The joy of being a Mahoney (or is that Mahony?)
It’s a surname that’s chock full of stories
What’s in a name? Ask Jim Oates (pronounced Otis, the Irish way, not like horse feed).
He’s a big fan of the Mahoneys. Not my Mahoneys (though I don’t think he has anything against us) but his own.
Back to Jim in a minute. First, as a surname, Mahoney is not exactly Smith or Jones, but neither is it Shmigliowski.
Especially in those parts of the known world where the Irish have weighed anchor, Mahoney is common enough to take up its fair share of column inches in the telephone book — remember the telephone book?
It has a fairly good footing in Hamilton, present and past — there are and have been a lot of Mahoneys, Mahonys and O’Mahoneys in the city, not the least being Thomas Joseph Mahony (no “e”) (1880-1961), Hamilton city council member, known as Mr. Good Roads for promoting road construction and maintenance.
He was The International Road Federation’s Man of the Year in 1954. (I was briefly named Car of the Year by MotorTrend, a title revoked after my urine tested negative for 10W-40.) And Mahony Park and Mahony Avenue in Hamilton are named after Thomas J.
People ask sometimes if I’m from the Hamilton Mahoneys (there are quite a few) but I’m from the Montreal branch, though I do have three cousins who, like me, have transplanted themselves here. (Hi, Gary, Owen, Patsy!)
But I’m here to talk about the aforementioned Jim Oates, of Burlington, and his Windsor Mahoneys. At great expense of time and money, he had an enormous granite memorial to his mother’s family installed on the banks of the Detroit River in Windsor. Maybe you’ve seen it when down that way. It went up in 2014, after 20 years of red tape. “What I went through,” Jim says, “if I’d had any hair I would’ve pulled it out.”
Who were the Mahoneys of Windsor (actually Riverside, a once separate community that was absorbed into the city in 1966)?
Wilma Mahoney Oates was Jim’s mother and a force on the Riverside Hydro-Electric Commission.
Her brothers Harry, Charles and John Mahoney were, respectively, Windsor postmaster, RCMP superintendent and Windsor deputy police chief.
Most colourful of all, perhaps, Jim’s grandfather Denis J. Mahoney, first police chief of the town of Riverside.
“I used to hang around him all the time when I was a kid,” recalls Jim, an only child.
“He was a kind, gentle giant, sixfoot-three and 270 pounds.
“My grandfather would say, ‘We’re gonna go on a cruise.
“He’d take me to the police station, downstairs to the cells. I called him Pa. He’d close the door of the cell on me and lock it. ‘How do you like it in there?’ ‘I don’t like it, Pa.’”
“Then stay out of trouble and don’t embarrass your family,” he’d say, and let him out. Jim loved those times. And he remembers how the man used to help out the families of men he’d sent to jail, bringing them food, says Jim.
One day Jim’s grandfather interrupted a man trying to break into his house. He chased him across the street before the man shot him. Grievously injured, Jim’s grandfather kept going and captured the shooter.
“He went to the hospital with a slug in his sternum,” says Jim. Somehow he survived. It made the front page of the Windsor Star.
In the ’90s Jim applied to the City of Windsor to have the Mahoneys memorialized somehow. Street name? Park? Parkette?
“They told me they already had a Mahon Street and a Maconi Drive, too close in sound. Lame answers. But I don’t quit.” He argued with the city for years. Finally, land earmarked for a pumping station was no longer needed for that use so they let Jim use it for a memorial.
It’s very striking. Dark granite. Beautiful setting. One day he sent a picture of it to me, given my last name and all. So we met. He mentioned how his Mahoneys originally came over on a “coffin” ship during the Potato Famine. So did mine, I told him.
“Maybe they were on the same boat,” says Jim.
Maybe. Aren’t we all, in a way, in the same boat?
So there you have it. Mahoneys. Just full of stories.
Now if we could just decide how to pronounce it.