Born to Move

Three rowers - all former Gentle Giant employees - hope to make it to the Beijing Olympics. If they succeed, they'll further cement the Somerville-based mover's reputation as an oarsman's paradise.

Above, Gentle Giant founder Larry O'Toole rows on the Charles River with former employee Al Gehant. From left, former Gentle Giant movers Dan Walsh, Matt Muffelman and Wyatt Allan all hope to win a spot on the US Olympic rowin team. (River photo by Laura Barisonzi; head shots from US Rowing)

Loading the contents of a four-bedroom Newtonville home onto a waiting van, Gentle Giant movers run past the front door and upstairs, leaving a Barack Obama poster flapping in their wake. The crew settles into a rhythm with boxes and blanket-wrapped furniture rushed down the front walkway by one broad-shouldered mover after another. The action is fast-paced but not frenetic. Smiling as they race from house to moving van and back, the crew's speed adds an element of friendly competition.

Half of the six-man crew this spring morning are former collegiate rowers, and that's not coincidence. You might think a moving company, if it targeted a particular athlete for its employees, would recruit weight lifters. But Gentle Giant founder Larry O'Toole, a onetime member of the North-eastern University varsity eight-man crew and the 6-foot-6 inspiration for the company name, figured tall, strong rowers accustomed to early mornings at boathouses, efficient teamwork, and extreme physical exertion would make good movers. "Because of the fiber they're made of, you don't hear rowers complaining" says O'Toole in his soft, Irish-accented voice. "Moving is a tough, physical job, and it's great when you have people with a competitive nature about them. They take pride in handling difficult situations that require either endurance or strength. It's a positive attitude and optimism. You get that in a lot of people, but in rowers, you can count on it."

Over nearly three decades, Somerville-based Gentle Giant has employed approximately 400 rowers, including 30 members of the US national team and 14 US Olympians, as well as 10 movers who have competed for foreign national teams. With three former Gentle Giant employees - Wyatt Allen, Matt Muffelman, and Dan Walsh - vying for spots on the 2008 US Olympic rowing team headed to Beijing this August, those numbers should increase.

"There's camaraderie on a crew team and on a crew of movers," explains employee and former Northeastern rower Stephen Kivimaki, on the job in Newtonville. "You have to work together." Kivimaki heads inside to help the rest of the crew with larger, unwieldy furniture. Carrying pieces two by two, the movers talk strategy about which bookcase, sofa, or mattress will come down the stairs next. They also crack inside jokes. Moving humor. Crew chiefs have been known to pull pranks, disguising fire hydrants in moving blankets and asking naive new employees to load the wrapped packages. A little entertainment goes a long way when a tough day on the trucks can stretch to 12 hours - and local rivers bustling with rowers are nowhere in sight.

QUALIFICATION FOR THE 2008 OLYMPIC rowing team continued with the late April National Selection Regatta in West Windsor, New Jersey. For the pair races, national team coaches put together Allen and Walsh, an unofficial and unintentional Gentle Giant entry. With the 6-foot-4, 210-pound Allen in the same boat as the 6-foot-7, 220-pound Walsh, the physically imposing pair brought 13 years' national team experience and seven summers' Gentle Giant moving experience to the tryout. Allen also brought a gold medal in the men's eight, won in the 2004 Olympics. Wearing Gentle Giant uniforms during part of the regatta, they finished third in the competition, clearing the way for 2008 Olympic berths on either the four or eightman heavyweight crews.

If all goes well as the rowers train throughout this month in New Jersey and as coaches keep mixing and matching individuals on different boats, Allen and Walsh, both 29, should make the Olympic team. Returning from an injury that required the removal of two ribs last year, 27-year-old Muffelman (6-foot-1, 155 pounds) has seen his chances drop from around 90 percent to 50 percent. The official decision for all three comes June 27. Only 16 of the 30 men in the heavyweight and lightweight pools will be selected.

During a typical training day, Allen and Walsh will row more than a marathon's worth of miles. Depending on how much speed work the practice sessions entail, rowers spend four to six hours a day on the water. "It's very masochistic," says Walsh, proud of the sacrifices and push-through-the-pain mentality that bond rowers when training long distances and racing over 2,000 meters. In a sport that doesn't create media darlings or generate large endorsement deals, national team rowers train in relative anonymity for one or two big races a year.

