On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 20:34:38 GMT, "Steven P. McNicoll"
wrote in
t::

[Well written analysis of OP's "Glurge" snipped]
Butch O'Hare was suitably honored when the Chicago airport known as Orchard
Depot was renamed O'Hare International in 1949. It's unfortunate that he and
the airport have to share the O'Hare name with his unscrupulous father.

http://www.snopes.com/glurge/ohare.asp


Steve,

You had me going there. That was so well written and, I was excited
to see that you really were capable of stringing informative sentences
together into cohesive paragraphs; I just couldn't believe it! Then I
read the snopes domain address at the end. Oh well...



Here's the other information on the Illinois Police & Sheriff's News
page:

From The Archives: 1939 - 1949.

Capone Mob Murder, World War II Hero
Figure In Naming of O'Hare Airport.

Their tickets and their luggage tags read ORD. They come by the
thousands, hour after hour, day after day, flying into the concrete
and steel and glass monster that's never quite finished, that's always
under construction, always expanding, always overflowing.

Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, even in the midst of a major
recession, remains The World's Busiest, as O'Hare boosters never tire
of telling us.

And it is pretty busy. Ask the people who get lost there. Ask the
homeowners in Des Plaines or Bensenville who live beneath the glide
paths. Ask the cabbies who scratch out a living hauling warm bodies
and their luggage to and from.

Back in the days when Super Mobster Alphonse Capone was losing control
of his sprawling criminal empire and was preparing for his trip to
Alcatraz on an income tax evasion conviction, a much smaller version
of the airport, then known as Orchard Depot, was just beginning to
spread its wings. In those days, most travelers took the train, and
international travelers went by ship. And anyway, Chicago's big
airport was Municipal, out on the South Side - now known as Midway.

Then as now, you had to really love flying to want to fly into or out
of ORD.

In 1949, six years after he went down near Tarawa Island in the South
Pacific, Orchard Depot was renamed O'Hare International Airport, in
memory of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Edward Henry (Butch) O'Hare.

Butch O'Hare, born in St. Louis and raised on Chicago's South Side,
was the affable, charming, pleasant-faced son of Edward J. O'Hare,
wheeler-dealer millionaire lawyer, federal informant and
partner-in-crime of Scarface Al Capone.

In a very real sense, Scarface Al, through his close involvement in
the life and sudden death of the senior O'Hare, was Butch's Godfather.
At the time the airport was named for the younger O'Hare, the Capone
connection was even then beginning to be lost and forgotten -
preserved only in the yellowing newspaper clips that almost no one
ever read anymore.

The day after Pearl Harbor—December 7, 1941, or 50 years ago this
month—the then-28- year-old Lt. O'Hare was pulled from the arms of his
beautiful young bride and their infant daughter, uprooted from their
lodgings at the U.S. Naval Training Center in San Diego, California,
and sent west to the shooting war in the Pacific.

Butch O'Hare had graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis,
Maryland, four years earlier in the summer of 1937. He had spent that
first tour of duty honing his skills as a Navy fighter pilot training
out of bases in both Florida and California. Before the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, career Naval officers like Lt. O'Hare were
part of a lonely crowd, generally shunned by a pacifist population
that solidly re-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt on his pledge
to keep the country out of war.

But after Pearl Harbor, the Butch O'Hares of the country were suddenly
in great demand. About ten weeks after the "day of infamy," as
Roosevelt called the Pearl Harbor attack, Lt. O'Hare was flying his
single-engine Grumman F4F fighter in the area of the Gilbert Islands.

O'Hare, accompanied by a wingman in another Grumman Hellcat, spotted
nine Japanese twin-engine bombers zeroing in on O'Hare's floating home
base, the aircraft carrier Lexington. At that crucial moment, only
O'Hare and his wingmate were aloft. The rest of the Lexington's
fighters were aboard the carrier refueling and reloading, with the
enemy bombers only about four minutes from their target.

