Tim McLoone: Curing Boredom with Success

FEATURED PHOTO: Tim McLoone in his restauraunt | CREDIT: Carmela Caracappa Photography

Living in Monmouth County, you’ve almost certainly heard the name Tim McLoone.

You’ve possibly attended one of his concerts with the Shirleys, or eaten at one of his many restaurants, or perhaps you’ve attended an event with Holiday Express, the charity he started in 1993, or maybe your son or daughter is on the track team he coaches in Rumson-Fair Haven. No matter how you’ve come in contact with the name McLoone, it usually brings up images of the Shore, music, good times, competition, and keen business sense. But there’s more to the man named Tim.

A conversation with the 71-year-old who was born on Valentine’s Day, reveals an introverted side to the gregarious entertainer. A self-proclaimed homebody who is happiest at home in Little Silver with his wife, Beth, and their four children, Molly, 30, Jack, 21, Connor, 19, and Hannah, 18, Tim humbly portrays his life as a series of “stumbled upons”.

Equally successful in the fields of music, business, philanthropy, and sports, his knack for achievement is due to a rare mixture of talent, confidence, hard-work, and a need for plan B. Having spent most of his childhood playing alone, Tim fills his schedule and avoids boredom at all costs. A gifted imagination, and a drive to help when needed, has led to unexpected success for a man who considers himself talented, but perhaps having never reached his full potential.

“When I was little, we had an unusual circumstance,” explained Tim. “My brother, Briane, and it’s spelled weird, b-r-i-a-n-e, had polio and was very ill. We lived on the grounds of a veteran’s hospital because my father worked there in the administration. So, I didn’t have any friends available to me, any friends I saw there had to be driven. And in the 1950s there wasn’t that much of that going on like there is now. I spent a lot of time with my imagination. I really did. I played alone a tremendous amount of my time. With my brother’s illness, I was alone, alone a lot of the time when I was 8-years-old, 7-years-old. Nothing to me was worse than being bored. There was no emotion in life that would be worse than boredom. So, I filled my life and it carried over into my adulthood. I tend to pack my schedule and take on things that people offer to me, and I’m fortunate enough that maybe I have the talent to do them, but it just kept going. The only regret I have is I always was tortured by the old maxim ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’. I was always fearful I was master of none.”

CREDIT: Scott Longfield

“It’s true to a great extent. Even as a competitive runner myself, had I been solely dedicated to that, I could have been a lot better. But I was out playing music the night before races, not acting crazy but…. And the restaurant business came along, and I realized as a musician I was not going to hit it big. And maybe that was a problem, that I doubted my own abilities instead of charging all the way into it. I was writing music and recording stuff and trying to get somewhere, but it just was clear to me I didn’t have the goods. I tended to play in bands where I was the least accomplished player, which is not a bad thing. It’s kind of like running track; if you’re on a relay team and you’re the slowest guy on the team, but you can run pretty well. With music I was surrounding myself with much better players, and it affected me negatively in the sense that I said, ‘I’m not as good as these guys’ so I decided maybe I should do something else. So instead of traveling from club to club, I decided to buy one and do that. And so, we bought the Rum Runner and by that time I was 39-years-old.” Having spent many nights entertaining in various clubs and restaurants, Tim befriended owners and managers and gleaned business strategy and know-how. He followed his intuition and believed he could make a successful go as a restaurateur.

“I’d never been in the restaurant business other than as a musician,” shared Tim. “I went into the restaurant business blindly. I knew the front of the house, I was confident with that, but I was totally ignorant of the back of the house. But I was fortunate to have absolutely spectacular people working for me over the years. Very few people leave us to go to another restaurant. Most people stay with us because they like the way we treat them. And we try to do it right, pay them appropriately, treat them with respect.”

The Rum Runner was an established restaurant desperately in need of repairs where Tim had played. He off-handedly told the owner to give him a call if he ever wanted to sell, and two years later the call came in. Tim bought the restaurant on New Year’s Eve 1986 after raising $1 million through second mortgages and savings. While renovating, an old friend of Tim’s named Bruce Springsteen asked if he and his band could rehearse upstairs for their Tunnel of Love tour. Happy to help, Tim offered the space at no charge. When he opened the doors to business in October 1987, he wasn’t sure what would happen.

“So, because I wouldn’t take any money from him, Bruce showed up on Halloween night with his band,” Tim tells the story in between chuckles. “They were in costume, meanwhile you could never do this now, but they were all in black with masks over their faces and they called themselves the terrorists of love. They kicked my band off the stage, they just pulled us off, and I realized shortly thereafter it was him. Even the audience wasn’t sure because he was wearing a mask. But then the mask came off and he started doing Glory Days, and well this was the second time I had buyer’s remorse. The word got out so fast, the parking lot was full, and there were no cell phones back then. People were on pay phones telling their friends, ‘Springsteen is at The Rum Runner.’ And what ended up happening was, we were just overwhelmed. I’m playing piano with Bruce and I look out the window and see police cars all over the place because we just got mobbed and there’s a back-up on Ocean Avenue. The cars were all over, and in my neighbor’s yard at Ship Ahoy, and about a week later the fence went up. (Tim laughed). We have since become friends. I don’t blame him, the original Rum Runner was quiet, nearly closed, everyone shared parking, and now all of a sudden what’s going on here? Springsteen is playing across the street. It was sort of good for business.”

