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O'Malley Memories
Pat Griffin Reminisces
About St.Anthony's...
When we say that our family comes from Gardenville, many of us are speaking of both branches of the ancestral tree. How many of my cousins know that the house they remember as the Griffin's residence on Echodale Avenue had been Aunt Betty's childhood home? The Steinitzes, Wrights and Gearys were all members of the parish. There were always, it seemed, Geary and O'Malley children attending class together at St. "Ant'ny's": Theresa and Patsy, Dot and A.G., Bill and Mary Louise, Peggy and Cass. (I'm not sure about Mary and Helen.) When Bill and Mary Louise began sixth grade in September of 1938, they found a new boy in their class.
About his father, Earl "Pat" Griffin...
When my father first attended his latest new school that fall, he was commuting from St. Leo's, a "home for older boys" in the Catholic Charities system, near the present intersection of High and Gay Streets. Said system planned to place him with a Gardenville family, but until it finished dotting their tease and crossing their eyes, Pat Griffin rode the #15 streetcar to and from school. Though his temporary residence with boys older than himself (and, we can only assume, more difficult to "place") left something to be desired, he had no problem with riding the trolley every day: his father was a trolley-car motorman, and Dad's earliest memories were of bringing coffee to his father at an assigned trolley stop on Edmondson Avenue.
The Columbus Day holiday rolled around, and Dad was still at St. Leo's. He decided to take the streetcar in the other direction, to visit his father in West Baltimore. His mother had died in 1932 and his father, with health issues of his own, needed help caring for his children. First, Dad and his siblings boarded with my grandfather's transit coworkers; when Ed Griffin could no longer work at all, the kids entered the Catholic Charities system. Still, Dad had a strong bond with his dad, and would visit him whenever he could - such as on school holidays like Columbus Day. This visit, instead of his father, he found two men standing at the front door. "You don't know, do you?" one of them asked. Ed Griffin had died the day before, on October 11, 1938 - six days after Louise O'Malley died.
Soon thereafter, with the paperwork cleared, my father moved in with the Moran family on the corner of Frankford and Remmell Avenues, and he began his life as a Gardenvillager. One day in the school yard, he watched a fight during the lunch recess. Bryce Butler, one of the larger and more formidable members of the student body, was getting all that he could handle from a younger and slighter boy; by the end of recess, they had fought to a draw, and my father was mightily impressed by the pugilistic skills of the smaller combatant, one Albert Glenn O'Malley.
(Aside to my own and the younger generation who cannot imagine the nuns of THEIR times ever allowing a fight to proceed much beyond a punch or two: you should know that, in 1938, on into the mid-1950s, St Anthony's parish property extended all the way to Belair Road. The school yard was not some paved and lined expanse extending to the concrete wall that separated it from the Food Fair/Pantry Pride/Value Food/Stop,Shop & Save/vacant supermarket lot, but an open field running all the way to the Gearys' place at the corner of Belair and Frankford. Uncle Jerry recalls the momentous battle occurring "behind Goss' house" - far enough away from immediate detection by the Franciscan sisters to allow for a considerable exchange.)
I'll end this little story quoting Uncle Jerry, the first time he told it to me years ago in California. "Your father liked the way A.G. handled himself with his fists, and followed him home to 4500 one day. That's how Pat Griffin became an O'Malley. Eventually, through attrition or what have you, he and your mother got together and here you are."
Pat Griffin -- July 2005
More of Pat's Reminiscences
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Baltimore, Maryland