In Tim Becker’s world, CM wasn’t an academic institution, it was a cultural entity that he was steeped in forming a part of a familial chain that came before him and after. To this day, CM still holds a deep significance for this current board member and champion of the school.
CM YEARS
To Tim Becker ’94, walking through the halls of CM as a freshman was neither intimidating nor unfamiliar. With an older brother who was a junior, and a slew of neighborhood kids who he knew, Becker was right at home. “For me and many of my friends, it was almost the equivalent of the public school in town,” says Becker. The early nineties at CM were marked by the number of Christian Brothers faculty members who numbered roughly half of what they had been at the school’s onset. According to Becker that didn’t mean their influence had in any way diminished. “Over the course of my years, I had both Brother Cavet and Brother Oxx, but in particular Br. Cavet. He was my first Latin teacher and my first Spanish teacher and that was a pretty significant influence in my life.” Contrary to most CM boys of the time, academics was where Becker shined. “I took after my brother,” he notes. “He graduated second in the class, and I wasn’t quite that high but I was near the top of the class.” To be fair, Becker was an enthusiastic basketball and soccer player, but… “There was one year, I think we were 0-20-4. And those four ties felt like we were winning the Super Bowl,” he says of his junior soccer season.
But it was languages where Becker not only succeeded but could see a pathway into college and beyond. So where did his gift come from? “I had barely heard a word of a foreign language,” says Becker, “but I could see patterns in language and words and grammar and the way they all worked. How things worked, and for that matter work ethic itself, was learned at home. Becker says of his parents’ instilling this value, “It wasn’t a question of ‘We work so, you have to.’ It was just automatic.” Becker held a job at Star Market from eighth grade all the way through high school.
LIFE AFTER SCHOOL
Attending the University of Loyola, Maryland brought with it a change for Becker, albeit geographical. But for this Spanish major, the real change would come in 1996 during his sophomore year when he headed to Madrid, Spain to study abroad. “I think it set me up for the adventure I went on for the next couple of decades,” says Becker, noting that after college he moved to Los Angeles to attend business school and then law school at USC, followed by a decade working in Manhattan and then in 2014 moving back to Boston. But what he wanted to be in life was something that he had to invent for himself. “The types of things that I was considering both for what I wanted to study and what I would eventually get into as a career were completely foreign to my parents,” recalls Becker. Throughout Becker’s years of wanderlust, he maintained close connections to his CM friends. “Mike Cooney ‘94 and Andy Maus ’94 I’ve known since elementary school,” says Becker. “And there’s a handful of guys who I’ve been friends with since ’94 or 5.” And while he fell out of touch with the school itself during this time, he says he kept an eye on it from afar. But what to do with a BA in Spanish? “I actually had a plan,” he laughs. “I always knew I wanted to get involved to some degree in international business, and I quickly realized a lot of what we were learning in business school could be absorbed just by reading the book. I thought I’d do something a little more creative and with less of a clear path than the business major. Becker’s path took him in the direction of law and as with much of his life to this point, the direction that this would lead him in would again be an unconventional one.
RETURN TO CM
In between business and law schools, Becker took a year to take stock of his upcoming commitment to be sure he was making the right decision. “I started working for Enterprise Rent-A-Car as a rental car person and then stumbled into being a headhunter which was a huge learning experience. I was recruiting for geologists and engineers, which I knew absolutely nothing about.” The perspective it gave re-enforced in him was how hard some jobs can be. The work ethic he’d learned at home from his parents was an indelible motivator that drove Becker to double down on what he calls his “superpower” and compete in the academic grind of law school. “I decided pretty early on that the traditional law firm was not for me which pushed me towards the transactional side,” he says. For the last 22 years, Becker has been helping people buy and sell companies, “quarterbacking transactions and trying to figure out how they get done,” as he describes it or in other words, he’s a tax lawyer. During the pandemic in 2020, while ensconced in work and married life, Becker was contacted by CM board member, Barbara Finnegan Fitzgerald about his interest in getting more involved with his alma mater. “Almost instantly, I had this feeling that this could be something interesting and rewarding. In my heart, I knew what the CM community was and the thought of getting involved in an official capacity was just something that would be really meaningful.” So, in 2020, he joined the board. “There’s a ton of things that on the surface are very different,” notes Becker about today’s CM. “But it didn’t take me along, once I got reintegrated, to see a lot of the same relationships and camaraderie among the boys, and how, how important that is to have that environment during your high school and middle school years.” For Tim Becker, helping move the school forward is essential, but helping to maintain that second home feeling for all the students is probably the best way he could give back.