Apart from being a great left-handed baseball player, Francis Joseph “Lefty” O’Doul (1897–1969) was also an example of an even more eccentric America phenomenon: having an Irish-sounding surname you would never find in Ireland.
Born in San Francisco, 128 years ago this week, O’Doul was indeed of part-Irish extraction, although he had German, French, and Italian forebears too.
He grew up in an enclave called Butchertown, so named for its abattoirs, and sided with the local Irish gangs in regular fights against the Italians of North Beach.
So was his surname a variant of what we call McDowell, just with the wrong patronymic? No. The Irish in him came via a grandmother with the impeccably standard Hibernian surname of Fitzgerald.
What’s with the name? – Frank McNally on O’Doul, O’Day, and other nominal oddities of Irish America
Far away, so close – Fionnuala Ward on measuring distance
The Derry man who influenced George Washington and Alexander Hamilton - Brian Maye on Hercules Mulligan
The BBC’s national question: Frank McNally on Edna O’Brien and ‘the North of Ireland’
But before she would marry a Louisiana Frenchman called Augustus Odoul, she insisted he add a “proper Irish apostrophe” after his O. Thus was the quirky surname put on the map, eventually. Today, a waterway beside San Francisco’s main baseball stadium is crossed by the Lefty O’Doul Bridge.
Lefty’s near neighbours in the phone directory of Irish-American nominal oddities include the jazz singer Anita O’Day (1919 – 2006). She too had roots in Ireland, via both parents, and grew up in Kansas under her father’s surname Colton (her mother was a Gill).
The “O’Day” arose as a stage name. And it sounds slightly more plausible to Irish ears than O’Doul: perhaps because, at least among people of exaggerated poetic sensibilities, the “break o’ day” is a daily event here.
But there was nothing poetic about her stage-name, which came from “pig Latin”: the secret language formed by transferring the opening consonants of words to their end and adding an “ay” sound.
O’Day’s inspiration was the American slang for money. As she explained in her memoir: “I’d decided O’Day was groovy because in pig Latin it meant dough which was what I hoped to make.”
Some Irish American surnames can seem almost plausible while also, if you’re from this side of the Atlantic, making your ears hurt.
Remember, for example, the doomed hero of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, played in the film by Jack Nicholson?
In the original novel, Randle Patrick McMurphy is an “Irish rowdy from a work farm where he’d been serving time for gambling and battery”.
But to us, his crimes also seem to include unauthorised possession of a prefix no genuine Murphy would claim.
Not that the construction is entirely unknown in Ireland. I’ve found at least one in the Irish Times Archive: John McMurphy, a member of the Commercial Traveller Association of Great Britain and Ireland, circa 1931. Even so, it’s an extreme rarity in these parts.
As is O’Murphy, although there is a famous one of those too, for which we must blame France rather than the US. Marie-Louise O’Murphy (1737–1814) was born in Rouen, the granddaughter of a plain Daniel Murphy.
His French-born son, Marie-Louise’s father, then morphed into “Morfi”. But along with the Morfi, she also inherited great beauty, which eventually caught the eye of King Louis XV, who hired her as a petite maîtresse (one of his lesser mistresses).
And unlike R.P. McMurphy, her improvised surname may at least have the excuse of having been founded on a high-class bilingual pun. Inspired by her loveliness, Giacomo Casanova claimed to have called her O’Morphi, from the Greek omorfia, meaning “beauty”.
Getting back to the US, it has also given us McGraw, as in Quick Draw McGraw, the anthropomorphic cartoon horse, and many others. Yes, there are a few of those in Scotland too (McGraws, I mean, not anthropomorphic cartoon horses), the name being probably just a variant of the one we anglicise as McGrath.
As such, McGraw has the virtue of recognising that the original “t” is silent (albeit by making it invisible too): a lesson many English football commentators never learned about Paul of that surname.
Next to Quick-Draw, the most famous McGraw may have been the actress Ali, of Love Story. Given the latter, the second half of her surname also has a certain aptness as a soundalike of grá.
Although while we’re at it, I might note in passing that Ali McGraw helped perpetuate one of the greatest untruths ever uttered in a movie: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” (Excuse me while I laugh bitterly.)
From a very different sphere of American life, there is also the name O’Banion, which has deep roots in the Irish midlands as Ó Banáin but is little known here in the English form. It might be little known in the US too, except that its owners there included the notorious “Dion” O’Banion (1892–1924).
Born in a part of Chicago known as “Little Hell”, he grew up to be one of the mobsters who exported hell to the rest of Chicago. He was thought to have killed at least 35 men before being gunned down himself, an event that in turn started the five-year gang war that ended with the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Since then, his name has been further immortalised by cinema. Posthumously and played by actors, Dion O’Banion may have appeared in more movies than Ali McGraw.
