Grabbed lunch the other day with a Southside legend who was hitting town for his cousin Jack O’Rourke’s funeral and we made a coupla stops to catch up and share some stories. His business card reads:
Captain Patrick ‘Doc’ Connelly
100 Ton U.S.C.G. Master
Royal Butler/Estate Manager
He went to Immaculate Conception in Elmhurst before Northern Illinois University and bounced across the bars of Rush Street for a few years in the late seventies. He’s lately been a ship captain in Florida, (“a nauti sailor”) but is a firm believer in re-inventing yourself every five years or so just to change things up.
He reminds me of the bartender in Preston Sturge’s classic film THE GREAT McGINTY, as he unspools his adventures all over the world.
He tells me he arrived on earth in Roscrea, Tipperary where he was adopted from a Mother and Baby home and then brought to the windy city to live with the Connelly’s.
As an altar boy Monsignor Plunkett advised him, “Sprinkle the holy water liberally Patrick!” and the lad asked, “Is it supposed to sizzle when it touches my skin?” And the revered Monsignor sez through his brogue “Well if it takes an exorcism, we’ll get the divil out of you one way or another!’
He was a. medic in the U.S. Army stateside during the backside of Vietnam, “hence the name ‘Doc’, and I was the medical emergency room tech at West Point…the name Doc was named after my late, great, and he was a WWII medical surgeon. I took on the name Doc in honor of my father.”
After college he went to work on Rush Street as a jack of all trades carpenter/bartender/fixer on the “street of dreams” at Butch McGuire’s and other pubs. “I helped build them…I was kinda one of those utility infielders. The bar broke, we got some broken chairs, this and that, and you’re working on them and oh, hey, you need a drink? And six hours later it’s whatever, two in the morning, like, hey I gotta get outta here, and the next day you’re back fixing somebody’s back door.”
Doc bounced between PJ Clarke’s and Butch McGuires, “My two watering holes…it was always interesting being down in that neck of the woods, in that business, you’d have gangsters rubbing elbows with cops and you’d have politicians rubbing elbows, but when you came to the watering hole, everyone was equal.”
Keeping to his five-year re-invention plans he then moved to Amsterdam to become a Royal Butler. Like the trade schools for plumbers and electricians there is actually a trade schools for butlers!
Doc met Robert Wennekes, chairman of the International Butler Academy and they hit it off.
Doc is an eccentric, switching accents and character voices as he goes along and he finally explains to me, “You know what it is, I’m just a strange ranger, kind of. I was always good with voices and a good ear and things like this. But as a funny, which at the time, Robert Wennekes didn’t seem to think so funny.”
He had many adventures at butler school and wound up teaching there as well, but eventually after three years moved to Florida to become a yacht captain which is his current gig in Fort Lauderdale. He credits Butler school with saving him from a bout of depression that he finally beat when he realized, “it brought back my spirit, the flame was back, I was like, hey I’m in command.”
Spoken like the true ginger he is.
Doc has lived more lives than a cat, but one of his truly incredible adventures, at least to my pointed ears, was his very brief marriage to the one and only Seka, the Platinum Princess of the adult film industry in the late seventies, early eighties. He is respectful and loving when discussing Seka so we won’t probe for details. Just wow!
These days he’s a hire-at-will ship’s captain down in Lauderdale and, above all, he is great company.
When we met weeks ago after his cousin’s funeral he was sanguine as we sat in his brother’s car in a local cemetery and he told me these stories. “It’s meant a lot to me and you never forget your roots, and it’s still the Nelson Algren, Mike Royko city of great stories.”
Doc, there will never be another like you!
