Part 3: Ed Boylan's self-doubts deepen as failures continue

By Tim Madigan

tmadigan@star-telegram.com

Third of four parts

Several months into his unemployment nightmare, Ed Boylan finally landed a face-to-face interview.

In late summer 2009, he was invited to fly to Evansville, Ind., where a company that sold children's nutrition products was looking for a sales director. Even more promising, the firm offered to put Boylan in touch with a local real estate agent during his trip north.

"So I got up there on Tuesday, and the Realtor showed me around and I called my wife," Boylan remembered. "I said, 'Hey, honey, some of these places are really neat. You'll love Evansville.' And the next day I go in and interviewed for an hour and a half with six different people. It went really well. I thought, 'Man, this is going to be great.'"

Back home in Keller, Boylan's wife, Linda, and his teenage daughter, Peri, looked at Evansville homes and schools on the Internet. Peri was a senior at Keller High School by then, and moving to Evansville would be a severe dislocation. But she was willing to do almost anything if it would end her family's ordeal.

In April 2009, Boylan unexpectedly lost his job as a pharmaceutical company executive. In the time since, the normally jovial 50-year-old had become subdued, the atmosphere in his home often tense and gloomy. The national economy had gone into the tank, and jobs were particularly scarce for former executives like Boylan, who had been making a solid six figures. Time after time, in telephone screening interviews, there was some criterion he couldn't meet, one box in an application process he couldn't check.

When Evansville came along, even if it meant uprooting his family, Boylan couldn't help being excited.

"Do you really want to work in Evansville?" asked Rick Andrews, Boylan's longtime friend.

"Hell, Rick," Boylan replied. "I've got to go where the job is."

But after he flew home, days passed with no word from his prospective employer. The more time that went by, the more certain Boylan was that there would be no move to Indiana. His job search would have to continue, a reality confirmed in a call about three weeks after Boylan's interview.

"I hate making this call because you've been so diligent and so nice," said the woman from Indiana, who worked in human resources. "But we're just not going to move you forward."

She didn't say why. They never did.

That afternoon, Boylan picked Peri up at school. Every day for three weeks, she had asked for news about the job in Evansville, and this day was no different.

"Did you get a call today?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said. "I didn't get the job."

Peri's heart sank. Why is this happening? she wondered. Across America, millions shared her experience, but to the teenager, it had begun to feel as if she and her family were alone in a hole, with no way of getting out.

Vacation canceled

The family had canceled their annual vacation to the beach in Florida. Boylan trimmed options on his telephone service and changed electric companies to lower the bill. He refinanced the house and car. The family had once enjoyed meals at trendy restaurants in Dallas or Sundance Square. Now they stepped out to pizza places or cheaper chains, and then only on special occasions. Boylan paid off the family credit cards. Peri took a job in a shoe store to pay for her own clothes. Now the family's designated grocery shopper, Boylan began clipping coupons.

Buy one, get one free. Twenty percent off. His wife laughed when Boylan came back from the supermarket with six boxes of the same kind of cereal.

"If you bought three boxes, you got three more," Boylan said.

Before he lost his job, Boylan made more than $200,000 a year. His family lived on a quiet cul de sac in a 4,000-square-foot Keller home. But several months into his unemployment, Boylan was looking to save a dollar on a bottle of shampoo. Anything to feel a little less powerless over his increasingly distressing situation. Anything to provide his family with a little more cushion, because as the months wore on, his severance money dwindled, and Boylan continued to "get my teeth kicked in."

In the fall of 2009, he flew to New Jersey, where a start-up company was looking for a national sales manager. Boylan again felt that his series of interviews went very well. As he got on the plane for Texas, he allowed himself to feel hope.

"If I don't have it, I'm really close," Boylan thought.

He never heard back from the company.

In another job interview over lunch, two men picked food off each other's plates like a couple of witless teenagers. Idiots, Boylan thought. If I was your boss, you both would be out on the street. When one of them left for the restroom, the other looked around and leaned forward, speaking conspiratorially.

"Give me the real story," he said. "With your résumé, why the hell have you been out so long? Why can't you find a job?"

"Excuse me?" Boylan said. "Have you ever been out of a job?"

"That doesn't matter," the man said. "Somebody like you should have gotten a job by now."

Boylan stifled an impulse to reach across the table and throttle the guy. When the second man returned, Boylan stood up.

"I don't have any more questions for you," he said and walked out.

He stopped telling his family when he had an interview because he didn't want to raise their hopes, only to dash them. Christmas presents that year were bought with money that Linda made from her small interior design company.

"There were less presents and a lot of smaller ones," Boylan said. "Instead of nice things, like electronics or covers for your golf clubs, you got underwear or soap, or a gift card so you could go buy something you needed."

Daily prayers

Boylan's daily prayers and Bible reading continued. He was a volunteer leader at the Southlake Focus Group, a large networking organization consisting mainly of the white-collar unemployed. He tried to keep faith with the notion that God had a new assignment for him in life. He just had to be patient, to wait and find out what it was.

But the months of joblessness, the months of rejection and humiliation, began to take a corrosive toll on his insides. The early weeks of 2010 were the worst. Boylan had refined his job-hunting skills, and his professional network had grown exponentially. But through much of January and part of February, job leads completely dried up -- not even a telephone interview.

"Ed's a very positive person, and to hear in his voice any kind of discouragement was discouraging to me," said Andrews, the close friend and former colleague who was also out of work for more than a year. "He was always the model of confidence and strength, and to hear his voice crack ...

"He'd say, 'I have a lead,' and then say, 'Oh, man, it went away. I don't understand what these people want. I've got everything they want. I just don't get it.'

"He would say, 'I'm back to square one. I have nothing in the pipe.'"

For Boylan, deepening self-doubt made his search more excruciating. He was coming up on a year out of work. What should he say when people asked what he had been doing?

"The gloom and doom starts to set in," he said later. "Even though I was praying hard, I was thinking, 'If I was interviewing this person who has been out of work a year, I would wonder if he was up to date with what's going on. I started to think, 'What's wrong with you? Why hasn't somebody hired you?' It was almost surreal. You'd been to the brink [of finding a job]. You'd been to the edge. And it never happened."

By March, his severance money was mostly gone. Boylan and his wife made plans to put their home on the market and considered moving into an apartment in Keller so Peri could finish high school. What if the house didn't sell? Would he, too, end up in foreclosure and bankruptcy? Boylan knew that he would soon have to dip into his retirement savings to pay the bills. It became harder and harder to believe the mantra of the Southlake Focus Group, that the best way to find a job was to help someone else, that no good turn goes unnoticed or unrewarded.

But then, after a long year, Boylan himself would become living proof.

Coming tomorrow: A former colleague never forgot Boylan's help and moves to pay it back, but for the Keller man, unemployed for a year, disappointment had shown its face so many times before.

Tim Madigan, 817-390-7544

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