~Colleen O’Brien
Frank McNulty, a classmate of mine in Jefferson, died last week – January 6, 2026. My sis called to tell me, and I’ve been crying since. I think he was, as I wrote in my journal, the case of “One more bites the dust.”
Frank and I are of an age when people die. We graduated from Jefferson High School in 1962 – so long ago. And I’ve been through sorrowful times when people I’ve known all my life or in parts of my life died.
I think I’m crying because I’ve been stoic about so many others who’ve preceded Frank. With his death, the accumulation has finally laid me low. I knew I’d see Frank McNulty again when I happened to be in Jefferson over Memorial Day at the Catholic Cemetery where he came every spring to honor his parents. But now, that’s not going to happen.
Frank was a country boy who tried out for Little League. My dad, Clem O’Brien, helped start Little League in Jefferson. He watched Frank at the spring try-outs in 1953 or ’54, and in Dad’s mind, Frank was a perfect prospect for catcher on his team, the Sox. When he told him, Frank replied that he couldn’t do it; he had chores at home.
So, Clem stopped by the McNulty farm north of town while he was on his rural mail route and told Frank’s parents he needed Frank on the team. The McNultys explained how they couldn’t get Frank to and from all the practices and games, what with running the farm. Dad told them he’d bring their boy home from practice and games, pick him up on weekends if there was a practice, and, oh, yes, lend him a catcher’s mitt.
Over the years, Frank was a huge part of the Sox winning so many games because as Dad said, “He’s a natural.”
Frank may have been a great catcher in the making but he was also a stocky, red-haired, freckle-faced pain, at least to this classmate
In our high school typing class, Frank sat in front of me. If he’d sat behind me in an earlier era, he would have been the boy dipping my pigtails in the inkwell. But modern days as it were, Frank simply turned around each time we had a timed typing test and moved the carriage of my typewriter, which took my speedy typing to the next line. My typing time never made it to a passing grade because of him.
But the most astonishing thing Frank pranked on me had to do with my dad’s Volkswagen and a catechism class at St. Joseph Catholic Church when we were JHS juniors.
His joke on me was monumental and should be honored in some hilarity museum because of its brilliance, however mortifying it was to me at the time.
As juniors, our catechism was held on Wednesday evenings in the front pew of the church’s nave with Father McGuire as our instructor. On a spring evening, after our hour of instruction, we filed up the middle aisle to the doors of the church. We couldn’t open them, so we went to the side door, walked around to the front of the church, and … there on the very top steps in front of the main entry was my dad’s red Volkswagen.
Dumbstruck, I stood there in confusion, until Father McGuire came upon the scene and said, “Miss O’Brien! This is not funny!”
Well, no kidding, Father, but do you really think I did this? I did not say it out loud.
And as I stood there with Father McGuire, Frank and his sidekicks – whoever they were – ran up the steps, picked up the little VW and brought it back to its parking place on the curb.
Crime solved.
I have no idea what trouble Frank got into because of the highjacking; I left the scene, drove to the library to give me a little time before I had to go home and tell Dad before the word got to him that I’d been accused of driving his VW up the steps of St. Joseph Catholic Church.
~~
In later years, I saw Frank now and then if I was home on Memorial Day and a couple of times at our class reunions. At one of them at a party at my summer home in Jeff, Frank said to me, “If it hadn’t been for Clem O’Brien, I would have become a bad boy. Playing on the Sox for your dad put me on a straight path.”
And Frank McNulty followed that path to an extremely good life as a salesman, married well to a wise and easygoing woman named Elaine with whom he had four daughters.
How very appropriate, Frank, that you had FOUR daughters to rear!
I wish I could be there as you get to the Gates of Heaven, so I could watch how you explain your Volkswagen caper to St. Peter.
But what I believe is this: God has a better sense of humor than the Gatekeeper and will let you in because, way after the fact, you brought such laughter into my life, and I know, into the lives of all who knew you.
