or-die time, and sometimes you end up on the short end of the stick." There was far less at stake in the neighborhood games that were a staple of Slattery's youth and which inspired momentary dreams of baseball glory. "The older I got the more apparent it became that it wasn't going to happen," he says. "I was never a star, but I could play well enough to have fun at most anything." Slattery attended all-boys St. Sebastian's School in Newton, his father's bostoncommon-magazine.com 89