MTD

August 21,1969 Mommy gave birth to Megan Tara Donohue. I was 6 and remember it all in great detail. Dad took me to a florist to buy her a plant in a pink ceramic baby bootie to take to the hospital. Megan had a full head of black hair, very much unlike KSD and I, and was a big surprise. She was almost instantaneously elected as "Daddy's Little Girl." She was far too cute.

Happy Childhood

The wondrous 1960s childhood in New York State and Vermont.

DED

Deirdre Ellen Donohue was born June 28, 1963 in Syracuse, NY. Mom was studying Library Science at Syracuse during that era. KSD was 4.
To me, this photo in the middle is flawless - such gestures, so many individual independent glances - I am the baby, Kev is in the corner, and my wonderful cousin Linda Repa is there - must be at my grandparents' house in Underhill VT.

Fatherhood in Vermont

Baby Kevin was born in Northern Vermont, where Mom and Dad lived in an apartment owned by Mom's father, John Repa. He looks like a happy camper.

KSD

KSD was born the same week the TV series "Twighlight Zone" premiered. Dad loved him so very much.

St.Thomas ca. 1958

OK, I know very little about these. They are printed from slides I found as a kid. I could not believe this was a real place...St.Thomas, where my folks went before there were any kids, was soooo exotic looking - the color of the water, for example. Hard to imagine from Cortland, NY in the early 1970s.

Thespian Love

Dad was a card-carrying member of Actors' Equity, he said. He performed in Saratoga. He was the reporter [the Gene Kelly part, as I knew it] in "Inherit the Wind," and I was completely dazzled with the production photos as a kid because the play had two actors who appeared in 1960s TV shows, and therefore were significant to me when small...Nancy Culp, who played "Miss Jane" on the Beverly Hillbillies and Victor Buono, who played "King Tut" on Batman.

This was the era of Polly Platt as girlfriend. Great stories about her...wearing a racoon coat from the 1920s on campus at Skidmore - with nothing on under.

Dad did this amusing, slightly insecure, but ultimately unconvincing thing - to canonize all of his former girlfriends - all were too beautiful and too smart and too fun. He never managed to convince me he had ever found anyone who could compare with my mom. I always knew she was the ultimate.

Photo Booth

I do not know when this was taken.
Perhaps it was the weird years when Dad travelled to construction sites for a living...seasonally.
Mom told me that when they met at University of Miami he would say "No wife of mine will work!" She always did, except while in Library school - then too. Her salary was more reliable than his.
In my imagination, this is a photo for mom, while he is off working. I may be wrong.
I could ask her, but no hurry.
This is the half-time of the biography - before the family - and there are great stories, very scrambled.
When he and his cousin emerged from the Marines - the world was their oyster - they had High School equivalency and the GI bill and smarts and were in FL. Dad says that his cousin wanted to be a Soldier of Fortune and told dad to meet him for an adventure, but Dad overslept and the adventure may have been the Bay of Pigs or related venture, because his cousin disappeared. He later said that the man was languishing in jail someplace.
Dad ended up, instead, at University of Miami on the GI bill studying Literature - James Joyce and all that. His girlfriend, he has said a thousand times - was Tina Louise. His other girlfriend was a guitarist from a kid's TV show I watched in the early 1970s, but I forget her name.
He seems to have stalked my mom, who was beautiful and from Vermont and had taffeta dresses and lived in a hotel being used as student housing at 1111 Ponce de Leon Blvd. and there was a pool there where they floted gardenias, but I get ahead of myself. More tomorrow.

Phil Donohue in the Marines

I know a whole lot about this, but all scrambled.
A defining period in Dad's life was his stint in the Marines, where he went at age 17. He was in the 6th fleet in the Mediterranean. He was in Orran North Africa, where he was so sunburned he was hospitalized, and all over Italy [see first posting for my most adored photo - the Leaning Tower of Pisa tourist shot], and here is Rome - the photo is torn, but there is enough to bear out what he told me.

I remember he differentiated the macho Marines from the gay Sailors, who had gone for him, and I thought how overly simplistic that was. This photo, however, has dad crouching in front [2nd from left] beside a sailor who looks absolutely trans-gendered!

Years later a friend who is an old - exquisite - Queen from the Bronx showed me a photo of himself in the navy in the 1950s and described it as the best time of his life [implication being as a gay man], and I wondered if he was on my Dad's ship...hysterical to imagine.

Dad became cosmopolitan, I believe, from the travel and diversity of construction and the Marines. It made him receptive and inquisitive to become the reader and social creature he became.

According to his own myth, Dad was thrown out of High School at age 16 by a belligerent nun. He had a violent altercation with her and off he went. He was walking down the street and his uncle saw him, asked why he was not in school, and immediately took him onto a construction job. Dad's family had been masons for generations. He was apprenticed then and there and still knew more about bricks and masonry than anyone I have ever met into his later years. He was genuinely passioate about the subject.
Although I remain to this day a frustrated brick layer - he refused to train a woman brick layer - he described the method for springing an arch and some other things pretty well - well enough for me to understand masonry better than most. Nowadays I slow down before masonry - new [the building going up nearby in Harlem] and old [churches in Milan and Ticino].
This photo is Dad on a construction site. He loved it. The stories overflowed from him - learning about Italian lunches from the other masons, the integration of construction sites not evident elsewhere in US culture - working for Grace Kelly's dad, meeting cool an famous people in NYC while building there, etc. Grace Kelly's dad, according to dad, saw a younger version of himself in dad and kept lining him up for work - invited him to her debut party in Philly - he was the same age - and kept doting on him until dad tied one on and missed a job. I think that was when he signed on to the Marines.

In this photo, Dad is #11 from the left. You can enlarge it by clicking on it. I love this photo - the rythm of casual poses of the workers and the light. I am very proud that my dad made buildings that live on.

