Early Life in St. Louis
Edward Joseph O'Hare, known to friends and family as E.J., was born on September 5, 1893 in St. Louis to first-generation Irish-American parents Patrick Joseph O’Hare and Cecelia Ellen Malloy O’Hare. The Irish name "O'Hare" meant, in Gaelic, "sharp, bitter, angry." On June 4, 1912, E.J. O'Hare married Selma Anna Lauth, a native of St. Louis, born on November 13, 1890. She traced her heritage to Germany. E.J. and Selma started their family in an apartment above Selma's father's grocery store in the Soulard neighborhood. They had three children: Edward ("Butch"), born in 1914; Patricia, born in 1919, and Marilyn, born in 1924.
E.J. passed the Missouri bar exam in 1923 and joined a law firm. From 1925 O'Hare operated dog tracks in Chicago, Boston and Miami. Edward J. O'Hare, as a lawyer, represented the inventor Owen P. Smith, high commissioner of the International Greyhound Racing Association, who patented a mechanical running rabbit for use in dog racing. As a result of this lucrative work for Smith, O'Hare moved his family in 1930 into a new house — with a swimming pool and a skating rink — in Holly Hills. During summers, the O'Hare family had escaped the St. Louis heat to river camps on the Meramec and Gasconade rivers. E.J. had given Butch a .22-caliber rifle. Plinking at cans and bottles tossed in the river, Butch became quite a marksman. It was also during this time that E.J. became fascinated with flying, even hitching a ride in Charles Lindbergh's mail plane. Lindbergh took his first job as lead pilot of an air mail route operated by Robertson Aircraft Co. of Lambert Field in St. Louis. E.J. then flew commercially whenever possible, and he found chances for his teenage son to briefly take the controls. As a result, his son Butch, the later Medal of Honor recipient, best known for his extreme bravery as a U.S. naval aviator in World War II, became quite a marksman and familiar with planes.
When Owen Patrick Smith died, O'Hare represented the administratrix of Smith's estate, Hannah M. Smith. E.J. began to expand his business interests from the St. Louis levee to Chicago.
One day in the 1920s E.J. came home to find his son, Butch, sprawled on a couch reading books and munching banana layer cake and doughnuts. The father decided that his boy was showing signs of laziness and enrolled him at Western Military Academy in Alton,IL.
Read more about this topic: Edward J. O'Hare
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or louis:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after night a man’s bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)