Businessman Frank O’Dea says his story is one of perseverence: ‘It’s about saying that when you have hope, then the rest is possible.’
‘I only recall not wanting to be me’
He was abused, fell into alcoholism and lived on the street. Now, Second Cup co-founder Frank O’Dea tells his story in a new memoir
SARAH HAMPSON
From Monday’s Globe and Mail
August 20, 2007 at 9:07 AM EDT
‘That was the worst because there was no anesthetic,” explains Frank O’Dea. “I was dead sober.”
The co-founder of Second Cup and successful entrepreneur of other ventures is talking about his efforts to explain to his mother, as she was dying of cancer, what had happened in his early adolescence to send him off the rails into alcohol abuse at 13 and, eventually, a life on the streets of Toronto.
Mr. O’Dea was by then a millionaire. “I was searching, I suppose, for a blessing,” he writes (with John Lawrence Reynolds) in his memoir, When All You Have Is Hope, to be published next month.
In bed and ailing, she listened to him pour his heart out. Silence ensued. Then she spoke, eyes closed. He had to lean in closer to hear. He asked her to speak the words again.
“I’ll never forgive you,” she repeated.
“Mom was a very complicated woman,” Mr. O’Dea says now, his face a mask of calm. We are sitting on a bench in Allan Gardens, a park in downtown Toronto, favoured by the homeless and close to where he spent half a year in 1971 moving between Yonge Street, to beg for spare change, to a corner wine store to buy a 99-cent bottle of plonk, and to a flophouse, to pass out, if he had bothered to save 50 cents.
Mr. O’Dea, now 62, is dressed in the uniform of a casual executive, tie-less but groomed. He has flown in for the interview on his own plane, a Piper jet prop, from Ottawa, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters in affluent Rockcliffe Park.
But he is not trying to market anything other than honesty. And in return, he wants neither pity nor congratulations nor celebrity. In fact, he is not sure what his memoir will bring.
“I’m scared of it, frankly,” he says at one point. “It took three years to write. Penguin [publishers] kept saying it needed to be said. But I went through agony. Nobody knows a lot of the stuff [in the book]. I sit on a lot of [corporate] boards.”
“That’s hard,” I offer.
“Yeah,” he says shyly, his eyes cast down at his feet. “I think so.”
In the book, he describes the sexual abuse he suffered, starting at 13, from a policeman, an older woman, two priests and others. “At times I felt as though I were wearing an invitation on my forehead, a sign visible to sexual predators that said, ‘Attack me!’ ” he writes.
Does he worry that people might look at him differently now?
He nods in gentle acknowledgment. “Or somehow see me as less,” says the noted philanthropist and recipient of the Order of Canada.
Mr. O’Dea’s stance is one of meekness, like that of a panhandler, oddly enough. There is a plea, and it is a simple one.
“Some folks will want to put me on a pedestal, and I don’t want or deserve that. Because I’m still a human being. I still make mistakes. I had to think about why I was doing this [book]. It’s about saying that when you have hope, then the rest is possible.”
Mr. O’Dea’s story is poignant and heart-wrenching and makes the reader feel sorry not just for him, but for his parents as well.
He grew up in Montreal West in the fifties, the era of white picket fences and repression. His father was a manager of a paint store and his mother stayed at home to raise the four children. It was a crew-cut life of neatness and perfection.
There was no violence; only cruelty by omission. In that postcard image of perfect family life, love was missing. Or at least, love that the children could feel. His father did not indulge emotion. “Mother did not hug her children on any day that I can remember,” Mr. O’Dea writes.
But the most difficult alienation came when he explained to his father how scared he was after being sexually attacked by a police officer. His father winced, got up from his comfortable chair and left the room without saying a word. They never spoke of it again.
The rejection sent the teenager careening into self-destruction. He stole money for alcohol. He stole the keys to his parents’ cars, including his father’s prized sports car, which he crashed. There were late-night calls from the police. He was expelled from high school, then sent to a private school, and eventually graduated. One semester at an engineering college followed. Eventually, his parents told him to leave the house.
He had a sales job, which he was good at, and an apartment, but drinking soon landed him on the street, penniless and unemployed. “I only recall not wanting to be me,” he explains. “Me was sexually abused and dirty.”
But one day, compelled by the mounting conflict between who he was on the inside – prideful like his father, he says – and who he had become on the outside, he spent a dime on a phone call to an alcohol-recovery facility. When he staggered up the stairs, a woman told him, “You’re home.” It was beginning of hope, he says now.
The recovery process wasn’t easy. He lived at a flophouse while he battled to stay sober, with the help of frequent phone calls to people from the recovery centre. He eventually got a suit from a second-hand store, a couple of shirts and a tie, and a job, selling industrial equipment.
He applied his sales ability to subsequent jobs and in August, 1975, started up a kiosk in a mall to sell coffee beans with Tom Culligan, a businessman he met while both were volunteering on a federal Liberal election campaign. The business was named Second Cup.
“It would certainly make me feel better if I thought I had been loved as a child,” Mr. O’Dea explains in his quiet, solemn manner. “And I probably was in the way they could best describe it, which was not well. But would it have changed things? Perhaps I wouldn’t be where I am if it weren’t for the journey. So how do you blame the journey?”
And his parents? His late father could never forgive him, either.
“Forgiveness. That is the one thing I have learned,” he says.
“That’s very Christian,” I say.
“But it’s so much easier,” he responds, laughing lightly. “Because to carry it is so painful.”
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