Then, O'Hare and his buddy discovered that the .50 caliber machine
guns in the second Grumman had jammed, leaving only Lt. Butch O'Hare
between the airborne assassins and the 2,000 or so Navy men on the
Lexington.

But this was a guy who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. This was
a guy whose father had friends in the Mafia. This was a guy who knew
everything there was to know about firearms - and how to use them.

One at a time, Butch O'Hare flew at the heavily armed incoming
killers, and one at a time, he began killing them off. In just
seconds, the Japanese squadron was in disarray, with Butch sweeping up
from below to within 20 or 30 yards of a bomber, then stitching its
fuel tanks with machine-gun fire, causing it to explode in flames,
then peeling off to attack the next enemy plane from above, opening
fire at a range close enough to see terror in the eyes of a Japanese
pilot as he gets shot to death.

All told, O'Hare destroyed five of the nine invaders, with three more
being killed by Lexington pilots who were able to take off after
O'Hare first engaged the bombers. The last Japanese plane, badly
damaged in the shootout with O'Hare, was able to get out of the
immediate area, but is believed to have crashed at sea some distance
away.

For his inspiring exploits on that fatal day in February 1942, Lt.
Edward H. (Butch) O'Hare was designated the U.S. Navy's first "Ace" of
World War II. He was immediately promoted two grades from Lieutenant
Junior Grade to Lieutenant Commander.

The airborne shootout took place within sight of hundreds of Lexington
crew members. O'Hare was being fired on with machine guns and cannons
from all angles, but he "just kept moving," one eyewitness report
says.

"O'Hare didn't give the Japs a chance," his commander later said of
the dogfight. "He just outnumbered them."

President Roosevelt called Lt. O'Hare's outstanding performance, "One
of the most daring, if not the most daring, single action in the
history of combat aviation." Years later, when Chicago's Orchard Depot
airport was renamed for Butch O'Hare, President Roosevelt's glowing
tribute was engraved on a plaque and included in an exhibit that stood
for years in the International Terminal.

Butch O'Hare's singular exploits did not stop with the Lexington
defense. Later in 1942 and in 1943, he acquitted himself brilliantly
in developing new techniques for intercepting and destroying enemy
aircraft at night. He subsequently earned the Distinguished Flying
Cross for these efforts.

But on November 26, 1943, while on a night interception near Tarawa,
Butch O'Hare was shot down and lost at sea.

His chaplain, Lt. Cmdr. Donald Kelly of Chicago said of him:

"Butch O'Hare was very enthusiastic about his wife and baby girl (who
was not yet two years old when he died). He was a real hero. He was
tops with both enlisted men and officers."

The Butch O'Hare story was inspiring enough to prompt some 200,000
Chicagoans to turn out for the 1949 renaming of the airport, including
then-Chicago Mayor Martin H. Kenelly and then-Illinois Governor Adlai
Stevenson. There were bands and speeches and overhead, a lone,
smoke-equipped aircraft spelled out the name "O'Hare" in block letters
emblazoned against a clear blue sky.

But it could not have happened that way had it not been for the
corrupt, tawdry and openly criminal life and death of Butch O'Hare's
father.

Edward J. O'Hare, originally of St. Louis, was a young lawyer on the
make when he ran into a local inventor and dog lover named Oliver P.
Smith. In 1909, Smith had developed a mechanical rabbit for use in dog
racing. For the next decade, Smith refined his invention and finally,
after hooking up with O'Hare, got the device patented.

Smith and O'Hare showed the running-rabbit system around the country,
just as the sport of dog racing was capturing the public's
imagination. The pair's early successes came in Florida, Massachusetts
and Illinois. Without exception, the people who were opening dog
tracks in those days were Mob guys who willingly paid Smith and O'Hare
a percentage of the gate for their use of the rabbit.

