A final toast to former restaurateur and PR executive
Tom Horan loved a good party, a good drink, a bad joke. Decade after decade he pushed downtown’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade and celebrated his own Irish-Catholic heritage.
“I’ve been to St. Patrick’s Day what Santa Claus is to Christmas,” Horan, a veteran restaurateur and public relations executive, used to say.
But no more. Horan, who suffered eight heart attacks and lost a leg to diabetes, died Saturday from the after effects of a stroke. He was 73.
Thomas Joseph Horan Jr. was born Jan. 21, 1945, at St. Joseph Hospital. His mother was Italian and famous for her corned-beef meatballs and spinach fettuccine; his father was Irish, a life insurance salesman, and a huge influence on his namesake son.
Selling was in the family’s DNA. He and his brother, George, were still in elementary school at Sacred Heart Catholic School when they sold doughnuts door to door on weekends. Horan learned he could sell more doughnuts than anyone else when he said they were fresh from his mother’s oven.
At 13, Horan convinced a manager at the now defunct Foley’s department store that he was really 16 and deserving of a job. He worked as a cashier wrapper and packer until he told his supervisor that he needed a raise from 50 cents to 75 cents an hour.
The boss didn’t think so. “You’re very important,” the older man told the kid. “But this is how quickly you’ll be replaced.” By way of demonstration, he removed a spoon from a tall glass of water. In seconds the water was calm and the glass still quite full.
Horan was able to make his point, too. Within a few months, he was earning 75 cents an hour as an usher at Lowe’s State Theater downtown.
From 1962 to 1966, Horan attended the University of St. Thomas. He met his future wife, Jean Jeanguenat, when she was a freshman and he a sophomore. Their first real date was supposed to be a Peter, Paul and Mary concert in late November 1963. Instead, they mourned the death of President John F. Kennedy.
Throughout Horan’s college years, he placed a greater emphasis on practical life skills than academics. By spring semester of senior year, Horan realized he had to have an A in English or he wouldn’t graduate. As he told his professor, he was married by then with a baby on the way, and he had a full-time job at the men’s clothing store, Walter Pye’s.
Horan worked for the clothing store for 11 years. He learned that customers are always right, even when they say and do the damnedest things. That information would stand him in good stead when he switched businesses in 1974. His brother Michael was opening an Italian restaurant, Birraporetti’s, and it quickly became a family affair.
Horan stayed two years, then hopscotched to another restaurant that sounded like a step up. But one day, his key wouldn’t open the front door. He said that’s when he learned a business partner wasn’t paying the bills. From 1976 to 1981, Horan continued to work in new and different restaurants. He loved the hard work, the team effort, the money, the stories.
One night at his most prestigious dining spot, Harrigan’s, customers complained all the food tasted too sweet. When he went back to the kitchen and did some taste-testing, however, the dishes were just right. That’s when he discovered a new bus boy was putting sugar in the salt shakers.
Before truth-in-menus became law, Horan and the rest of the Harrigan’s staff had a habit of substituting pork for veal in some of their most popular dishes. They fooled all their customers, including some who considered eating pork a violation of religious dietary laws. “If I go to hell,” Horan said, “that will be why.”
The genial restaurateur used to schmooze with guests while sipping from a martini glass. The bartender knew to fill the glass with water and a few olives. One night, a friend of Jeani’s called to complain about Tom. He was developing a drinking problem, the friend said. She’d just watched him down six martinis.
Horan started his own public relations business in 1981. He still loved restaurant work, but the hours were so long he didn’t get to see his family. By the time he dragged home at night, his three kids were asleep.
“I had to decide, did I want to be a part of their lives or not,” he said.
One of Horan’s greatest gifts was his ability to attract crowds to the restaurants he represented in his PR business. At a Blackeyed Pea, he once promised a daytime fireworks display. That meant there were no fireworks, really, but a DJ simulating the sounds.
Other clients of Horan’s included Jameson Irish Whiskey and the Shamrock Hotel, which was opened in 1949 by wildcatter Glenn McCarthy. The hotel was decorated in 63 shades of green, in a nod to McCarthy’s Irish heritage, and in no time the Shamrock was home base for others like Horan, who virtually bled green.
The society set loved the enormous hotel, too, but none of that support was enough to fill all 1,100 rooms or make the books balance. The property ended up being bought by the neighboring Texas Medical Center, and eventually was demolished in 1987.
The destruction of the Shamrock, a Houston landmark, was something he couldn’t understand.
An old acquaintance, someone who was on the other side of the debate, called him and said, “You can’t stay mad at everybody forever.”
Horan wasn’t so sure. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, just like the Joni Mitchell song,” he said.
Horan retired from his public relations business in 1995, after his first heart attack, but he didn’t stay gone for long. After he recovered, he tapped into the country’s love for restaurant lists and produced Tom Horan’s top 10 steak houses, Tom Horan’s top 10 seafood houses and even put together a restaurant hall of fame. Restaurants didn’t pay to participate, Horan said, but those that made the lists bought the brochures to pass out to guests.
He retired for good in 2011. “I’d lost 90 percent of my heart from the heart attacks,” he said. “Then I lost my leg. That was really rough. I didn’t want to be a caricature of myself or go from ‘Who’s Who’ to ‘Who’s he?’ ”
Horan described himself as a sort of circus ringmaster, a shoe nut and a clotheshorse, a guy whose corny jokes wouldn’t make it in Sunday school.
But friends told a different story. They knew Horan as an effective community leader and fundraiser, one of Houston’s original “foodies,” a man who served his family, his church and his city.
A vigil will be held 5-7 p.m. Thursday at St. Anne Catholic Church. The funeral Mass will be at 10 a.m. Friday at St. Anne’s.