Now he’s vice president of Hartford Hospital, but Kevin Kinsella’s first job occasionally put him on the run from the cops.
Not that Kinsella was doing anything nefarious – police were mostly called in to shoo him and the other neighborhood boys away from the racetrack in East Boston’s Suffolk Downs, where they sold used racing programs at cut-rate prices.
“I don’t know if it was legal or not,” Kinsella said; but in the summer when he was about 10, the police came in two or three times to make the boys scatter. The racetrack, Kinsella said, didn’t like the little side business the kids cooked up.
Racetrack visitors paid 50 cents for a new program. All the boys had to do was wait for the early races to get out, then pick up the used – often marked-up – programs and re-sell them for 25 cents to the later crowds.
It wasn’t lucrative, Kinsella said: “If we made three bucks a day we made a lot of money.”
The scalping business didn’t rake in the cash, but it provided a kind of education to the boy who would eventually study psychiatry at Yale.
“I saw all kinds of people who came in and out of that racetrack every day. People who were happy, people who were sad, people with problems,” he said.
That part of the job made a big impression: It put him smack in the middle of a tide of humanity and all its drama every day. But it was the next memorable summer job that taught him about moneymaking.
By his early teens, Kinsella had moved to New York. There he spent summers clamming in the Great South Bay and learned that earning money was part skill, part luck.
Kinsella and other clammers would stand or tread in four or five feet of water, feeling along the murky bottom with their feet. When they found clams, they’d pull them up and put them in a wooden bushel basket, to be sold to wholesalers back at the dock.
The lesson of that job was simple: Fill your baskets or go home empty-handed.
“If you didn’t dig enough clams, you didn’t get any money,” Kinsella said.
And you got good at that by roughly the same way you get good at any job: By learning from the more experienced workers and then striking out into new territory. The veteran clammers knew, say, where the clam-heavy spots were likely to be.
Kinsella took those lessons of commerce with him to college. He funded his liberal arts studies by working as an indoor painter, and then went on to get his masters in hospital administration at Yale, where he also studied psychology.
His early career focused more on his psychology expertise, as he ran a drug and alcohol recovery program in the Yale psychiatry department in the late 1960s. Kinsella saw plenty of work available in that field because of a drug addiction crisis in America at the time and a corresponding “explosion” of federal grants for such programs.
But eventually Kinsella became a hospital administrator, working for the Connecticut Hospital Association and then the Institute of Living before joining Hartford Hospital.
