I decided to write this autographical memoir for present and future members of my family who wanted to know something about those who came before them.
Lately, two of my three daughters -- Sara and Kelly -- and I have given some thought about the little information we had on our forbearers. I could just tell you about my accomplishments, but a CV (curriculum vitae) can answer that. I wasn’t always just looking out for my family and career, so I thought I would tell you about some of my fun experiences and recount some of the incidences in my life and our family that you may or not have heard many times over the years.
Maybe at some time in the future, these stories will be heard by future generations of our family. In addition to pictures, I have included as much history of the Walshes, Donegans and Hughes that we know. You may not want to read all of this, but as it says in Luke 4:24, “The prophet was not a hero in his own town.” However, pieces of it may bring back some of your own memories.
I have not always been sure of dates, so I decided to put events into categories. I have added an index in the front. I am not always too careful about the spelling and the grammar, so just read along. Some of the stories are told twice. That was not my intention. Just go on to the next paragraph.
I will tell you as much as I can about both families in case you plan to do some in-depth search at some time in the future.
My Father
I was born September 18, 1931 in the Bronx. My mother was Virginia Hughes Walsh.
My dad, Thomas Joseph Walsh, was born in 1890 in New York City. His family lived in old Yorkville in upper Manhattan, in a brownstone house on 87th Street just off Third Avenue. I also have included my father's birth certificate. Also, I have provided his war record and discharge papers. He died in June 1965.
Dad had an older brother, William, who worked as a guard at the Metropolitan Art Museum. They had two sisters, one whose name I do not know. She married a man named Joseph Bracconere, who lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She died early in their marriage, and I do not know any details. She and Joseph had a daughter named Peggy, who lived with our family in New York. She died from some kind of cancer when I was young.
My father's other sister was Margaret, who married a man named Arthur Potter.
I never knew my grandfather. His name also was Thomas Walsh, and he came from Ireland. He is listed as a ''car driver'' on my father’s birth certificate. My grandmother’s maiden name was Sullivan.
Grandfather Tom died young (43), so my father took charge of the family he was 22 when he went to work. He applied to the New York City police and fire departments and was accepted by both. He chose to be a policeman and served in the mounted division. He married my mother in 1930. She was one of the Hughes girls.
My dad used to tell me a lot of stories, and that is where I get the habit. One of the pictures of him in uniform was taken with his best friend in the NYPD. His name was Charlie McCarthy. In my youth, there was a ventriloquist named Edgar Bergen who had a dummy by that name. I’ll leave the jokes for you.
I remember one story in particular. In 1918 during World War I, my dad and one of his friends were sent on patrol in the Argonne Forest and got caught in a box barrage. This is an artillery barrage in which the guns are set out to fire into the four corners of the area under attack. They continue to fire toward the center, catching everyone in the box. Fortunately, my dad survived.
Early in my dad’s career as a policeman, he was assigned to protect a famous Irish tenor named John McCormack whenever he came to town. In those days protection was from fans, not thugs. My parents were invited to a lot of the shows where McCormack performed, usually at the biggest theater in the city, which was called the Hippodrome. It was on Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street. The Hippodrome was torn down in 1939 and is now an office building and a garage by the same name.
The Hughes Sisters
Virginia, my mother, was born June 6, 1901 in New York City. Her father was named Edward J. Hughes, and her mother was named Mary Wall. She married Dad on February 3, 1930 at St. Ignatius Loyola.
My mother died in 1944 in Lenox Hill Hospital when I was about 13 years old. I think she died of Hodgkin’s cancer, though she also had a rheumatic heart condition. There was an autopsy, but I have lost the report that was given to me by Aunt Loretta. In this book, I have enclosed a copy of her death certificate. There is also the receipt for Calvary Cemetery, where she is buried. Unfortunately, I only have a few pictures of her.
There were four Hughes sisters -- May (Mary), Virginia, Edna, Loretta -- and they all lived in Yorkville. Later on, they lived in an apartment on the northeast corner of 90th Street and Madison Avenue. It was a huge apartment that ran the entire floor.
The head of the household was Aunt Kitty, who had married a man named Joe Quinn. He had died years before I first came to visit.
Aunt Kitty and Joe had three children. May and Florence were unmarried and were school teachers. Their brother, John, became a Jesuit priest. Eventually, he was Prefect of Discipline at Xavier High School, my alma mater. After that, he was made pastor of a Jesuit church on the east side of Greenwich Village about Second Avenue and Thirteen Street.
Before Sally and I were to be married, we visited him and I asked him to perform the ceremony. Unfortunately, before that could happen, he died on the altar of an apparent heart attack even though he was in his 30s. You can make of that what you want.
The Wall Connection
Aunt Kitty had a sister named Laura Wall, who also lived there on 90th Street. This is the Wall connection. In the other bedrooms lived the Hughes girls. When I went to Xavier, I used to visit on Friday afternoons. I would take one of the double-decker buses uptown and visit them in my school uniform. Then I would get the IRT at 86th Street, which to this day lets you off at Mosholu Parkway.
One of the Hughes' cousins was named Cummings. That family lived in suburban Washington, D.C. They had a large farm, which was in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The Hughes girls would visit in the summer and go horseback riding. The father was some big shot with the State Department.
