WEST PALM GRAFFITI

Born the fifth of eleven siblings in 1950, in San Antonio, Texas, the author grew up in San Juan, PR and then West Palm Beach, FL, where he attended St. Ann's School and graduated from Cardinal Newman High School. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, Mr. O'Hara and his wife Virginia taught elementary school for two years before starting successful landscape and pest control companies, which are now managed by their sons Thomas and Alexander.

Family, friends, neighbors, cops, demographic emergence, fledgling integration, attacks by bullies, attacking bullies back, twelfth floor water balloons, coconut launchers, nail launchers, Cohiba cigars, starter pistols and root beer balloons at the movies, fuse delayed explosives, wilderness and wildfire, getting chased, getting caught, convenience store bullets, rifles, getting paid to race rental cars, crime, combat, the Sixties. Boomers ten years older or ten years younger missed the 1960's transition through an imperfect parallel universe, where the time lapse between relaxed rules and official corrective enforcement was wide open, when the acknowledgement of a second class demographic was beginning to open, and before that window of transition ultimately closed forever.
Liberty flowed through the O'Hara brothers and other unwitting youngsters, inspiring multiple forays into an adventure spectrum ranging from the hilarious to the hazardous. Participants of these forays were safeguarded through adolescence by a dominant but vulnerable culture rooted in family, faith, and tolerance.
West Palm Graffiti is a mostly happy, sometimes violent fictional journey through the southeast Florida culture of a vanished transitional era, depicting memories of improbable events and attitudes from that time and at that place through a perspective limited by adolescence, mobility, and demographics.