Knowing the challenges for any rower dedicated to making the national team, Larry O'Toole and his moving company supported former employees Allen, Walsh, and Muffelman whatever ways they could. For Muffelman and Allen, that meant primarily accommodating work assignments, leaving time for training on the Charles River and travel to competitions. "Larry appreciates that people have other things they want to pursue, and the workers in turn work incredibly hard for him," says Allen. "It's a two-way street." As Walsh climbed the national team ranks, the company offered financial assistance in addition to flexible work hours. While Gentle Giant never spelled out a sponsorship arrangement, Walsh says the company "made sure I didn't starve" during early years on the national team.

After the Beijing Olympics, Walsh will return to Gentle Giant and work on the trucks, moving customers as he has on and off since his freshman year at Northeastern in 1998. "I want to say thank you," says Walsh. "I'd like to think I have the internal fortitude to have made it without the aid of Gentle Giant and Larry and his generosity, but they definitely helped me get where I am today. I'm the type of athlete that, if I'm going to do this, I have to train full on. If it wasn't for what Gentle Giant did for me, I probably would have rowed a little bit more half-assed. Being able to take away the financial burden for a couple years made a huge difference."

After serving as the men's heavyweight alternate at the 2004 Olympics, Walsh visited the Gentle Giant Rowing Club boathouse in Malden. It was another thank you. Tucked behind offices for the Malden Department of Public Works with a yellow snowplow marking the entrance, the white industrial tent capable of housing 20 shells can be hard to find. The boathouse serves Medford and Malden high schools, Mystic Valley Regional Charter School, adult rowers from the surrounding communities, and Gentle Giant employees training for the Head of the Charles. There are oar blades painted in Gentle Giant's trademark maroon and gold and a shell labeled "Gentle Giant Rowing Club." Gentle Giant has donated $92,000 to the six-year-old club, paying primarily for equipment and youth coaches.

Sounding like a rowing missionary, O'Toole talks about big plans for the rowing club, starting with the construction of a permanent boat-house. On the day Walsh stopped by and spoke to the youth rowers, he also had big plans in mind. He told the teenagers that "it's not impossible to go from a small rowing club to the top of the game" and "nothing great in life comes easy."

TOM KIEFER STANDS amidst towering stacks of crates at Gentle Giant's 2 1/2-acre Wilmington warehouse. He exhibits the same focused determination building crates that earned him a silver medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics on the US men's coxed four. When Kiefer joined Gentle Giant in 1986, the parallels between the physical demands of rowing and moving left him "completely in love with the whole aspect of the company." It was love at first hand hoist. Two hours after Kiefer called O'Toole for a job, the 6-foot-3 Olympian joined a move in progress and formed part of a human pulley system, raising furniture to a second-floor window with just nylon straps and muscle. Since his original stretch with Gentle Giant, Kiefer has explored other employment opportunities, starting his own carpentry company and serving as evening boatman at MIT. But the familiar culture of Gentle Giant, where employees talk about rowing workouts on the loading docks, keeps him coming back.

"If everyone has the love of the same sport that was true when I started at Gentle Giant, then you speak the same language," says Kiefer, who assembles a crate with deliberate economy of motion. "You have similar experiences. You could joke about the same things. But it was more than that. We were all interested in pro- viding great service, really trying to provide excellence. We were striving for excellence in our rowing careers, and that transferred over to our job at Gentle Giant."

On average, the company completes approximately 12,000 moves a year, yielding $28.1 million in revenue last year. Companies can spend tens of millions of dollars developing a brand identity customers will associate with reliability and quality. They also can spend at least that much on internal training and team-building exercises, hoping to instill a workplace culture of commitment to productivity. By starting his moving company with rowers, O'Toole accomplished both business objectives with no monetary expenditure at all. "It's a self-selecting, nose-to-the-grindstone sport that requires brute force, and Larry realized the resource he had around him and took advantage of it," says Allen, the 2008 Olympic hopeful. "In rowing, you end up with a person that has a certain character, a certain personality - hard workers, well-educated, pleasant to be around. I recognized that the minute I showed up at Gentle Giant. It's not something you expect climbing onto the docks at a moving company."

Whether moving customers, establishing a company culture, or just having fun, Gentle Giant prizes speed and efficiency. At the annual August company party, O'Toole sets up a Concept 2 rowing machine. Employees race to see who can row the farthest in one minute. Any employee who beats ultra-competitive O'Toole earns $100. It is hard-won money. The 57-year-old O'Toole twice won his division at the C.R.A.S.H. - B Sprints World Indoor Rowing Championships, the most recent victory coming in 2006.

