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Looks like he was raised by his father.

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His parents were divorce and the father kept the children.

But where Edward J. O'Hare may have been the personification of the corrupt lawyer, he was a doting father whose love for his offspring knew no bounds. His daughters were raised as if they were some kind of Irish-American Princesses. And for his son, Butch, there was nothing that he would not and could not do.

Educationally, it was only the best schools of the day for Butch. Recreationally, the senior O'Hare always found time to spend time with his son, whether it was at a sporting event or a poetry reading or a theatrical production or just shooting cans off the back fence with a six- shot .38.

In conversation, the senior O'Hare's favorite phrase seemed to be, "My son, Butch…"

When Butch was about to graduate from high school, he told his father of his burning ambition to go to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. If money had been the only problem, Eddie would have dipped into his pocket and sent the boy off to Maryland without a second thought. But, then as now, entry into Annapolis required the blessing of a would-be midshipman's local representative in Congress.

At the time, Al Capone was hot and getting hotter. It was known that the Feds were closing in on him with a unique new form of prosecution based on violations of the Federal income tax statutes. It was also widely known that Capone and Butch O'Hare's dad were deeply involved in a variety of joint enterprises, some criminal and some only quasi-so. What O'Hare knew about Capone's day-to-day criminal activities was the stuff that the typical Federal prosecutor's dreams are made of.

To make that dream a reality, all that was needed was the timely intervention of a St. Louis Post Dispatch reporter who was in the odd position of being both a personal friend of Eddie O'Hare and the best buddy of one of the key people on the prosecution team. The reporter, John Rogers by name, knew that O'Hare wanted very badly to get his young son into Annapolis.

Rogers first went to his pal on the Capone prosecution team, who took the pitch up the line to the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, who then went to Congress with the plan, which then found its way over to Annapolis, with the word coming back down to Eddie that Butch was in - if only the senior O'Hare would tell everything the Feds wanted to know about Scarface Al Capone.

He did. The Feds made excellent use of the information. Capone went down for 11 years, with the first two years being served behind the bars of the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta, and the rest spent locked up on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

In 1937, the year that Butch O'Hare graduated from Annapolis, his father received a piece of mail from an ex-con who had been in Alcatraz with Capone. In simple, declarative sentences, the note read: "Capone is mad. He is enraged. He will kill you."

The senior O'Hare, still President of Sportsman's Park Race Track and a millionaire lawyer with enough horse-racing interests, dog-racing deals, real-estate interests and stock transactions to keep an army of accountants on overtime, began to seem a little nervous, a little distracted, his friends said.

However, Ursula Sue Granata, sister of a Mob-tied State Representative and Eddie O'Hare's seven-year fiancee, denied that he was showing signs of any kind of strain or nervousness. "He entertained ten or twelve friends at a dinner party in the Illinois Athletic Club," she said. "Contrary to some things I have read, I didn't see the least indication that he was nervous," Miss Granata declared.

Eddie and Sue, who were long an item in the gossip columns, never seemed able to get their relationship formalized because his earlier divorce from Butch's mother kept all the Catholic priests in the area from officiating. However, they were hopeful that by about the spring of 1940, their request for a dispensation from the Vatican would come through and they would then be able to marry.

But before that happy day would come, Alphonse Capone, regarded by many as the father of organized crime in America, was due to be released from Alcatraz.

On November 8, 1939, or about 27 months before Lt. Butch O'Hare would save the U.S.S. Lexington, Edward J. O'Hare was seen cleaning and loading a Spanish-made .32-caliber semi-automatic pistol in his office at Sportsman's Park. Although he was known to own several firearms, he was never known to carry a gun.

He left his office that afternoon, got into his black 1939 Lincoln coupe and drove away from the track, heading first north on Cicero and then northeast on Ogden, toward Downtown Chicago. As Eddie O'Hare approached the intersection of Ogden and Rockwell, a car roared up beside him and two shotgun-wielding murderers opened fire with repeated blasts of big- game slugs. The slugs tore through the glass and metal of the Lincoln's door, killing Eddie instantly.

As the Lincoln crashed into a post at the side of the roadway, the killers continued east on Ogden, where they soon became lost in other traffic. As might be expected, they were never found.

In addition to the gun that Eddie O'Hare never had a chance to use, police removed from his pockets a rosary, a crucifix, a religious medallion and a poem clipped from a magazine.

The poem read:

The clock of life is wound but once
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour.
Now is the only time you own.
Live, love, toil with a will.
Place no faith in time.
For the clock may soon be still.