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TIMOTHY J. COUGHLIN: A Face Promising Friendship

 

Who's that guy? That's what the copy shop clerk wanted to know when a customer came to pick up the funeral photos of Timothy J. Coughlin. That's what his wife, Maura, wanted to know when she first spotted his "big Irish face" in a downtown bar. People were drawn to him before he even opened his mouth, often to tell a bawdy joke or display his distinctive vocabulary ("Great lair!" he would say to a host).

But there was plenty of substance to back up his friendly appearance. When Mr. Coughlin was not trading treasury securities at Cantor Fitzgerald, golfing, or taking his children -- Ryann, 4, Sean, 2, and Riley, 9 months old -- to the carousel in Central Park, he was planning social gatherings.

"I called him a friendship hawk because he was just so good at circling back and seeing how friends were doing," said Frank Coughlin, one of his three brothers.

Timothy Coughlin was the kind of man who gave the towel guy at the gym his start on Wall Street. The doorman from the Coughlins's Upper East Side building was at the funeral. "I said something smug about how Timmy was so generous," Frank Coughlin recalled. "He said, `No, it wasn't that. It was that Timmy was my friend.'"

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From "Profiles in Grief" of The New York Times