Flatley at the Boston College President’s Circle Dinner in 1990. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

At meetings of the Boston College Board of Trustees for nearly 30 years, Thomas Flatley stood out for his brogue, a haircut simple enough to have been acquired in a barber shop with a spinning pole beside the door and Clubman Pinaud on the counter, and suits that didn’t call attention to their quality. About Mr. Flatley’s suits, in fact, I’m going to guess that they were selected from the rack in a good department store and then conveyed to a storefront tailor in Mr. Flatley’s hometown of Milton, Massachusetts, for pinning and chalking. “Is Thursday next week okay, Tom?” the tailor might have asked. And Tom would have said, “Sure.”

Displays of modesty can be an affectation in a billionaire—which Mr. Flatley was—but in his case the display was of wrought character. A young man from Kiltimagh, in rural, central County Mayo, Mr. Flatley arrived in Baltimore in 1950 with $32 in his wallet. After serving in the U.S. Army, he was discharged in Boston, where he chose to make his life, first as an electrical and refrigeration contractor. And then he built a small apartment building, then another, then hotels, office buildings, nursing homes, malls—buildings of solid utility and low profile and suburban location. He was not a man for downtown, for towers or champagne toasts. He was, as Forbes magazine once famously wrote, “the anti-Trump.” At one point, he was reported by the Times of London to be the second richest Irish native living outside Ireland, and to hold the sixth largest real estate portfolio in the United States.

For the Board of Trustees, Mr. Flately served many years as chair of the buildings and properties committee, and his presentations to the full board were models of swift cogency. Called to report, he’d say something like: “Mr. Chairman, the committee met with four general contractors and selected Acme from among them. Acme has a good reputation in the business and has done work for our competitors, and has proposed that they can build this residence hall for x dollars and y cents per square foot. That may seem a bit high in this market, where you can generally build residential property for x–1 dollars and y cents per square foot, but given the special conditions of this site and the time demands we are making on the contractor, we believe this is a fair deal and one we ought to accept.”

If anyone ever chose to quibble with Mr. Flatley over these particulars, I don’t recall it, nor do I recall that he often spoke on matters that came before the board that did not pertain to square-footage costs. He was built that courteous way, a man who seemed rooted in another, less restive time, when business leaders were expected to example an affection for family, church, nation, work, charity, prudence, and privacy.

Following his death on May 17, a newspaper reporter recalled receiving a phone call some years ago from Mr. Flatley after she’d published a story about a local man who required, but could not afford, a wheelchair-accessible van. She first thought Mr. Flatley intended to contribute money toward the purchase; but no, he wanted to buy the van outright for the man. And then he put his secretary on the line to make the arrangements and went back to work. Mr. Flatley was similarly self-effacing in his other charitable undertakings, sometimes employing spotter intermediaries to identify and assist people who needed his money. At Boston College, which has cashed Flatley checks for some years, the name itself appears only on a professorship and fellowship in theology that Mr. Flatley named for his mother, Margaret O’Brien Flatley, and on an annual lecture in Irish Studies that carries his name.

Mr. Flatley dismantled much of his real estate empire in his last years and created a private charitable foundation with some of the proceeds. His final act of benevolence, however, seems to have been placing the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in a 140,000-square-foot suburban office building after the Church sold its Brighton campus to Boston College. When the Boston Globe asked Mr. Flatley whether he would be selling the structure to the archdiocese at market ($14 million), he replied, “You don’t charge God market rates.” Well true enough, I thought on reading this, but what do you charge Him? Students of what’s now called practical theology should note that Mr. Flatley’s answer, according to Registry of Deeds filings, turned out to be zero—or to be fussy about it, less than a hundred bucks. It was, as the reporter Lane Lambert of the Quincy Patriot Ledger nicely put it, Mr. Flatley’s “last big deal.”

Thomas J. Flatley leaves his wife, Charlotte, five children—four of whom hold degrees from Boston College—and 18 grandchildren.

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