For Baker, a Little Brother for life

They bonded over Howard Hughes and Cap’n Crunch.

Their relationship, arranged more than 30 years ago by the Big Brother program, lasted into adulthood, and in different ways, became a constant in each man’s life. Newlon, the Little Brother, is now 46, gray prominent in his hair; Baker, the Big Brother, is 53, and the Republican candidate for governor.

If most voters know Baker as a wonky former state budget chief, Newlon, over three decades, came to know him much more deeply.

“Trust me,’’ Newlon said over breakfast recently at a diner near his home in Medfield. “If you had known me at 13, he’s a very patient man.’’

Baker said he never imagined he would stay connected all these years with Newlon, who was entering adolescence with a fury. Their relationship evolved — through AC/DC concerts, “Hill Street Blues’’ nights, Newlon’s bouts with unemployment and near homelessness, spots in each other’s wedding parties, and graduations that seemed, for one of them, improbable.

For Baker, the long friendship became a profound lesson in perseverance — seeing Newlon struggle through setbacks to find his way, and seeing himself stick by Newlon. And it exposed Baker, the son of a Reagan administration official who grew up relatively comfortably in Needham, to the kind of economic struggles that were unfamiliar in his own circle.

“It was my first experience with mentoring and sort of pseudo-parenthood,’’ Baker said. “After a while, it just becomes part of your life.’’

“I’ll do pretty much anything for him if I can,’’ he continued. “He certainly knew that when he was young, and I know it mattered to him.’’

Before all that, it started with a college freshman hearing an ad on the radio: The Big Brother program needed mentors.

“My parents were always really important to me,’’ Baker said. “And when you hear the ad that talks about kids without dads and all the rest . . .’’

He jotted down the phone number on his desk calendar. He stared at it every day. After a month, he called to apply.

Newlon, by then, had been on the program’s waiting list for a few years, attending what he and his brothers ruefully called the “pathetic picnics’’ for unmatched kids. His father had left his mother and six children to survive on welfare, drinking powdered milk in a crumbling Victorian house in Newton, he said.

He was a precociously intelligent child who was acting out, as his mother attended night school. The Newton schools kicked him out, sending Newlon more than 40 miles on a bus to private alternative school, he said. He was acquiring bad habits and the wrong friends, he said, though he was reluctant to share details.

The counselors at the Big Brother program thought Newlon and Baker would make a good match. So they invited them to the office in downtown Boston and sent them on a walk, to see how they got along.

They walked to Boston Common, found a bench, and began chatting about Howard Hughes. Newlon had read a Time magazine story about the wealthy aviator and industrialist’s descent into eccentricity and delusion. Newlon was pleased that he and Baker could talk about a current event, and he suspected that Baker was impressed that someone his age was reading Time.

“I don’t know what Charlie saw in me, but this guy was 6’7’’, whip smart, knew about everything I knew,’’ Newlon said. “It seemed a good fit. Plus, I was desperate to get a male figure in my life.’’

Newlon wasn’t an easy protégé, both men say.

“He was a real handful, there’s no question about it,’’ Baker said. “He was mad, and he was angry and he was [ticked] off.’’

There weren’t many reliable adults in Newlon’s life. Newlon’s two brothers had their own mentors in the Big Brother program. One mentor lasted a year and then moved away. The other lasted two weeks.

Newlon and Baker started out with a trip to the Museum of Science. Soon, Newlon began coming to Harvard weekly, watching dollar movies, eating at the cafeteria, spending the night in the dorms talking about the civil war in Cambodia. Baker didn’t lecture; he just showed him an example of success and consistency, Newlon said.

“Charlie Baker didn’t say ‘12 boxes of Cap’n Crunch is too much, John. It’s too much sugar.’ He just smiled and stuffed it in his gym bag,’’ Newlon recalled.

Baker would occasionally insist Newlon try different movies or music — “MASH’’ instead of James Bond, Blondie instead of ABBA. By sophomore year, two of Baker’s three roommates also had little brothers, allowing for group trips to hockey, baseball, and football games.

“They just liked hanging out in our rooms, being big guys,’’ said Glenn Parsons III, one of the roommates, and now a software chief executive in Westwood.

Baker’s influence hardly stopped Newlon from making mistakes. He dropped out of high school at 17. He also bailed out once when Baker came to help him fix a hole in his mother’s ceiling, deciding it would be more fun to go to a friend’s house; Baker was furious, and didn’t call Newlon for months.

Baker would ask his own parents for guidance on thorny issues. He worked with Newlon’s mother to get him back into school and, later, on a path toward college.

As Baker finished college, and then business school, the two men stayed connected. They met weekly in the early years, then monthly after that, even as Baker became a Cabinet secretary for Governor William Weld. In the 1980s, Newlon would take his homework to Baker’s apartment on Thursdays and watch “Hill Street Blues’’ with Chinese take-out. Newlon made sure to take serious girlfriends to dinner with Baker and his wife, Lauren.

“It just kept going,’’ Newlon said. “I’d sit there every once in a while and say, ‘This is pretty weird, but we’re friends.’ ’’

When Newlon hit another rough patch in the late 1980s, “basically almost homeless,’’ he said, Baker and his wife gave him their guest room for several months. Newlon was, by then, more or less family — a member of Baker’s wedding party and a guest at New Year’s Eve parties held by Baker’s father in Rockport. Baker was Newlon’s best man when he got married in 1993.

“That was one of the happiest days of my life,’’ Baker said. “It validated everything that he and I had put into our relationship, and it was sort of a statement about how far he had traveled.’’

It took a dozen years, but Newlon graduated summa cum laude from Northeastern in 1992 and earned a master’s of business from there in 1996.

By then, Baker was something of an evangelist for the Big Brother program, serving on its board from 1998 through 2003. His story, though not uncommon, became well known within the program because of Baker’s prominence, and because Baker had nominated Newlon for a United Way Courage Award in 1998. Program executives say their story remains useful in fund-raising and volunteer recruitment.

“Charlie didn’t have to do this, and there were times that it wasn’t rewarding, because John’s had such difficult circumstances,’’ said John Pearson, who led the Boston chapter of what is now called Big Brothers Big Sisters from 1984 through 2008. “But he had faith.’’

Pearson said the average Big Brother relationship lasts 24 to 30 months, though that figure does not include time spent when participants no longer need official guidance. He estimated that 10 percent or more become lifelong friends.

Newlon has two children of his own now, but his life remains one of ups and downs. He said he has been laid off three times and is again back in the job market. He doesn’t see much of Baker now that the gubernatorial campaign is in full swing.

“I don’t expect, at this point in time, that he’s got a whole lot of time,’’ Newlon said.

Newlon said he has voted for Democrats in recent elections, but that he will do anything he can to support the man who, until his wife came along, was the best friend he ever had.

“I’ve donated to the campaign,’’ he said. “Which, as an unemployed person, is not an easy thing to do.’’

Noah Bierman can be reached at nbierman@globe.com.