Who Do You Think You Are? Ancient O'Herns Edition

Consider the Irish. They've got that Celtic mysticism thing going on. Joyce and Yeats give them plenty of literary firepower. There are those haunting songs and a certain (albeit disputed) charm that allows the Vice President to say the f-word on national television and not appear to be a lout. Their national holiday gives the world annual license to get knee-walking drunk. What's not to love about them, I wonder? Maybe a few of MC's relatives.

MC thinks that perhaps her great-grandfather took the whole potato famine business too personally. In any event, the lore that has come down to her about P.S. O'Hern has not described him as a harp-playing lad with a sweet tenor voice telling droll stories over a pint. The Patrick Stephen stories tend to be about land acquisition and the complicated division of his assets among his 12 surviving children.


In the bottom left photo, there's a house behind the zeppelin-sized pig. The pig, relative to the house, must be about the size of the the living room, if the house has a living room. P.S. O'Hern and his wife Mary Jane raised 13 children in that house. According to lore, when one of his 10 sons received his acceptance letter to West Point, the son threw down his shovel and declared he was finished, forever, with farm work. P.S. seemed to have had that effect on children.

P.S. O'Hern's last living son died recently at the age of 101, after being profiled by every major news outlet in the state. After you hit 100, folksy geezerdom becomes irresistible, and Charlie acquired a stack of press clippings. His attentive caretaker also shared and archived many of the documents in his house, including the images shown here. In these photos, Uncle Chuck and a horse are standing in the bed of a pickup, a fairly low-security arrangement for the horse, and not so great for Charlie either.

The stories that persist about Uncle C indicate more than a passing resemblance to his father. For example, when one of his nephews served on a submarine, he was asked to fill out a questionnaire and explain, "Why did you join the Navy?" Morris Dale wrote, "Uncle Charlie." When his officers asked for clarification, the nephew said, "If you ever worked for Uncle Charlie, you'd know why I joined the Navy." The people who worked for Uncle Charlie drove pickups without heat, used machinery long after it had completed its depreciation schedule, and received only modest compensation. A pair of them were changing a flat on a dilapidated trailer filled with cattle when Uncle C came upon them and made inquiries. Uncle's hired hands didn't lack for snap. They told him, "You didn't give us enough to do, Charlie, so we're rotating the tires on this trailer."

The axiom about age having its privileges is true in Uncle C's case, particularly since he outlived the folks who could contradict his version of family history. His very presence, in a house that made P.S's look like a McMansion, seemed the essence of his father's ideology about getting money and keeping it. Perhaps the ancient Celtic charm in MC's family was snuffed out by nasty English landlords. Maybe MC's relations were profoundly moved by the rich brother in The Quiet Man. But somehow "Danny Boy" morphed into Gordon Gekko with an 8th grade education.

Cranky #2 met Uncle C when she was about 3; by that time she had considerably more teeth than he had. Herr Cranky made the introductions, saying, "Here's another red-headed O'Hern for you." Uncle C observed: "There's a lot of us." Maybe that's the ultimate prize of these generations of tight-fisted tenacity: we endured.
--MC