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Letter to the editor

Sendoffs: Saying goodbye for the last time

Larger than life

By JOHN BARRY
Published July 3, 2004

[Times photo: Kinfay Moroti]

“Goodbye, Patrick,” whispers Gloria Olsen of St. Petersburg as she touches the grave of her brother Patrick O’Hara, wrestler, paratrooper, tough guy, gentle man.

	[Family photo]
	PATRICK O’HARA Oct. 19, 1919-June 21, 2004

PATRICK O'HARA: Oct. 19, 1919-June 21, 2004

ST. PETERSBURG - The marble urn was absurdly small. Pat O'Hara couldn't be in there.

He was too outsized for death. His strength, his endurance, his outlandishness made him mythical, even among those who saw how the blows and spills of pro wrestling had made the big man mortal. Even after seeing him reduced by Parkinson's, they could speak only in hushed awe of him at his funeral at Bay Pines National Cemetery.

"Everyone got quiet when he walked in a room," said his daughter, Patricia O'Hara.

The funeral was only minutes long for the farmer-paratrooper-pro wrestler whom longtime Tampa Bay sports fans may remember on grainy UHF TV in the '60s as being introduced as "that well-known household cleaner."

No Psalm was read, no prayer was said. The military part consisted only of a recording of taps and the presentation of an American flag. A heavy, sweating cemetery worker with the name "Roger" embossed on his shirt laid him to rest.

Dad wouldn't have wanted more than that, said O'Hara's son, Art O'Hara. But a final tall tale or two? Maybe the one about that time he sewed his foot with a needle and thread? Yes, Art said, Dad would have liked that.

"Be sure to ask about the time he wrestled a bear," O'Hara's niece, Kyra Kubik, suggested quietly, while his urn awaited burial. "And how he barricaded himself with hospital beds to keep the doctors from cutting off his leg."

Well, yes, Dad did once wrestle a bear, Art confirmed. "But it was a trained bear." And Dad did once fight off Army doctors to save his leg from amputation.

He had ruined his ankle as a World War II paratrooper. He was known then as Sunday Feuer, the name he was born with. His more than 100 combat jumps included one over Normandy on D-day. He came out of the war with two Bronze Stars and an inability to watch John Wayne charge a machine gun nest on TV without waking up later, screaming.

The damaged ankle had caused blood circulation problems and danger of gangrene, but he so violently resisted surgery that he was shipped back to the states from England, leg attached. In the United States, doctors wired his ankle together. Family lore has it that he awoke midway through surgery and refused more anesthesia so he could watch.

Could that be true? Art remembers wading with him off the Sunshine Skyway causeway. Pat stepped on something sharp that left a 4-inch gash in his arch. "When we got home, I watched him as he sat on the foot of the bed and cleaned the cut with alcohol. Then he sewed it up with a needle and thread.

"I didn't see a grimace. I saw a few beads of perspiration."

The high pain tolerance "gave him an ability to keep going," Art said. Again, there's that tone of quiet awe. To "keep going" means to extend oneself beyond ordinary human limits - whether swinging a scythe through hay from daybreak into night, or tilting a VW Beetle on its side, or pulling on a thick iron breaker bar against a rusted tractor bolt with such force that the bar cracks.

The wrestling began after his ankle healed. He changed his name from Sunday Feuer to Patrick O'Hara simply because a fighting Irishman had a higher postwar marquee value than the son of Eastern European immigrants.

"He studied an old book on wrestling moves," said his sister Gloria Olsen. She helped him get a match in New York City (in addition to fixing him up with her girlfriend Elizabeth, his future wife). "Then he went back to St. Pete and really got into it."

Wrestling may have seemed the perfect outlet for O'Hara, but it wasn't always a perfect fit, Art and Patricia said.

For one, farmers are obsessively cautious, and O'Hara had a side that craved peace. Art recalled only one spanking. Patricia remembered her dad's fussy rule against "slamming the screen door." He carved tiny animal figurines. A half-blind horse named Molly followed him like a puppy. His farm in Arcadia had a long driveway; people dropped off unwanted dogs at the end of it. Gloria thought he should have been a veterinarian.

It took Roger the cemetery worker all of about two minutes to cover Pat O'Hara's urn, placed beside Elizabeth's.

A small marker and a tiny square of sod covered them both.

- John Barry can be reached at 727 892-2258 or jbarry@sptimes.com Sendoffs appears Saturday in Floridian.

[Last modified July 2, 2004, 09:36:49]