O'Malley Memories

Pat Griffin Reminisces (Part Two)

About Old Pictures...

Taken in early June of 1938, this photo illustrates better than any other single photo the age range of the O'Malley children the year their parents died: Helen, a freshly-minted Seton alumna; Catherine, a brand new Saint "Ant'ny's" graduate; and Jerry, at the successful completion of first grade. The photo also represents the earliest picture in my mother's personal collection for which she also held the negative. I asked her on a number of occasions if she had gotten the camera as a graduation present, but she could not remember such an extravagance being a part of Gardenville life back then.


This photo is a grouping of the cherubic youngest third of the O'Malley line-up taken at the same time as the one above (notice Jerry wearing Helen's mortarboard). Off to the far right, you can see part of a fourth child in the background. A print of the full negative would reveal two be-knickered boys mugging for the camera while one playfully placed the other in a head-lock. "Who are those boys, and what are they doing?" I asked my mother the first time I saw this photo, years and years (and years) ago. "That's Danny and A.G.," Mom told me, "just being o'n'ry." (Mom's vernacular pronunciation for one of her favorite words, which I was surprised to learn much later was actually spelled "ornery".)

Just what did that epithet mean in the context of the latter years of the Great Depression? For Uncle Carl, who did much of the heavy lifting in the discipline department at 4500, often quite literally by the scruff of the neck, it meant his nephews falling under the bad influence of the Rudolf brothers ("Rubinoff", to Uncle Carl) from down the street. Most probably, the O'Malley boys didn't need anyone else to show them how to get into trouble. Though their antics would make them seem to be choirboys by 21st century standards (no semi-automatic weaponry sticking menacingly out of the waistband of their knickers), their behavior fell somewhere along a continuum between the Little Rascals and the Dead End kids, though a bit closer to the latter.

About his Uncle AG...

If Uncle Carl did in fact manage to wean his charges from the malevolent influence of the "Rubinoffs", and if Danny's scholarship to Calvert Hall brought with it homework sufficient to curtail his time spent on mischief with his brother, young Alsie never lacked for ready, willing, and able confederates in his miscreant schemes. One Sunday not too many years ago, I spent the day being regaled by Gene Malpass with stories from that era; almost all of them were second-hand accounts of the shenanigans A.G. and his friends concocted while Gene was busy helping his father at the Malpass car lot. (Among these friends, the only one I ever met, besides my father, of course, was Nicky Mueller who, like Danny, became a city firefighter and, again like Danny and A.G. and Eddie, died too young of a heart ailment. He was also a catcher on the softball teams on which my father and uncles played in the early 1950s and for which I was the batboy. My most vivid memory of him is of a time at the Clifton Park bowl when we swapped ball caps, and mine fell over his ears and down onto the bridge of his nose. I can still hear his most idiosyncratic, uncontrolled laughter - and he couldn't even see how silly his cap looked sitting beanie-like atop my own cranial expanse...but I digress.)

You're not a member of this family if you don't have your own favorite A.G. tale. One I'll include here concerns the night when he, my father, Nicky, et al had nothing better to do than to take persistent aim with their pea shooters at the windows of neighborhood grocer Morris Kellman. My cousins may be familiar with his grocery and meat market several blocks east of the parish church on Frankford Avenue, but in those days, his business was directly across the street from the rectory in what became The Dutch Oven during my childhood. He and his family lived above the store. He was by no means the neighborhood meanie - in fact, he would sometimes play in the choose-up-sides baseball games the men of the parish would play on the open fields that extended from the school building west toward Belair Road - but rather a vehicle to bring into play the real target that night, the local police!

The young "punks" - the term by which they addressed each other as a badge of honor - maintained their siege upon the grocer's windows until the patrol cars responded, then made a dash toward home down the alleyway that ran alongside the convent, between the Sprouls and the Zeilers' homes, then between 4500 and the Armstong place and on into the woods behind the O'Malleys' garage. The police halted their pursuit at the edge of the trees, when one of them began speaking in an overly-loud manner for any and all of the boys to hear: "Okay, we'll split up and go in from both sides (the trail through the woods emptied out onto Greenhill Avenue) and catch them that way". At that, from the darkness behind the garage, came A.G.'s voice: "Oh, don't do that; you might scare us!" Then he and his cohorts retreated safely deeper into the darkness.
Pat Griffin -- July 2005