The Maust Family
My wife Sally was a member of the Maust family. They also were from Yorkville and knew the Hughes. There was Grandmother Sara Maust and her sister, Aunt Dorothy. There were several brothers. One was Daniel, who was a vaudeville singer. His theme song was “Tea for Two” and I still have his top hat in my closet.
I know Grandmother Maust was well-educated. My mother-in-law was a schoolteacher when she got married. She met Sally's father, Ray Maust, at a coffee house during the First World War.
Ray grew up in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. I don’t know where he was born or anything about his parents. When he moved to New York, he worked for them in PA before he was drafted to work for a coal company called Rainey and Company. He worked himself up through the ranks and he eventually bought the company and called it the Maust Coal and Coke Company. The latter was for making steel. After he married, he moved to Pelham, New York, where he brought his “mother” from Pennsylvania. She lived with his family until she was about to die. She returned to Uniontown before she passed.
As his company grew to be the fifth largest coal company in America, Grandfather Maust went international and called the next company SalJoan Inc., named after his two daughters, Joan and Sally.
A Maust Thanksgiving
Here's a story about Grandfather Maust: When Sally and I were away in North Carolina during my residency, we did not come home for Thanksgiving. During Thanksgiving, the rest of the family was having dinner at the house in Pelham when the lights went out and nobody knew what to do.
Somebody had to call Con Edison. The only person that Ray knew was the Con Ed chairman, Charles F. Luce, so Ray called him. Mr. Luce did not come, but he sent someone over. Ray was not trying to impress anyone. Mr. Luce was the only man he knew, and he was happy to help out.
Early in his life in New York, Ray became friends with J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the FBI for many decades. When I was dating Sally during my time in medical school, Ray was having trouble with the unions. Ray's company had just built a state of the art Tipple, a device which sized and cleaned coal. It cost about $3 million. But someone from the union burned it to the ground. Then someone took a shot at Grandmother Maust's car in Pelham. Nobody was injured. Then the union blew up one of his coal trains on its way to Baltimore for overseas shipment.
When this broke interstate laws, Ray called in his friend J. Edgar. The FBI agents stayed in the house in Pelham. One night, I borrowed my uncle's car. As I drove into the driveway, the lights came on and I was surrounded by FBI agents who stood me tall until Sally and I were vouched for.
Ray was all business but generous. He was very straight about doing the right thing.
Christmas Eve
One of Ray’s business party on Christmas Eve was a luncheon at the Downtown Athletic Club. At the end of it, Chuck, my future brother-in-law, Ray and I were taken home in a Carey limousine. We had to make one stop per order of the girls. We stopped at FAO Schwarz to get a hobby horse for my future sister-in-law's son, John. We picked it up and off we went to Sally’s home.
We were not warmly received by the ladies because our condition was not the best. Before I had met Sally, Ray one year earlier had come home for Christmas in the same condition and tried to put up a Christmas tree. He ended up cutting it in half.
Ray was friendly but was all business, so we rarely had any prolonged conversations. He was always writing checks for some charity or another. The owner of the big limousine company that Ray used a lot was very big in Catholic politics. So, Ray, who was not a Catholic or a member of any church, was talked into writing another check. He was then put on the exclusive Cardinal Spellman committee. Since they felt he was a sucker, that same friend had him write a check to Fordham University and they gave him an honorary degree.
Later on, when Ray died, the local church did not sanction him to be buried with his wife in consecrated ground. A long-time Catholic priest who was very friendly to the family offered a service at the house and accompanied us to the grave.
As I mentioned before, Ray was all business. The Maust’s were invited to England for a royal wedding. The head of American Express was another of Ray’s friends. He arranged for them a great hotel with a view of the parade route and first-class accommodations on the Queen Mary. He even escorted them onto the boat, since Ray was not wild about the trip. Ray went to Wales looking at mines while Grandmother Maust spent most of her time looking out her window. Work, work and work. He then took her to Germany so he could see more mines.
Grandmother Maust was a Donegan. She was born in Manhattan on January 13, 1887 at 1177 Third Avenue. She attended Hunter College and later was appointed a teacher in the city system. Subsequent to this, she went to Columbia.
Sally’s grandmother was named Sara Ann McDonald and she was married at St. Vincent Ferrer Church at 66th Street and Lexington Avenue on November 26, 1873.
Sally's grandfather was named Daniel Michael Donegan. He was born Sept 2, 1854 at home on Second Avenue and Second Street. He died on December 21, 1918.
At one time, Sally’s mother moved to 231 East 87th Street. That is very strange. My father grew up in a brownstone house on 87th Street, on the east side of Third Avenue, but I don’t think they knew each other. This was only four blocks from where the Hughes girls lived on the corner of Madison Avenue and 90th Street. These details, birth certificates and other items will be included in the picture section.
Sally’s mother always said her people came from near the Bridge of Armagh, which is on the border of Northern Ireland. One of the earliest of the Donegan’s came to America as governor of New York City in 1683. Now there were several branches of the Donegan’s, and I know that the one who was governor was from southern Ireland and from history had no children.
Sally’s grandfather was written up in the Catholic Herald along with a history of the Donegan clan. A copy is in the picture file. It seems that our Donegan’s from Grandmother Maust and the Hughes from my mother's side came from Ireland near the Bridge of Armagh.