The inventor died in 1927 and O'Hare, who was, after all, a lawyer,
aced Smith's widow out of the picture and gained complete control of
the rights to the rabbit for himself. At about that same time, O'Hare
shed his wife and took his three children, Butch and his sisters
Patricia and Marilyn, with him to Chicago.

Scarface Al Capone took an immediate liking to Eddie O'Hare and
brought him into the newly-created Hawthorne Kennel Club as a major
partner. Dog racing, then as now, was illegal in Illinois.
Nevertheless, Capone, O'Hare and several top Mob characters operated
the Hawthorne plant (located in Cicero) while they kept the legality
vs. illegality question tied up in court for several years.

Also, the dog-loving team of Al and Eddie took their show on the road,
gaining control of a Boston-area track and two plants in Florida. The
scam aspect of dog racing—which is what obviously appealed to Capone,
if not also to O'Hare—was as easy to carry off as throwing a dog a
bone.

The races were usually made up of eight greyhounds chasing the
mechanical rabbit around a half-mile track. The dogs were trained to
break from a starting gate which was actually a line of eight
individual kennels, or boxes, with wire-mesh fronts that snapped out
of the way the instant the rabbit started to run. Reaching speeds of
40 miles an hour or so, the dogs would sprint after the mechanical
rabbit, never catching it, with the first greyhound across the finish
line being the winner, the second grabbing the place payoff and the
third animal coming in to show.

Betting was done according to the pari-mutual system, which is the
same plan used at horse and dog tracks around the country today. But
what turned the sport into the money- generating scam that it was for
Capone and O'Hare were the twin facts that (1) dog racing was
unregulated at the time and (2) if you give each of seven dogs a pound
of hamburger a few minutes before a race, it's a cinch that the
eighth, unfed dog will win.

It should take no stretch of the imagination to figure out which dogs
Scarface and Eddie and their criminal associates were betting on in
those days.

Eventually, dog racing in Illinois was determined to be unequivocally
illegal and the Capone- O'Hare combine had to shut down the Hawthorne
Kennel Club operation, although they continued to run dogs in the
Boston, Miami and Tampa areas.

But, almost overnight, they turned the shuttered Hawthorne Kennel Club
into Sportsman's Park Race Track and began to run thoroughbred horses
where once greyhounds had chased Oliver Smith's running rabbit. Never
mind the fact that Sportsman's was right next door to Hawthorne Race
Course which, for 40 years at that time, had also been running
thoroughbreds.

If one horse-racing facility was good for Cicero, Capone and O'Hare
evidently figured, two would be twice as good.

Edward J. O'Hare was named president of the new Sportsman's Park
racing plant.

In addition to running Sportsman's, O'Hare performed a variety of
legal services for Scarface Al and various members of the Capone Mob.
He was always right around the edges of the ever-present political
fix. He looked after the murder, gambling and prostitution busts that
assorted Capone guys were always getting themselves into. He became
deeply involved in setting up elaborate real estate and stock
transactions for Capone, himself and other insiders of the gang.

Along the way, Eddie O'Hare developed both a friendship and a real
estate partnership with a Chicago Rackets Court Judge named Eugene J.
Holland. Just as an indicator of the kind of guys O'Hare ran with, in
one 15-month period, Judge Holland dismissed gambling charges against
12,624 defendants, while finding only 28 guilty.

But where Edward J. O'Hare may have been the personification of the
corrupt lawyer, he was a doting father whose love for his offspring
knew no bounds. His daughters were raised as if they were some kind of
Irish-American Princesses. And for his son, Butch, there was nothing
that he would not and could not do.

Educationally, it was only the best schools of the day for Butch.
Recreationally, the senior O'Hare always found time to spend time with
his son, whether it was at a sporting event or a poetry reading or a
theatrical production or just shooting cans off the back fence with a
six- shot .38.

In conversation, the senior O'Hare's favorite phrase seemed to be, "My
son, Butch…"

When Butch was about to graduate from high school, he told his father
of his burning ambition to go to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.
If money had been the only problem, Eddie would have dipped into his
pocket and sent the boy off to Maryland without a second thought. But,
then as now, entry into Annapolis required the blessing of a would-be
midshipman's local representative in Congress.

