With Susanne Beck
“Letting them know you are here if you need me.”
A visit with Mark Duffield at Upstairs Downstairs
Introducing a new column entitled “Behind the Counter,” featuring a salesperson, residents or visitors one would likely meet when shopping or just browsing around the Hill.
Visitors to Upstairs Downstairs Home at 69 Charles Street are to be forgiven for doing a double take as they step into the store. The salesperson greets them, they swear they have seen him before, somewhere else. Chances are good that they are right, and that the person in question is a longtime Beacon Hill resident Mark Duffield who literally has worked both sides of the legendary street for years.
For more than a decade, until 2019, Duffield co-owned kitchenware and gift store Blackstones at 40 Charles Street with Jennifer Hill. Today, he helps out Upstairs owner Laura Cousineau sell antiques, art, and other home goods.
“I started working with Laura during the pandemic when everyone was terrified of getting sick,” Duffield recalls. No one wanted to come to work and risk unnecessary exposure. Except him. “I had already come close to dying twice,” he says almost casually, while undergoing treatment for heart conditions at Mass General Hospital. “I wasn’t scared of COVID.”
Duffield has been behind the counter, so to speak, ever since.
After a recent conversation with him, in fact, it seems there is almost nothing that really scares him. His life has been a never-ending adventure, shaped by serendipity, a few good mentors, and an open, easy-going and generous nature that enables him to connect with anyone, and to walk away with a story to tell about it all.
“My parents were both adventurous in a way,” he says. “My mom went to the American Embassy in Paris right out of college and then got transferred to Morocco to open up the office in Casablanca. My father traveled the world in his job at Coca-Cola.” His ancestors seem to have set the tone years before. “I’m told we were the first family to cross the Des Moines River and make a permanent settlement in what was then called the Wisconsin Territory,” he chuckles.
Duffield’s first foray seems to have been in part due to a bad hangover. He and some college buddies were offered a place to stay on Nantucket over Labor Day weekend. “This was 1971, I think. We loaded up a Volkswagen with a case of beer (“don’t ever do that!” he advises this reporter, midstream). And off we went. It was a three-day lost weekend of drinking and partying and everything.” As they went to board the ferry at the end of their stay, to head home, Duffield hesitated. “I was the last one up the ramp and for some inexplicable reason, I came back down and decided I was gonna find my way on Nantucket island.” He laughs at the memory.
For almost a year, Duffield found work at a small restaurant in Nantucket, manning the fryolator and making just enough to get by. Luck soon intervened in the form of local fisherman Charlie Sayles who swung by the eatery one day and let it be known he was looking for someone to help him scallop. “I always say in life when we meet some people for the first time, something changes. You don’t know how or why, it just does. I call them change agents. And Charlie really was my first change agent. He made a hard worker out of me.”
Sayles also provided Duffield with a living wage, a place to stay that he could return to, and a family to become part of (“I became his son’s godfather years later,” he says with pride.) “That was the time when I could blow any money I made.” So, when he wasn’t on the boat, Duffield says: “I went all over the world, living with the Masai Tribe in Kenya, crossing the Sahara Desert and boating down the Amazon for thousands of miles. I went out and saw the world while I could afford it. I wanted to see things and expose myself to all these other cultures and ideas.” He emphasizes that in the late 1970’s, his lifestyle was not uncommon for young adults. “We were drifters, all of us, looking for work, looking for this, looking for that and everything else.”
What he had not anticipated though, was a life-threatening situation that shifted his perspective and his choice of career. Today, Duffield can still recount in detail a subsequent boating trip in the Florida Keys, crewing for a wealthy Nantucket resident. An unexpected downturn in the weather conditions erupted into what Duffield now calls today “a perfect storm” with harrowing conditions that prompted a rescue effort by the Coast Guard. With the helicopter being tossed around in gale force winds, the boat owner made it clear that he was staying with his ship, regardless. Duffield opted to stay with him while others left, if for no other reason than loyalty. “He was staying so I did too” he says matter-of-factly.
By the time they came to shore, Duffield headed north to New England, getting off the water and landing on Hancock Street on Beacon Hill. “I’d explored the world so then, I needed to explore myself and see what I was capable of doing, if anything.” He describes his early Hill digs as “a rat-infested hovel.” “I still walk by it!” he chirps. With no relevant skills and no money to speak of, he became certified as a bartender and started volunteering at local radio station WGBH (“I wasn’t even a listener at the time!”)
Enter Margaret Faulkner, then-head of institutional development for GBH. She had heard about Duffield and the many inconceivable tales he had shared with her colleagues. She was intrigued. “I want to talk to you,” she commanded him one morning. “She saw something in me,” Duffield remembers, “my way with people, my ability to tell stories. She thought I would be a natural” at fundraising and business development. Duffield says it was Faulkner (“my second change agent”) that caused his life’s trajectory to turn again. “She basically pulled me out of a gutter and gave me a job,” he says gratefully.
With a stable income, a regular work schedule, and a permanent home perch on Beacon Hill, Duffield’s adventures quickly became more of the mind than the body. Fifteen years at the public station was followed by a new path into retail ownership at Blackstone’s. As if that wasn’t enough, he also found the time to pen several books including “Tales of the Tenth Ornament” a Christmas story based on Beacon Hill that was adapted into a play and became a successful fundraising vehicle for childhood cancer at Mass General Hospital. True to form, he also could not say no when a friend told him about a start-up radio and podcast called Talkin’ Birds that was looking for an Executive Producer. “Did I know anything about birds?” he asks rhetorically. “Of course not!” he chuckles. He is still listed on the staff list today as Executive Producer Emeritus.
When pressed to identify a common thread that might run through all his many adventures, including his current outpost at Upstairs Downstairs, Duffield doesn’t hesitate. “It’s all about people. Listening closely. Learning from them. Telling stories. Giving them space. And letting them know you are there if they need you.” Visitors to 69 Charles will find just that and more.
Susanne Beck is a Beacon Hill resident.