December 24, 2024 - It is with great sadness and much relief that our family shares the passing of my dad, Bay 8th Street tennis icon Charles O'Donnell, after a fortunately brief bout with CNS Lymphoma.

He was 84.

Born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in 1940, Dad served in the Army in Panama in 1958. Not long after he returned in 1960, he met my mom Carol Odonnell at a Tito Puente concert at Regina Pacis. They were married the next year, celebrating 58 anniversaries before her passing in 2019.

He got on New York City Fire Department (FDNY) in 1963, putting in 20 years as a firefighter in Sunset Park—running into some of the city’s biggest fires including the Morgan Station Postal Annex blaze in 1967.

After going back to school in the late 70’s, he started an accounting practice out of our home, helping hundreds of clients with their returns over the next 40 plus years—as recently as this year. He also substitute taught at Lafayette High School.

He leaves behind three sons—me, Scott ODonnell and Steve Odonnell—and a massive hole in the 2025 revenue forecast at Gino's Restaurant, Bay Ridge, where he will be forever enshrined on their wall as the man walking into the restaurant in the recently commissioned painting of their storefront.

Eulogy

“Thank you all for coming.

The specials can be found on the single page addition to the menu…

Oh, wait. We’re not at Gino’s.

Sorry, I just assumed because Dad was here that’s where we were.

I’d like to share a few things that I appreciated about my dad–but you’ll have to remember that I got a different experience of dad than others.

Of course, Dad was a little bit accident prone. You’ve all met Scott and I don’t think I was planned either.

There’s almost sixteen years between me and Steve.

By the time I came around, he wasn’t the wild kid who had to be set straight in the Army in Panama–which, of course, didn’t really work.

Eventually, Dad straightened out into a very responsible adult and father–which is pretty amazing when you consider that his father walked out on him when my dad was just an infant.

As Scott mentioned last night, my Dad didn’t really know what it was like to have a dad, except for his Uncle Frank, who set a great example for him.

He always felt like this made him a bit unqualified for the job–but to me, he did amazingly. You can see in photos of me when I was a little kid that he genuinely enjoyed raising a kid later on in life–and I see a lot of that in my own relationship with Mirren.

I’ve also appreciated his relationship with work. He found a way to continue to make a living long after the fire department in a flexible job that he enjoyed that kept him around the house. He had a flexible schedule that allowed for him to attend all my baseball games and take us down to Florida multiple times.

He taught me a valuable lesson in what it meant to have *enough* money… but not to sacrifice your whole life for a job.

The other thing I appreciate about my dad was his bravery.

He fought several really bad fires–including a cargo ship fire in which he and his brothers at Engine 228 had to fight zero visibility to make it down into the boiler room where it had broken out. He also fought a postal annex fire on 34th street in the city in the late 1960’s that was so big, they were calling houses as far as Sunset Park to fight it.

But maybe the bravest moment he ever had in his life was when he had to tell my grandfather that my mom was pregnant. My dad recalled that there was literal steam coming out of Pop’s ears–a memory he rationally knows couldn’t have been true but he swears it happened anyway.

He found a way to eventually build a really strong relationship with my grandfather over time. Pop came to appreciate my dad’s dedication to our family and that meant everything to him.

He took this experience and used it to help others. We found out after he passed that he had helped one of his neighbors rebuild a relationship with his father.

His neighbor wrote the following to me:

“My father and I had a rough life with each other. My father moved to Brooklyn two years ago and he became friends with your dad. I didn’t talk to my dad for a long time, and your dad over time would talk to me about healing our relationship. It didn’t work at first but recently my father and I started talking again. And I can honestly say a major factor of this was your dad.”

He also told us:

“This summer your dad and I sat outside and talked about marriage and life and he said to be really happy, he gave me advice to have a wonderful love like your mom and he had. Oh. He missed and loved your mom more than you can ever think.

Charlie, I am not a book or movie writer, but if I was, your dad gave me a Christmas miracle.”

Since my dad passed, we’ve heard person after person tell us what a great, generous guy he was–from his crew at Gino’s to his pharmacist, his butcher, other accountants, local lawyers… everyone sharing how nice my dad was to them.

My dad also had a great sense of humor. One time, the phone rang during dinnertime on 73rd street. My mom said not to pick it up, but my dad jumped up to answer because he knew it was probably a telemarketer.

“What? Oh, no sorry… I thought you were the plumber calling. A pipe burst and I’m up to my waist in water here.”

While narrating a video of us picking apples upstate, we lamented that we were having trouble finding a tree that had apples left on it. He said, “They oughta hang Farmer Ox by his thumbs.”

When we finally did find rows and rows of apples, he said, “Sorry Farmer Ox for everything I ever said about you. You’re a good man.”

In the last couple of years, my dad really enjoyed being Grandpa to my daughter Mirren. Every single time he walked in the door, he came with a new stuffed animal–each one seemingly bigger than the next. He spent a lot of time swimming with Mirren in local pools and she always wanted him to sit next to her at our weekly dinners at Haenyeo–yes, he did actually eat at another restaurant.

Mirren, who is three, asked if Grandpa was sad when he died.

He honestly wasn’t.

He was comfortable and went peacefully–and while we wished he had more time with all of us, I hope you share the same sense of relief that I had that he didn’t suffer long.

I love him and I’m going to miss him.”