Frank P. O'Hare

Francis Peter O'Hare, best known as Frank P. O'Hare (1877-1960), was an American socialist political activist, journalist, and newspaper editor. O'Hare is best remembered as the husband and helpmate of Kate Richards O'Hare, one of the preeminent female socialists of the first quarter of the 20th Century, and as co-editor with her of The National Rip-Saw, a St. Louis socialist weekly. Following the couple's 1928 divorce, Frank O'Hare made a career as a writer and columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Francis Peter "Frank" O'Hare was born April 23, 1877 in New Hampton, Iowa, the son of Peter Paul O'Hare, an Irish-born itinerant laborer, miner, and adventurer, and the Dutch-born Elizabeth Weijers Petzold O'Hare, a widowed storekeeper. His father abandoned the family when Frank was a young boy, providing only minimal financial support for his wife and her four children over the years. Frank's mother was forced to take up sewing for sympathetic neighbors while his older half-brother entered the work force at an early age to help the family make ends meet.

In 1881 Frank's mother moved the family to St. Louis, Missouri, and it was there that the boy spent his formative years. The family lived in poverty in a small house, with the children raised to be devout Roman Catholics. Frank began attending public school in St. Louis in 1885 at the age of 8 and began working as a newspaper delivery boy just two years later. His newspaper route, delivering to 200 subscribers, brought Frank not only significant income, but helped introduce him to the newspaper business and political affairs at a very early age.

Frank's mother, who had raised him as a single parent, died in 1891 and the 14-year-old boy moved into a small apartment with his two older brothers, with his sister leaving the state to live with relatives. He managed to stay in school and work part-time for two more years but finally dropped out of high school to work full-time at the age of 16. Although the nation was then mired in the Panic of 1893, O'Hare managed to find temporary work as an engineers' assistant working for the Union Switch and Signal Company, a company which had been contracted to help with the construction of St. Louis's Union Station.

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