'Doorman of the Country' dies at age 80

Phil Adelman knew Cambridge like the back of his hand.

Just ask anyone who stayed at the Marriott in Kendall Square in the 1990s.

Last week, Adelman, once hailed as the "Doorman of the Country," died in his home after a long battle with cancer. Later in the week, friends and family gathered at his funeral in Brookline to say their goodbyes.

"He was a very special guy," said Adelman's wife, Helen. "He loved people, and people loved him. He was just the sweetest man you'd ever want to meet."

Adelman, 80, received a fair amount of celebrity in the mid-1990s, after he was featured in a book heralding the heroes of the service industry. Adelman, then working as a doorman at the Marriott Hotel in Kendall Square, was a man wholly dedicated to his job, according to his family. He would pore over maps and books about the city, and quiz cabbies about the best shortcuts, all in the name of better serving the guests at the hotel, his wife said.

"He had a reputation for filling the suggestion box at the hotel with ideas about how to make the hotel better," Helen Adelman said.

That he was dedicated to his job was an understatement. "That overhang [outside the main entrance to the hotel] wasn't there before he started working there," Helen Adelman added. "He kept pestering the hotel until they finally agreed to put it in."

Adelman's devotion to his work earned him top billing in authors Bill Fromm's and Len Schlesinger's 1994 book, "The Real Heroes of Business … and Not a CEO Among Them." The prominent placement in the book earned him a handful of appearances in national media outlets, including the New York Times, the "Today Show" and the "Oprah Winfrey Show."

"It was all about how he'd roll out the red carpet a thousand times a day," Helen Adelman said.

Adelman originally applied for a job at the Marriott as a dishwasher.

"They wanted him to be the first person people met upon arriving at the hotel," Helen Adelman said. "You can't teach someone how to be pleasant, how to be helpful or how to be really nice to people. That's what made him so good at it, I think."

Adelman, according to his wife, was "a Cantabrigian to the end." For 75 of his 80 years, Adelman lived on Longfellow Street, across from Mt. Auburn Hospital.

"When we moved to Newton [in 2001]," Helen said, "he was heartbroken. He kept a little sign on our door at the new house that said 'Entering Cambridge.' He refused to leave the city entirely."

Born in 1927, he joined the Army immediately after graduating Cambridge High School in 1944. His first deployment as a soldier, according to his niece, Joan Wolfson, was to Japan in August 1945.

"He was on his way to the south of Japan when the bombs dropped," Wolfson said, referring to the nuclear strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug.9, 1945. "He was part of the first unit that was on the ground after the attacks."

After the war, Adelman returned to Cambridge to work as a stock boy at Lechmere Sales. There, he rose all the way to the rank of buyer, before the company began downsizing in the 1980s. It was after he was asked to take an early retirement from the retail chain that Adelman took a job as a doorman in 1989.

Helen Adelman described her husband's commitment to his job as unflappable. After he was diagnosed with colon cancer, Adelman received 38 radiation treatments, and - according to Helen - never missed a day of work. In fact, she said, the only time he ever missed a significant number of days at the Marriott was during the Persian Gulf War.

"He took three weeks off during the first Gulf War to volunteer in Israel," Helen said. "He saw the Scud missiles landing on Tel Aviv, and said he just had to go.

"He had an interesting life," Helen said. "He was fun to be around, he loved his family, and everyone, when they met him, just seemed to like him from the get-go. Our nieces and nephews used to kid him. They'd say he never really grew up all the way; he was always a kid at heart. That was him."

Matt Dunning of the Cambidge (Mass.) Chronicle can be reached at mdunning@cnc.com.