In his early moving days, O'Toole called upon his rowing strength and industrial-engineering background to handle the toughest jobs. He figured out how to move a full-size refrigerator up a flight of stairs by himself. "It's all down to leverage and knowing the angles and how these things work," says O'Toole. "If the angle is right going up one stair at a time, it's never going to fall down." He sounds ready to demonstrate the technique on the spot. Wearing a Boston Marathon windbreaker and Gentle Giant shorts, the slender, angular O'Toole still looks more like a mover than company president, an observation he takes as a compliment.

"Since Larry started the place with the mindset of a rower, there's a trickle-down effect," says lightweight rower and company employee Niles Kuronen. "There was a certain inevitability about working at Gentle Giant, because I had so many teammates and roommates that were rowers and worked here. You know you trust people here already just based on their merits as rowers."

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN, 12 GENTLE GIANT employees, including one competitive female rower and mover, gather in Harvard Stadium at the bottom of Section 37. Despite a swirling, bone-chilling wind, many of the employees wear black shorts and maroon T-shirts with the company logo. It is a mix of movers and office staff, competitive rowers and weekend warriors. Ages range from 20-something to 50-something. O'Toole starts the group climbing the large stadium stairs where fans usually sit for football games. Some bound up and down with apparent ease. Others pace themselves. By the time the first wave reaches the midway point of the horseshoe-shaped stadium, however, faces show strain and quads burn.

"It's amazing how fast you hit the wall when you do hit it," says O'Toole. "That's when you find out what somebody's made of. The stadium is a way of Gentle Giant saying to somebody, `This is what we're all about. Get used to it.' " A familiar rowing ritual for college crews around Boston, the Harvard Stadium run serves as initiation rite, workout, and team-building exercise for Gentle Giant, depending on the day. O'Toole returns a week later with Gentle Giant's newest employees, a group of eight culture-shocked men from Romania. Some take well to the stadium run. Others struggle. Afterward, back at the company's Somerville warehouse complex, O'Toole provides breakfast, then teaches the new movers what will be expected of them.

As the session ends, O'Toole nods toward a tall, lanky kid with a black faux hawk named Gheorghe Leordean and announces, "We have a money guy. It's 25 bucks for beating me at the stadium and 25 bucks for finishing under 30 minutes." That morning's run went well, though once the new recruits leave the room, O'Toole mentions some of them failed to meet minimum expectations and will return to the stadium until they finish in under 40 minutes. For O'Toole, running under 40 means employees are "adequately fit" to be movers. With an office opening in Seattle and more planned across the country, O'Toole concedes Gentle Giant needs a new infusion of rowers. The company regularly places recruiting ads in Rowing News magazine. Currently, just 35 of the company's 245 year-round employees come from rowing backgrounds. As a result, O'Toole works harder to keep the rowing culture in place. The stadiums runs and the rowing club are part of the plan. David Lister, director of human resources and a rower, says: "People know we're sort of a rower's moving company. We certainly don't want to lose that connection. There are very few rowers you hire that don't really stand out."

O'Toole likes to tell the story of a three-man crew with two movers a few weeks removed from winning silver medals at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. It was a "stair job" in the Back Bay, which means a move from one walk-up to another. The two Olympians raced up and down the stairs effortlessly. The third member of the crew found it impossible to keep up, breathing heavily and sweating profusely. The customer called and complained. Two of the movers were fantastic. By comparison, the third mover left a lot to be desired. Laughing at the memory, O'Toole says, "Sometimes having Olympians can make a normal human look bad."

Beijing Bound?

These former Gentle Giant movers all hope to win a spot on the US Olympic rowing team. Official word comes June 27.

WYATT ALLEN

Age: 29
Height: 6-foot-4
Weight: 210
Hometown: Portland, Maine
Education: University of Virginia
Graduated: 2001
Gentle Giant service: 2 summers

MATT MUFFELMAN

Age: 27
Height: 6-foot-1
Weight: 155
Hometown: Mathews, Virginia
Education: Dartmouth College
Graduated: 2003
Gentle Giant service: 2 years

DAN WALSH

Age: 29
Height: 6-foot-7
Weight: 220
Hometown: Norwalk, Connecticut
Education: Northeastern University
Graduated: 2002
Gentle Giant service: on and off for 9 years