Egan's father worked as a meatcutter at Cifrino's supermarket, right behind the house. Paul Cifrino was also the landlord, and when he chose to erect a maintenance building next to the supermarket, he took away the Egans' backyard. Egan had lots of jobs while he was growing up, one after another, sometimes overlapping, until, he says, "work became a habit." He delivered newspapers. The route was huge, traversing three parishes, and every day after he finished, he stood on the corner of Adams Street and Gallivan Boulevard, in front of the Eire Pub, and sold the extras. He fixed cars. He was a bundle boy at Cifrino's and later a cashier, and later, briefly, a meatcutter like his father. ("They start you off with chickens, then you go to pork, then you go to steaks, and the hardest job is boning a chuck.") At home there were always chores: every night, he filled the furnace in the basement with coal; he carried kerosene upstairs to the kitchen stove. ("You had to flip it fast so it wouldn't spill.") But the chore he detested most -- even more than fetching his father from the barroom on Friday afternoons -- was delivering the rent money to the supermarket on the first of every month.
He did it because his mother made him, but he hated it, hated the long climb up the stairs to Cifrino's office, hated the condescending way the staff looked him over once he got there, hated most of all how scrawny and insignificant he was made to feel. Like a "dead-end kid," he says, "like you see in some of those old movies." Egan never forgot that feeling. Years later, after he'd become a millionaire many times over, he tried to buy the supermarket from Cifrino's son (ostensibly to help a friend in the catering business). He went there himself to make his offer, found Paul Jr. sitting in the same palatial office above the store where the elder Cifrino once sat, told him who he was (Cifrino had no idea) and what he wanted -- and was refused. "I hope the place blows up with you in it," were Egan's parting words. "Take it with you to the grave."
Egan had two models as he grew up: failure, embodied by his father, who was a drunk, a marginal provider, really "a disappointment" is how Egan sums him up; and success, in the person of his grandfather, his father's father, an Irish immigrant who somehow cracked the Brahmin world of Boston finance, who managed investments for a living. Egan's grandfather lived in a big house in a fancy suburb and had a summer place in Pembroke where Egan made "a lot of classy friends." Once, when one of those friends gave him a lift back to town, Egan insisted on getting out of the car at the corner and told his friend he'd walk home. "I wonder why I remember that. I guess it's because the whole 22 miles from Pembroke to Dorchester I kept thinking about it and worrying about it."
Egan never did solve the family riddle; he doesn't understand to this day why his father never went to college, where he lost his footing, or really how, in the end, he managed to fall so far behind his own father's hard-won position on the social ladder. Egan's father was a warning, a living preview of disaster, in the same camp with the ditchdiggers by the side of the road that his mother was always pointing out. "Gee," she'd say, "I wonder why he didn't go to college."
Egan graduated from Boston Technical High School in 1954, enlisted in the marines, and caught the end of the Korean War. (A helicopter crew chief, he once helped pull a pilot from the water.) Eventually, he enrolled in Boston's Northeastern University on the GI bill. In his freshman year he married his sweetheart from the neighborhood and started a family right away. He chose as his major electrical engineering (because he was good in math and because, when he was preparing for his college boards, he had read a magazine article that showed "electricals made more money than mechanicals, who made more money than civils"), and made it through in five years on the work-study program. College was not fun for Egan; the stakes were way too high. "If I didn't make it, I'd be on the poles or in the holes, you know? I'd be working for Edison or the telephone company. I went through college scared out of my wits the whole time, scared to death I'd flunk out."
Afterward he interviewed with a dozen computer companies. Not with IBM, though. Egan had a thing about IBM even then, ever since three of his buddies from Northeastern went to Poughkeepsie one weekend to take an IBM employment test and raised hell the night before at the hotel ("drinking beer," says Egan, "watching King Kong on the late show"). Told by the Blue Suits who reprimanded them that perhaps they weren't IBM material after all, they took the test anyway, the story goes, and got the three highest scores in the group, at which point the Blue Suits smiled and offered them jobs. "My friends," Egan says proudly, "took their hats off coat hooks one, two, and three, put them on their heads, and said, 'IBM, va fa'n culo!"
Egan got the job he wanted most, at Honeywell, and enrolled concurrently at MIT, where he helped develop a guidance system that was later deployed in the Apollo moon shot. That gave him technical credentials, although he failed to complete his graduate degree; after he left Honeywell for a sales job at Lockheed, he never returned to the lab. There followed stints at Cambridge Memory Systems (later Cambex), which he helped found as vice-president for sales and marketing; Intel, where he engineered the turnaround of a laggard division and came away with "a fair amount of dough," most of it bonus money; and Cambex again, which had faltered in his absence but which he helped revive. Then, in 1979, with the capital he'd been hoarding, and with help from Roger Marino (a classmate from Northeastern, the M in EMC) and an unnamed Mr. C (who dropped out after they'd registered the name), Egan went into business for himself.
EMC, when it started, was a company with no product or defined market. Egan and Marino got going on the idea that they could do as well working for themselves as they could for somebody else -- or better -- and that was the extent of their business plan. "I knew we'd eventually be designing, developing, manufacturing, and selling something," Egan says. But what? Office furniture. Sure, they felt funny selling desks -- two guys with their experience, and with degrees in electrical engineering -- but it helped the cash flow, and most important, it got them where they wanted to be: inside New England's high-tech industry, in contact with purchasing managers and engineers. It was while Egan was paying a sales call one day at the University of Rhode Island, trying to sell a DEC-compatible memory system made by Intel, that he found out what the university's lab really needed was more memory, at a better price, for its Prime Computer systems. "We figured out how to do it," Egan says, "and hit the market with that, and we were off and running."
