That is all for now folks: MAC calls it a career after devastating diagnosis

Lifelong Cantonite Joe DeFelice with his massive softball trophy collection

This story originally appeared in the March 24 edition of the Canton Citizen.

As recently as two weeks ago, right up until the moment “Dr. Doom” walked into his room at Brigham & Women’s Hospital to deliver his startlingly blunt prognosis, everything still made sense in Joe DeFelice’s world.

Other than his one mystery ailment — persistent abdominal swelling that had vexed his doctors for months — DeFelice had managed to stay remarkably fit and active for a man on the other side of 80, and he had lost exactly none of the passion that had fueled his countless national and world championship runs as a player-manager on the senior softball circuit.

Meanwhile, in the eyes of his fellow Cantonites, DeFelice was still the same old “MAC,” churning out his “Man About Canton” newspaper column every Thursday, just as he had done for the last several decades save for just a handful of weeks off.

“I think I’ve kept every column, every single one of them,” noted DeFelice, his voice breaking at the mere thought of having to say goodbye.

Of course, if it were up to him, DeFelice would have “kept right on writing,” for years, even decades more if he could. Instead, life threw him a truly vicious curveball — end-stage kidney failure, terminal and advanced — and as a result, the March 17 edition of Man About Canton (“New polling location in Canton”) was officially his last.

“I still can’t even believe it; it’s just awful,” DeFelice said of his recent diagnosis, which stunned both him and his loved ones. “The one I call ‘Dr. Doom,’ he told me I only had 30 days to live. That’s exactly what the bastard said to me.”

Colorful language aside, DeFelice said his doctors had worked for months trying to get at the root cause of his fluid buildup, and when it became clear that both his liver and kidneys were failing, he said they “tried everything” to minimize the damage and buy him some more time. “They were never able to figure out why they were failing,” he said. “A ‘rare case,’ they called it.”

After informing him of the diagnosis, the doctors “tapped” his abdomen to remove several liters of fluid and then gave him a blood transfusion to help “pep [him] up” and strengthen his body before discharging him from the hospital. They instructed him to return every Friday for the next few weeks to be tapped but otherwise urged him to focus on getting his affairs in order and spending time with loved ones.

Perhaps the cruelest irony is that DeFelice doesn’t feel sick. In fact, just the other day he was out on the softball diamond — just to feel a sense of normalcy and, in the words of his son Joe Jr., to “see if he could still hit.”

“I feel good,” DeFelice reported during an interview last week at his Canton home. “The doctors say [kidney failure] is kind of a silent killer. There usually isn’t much pain — you kind of just go to sleep.”

***

In the days following his discharge from Brigham and Women’s, DeFelice’s phone rang off the hook and his home was a revolving door of friends and well-wishers. Being something of a pack rat, he has also begun the unenviable task of going through his old files and belongings and discarding what he no longer needs — a process that has been both therapeutic and painful.

While still in many ways the same old MAC — friendly, blunt, and a gifted storyteller — there were certain topics that caused him to immediately tear up, notably his love of the town of Canton.

Joe DeFelice in his college graduation photo

“Just obsessed with the town his whole entire life,” noted Joanna Alessi, one of his two daughters along with Michelle DeFelice.

Appearing in the town’s birth records in 1941, DeFelice is indeed a Canton man through and through, although he notes that his late mother, Anna, was an “original Cantonite,” having been born in the family’s home on Mechanic Street and remaining in the town until her death in 2003.

Joe, meanwhile, has been a bit more worldly, venturing off to college at Northeastern University, and then to Korea for a little over a year during his time in the Army, with numerous vacations and softball tournament trips sprinkled in over the past several decades. For a brief moment in the 1980s, he even considered moving out of state with his family after his employer at the time, the Kendall Company out of Walpole, relocated to Athens, Georgia. He made several trips down there to help the company set up, and he nearly went through with the move.

“But I just couldn’t leave Canton,” he said. “I really couldn’t.”

Of course, while many so-called “Townies” are proud of their home communities, DeFelice dove in headfirst and became an active contributor from a young age, winning a seat on the Planning Board shortly after graduating from college.

A natural leader, DeFelice would go on to chair the board for his first three years in office and served a total of six years before jumping to the Board of Selectmen in 1974. In those days, local races were closely tracked affairs and drew a large pool of candidates, with voter turnout often exceeding 50 percent.

