Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Floor Speech: Senator Coons pays tribute to Matt Haley
As Delivered on the Senate Floor
Madam President, I come to the floor today my heart heavy with a challenging task, which is to convey to you the remarkable, the special, and the powerful spirit of a friend who passed just three weeks ago in a tragic accident in India. Matt Haley was a remarkable Delawarean. Matt Haley was a gifted and accomplished chef and entrepreneur. Matt Haley was someone who touched so many lives in my home state of Delaware.
In 2012, Matt won the Delaware Restaurant Association's Cornerstone Award, a lifetime achievement award recognizing restaurateurs who dedicate their lives to humanitarian efforts. Matt owned eight different restaurants all across the beach region so well-known to folks here in Washington. Matt owned restaurants in Rehoboth Beach, Lewes, Ocean View, Bethany Beach, Fenwick Island and was involved in dozens of other enterprises in other states of the region. And in 2014, Matt had the best year he'd ever had in terms of the reach and scope of his potential and his vision and his recognition by his profession.
He won the National Restaurant Association Cornerstone Humanitarian Award, and I was thrilled to be able to join in that celebration here in Washington. He won the International Association of Culinary Professionals Humanitarian of the Year Award. He won the James Beard Humanitarian Award in a remarkable celebration in New York. He won all three major recognitions, major awards from the restaurant and culinary industry, the Triple Crown, as it were.
Having never met him, you might think that this man, having been so successful as an entrepreneur and a businessman and so recognized and celebrated in all these different ways, would have been puffed up and filled with himself and with pride and with a sense of accomplishment and success. Matt did have a sense of accomplishment and success but it came from a very different place, and his spirit, his personality was profoundly different than that brief resume might suggest. Because Matt, you see, was someone who had had a second and a third chance at life. And so he embraced it with a passion and an open-heartedness I have never seen anywhere else.
Matt was 53 years old and had been sober for 24 years. And Matt, not many years before this remarkable year of success he had this year, had been riding the bus to work as a minimum-wage dishwasher as he was reinventing himself. Matt spent four years in prison on a 13-year prison sentence. And Matt, as he memorably remarks in a TED Talk he gave just days before he left on this trip to India, had had just life-altering, terrible experiences as a child. Matt had managed to grow up in an environment and circumstances and have experiences that would mar, that would cripple any human person, any spirit, and had become someone who was violent and was addicted and inevitably as a consequence of a lot of his actions ended up in jail. He was exactly the sort of person that so many would be willing to write off.
Yet Matt found an opportunity through the culinary arts, through the simple and powerful skill of cooking for others, he found a pathway back and a roadway up. Matt was someone who cooked not just well but was gifted at pulling together completely unrelated items and making something simple and tasty and powerful. And Matt understood what a remarkable pathway towards success and independence restaurants can be for those who start working at the very lowest end of the scale in our country in terms of pay and skill and yet can steadily grow up to be successful managers or even restaurant owners.
Matt was someone who also had just gotten a positive diagnosis after struggling with a nearly life-ending bout with cancer. Matt had nearly died to this world once as a young man in prison and then had nearly died to us a second time through cancer. And I was blessed to have gotten to know him just in the last few years and to have been touched by the power of his energy.
Matt had a hunger to connect with and touch and help love others in the world that hadn't yet seen the possibilities of this world. Matt would go anywhere any time to help someone in need in Delaware. And the stories are legend of what Matt did, spontaneously and powerfully, to reach out and touch folks in our home state and around the world who needed his special gift. Not just his resources but his energy and his kindness. Matt's business partner, Scott, shared with me a story I think well-known in Delaware that he was literally driving down the road and came across a van from the Delaware Adolescent Program, from DAPI, a van for a program that helps young moms both complete school and be healthy and successful mothers. Their van was broken down by the side of the road. And learning more about the program and its impact and its importance and seeing their dilapidated and outdated van, he literally bought them a new one on the spot.
Matt was someone who, having never traveled before in his life until recent years when he became successful, first found himself challenged and enlivened and then aflame with passion for traveling around the world and hearing from and with connecting with young people and their needs. And he tells much more powerfully than I can the story of his becoming connected to young women, to girls in Nepal, victims of trafficking, victims of sexual abuse, who were hungry and lonely and who he was able to help provide food and shelter and hope. He later also connected with a whole community in Central America and he traveled regularly to India and Nepal and to Central America as well as up and down my state. He volunteered in our prisons. He worked with our food bank. He spent time and gave resources in India and Nepal and in Central America.
Literally the last time I spoke to Matt, I had just had an opportunity to meet a young woman who was truly struggling to find opportunity in our home state. She was a recovering drug addict and came up to me at an event in Dover and, frankly, said she never believed that someone in my position would care and would work and take any risk to help someone like her find employment. She was interested in possibly working in a restaurant. And as we talked at greater length, I told her Matt's story. I told her how this young man, full of anger and of abuse and of difficulty in his young life, had ended up an addict and in prison, and yet through his own determination and through the kindness and partnership of others, had managed to go on and be an incredible success, an employer to hundreds, even thousands, and a contributor and a leader to groups like La Esperanza and the Food Bank and to support public school teachers and to support folks coming out of prison. And I asked if she'd be interesting in hearing from him.
My last conversation with Matt, a man incredibly busy as he was finishing up several business projects and about to get on a plane and go to India to meet a long commitment to a group of girls in need, said, absolutely, I'd love to talk to her, get her on the phone with me. He made time the very next day to meet with her, to encourage her and to invite her to come with him to the Food Bank presentation he was making.
Matt, to his very last breath, was passionate about touching and changing the lives of others. His very last initiative was to fund teachers in schools in southern Delaware and help provide supplies for them in their classrooms.
And his very last day was spent riding a motorcycle on one of the highest and most dangerous roads in the world in the Himalayas to personally deliver supplies and engagement and support to girls in a remote village, in a difficult and distant part of the world. Matt Haley’s compassion, his spirit, and his energy touched me and so many others deeply. His determination to do everything he could with every day he had and to make every difference he could in the world should inspire and challenge all of us. And he has left a significant amount of his accumulated resources to his Global Delaware Fund, which will continue his great work in these many places.
It is my hope, my prayer that all of us whose lives have been touched by Matt and by his unique and infectious humor and spirit will continue his remarkable lifetime of work. And that all of us will remember that in this nation every person has value and every person has potential, no matter where they're from or where they are today, their path forward can be lifted if we just continue to carry forward the remarkable passion and spirit of Matt Haley.