Basketball Kid

Late in Dad's life Uncle Mike came up with this photo...a newspaper clip of Dad in his basketball gear...amazing. The difference between this kid and the one in the studio portrait. Although the outfits are similar, his place in the world is reversed, not being able to afford a uniform, he is awkwardly standing out as a "have-not," yet is a young wolf, filled with vigor and ambition. I really recognize that kid. All of the mysterious photographs from his years in the Marines have that quality - charisma, hunger, wildness. Some of that remained in my memory, but it was in eclipse.

Dad LOVED basketball. He played in the Marines. He bragged that the Marine 6th fleet team he was on beat the Greek Olympic Team - which was so funny to me as a kid. He taught me to shoot and dribble. I wanted to play basketball because I saw how it pleased him. I tried out for the team in 7th grade and was rejected - under height - I was five feet tall.

He watched basketball on TV on weekend afternoons and I fell asleep to that weird noise a gym filled with sweat and audience makes. When I hear a basketball game to this day I feel all sleepy.

Some early photos

The photo here is the earliest one of dad that I know of. It is a proper fancy posed store/studio photo and he is well-fed and well-dressed. It jives with what I know...that Dad was a kind of upper middle class baby, born at the end of the good fortune from the previous generation that was in the process of being gobbled up by "la dolce vita" - Saratoga Springs Style.

Dad's grandfather had dough and the generation of his father - the exquisite George Donohue - used that up in a reasonably short period of time. The industrious part of the family built amazing things in Saratoga - The Hall of the Springs, the Bottle House, and the next generation enjoyed the glorious life in Saratoga, gambling, drinking and so forth...not shown here is a photo I remember but do not possess of my grandfather waiting tables in a stunning white tux.

By the time I knew George Donohue, in the 1970s, he was an anachronistic man with such elegance that everyone was drawn to him. He had handwriting like a prince, and was regal in his bearing, although he lived on Social Security. I always thought that he had bailed out on his family, but later on my Dad revealed that he was not the culprit, but the story was more complex. My grandmother was Helen Donohue, a redhead until her death - a recluse for the last 20 years of her life, mass-goer. Still an enigma. I recall a succession of cats all tabbies - all named Mr./Mrs. Morris after the cat in the TV commercial. I recall that the nuns brought her groceries, and she did not seem to know how to cook, and her red hair dye over her snow white hair made her look comical, like Bozo the clown. I recall that she once went partying with her cousin in a magnificent black car with bat wings up near Syracuse and my Dad and Uncle had to go find them.

Back to the chubby baby Phil - he looks like a typical baby boy of the 1930s. This photo gives no indication of the stories I heard from his childhood. The earliest story was the one about him buying ice creams for a penny each and selling for a nickel each at the race track to the rich New Yorkers - his first job. There were stories about shining shoes and an actual shoe shining kit that may be in storage someplace. Stories about caddying for Jock Whitney and other swells. A story about the filming of the Hollywood film "Saratoga Trunk" and his mother may or may not have been an extra. The Canfield Casino in Congress Park and all of the life around that. Monty Wooley at Saratoga and a painter he knew, so much color.

There was Walter Gries, his grandfather, in a hotel suite with awards and so forth on the walls, who was so deeply impressive to dad. He threw cash to Dad and Mike. He was a diamond cutter. A developer of the gyroscope. The system of having a precise timing bar at the bottom of a photo-finish in a horse-race was a patent of his. He was taken into custody by the USA government during WWII because of the gyroscope knowledge and his Bavarian/Austrian birth. He was released after. All this was part of dad's repertory.

Finally the dark part of the story - his mother turned Dad and Mike over to the Christian Brothers, keeping her daughter at home. The stories about the Christian Brothers were unspecific - cardboard shoes, lice, bad haircuts, hunger, anger, a feeling of despair when he lied about his age to join the Marines and leave his brother behind in order to assure that he would be educated properly. The whole Christian Brothers part made no sense to me until later - when I saw the film "The Magdalen Sisters" in the New York Film Festival and the Director later compared the process of Priests convincing parents to turn their troublesome adolescents over to the church - girls to the Magdalen Sisters in Ireland / boys to the Christian Brothers in the USA. Something clicked at last.

Dad's parents, although they had this baby picture made, were not "parental." Not in any sense I know. His dad was beautiful and fun and fascinating, but not a father, really, and his mom was not maternal in any way whatsoever. However, he took them both on in the end of their lives - made their lives ones of grandparenthood, inexplicably. He re-formatted them to suit his needs, but the ambivalence with which he did this showed through.

Introduction

For some time now I have wished that I could write down all of the scrambled facts of Philip Edward Donohue's life before they begin to be obscured by poor memory. He passed away in March of 2003. I thought about publishing a biography for his grandchildren, using the opportunity to interview the remaining family members for facts, but that was not practical.

Furthermore, my favorite thing about Phil Donohue, my dad, was his colorful self-mythologizing, and I would hate to be disabused of any of my fallacies about him. He wanted to be like Hemingway, and never managed to publish a novel, although I expect that he would have settled into some writing routine in his planned retirement in Key West. He told stories so beguilingly. I have so many of them in my head. No idea whether they can verified, and not sure I want to try.

In the four years since I last spoke to him I have only had photographs to refer to. I really love them because they reinforce most of what I know about him - charisma, street smarts, flair for melodrama, and how he was actually strangely paternal after all, in spite of never having been in a family unit as a child.

It took me too long to recognize that the things that we fought about were our mutual misunderstandings about what our roles were.

I loved him, although he could be miserable to me at times. Not long before his death, about 6 months, he came into focus somehow, and I understood him so well, and really did understand myself better at last.