Pat Flaherty

Pat Flaherty (March 8, 1897 – December 2, 1970) was an American actor who primarily played uncredited roles as forces of the law.

Biography

Early life

Flaherty was born Edmund Joseph Flaherty in Washington, D.C.; the son of Mary Rose Ella (née Wilson) and Michael Joseph Flaherty. He was the older brother of writer Vincent X. Flaherty.^[1] Flaherty had Irish ancestry.^{[2] [3]} Pat attended the Eastern High School, and the Dean College in Franklin, Massachusetts, after the baseball, he attended the Princeton University and graduated on January 26, 1918.

Early Athletic Career

Flaherty was a popular Washington D.C. athlete and coach, who went on to become a professional baseball and football player who pitched for John McGraw's New York Giants, and punted for George Halas' Chicago Bears. After his professional athletic career ended, he went into the music publishing business with the legendary Da Silva, Brown and Henderson during the time of Mayor Jimmy Walker in New York.

Acting career

Pat Flaherty relocated to Hollywood to take a position as a producer at 20th Century Fox for the owner Joseph P. Kennedy when the Great Depression began. Subsequently he found work as an actor and technical advisor in over 300 motion pictures. Flaherty can be seen in roles both large and small in movies such as Death on the Diamond (1934), Pride of the Yankees (1942), It Happened in Flatbush (1942), The Stratton Story (1949, as the Western All-Stars coach), The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and The Winning Team (1952, as legendary umpire Bill Klem). He was given the task of making William Bendix look, move and act like Babe Ruth in The Babe Ruth Story, and Gary Cooper look, move and act like Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees. In order to make Cooper appear left-handed like Gehrig, the film was reversed. Outside the realm of baseball, Pat Flaherty was usually cast in blunt, muscle-bound roles, notably Fredric March's taciturn male nurse "Cuddles" in A Star is Born (1937). One of Pat Flaherty's most unusual assignments was Wheeler and Woolsey's Off Again, On Again (1937), in which, upon finding his wife (Patricia Wilder) in a compromising position with Bert Wheeler, he doesn't pummel the hapless Wheeler as expected, but instead meekly apologizes for his wife's flirtatiousness!.

Military career

Flaherty graduated from the School of Military Aeronautics at Princeton University on January 26, 1918. That year he was missing from spring training because he was a World War I pilot with the U.S. Army Aviation Corps stationed in Memphis, Tennessee. He was in the military service during the Mexican border war, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, having attained the rank of Major by the time of his final discharge.

Personal life

Pat Flaherty was married twice. His first wife was the former Dorothy Fiske. The couple had one child, Edmund Flaherty, Jr. who was born in 1919 and died in 1995, by which time his name had been changed to Edmund Graham. On January 19, 1929 Flaherty married Dorothea Xaviera Fugazy, the daughter of boxing promoter Jack Fugazy aka Humbert Fugazy, who dared to operate in New York during the heyday of Tex Rickard. Fugazy had grand visions of using outdoor venues to draw larger fight crowds (he owned the Brooklyn Horsemen of the first American Football League in 1926). He was the first promoter to gain the exclusive right to use the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field for boxing matches. Indeed, Fugazy promoted two of Jim Braddock's fights against Norman "Doc" Conrad in Jersey City on December 26, 1926, and against Joe Sekyra in Ebbets Field on August 8, 1928. Dorothea and Pat had two children, Patrick Joseph Flaherty and Frances X. Flaherty Knox.

Death

Flaherty died on December 4, 1970, in New York City of a heart attack. He was a man of many talents who knew how to live life to the fullest by making many friends. The list of celebrities who considered him a friend is enormous. As just one example, when it came time for his daughter Frances to learn to play golf, it was his friend Smoky Joe Wood who taught her. His Washington Senators teammates enjoyed having him around in spring training, and they missed him when he was shipped out. It was the Senators fans' loss that they were never able to see him pitch for the team during the regular season.

References

External links

• Pat Flaherty at the Internet Movie Database
• Pat Flaherty – CITWF