(Linda Wheeler/WASHINGTON POST) - The O'Leary family sits aboard their ship, Chicago, while they wait for decision by Navy about their use of their dock in 1973.
James O’Leary claimed that he and his family were firm believers in reincarnation, that eastern religious doctrine whereby the human soul returns to Earth to live in a new body.
“We’ve been through it.” he told a Post reporter in 1973. “But we made one mistake — we came back as O’Learys.”
There were a lot of O’Learys to come back as. When James, his wife, Florence, and their 17 children arrived in Washington in 1972 and moved aboard a dilapidated boat, they must have looked like some sort of invading army. Old salts on the Washington waterfront still remember them — and none too fondly. The Von Trapp family they were not.
James grew up in an orphanage in North Tonawanda, N.Y., between stints in nine foster homes. He said he spent six years as Harpo Marx’s makeup man. Florence said she was the half sister of flame-haired Hollywood movie star Rhonda Fleming. The couple met at the Iowa State Fair, where Florence was working. James was going to steal one of the prize fruits. Florence gave it to him. Perhaps she was what we now call an enabler.
The pair crisscrossed the U.S.A. in an old school bus and then started filling it with their offspring, including four sets of twins and one set of triplets (named Tom, Dick and Harry). Were there really a total of 17 little O’Learys? Some newspaper accounts say so. Others put the number at a still impressive nine or 11.
Whatever the total, they traveled the world with their parents. James ran oil in Pakistan and ferried boat people in Vietnam. The authorities did not always approve of his activities.
“What’s a crime in one place makes you a hero in another,” James said. He would know. He was imprisoned for seven months in Guam and then spent seven months in a Chinese jail. He couldn’t have asked for more loyal kids, though. Once in Honolulu, his children used pikes and gaffs to repel a police boarding party.
There is a romance to the water, but harbors are also places of mud, muck and mire, of barnacles and bilges, and this was the O’Learys’ milieu.
They were “like hermit crabs,” a Post reporter wrote, “scavenging any musty derelict boat and knocking around the world until they run afoul of the law.”
They had a habit of resurrecting wrecks and making them barely liveable. Such was the case with the Chicago, an 85-foot former workboat they found partially submerged at Washington Marina.
While a boat in the middle of the ocean may be rent-free, a boat tied to a dock is not. The O’Learys allegedly never paid their slip fees at the Washington Marina, and after a year of antagonizing other boat owners and arguing with school and welfare officials, the family and their boat were evicted. It took three police boats, a fireboat, a tug, a dozen D.C. police officers and five U.S. marshals to tow the Chicago away from the marina.
“Get that heap out of here,” James O’Leary shouted at a vessel as it passed the commotion. The “heap” was the presidential yacht Sequoia. (The first family was not aboard.)
The engine on the Chicago did not work, and as the boat drifted toward the Navy Yard, James O’Leary unfurled an orange flag and announced, “We are mariners in distress and claim sanctuary here.”
The Navy was not amused.
The Chicago was eventually abandoned, and the O’Learys raised their next home: a half-sunken minesweeper called the Reliant. They moored it in Alexandria in front of a city-owned boathouse, where it was deemed a hazard to high school crew teams.
But the O’Learys could never stay in one place long, and when a Cadillac limousine was somehow acquired the family drove to Fort Lauderdale. Then they came back to Alexandria and lived in a house on Mount Vernon Avenue, at least until it burned down under mysterious circumstances. They kept returning to their ramshackle boat, as if they needed the comfort of water beneath them.
And then suddenly they were gone.
“Every day that you don’t enjoy life, you’re being cheated,” James O’Leary once said.
It cost Alexandria $20,400 to cut their boat into pieces, haul it ashore and dispose of it. I wonder where the O’Learys are now.
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