Oral History Project

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project THOMAS P. GALLAGHER Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial Interview Date: October 26, 2012 Copyright 2015 ADST Q: Today is 26 October 2012, an interview with Thomas Gallagher. All right, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? GALLAGHER: 9/11/1940 on Fifth Avenue, New York City. Q: All right, let’s start on your father’s side. Where does the Gallagher side of the family come from? GALLAGHER: The bogs of Mayo, God help us. Both of my father’s parents were immigrants from Ireland. My father was born in Philadelphia. My grandfather was a wetback. He swam ashore. Q: How did that happen? GALLAGHER: The Brits had a bounty on his head for something that happened in a pub. He called it revolution. They called it murder. He fled to Liverpool and was found by an Irish cop who said, “They know you are here. Get out of town.” He went down to the docks where he knew some longshoremen who stowed him away on a freighter. Two weeks later, the ship docked in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was afraid to get off during daylight hours for fear that the immigration folks would send him back to England to be hanged, so he waited until dark and swam ashore. The next morning, he asked somebody, “Which way is it to Philadelphia?” They pointed and said, “It is over there.” Four and a half days later, after stealing apples from the farmers in New Jersey, he arrived in Philly. He stoked coal in a steel mill for the rest of his life and made bathtub gin in the basement during Prohibition. He died shortly after my birth confirming what he believed was a curse on the name I shared with him. The curse was made by an Englishman who was reduced to penury because of a boycott that was arranged by one of my ancestors. As he got on the boat taking him away from Ireland the Englishman reportedly said: “Let there be a curse on the name Tom Gallagher. For every one who is born, one must die.” My grandfather insisted that this process has gone on for generations. Strangely he didn’t tell my parents about the curse until after they had chosen my name and baptized me. I think he was ready to die. Q: What had the Gallaghers been in Mayo? GALLAGHER: Farmers. 1 Q: And your grandfather met up with an Irish girl? GALLAGHER: I believe they met in this country. She was from not far away from where he grew up. Q: Do you know anything about her background? GALLAGHER: Very little, actually. She was the only grandparent that I can remember, but I don’t know much about her. She was a bit of a grumpy old lady and didn’t talk much about her background in the old country. She was a Lynch of the family that invented the word, but those hangmen were not closely related to us. Q: Well then your father. What do you know about him? GALLAGHER: Not as much as most people do. His work took him away from home a lot, and he died when I was 13. During the war, he was a truck driver for the army. He was diabetic, had two kids, and was a little too old to be drafted. His job took him on long trips to California and Georgia that kept him away. After the war, he became a private chauffeur. Q: In Philadelphia? GALLAGHER: No, in New Jersey and New York. His army job took him to Fort Monmouth, NJ and we lived near there. Before the war he had been a chauffeur for various people and a cab driver in New York. He was the Pope’s chauffeur briefly in the 30’s. Before he ascended to the papal throne, Pius XII spent six weeks in New York. My father was working for a priest at the archdiocese at the time, so he was lent to the Pope. That was his claim to fame. Q: How about on your mother’s side? GALLAGHER: My mother was an immigrant from a town called Charlestown, which is located right on the border of Counties Mayo and Sligo in the west of Ireland. She came to this country in 1925 as a 19 year old – all alone and scared to death. My parents married in ’38. She worked most of her life as a maid and waitress. Q: Was this mostly in the Philadelphia area? GALLAGHER: She started out in Philadelphia but she didn’t like her relatives in Philly, so she moved to New York as quickly as she could. Q: This is why you were born in New York City. GALLAGHER: That is right. My father was also pressured to get away from Philadelphia. I didn’t learn this until I was more than 50 years old, but apparently I have 2 an older half sibling who was born out of wedlock. According to the very little I know about it, the girl’s father was a cop who made it clear to my father that he was not safe in Philadelphia. So he moved to New York. Q: Other than half siblings, did you have any brothers and sisters? GALLAGHER: Only one, and he died at age two. He was two years younger than me. Q: So you grew up as an only child. GALLAGHER: Basically. My parents had what I call a “Catholic divorce.” After the war, my father worked for a fascinating family who founded MGM and Random House among other things. They lived in New York City during the winter months, and he stayed there with them. We lived in the garage of one of their estates on the Jersey shore. Q: What family is that? GALLAGHER: The family name was Goldsmith. Mrs. Goldsmith was a Selwyn, which is the wyn part of Goldwyn. Her brothers went into partnership with a tailor from Brooklyn named Samuel Goldfish. They wanted to combine their names to name their business. Q: Oh yes, Goldfish, of course. He became Sam Goldwyn, didn’t he? GALLAGHER: That is exactly true. In combining their names, they didn’t want to become the Selfish Corporation, which had obvious disadvantages, so they named it the Goldwin Corporation. Mr. Goldfish took the name and became Samuel Goldwyn. Like everyone else in Hollywood, the Selwyn brothers learned rather quickly to hate his guts, so they ran him out of the company and sold it to an outfit called the Metro Corporation, which in turn sold it to Louis B. Mayer a couple of years later. Q: Did your father have any stories that came out of this work? GALLAGHER: All sorts of stories. We lived dull lives, but there were always names to drop and stories to tell about the people we worked for while we had dinner. Q: I am a movie buff so it is up to you. GALLAGHER: Mrs. Goldsmith was the daughter of an itinerant rabbi who ended up in Selma, Alabama in 1890. You can imagine what the Jewish community in Selma was. I don’t think he was a very successful rabbi. But she did something that no rabbi’s daughter in the 5,000 year history of Judaism ever did before. She married an Irishman. Q: Good God. 3 GALLAGHER: Good God indeed, what a scandal. Her first husband wrote songs with and for Charlie Chaplain including “Come Away with Me Lucille in my Merry Oldsmobile.” Their daughter sued Oldsmobile for a quarter of a million in ’54 when they were using that song in their ads without her permission. Anyway, Mrs. Goldsmith divorced the Irishman who died dead drunk on 10th Avenue with 47 cents in his pocket. She then married Sam Goldsmith, a member of the German Jewish aristocracy, who had divorced his wife, a Guggenheim, in a great scandal in the early 20th century. He then turned around and to the absolute horror of the German Jewish community, he married a Russian Jew. Furthermore, she was an actress, and further still her first husband was Irish. What a scandal that was! Q: I am aghast. GALLAGHER: Mrs. Goldsmith’s brother Edgar, the one who founded the Goldwyn Corporation, led his three younger siblings to Chicago after their parents both died in Selma. At age 20, he decided that he was a failure, so he jumped into the Chicago River in an effort to commit suicide, but it was January or February and the river was frozen solid. He didn’t even break a bone. As he dragged himself onto the river bank, a thief put a gun in his face and said: “Your money or your life.” “That’s exactly the point,” said Edgar. “I have no money and I’m trying to commit suicide, so please shoot me.” The bandit couldn’t pull the trigger. Instead, the two of them sat on the riverbed to discuss their mutual poverty. Edgar decided that the only thing they had of value was the gun; and he persuaded the thief to hock the gun and split the profits with him. He parlayed that into ownership of the two largest vaudeville theaters in the U.S. – the Twin Theaters, which are registered landmarks in Chicago. He also built the second theater on Times Square in partnership with an Irishman named George M. Cohan. It’s now the American Airlines Theater on 42nd St., and is also a landmark.

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