At the time, Al Capone was hot and getting hotter. It was known that
the Feds were closing in on him with a unique new form of prosecution
based on violations of the Federal income tax statutes. It was also
widely known that Capone and Butch O'Hare's dad were deeply involved
in a variety of joint enterprises, some criminal and some only
quasi-so. What O'Hare knew about Capone's day-to-day criminal
activities was the stuff that the typical Federal prosecutor's dreams
are made of.

To make that dream a reality, all that was needed was the timely
intervention of a St. Louis Post Dispatch reporter who was in the odd
position of being both a personal friend of Eddie O'Hare and the best
buddy of one of the key people on the prosecution team. The reporter,
John Rogers by name, knew that O'Hare wanted very badly to get his
young son into Annapolis.

Rogers first went to his pal on the Capone prosecution team, who took
the pitch up the line to the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue
Service, who then went to Congress with the plan, which then found its
way over to Annapolis, with the word coming back down to Eddie that
Butch was in - if only the senior O'Hare would tell everything the
Feds wanted to know about Scarface Al Capone.

He did. The Feds made excellent use of the information. Capone went
down for 11 years, with the first two years being served behind the
bars of the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta, and the rest spent locked
up on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

In 1937, the year that Butch O'Hare graduated from Annapolis, his
father received a piece of mail from an ex-con who had been in
Alcatraz with Capone. In simple, declarative sentences, the note read:
"Capone is mad. He is enraged. He will kill you."

The senior O'Hare, still President of Sportsman's Park Race Track and
a millionaire lawyer with enough horse-racing interests, dog-racing
deals, real-estate interests and stock transactions to keep an army of
accountants on overtime, began to seem a little nervous, a little
distracted, his friends said.

However, Ursula Sue Granata, sister of a Mob-tied State Representative
and Eddie O'Hare's seven-year fiancee, denied that he was showing
signs of any kind of strain or nervousness. "He entertained ten or
twelve friends at a dinner party in the Illinois Athletic Club," she
said. "Contrary to some things I have read, I didn't see the least
indication that he was nervous," Miss Granata declared.

Eddie and Sue, who were long an item in the gossip columns, never
seemed able to get their relationship formalized because his earlier
divorce from Butch's mother kept all the Catholic priests in the area
from officiating. However, they were hopeful that by about the spring
of 1940, their request for a dispensation from the Vatican would come
through and they would then be able to marry.

But before that happy day would come, Alphonse Capone, regarded by
many as the father of organized crime in America, was due to be
released from Alcatraz.

On November 8, 1939, or about 27 months before Lt. Butch O'Hare would
save the U.S.S. Lexington, Edward J. O'Hare was seen cleaning and
loading a Spanish-made .32-caliber semi-automatic pistol in his office
at Sportsman's Park. Although he was known to own several firearms, he
was never known to carry a gun.

He left his office that afternoon, got into his black 1939 Lincoln
coupe and drove away from the track, heading first north on Cicero and
then northeast on Ogden, toward Downtown Chicago. As Eddie O'Hare
approached the intersection of Ogden and Rockwell, a car roared up
beside him and two shotgun-wielding murderers opened fire with
repeated blasts of big- game slugs. The slugs tore through the glass
and metal of the Lincoln's door, killing Eddie instantly.

As the Lincoln crashed into a post at the side of the roadway, the
killers continued east on Ogden, where they soon became lost in other
traffic. As might be expected, they were never found.

In addition to the gun that Eddie O'Hare never had a chance to use,
police removed from his pockets a rosary, a crucifix, a religious
medallion and a poem clipped from a magazine.

The poem read:

The clock of life is wound but once
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour.
Now is the only time you own.
Live, love, toil with a will.
Place no faith in time.
For the clock may soon be still.