21 years of morning cheers

Ed McDonough, 'Mayor of Garden City,' keeps community together at Starbucks

By Thomas Greenberg
Posted 9/27/18

By THOMAS GREENBERG -- He calls himself the Mayor of Garden City. And he's held public hearings at Starbucks every day for the past 21 years.

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21 years of morning cheers

Ed McDonough, 'Mayor of Garden City,' keeps community together at Starbucks

Posted

He calls himself the Mayor of Garden City. And he’s held public hearings at Starbucks every day for the past 21 years.

Since September of 1997, Ed McDonough, a long-time resident of the Garden City neighborhood and member of the Rotary Club of Warwick, has sat in the same corner of the Garden City Starbucks, ordered an espresso and a glass of water, and struck up conversation with just about anyone who comes in.

Through this, a group of men has formed that sits in a circle, in the big lounge chairs set up in the middle of the coffee shop, to discuss everything from local issues to sports, culture, and world affairs. They’re there starting at 6 a.m. and leave by 8:00 a.m. to begin their days. The exception is Sunday when they convene at 6:30.

“We start by reading the paper and go from there,” McDonough said over a glass of water Monday morning. “We’re always here right at 6:00.”

He said that the group’s members are all businessmen hailing mostly from Cranston. He said there’s always been a “solid five” that go in, but the group has added and subtracted over the years, getting up to 10 people sitting in a group at times.

And although that core group has mostly been limited to businessmen, McDonough said that everybody walks through that Starbucks, which has no drive-through and forces people to go inside. McDonough and the group greet them with open arms.

“We make people laugh,” he said. “And that’s what the world should be.”

There are regulars, who McDonough has come to know their names, their children, and their back-stories. There are those who come in periodically, and though McDonough may only know them by face, he can tell you what job they have and the connection they have to Cranston.

The list includes schoolteachers, businesspeople, lawyers, doctors, and political candidates, though McDonough said the latter generally only show up around election times.

McDonough calls the group, “the Cheers of Cranston.”

One of the regulars, who picks up her coffee on the way to work as a 2nd grade teacher in Providence every morning, is Stephanie Marino.

Marino said that seeing the group there every morning when she comes in provides a sense of normalcy to her day.

“With everything being so transient, it’s so nice to know they’ll be here every morning,” she said. “When they’re sitting here, you know everything’s going to be okay.”

McDonough said that Marino gives them insight into the Providence school system as well as the tough lives of many children that she teaches for, as she works in a low-income area in Providence. Marino, a Cranston resident, said that being able to talk with McDonough and his group every morning provides a strong community feel that she feels many people have lost over the years.

“These guys give life to this place,” she said. “They’re the nucleus, they don’t change. And Ed – he knows a little bit about everybody.”

Jose Garcia is another regular at Starbucks, and although he lives in Providence he said he stops at the Garden City location because the service is the best he’s seen – and because he gets to converse with many of the same faces every morning.

“These guys are the best,” Garcia said about McDonough and his crew.

Garcia works as a district manager for Walgreen’s and is overseeing the merging of all the Rite Aid’s in Southern Rhode Island, so he keeps the meeting group up to date with the acquisition.

“We’ll hear things in here two days before they’re in the paper,” McDonough said.

McDonough also involves the youth with his group – on Monday he was greeted by Asher Perkins and his mom, Sandy. Asher is a student at Peter’s school and likes to read the Providence Journal comics while his mom orders her coffee. While she grabs her coffee on the way to work, Perkins always says good morning to McDonough.

When asked what McDonough does every morning in the Starbucks, Perkins’ answer: “He holds court.”

Another visitor is David Pocknett, who has gotten his coffee there for the past ten years and has formed a friendship with McDonough. He said the meeting group is a “good tradition to have” for the people coming into Starbucks every morning.

A common thread between all these people – they greet McDonough with a smile, a handshake, or a hug and kiss. And though they only know him from Starbucks, they’ve grown close to him because he makes sure to be there every day.

These bonds are part of the motivation for McDonough to wake up early every single day for the past 21 years, but he also said the group itself helps keep him going.

“It wakes me up,” he said. “You make connections, you talk about everything, you seem to learn something new every day.”

He said he’s used the group to make business connections – he is president of McDonough Company that manufactures coin counting machines with operations in China – as well as helping each other with random things, such as obtaining tubes for the ties on his antique MG.

“Your resources here are limitless,” McDonough said of the group.

He said the group’s conversations range from silly, sometimes inappropriate, banter to world politics, national current events, Wall Street, and local issues, such as the recent PawSox decision, the Governor’s race, and local elections.

“We solve all the problems in the world, but offer no substance,” McDonough quipped about the group’s conversations.

He said that although he enjoys the conversations the men have, he learns the most when other Starbucks customers, or special guest speakers, come in and tell their experiences.

McDonough said he gets there ten minutes to 6 every day and doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. He has seen the group grow and shrink over the years, but to him, the group itself is merely the consistent base on which the morning customers at the Garden City Starbucks feeds off. The community members who come in and bring their own perspectives, for McDonough, is what really makes this 21-year venture so special.

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  • Justanidiot

    Warwick has finally run out of stories. Sad. Master Mayer is correct. We are losing our population at an alarming rate. At least interesting people to write stories about.

    Monday, October 1, 2018 Report this