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 and/or louis:
“The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at an early age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life it self is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Faeroe, no more than without Sense.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)