My very best wishes to you and your family.
Thanksgiving day always reminds me of the obstacles our forefathers confronted, and the courage that has made California, and America a great place. On this particular Thanksgiving day, there are many people who for one reason or another, do not have families, or homes, or who will not be able to join their families for a traditional Thanksgiving. I hope that we can all take, as I do, comfort and encouragement from our achievements of the past, and in that regard I'd like to say something about my Pop's side of the family, and his father, the Old Centerfielder.
My great grandfather Patrick O'Flaherty was born in 1824. He came to America to escape persecution in Ireland. He worked as a laborer until he had enough money to by a horse and wagon, and become a Teamster. He married a lady named Bridget Murphy.
My grandfather Mike, on the left, "The Old Centerfielder", was the youngest of his siblings. John, on top and Pat on the right were also early baseball players. They found careers in law enforcement. James J. O'Flaherty on the bottom, was known as Riverfront Jack because he shot a bunch of bad guys on the St. Louis waterfront.
Not long after that photo was taken, Mike and his brother Jim, aka Riverfront Jack, moved to Washington D.C. where Thomas O. Flaherty, of Oxen Hill, Maryland, had arranged jobs for them with the government. Jim joined the Secret Service, and Mike joined the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where he worked all his life, as a printer. He liked to say that he made more money than Rockefeller but he just couldn't keep it.
The truth, was that his salary was barely enough to raise his family, and provided no savings to send any of them to college. When he was very old and living alone, he was the last white person in the neighborhood, as the central District of Columbia, the area all around the White House had become a run-down ghetto, inhabited by poor blacks, former slaves and the children of slaves.
Some in our family were worried about him living there all alone. They tried to get him to move, but he wouldn't hear of it. He had raised his family in that house, and that was where he was going to stay. Regarding the Negroes, as they were called then, he said he got along fine with his neighbors, and he reminded his proud sons and daughter that some of our O'Flaherty clan had lived and died in slavery themselves, well into the 19th century, on the British plantations in the Bahamas.
Nevertheless, one evening when he was about 96 years old, the family got him out to a Thanksgiving dinner at old Tom O’Donnell’s restaurant, and while they were there, everything he owned was moved into a place closer to them in Maryland.
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