Midway Airport: The First Seventy-Five Years by Christopher Lynch Lake Claremont Press Phone: 773/583-7800 http://www.lakeclaremont.com/

In Chicago Aviation, before their was an O’Hare, there was an O’Hara, Officer O’Hara. Thomas O’Hara was a police officer who’s beat was Midway airport from the mid-1930's to 1955. The story of how O’Hara was assigned to Midway airport is an interesting chapter of the airport's history.

An immigrant from Ireland, Tom O’Hara was assigned to the Deering Street Station, (which no longer exists). O’Hara was an honest cop in an era when corruption was not unknown in the ranks. He was a plain clothes officer, and he and his partner "were fond of knocking down cat houses", as his son Jim O’Hara, described it.

O’Hara’s next target were two brothels that were known to be protected. When his superiors heard about his plan to raid them, O'Hara was warned to stay away. O’Hara’s response was "too bad. What’s right is right, and what’s wrong is wrong."

He raided the brothels, and was immediately punished by his superiors by being transferred to a walking beat on the southwest side of Chicago. In the early 1930's, that land was basically just a prairie, except for some industrial parks in the Clearing District.

On his walk through his beat, he came across another hotel near the airport that was also reputed to be a brothel. O’Hara was not even in his new district three weeks before he broke up that house of prostitution. He was immediately called on the carpet by his bosses and asked "Don’t you ever learn?"

O'Hara's raid was the last straw. His superiors decided to assign him to the newly built terminal on Chicago Municipal Airport, a simple white building built in 1931 at 6200 S. Cicero Avenue, a block north of the corner of 63rd and Cicero. There, according to his son Jim, "he couldn’t get into any trouble."

In those days, the commercial airlines shared a counter, the CATO ticket office (Consolidated Airline Ticket Counter). At the other end of the small building was a weather station, where chattering teletypes punched up weather reports for the pilots. In one wanted a sandwich, across from the weather station was a coffee shop.

The was also a newspaper stand, run by a boy named Louis Galina. He was only 12 years old, and no one really knows how he got the first newspaper concession for Chicago’s only airport. Galina was hard working and ambitious, and Officer O'Hara looked out for the young lad as if he was his nephew.

Louis also supplied the airlines with newspapers for their airplanes. He quickly realized, as he boarded these aircraft, that passengers often left behind their newspapers at the end of their flights. Louis would resell these papers, and although O’Hara knew about Louis's sceme, he looked the other way, only commenting, "He’s a hustler".

Because he was so young, the young newspaper boy attempted to grow a mustache to look older. As O’Hara’s son Jim recalled, "Not having a great deal to do in [in the terminal] in the late 1930's, the cops trimmed Louis's mustache in the basement where the redcaps and cops had lockers." However, the cops-turned-barbars had a motive; "They shaved half of it off."

Later in life, Louis Galina would go on to become a police officer himself, working for the railroad, as well as owning a restaurant.

Another character O’Hara knew on his beat was Natty Dominique. Natty was a redcap, the porters who carry passenger’s luggage for tips. But Natty was no ordinary redcap. In fact, he was a famous New Orleans jazz man, with stories from the early days. O’Hara would listen to these tales about Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats and say in his Irish brogue, "take half of that and throw the rest away, and divide that up in quarters." But it is true that Natty Dominique was a great jazz artist, as his albums are still available today.

However, working at the airport wasn’t always fun and games. There were accidents, and O’Hara was often the first on the scene. In the day of propellor aircraft, there were sometimes cases of a passenger walking into a prop, especially with twin engine aircraft. When propellor’s turn, they can be invisible to the unsuspecting passenger until its too late. And of course there were crashes off the field as well, that O’Hara would rush to the scene.

Yet the pleasant memories outnumbered the unpleasant ones. When presidents, movie stars and celebrities landed at the airport, O’Hara was there as well. One of the most memorable visits was that of Eamon DeValera, the President of Ireland, who arrived at Midway Airport on an official visit to the United States. And on Midway’s tarmac, he met his fellow Irishman O’Hara, who was also, ironically, a classmate of Dev’s back in their youth.

In 1955, O’Hara retired from the Chicago Police Force and left his Midway Airport beat. He would live to the age of 93, a man whose quiet presence and sense of justice was respected by those who had the pleasure of knowing him.