[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 14934-14935]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         REMEMBERING MATT HALEY

  Mr. COONS. Madam President, I come to the floor today my heart heavy 
with a challenging task, which is to convey the remarkable, the 
special, the powerful spirit of a friend who passed 3 weeks ago in a 
tragic accident in India.
  Matt Haley was a remarkable Delawarean. Matt Haley was a gifted and 
accomplished chef and entrepreneur. Matt Haley was someone who touched 
so many lives in my home State of Delaware.
  In 2012 Matt won the Delaware Restaurant Association's Cornerstone 
Award, a lifetime achievement award recognizing restaurateurs who 
dedicate their lives to humanitarian efforts.
  Matt owned eight different restaurants all across the beach region so 
well known to folks here in Washington. Matt owned restaurants in 
Rehoboth Beach, Lewes, Ocean View, Bethany Beach, Fenwick Island, and 
was involved in dozens of other business enterprises in other States.
  In 2014 Matt had the best year he ever had in terms of the reach and 
scope of his potential and his vision and his recognition by his 
profession. He won the National Restaurant Association Cornerstone 
Humanitarian Award. I was thrilled to be able to join in that 
celebration here in Washington. He won the International Association of 
Culinary Professionals Humanitarian Award. He won the James Beard 
Humanitarian Award in a remarkable celebration in New York. He won all 
three major recognitions, major awards from the restaurant and culinary 
industry--the triple crown, as it were.
  Having never met him, you might think this man, having been so 
successful as an entrepreneur and a businessman and so recognized and 
celebrated in all these different ways, would have been puffed up and 
filled with himself and with pride and with a sense of accomplishment 
and success. Matt did have a sense of accomplishment and success, but 
it came from a very different place. His spirit, his personality was 
profoundly different than that brief resume might suggest because Matt 
was someone who had a second and a third chance at life, so he embraced 
it with a passion and an openheartedness I have never seen anywhere 
else.
  Matt was 53 years old and had been sober for 24 years. Not many years 
before this remarkable year of success he had this year, Matt had been 
riding the bus to work as a minimum-wage dishwasher as he was 
reinventing himself. Matt spent 4 years in prison on a 13-year prison 
sentence.
  As he memorably remarked in a talk he gave days before he left on 
this trip to India, Matt had life-altering, terrible experiences as a 
child. Matt had managed to grow up in an environment of circumstances 
and have experiences that would cripple any human person, any spirit, 
and had become someone who was violent and addicted, and inevitably, as 
a consequence of a lot of his actions, he ended up in jail. He was 
exactly the sort of person so many would be willing to write off. Yet 
Matt found an opportunity through the culinary arts, through the simple 
and powerful skill of cooking for others. He found a pathway back and a 
roadway up. Matt was someone who cooked not just well but was gifted at 
pulling together completely unrelated items and making something 
simple, tasty, and powerful.
  Matt understood what a remarkable pathway toward success and 
independence restaurants can be for those who start working at the very 
lowest end of the scale in our country in terms of pay scale and yet 
can steadily grow to be successful managers or even restaurant owners.
  Matt was someone who also had just gotten a positive diagnosis after 
struggling with a nearly life-ending bout with cancer. Matt had nearly 
died to this world once as a young man in prison and then had nearly 
died to us a second time through cancer.
  I was blessed to have gotten to know him just in the last few years 
and to have been touched by the power of his energy. Matt had a hunger 
to connect with and touch and help love others in the world who hadn't 
yet seen the possibilities of this world.
  Matt would go anywhere, anytime to help someone in need in Delaware.
  The stories are legend of what Matt did spontaneously and powerfully 
to reach out and touch folks in our home State and around the world who 
needed his special gift--not just his resources but his energy and his 
kindness.
  Matt's business partner Scott shared with me a story that he was 
literally driving down the road and came across a van from the Delaware 
Adolescent Program, Inc., DAPI, a van for a program that helps young 
moms complete school and be healthy and successful mothers. Their van 
was broken down by the side of the road, and, after learning more about 
the program and its impact and its importance and seeing their 
dilapidated and outdated van, he literally bought them a new one on the 
spot.
  Matt was someone who, having never traveled before until recent years 
when he first became successful, found himself challenged and then 
enlivened and then aflamed with a passion for traveling around the 
world and for hearing from and connecting with young people and their 
needs. He tells much more powerfully than I can the story of his 
becoming connected to young women, to girls, in Nepal, victims of 
trafficking, victims of sexual abuse, who

[[Page 14935]]

were hungry and lonely and to whom he was able to help provide food and 
shelter and hope.
  He later also connected with a whole community in Central America, 
and he traveled regularly to India and Nepal and to Central America as 
well as up and down my State. He volunteered in our prisons. He worked 
with our food bank. He spent time and gave resources in India and Nepal 
and in Central America. Literally the last time I spoke to Matt, I had 
just had an opportunity to meet a young woman who was truly struggling 
to find opportunity in our home State. She was a recovering drug addict 
and came up to me at an event in Dover and frankly said she never 
believed someone in my position would care and would work and take any 
risk to help someone like her find employment. She was interested in 
possibly working in a restaurant.
  As we talked at greater length, I told her Matt's story. I told her 
how this young man, full of anger and abuse and difficulty in his young 
life, had ended up an addict and in prison and yet, through his own 
determination and through the kindness and partnership of others, had 
managed to go on to be an incredible success, an employer to hundreds, 
even thousands, and a contributor and a leader to groups such as La 
Esperanza and the food bank, and to support public school teachers and 
to support folks coming out of prison. I asked if she would be 
interested in hearing from him.
  In my last conversation with Matt--a man who was incredibly busy, as 
he was finishing up several business projects and about to get on a 
plane to meet a long commitment with a group of girls in need--he said: 
Absolutely. I would love to talk to her. Get her on the phone with me.
  He made time the next day to meet her, encourage her, and invite her 
to come to the food bank presentation he was making.
  To his very last breath, Matt was passionate about touching and 
changing the lives of others. His very last initiative was to fund 
teachers and schools in southern Delaware and help provide supplies for 
them in their classrooms, and his very last day was spent riding a 
motorcycle on one of the highest and most dangerous roads in the world 
in the Himalaya to personally deliver supplies and engagement and 
support to girls in a remote village in a difficult and distant part of 
the world.
  Matt Haley's compassion, his spirit, and his energy touched deeply me 
and so many others. His determination to do everything he could with 
every day he had and to make every difference he could in the world 
should inspire and challenge all of us. He has left a significant 
amount of his accumulated resources to his Global Delaware Fund, which 
will continue his great work in these many places.
  It is my hope and my prayer that all of us who have had our lives 
touched by Matt and by his unique and infectious humor and spirit will 
continue his remarkable lifetime of work and that all of us will 
remember that in this Nation, every person has value and every person 
has potential no matter where they are from or where they are today. 
Their path forward can be lifted if we just continue to carry forward 
the remarkable passion and spirit of Matt Haley.
  I thank the Chair.

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