Thomas Dowd: Jokes and Furious
Sports
It
was easy to tell if Thomas Dowd liked you, because if so,
he would insult you.
"He never changed who he was based on the people who
he was with," said Scott Harris, whose bonds with Mr.
Dowd were forged when their neighboring town houses
burned down in 1994.
Mr. Dowd would laugh at his own jokes harder than
anyone, and as a bond broker at Cantor Fitzgerald, there
were plenty of jokes -- a sign on someone's back,
Parmesan cheese in the telephone receiver.
But if he sometimes seemed brusque, perhaps someone --
often himself, sometimes someone else -- was not
measuring up to expectations. At 37, he coached
basketball like a fury, pouring his time and emotion into
three youth neighborhood and regional leagues. The time
not spent with his three children -- Heather, 17, Tommy,
15, and Brittany, 10 -- was devoted to his childhood
friends from the neighborhood, Inwood, in Upper
Manhattan.
Years earlier, his pursuit of one friend, Kerriann
Cregan, had been particularly steadfast. "He would walk
up the block with his basketball, and I knew he was
coming because I would hear it bouncing," she said. "He
had to pass my window, and I hid to watch him go by. My
father always asked, 'Did he look?' " Often enough, said
the former Miss Cregan, who became Mrs. Dowd in 1984.
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