Tim met Beth at The Rum Runner, and for that it will always be the flagship for his company, holding a special place in his heart. With three of their four children in college up until last month when their son, Jack, graduated from Fordham, Tim says the restaurants have been a blessing. The daunting and impending financial strain of three in college had led Tim to want to expand. As seems typical with his endeavors, he sought a way to fix the problem he saw coming.

“We had one restaurant for 17 years, The Rum Runner in Sea Bright, and I was very content there. Then my eldest started getting close to college and I realized what was going to happen and said to myself that’s not going to work. Maybe we better get another restaurant. And we started down the path.”

That path has led to eleven successful restaurants in Bayonne, West Orange, Woodbridge, Maryland and all over Monmouth County. The newest for McLoone’s Restaurants is the Iron Whale in Asbury Park that opened in May.

PHOTO: Tim at a Holiday Express Event

Even with being a popular musician, a coach, and owning a successful string of restaurants, Tim has found time for another career. As an alumnus of Harvard’s All-American Track and Field Team, Tim parlayed his interest in athletics and entertaining into a career as a sports announcer. He has done broadcast work for the U.S. Olympic Trials and was part of the Emmy Award-winning broadcast team for the New York and Los Angeles Marathons. Off-camera, Tim directed the U.S. Men’s Olympic Trials in 1998 and served as musical director of the Rockefeller Center Tree Lighting Ceremony for NBC from 1998-2000. Additionally, he serves as Director of Game Operations and Arena Announcer at The Prudential Center for Seton Hall Men’s basketball and held the same position for the New Jersey Nets.

In 2012, a dear friend and WOR radio host, Joan Hamburg, convinced Tim to create The Tim McLoone Radio Show. His first show aired in December of 2012 and taped in front of a live audience at Tim McLoone’s Supper Club in Asbury Park every week. The variety-type show covered a vast array of topics including sports, music, food, entertainment and their take on the hot topics.

One topic that often came up on the radio show was giving back. Tim’s childhood experiences instilled in him a sense of helping others.

“I grew up on the grounds of VA hospitals, I was born on one, and then we moved to the VA hospital in East Orange,” said Tim. “I was immersed in the world of adults. I was the only child living there. So, I became, in a sense, friends with the soldiers returning from mostly Korea. They had amputations, restless leg, what we would now call PTSD. I think that had a lot to do with it. My father was in charge of the activities and what that meant was he brought the entertainment and athletic things to campus.”

When in his junior year of high school at Seton Hall Preparatory School in West Orange, Tim met a priest who asked him to go to a retreat called YCLI – the Young Christian Leaders Institute.

“It sounded horrible, and I was going to have to go for a week to a monastery in North Jersey and I’m thinking this is going to be the worst,” said Tim. “I landed in a world of idealism. It was 1963 and the country was about to change. This one charismatic priest gathered all similarly thinking religious people and got them to buy into this thinking. And it was all workshops, and you were just on fire about how great it was. It was funny, and there was a lot of music, and you couldn’t help but get affected by it.”

“Seven days changed my life. I went back there the next two years as a counselor because it lit something in me. It was a life changing moment, and it got me thinking outside myself. And nothing came of it for a very long time until I went to work for the New Jersey Nets. There was a player who had been incarcerated, but he was a very nice guy, and he wanted to do something nice for the kids in Newark, and basically would anybody else come along. Who wants to volunteer on Christmas Eve? Well, I did. I was feeling cynical about my life, and religion, and Christmas and everything like that. I went and I took my oldest daughter with me. We went home in the car singing Christmas carols and it got me thinking that whole next year.”

PHOTO: Tim at a Holiday Express Event

Two Christmases later, in 1993, the fire that had been lit so many years before birthed a new organization. With the help of his friends in the music business, Tim founded Holiday Express, a volunteer, non-profit and non-sectarian organization dedicated to bringing music, gifts, and holiday cheer to those less fortunate. More than 100 holiday events are held each year for those in need whom are often forgotten. The Holiday Express team includes about 2,500 dedicated and talented volunteers, including more than 150 professional singers and musicians.

“Holiday Express is the best thing I ever did in my life. For all of us at Holiday Express, it doesn’t come with any kind of agenda. Everyone who is in it just does it. We’re not trying to cure diseases, we’re not trying to build buildings, we go to be one-on-one with people and lift their spirits. The phrase we use is bringing the gift of human kindness. Which sounds a little high falutin, as my mother would have said, but it’s true.”

When asked of all his achievements, which is closest to his heart, Tim doesn’t hesitate to answer.

“People often ask me that,” said Tim. “The truth of it is, I’ve always been attracted to challenges, and I tend to take them. I volunteer for stuff maybe I shouldn’t, even in job offers. A lot of attractive stuff comes my way, and people would think they’re interesting and fun, and they are. Like being a musician all my life, how much fun is that? When I’m playing music there’s nowhere else in the world I want to be in that moment. There’s nothing else on my mind. The same thing goes when I’m coaching track and cross country. I’m with those kids and that’s what we’re doing. It’s where I’m happy to be in the moment.”