“Oh, they’d come out in droves,” DeFelice recalled. “I call it the golden age of politics in the town of Canton.”

While he enjoyed the thrill of campaigning and winning elections, DeFelice said he is most proud of the work he put in to make lasting improvements for the town, such as the rezoning of Dan Road — now a major industrial hub off Route 138 — and the acquisition of Pequitside Farm, a recreational gem in the town.

DeFelice said he and his colleagues came “close” on other future initiatives, such as the rezoning of Route 138 and the construction of the infamous “east-west road,” which would have connected Pleasant Street to Turnpike Street and offered an outlet to Canton’s increasing traffic volume.

Perhaps his most significant lasting accomplishment, however, was the work he did as a selectman to get the town pool constructed. After attending a municipal meeting in Boston and hearing a presentation about federal grants for swimming pools, DeFelice got the ball rolling and together with his longtime friend and then executive secretary Bill Thibeault, they were able to secure the grant funds and ultimately get the original pool built on Bolivar Street. The entire process took roughly a year and the facility lasted until the new complex was built in 2020.

***

While unable to fully articulate what drove him to be an organizer and a leader, DeFelice has a much simpler explanation for how he attained his legendary status in the softball world: his love of the game.

A talented baseball player in his heyday, DeFelice joined Little League at age 10 and promptly became the youngest member of that year’s all-star team. Primarily playing shortstop, he would help lead Canton’s 12-year-old team to within a pitch of going to the World Series in Williamsport, and he later went on to play baseball at Northeastern and helped his team win the Greater Boston League in 1964.

A young Joe DeFelice (front, 2nd from left) with his fellow Canton Little League all-stars (click to enlarge).

Meanwhile, even before finishing college his passion started to shift to softball, and at age 19 he formed his own fast-pitch team, which he called the Canton All-Stars, and then organized record hops at Canton High School to raise the funds for uniforms, gear and equipment. A few years later, when slow-pitch softball supplanted fast-pitch in the area, DeFelice again proved to be a trailblazer, launching the popular Canton Men’s League and kicking off a dynasty that would last the next two-plus decades.

Around the time he started the slow-pitch league, DeFelice also made another major recreational contribution in this town with the development of the July 4 road race — an annual Canton tradition for the last 50-plus years.

“I started every single race for 50 straight years,” he recalled. “In fact, for one of them, [longtime friend] Glen Hannington got married at noontime. I started the race at 9:30 in a tuxedo and I raced down to Fall River and I was the best man at the wedding.”

With Hannington’s financial backing, DeFelice would go on to become a managerial force in national senior softball, recruiting top players from all over the region and beyond to form a series of “super teams” that collectively won four national titles and three world titles. Those championships rank among his greatest personal achievements; however, DeFelice said it is the friendships and the experiences traveling around the country — all made possible by senior softball and Hannington’s generosity — that he will surely miss most.

***

For the first dozen or so years that DeFelice wrote “Man About Canton,” back when it was published in the Canton Journal, he did so anonymously, going only by MAC. A sportswriter originally, DeFelice had gotten involved in local politics and his editor suggested he consider a political opinion column. So he conceived of “Man About Canton” and the anonymity he was afforded, although not ideal journalistically, enabled him to freely criticize those in the town who he felt were hypocrites or lazy or self-serving.

When he did finally reveal his identity in the early 1980s, DeFelice said he had gotten comfortable enough in his skin to not only make the punches, but take them as well, and he has loved every bit of the ride ever since.

All told, DeFelice has authored well over 2,600 MAC columns since he filed his first ever installment in June of 1970. What he may not realize, however, yet would certainly appreciate as a fan of sports and statistics, is that he is walking away as one of the longest tenured columnists in the United States.

While a few former heavyweights, like Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle or John Gould of the Christian Science Monitor, approached or hit the 60-year mark, at present there does not appear to be any columnist writing who has done so almost continuously since 1970. Just a few years ago, in fact, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported on the retirement of Violet Spevack, who retired after 50 years with the Cleveland Jewish News and was recognized at the time as having the longest running column in the country written by a single person. A few others, like Jim Monday of the Leaf-Chronicle in Tennessee, retired around the 50-year mark, but the Citizen could not find any current columnist who has bested MAC’s total.

Congrats MAC. That is all for now folks.

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