Coffee saved his life
Frank O’Dea. Second Cup founder had been homeless
STEPHANIE WHITTAKER, Freelance
Published: Monday, September 17
Dressed in a well-tailored suit and pressed shirt, Frank O’Dea looks every inch the successful businessman.
It’s not surprising, considering O’Dea has made a fortune in the coffee business. As co-founder of the Second Cup empire, O’Dea taught Canadians to love high-quality coffee. He was instrumental during the 1970s in spawning a java culture in a country that had been seeing an annual decline in coffee consumption.
So it’s not easy to imagine the same immaculately groomed man, who has also devoted his life to helping street kids in the developing world and to ridding the planet of land mines, was once a homeless alcoholic, begging for coins in Toronto’s gritty neighbourhoods so he could drink himself senseless.
That, however, is the remarkable story behind O’Dea’s newly published book. When All You Have Is Hope (Viking Canada, 2007) is a poignant memoir of how O’Dea spent his adolescence sliding into substance abuse, hitting rock bottom as a homeless alcoholic and subsequently healing his life, in the process becoming one of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs.
“Yes, writing this book was a painful experience,” he said last week during a book tour interview. “But I wrote it because I want to give others hope. My wife didn’t even know some of this stuff about me.”
That “stuff” is a shocking recounting of his childhood and adolescence, growing up in a comfortable middle-class family of four children and emotionally detached parents in Montreal West.
Life began to go awry when O’Dea was 13 and he discovered alcohol.
He embarked upon a drinking habit that saw him stealing money from family members to finance a daily alcohol fix. O’Dea also was 13 when, after accompanying his father to a campaign headquarters on an election night, he was lured into a car by a middle-aged woman and raped. During his adolescence, he would be raped three more times, once by a local police officer and twice by Roman Catholic priests.
O’Dea’s adolescence was a blur of incidents in which he would get drunk, drive one of the family cars and frequently end up in traffic accidents.
Deciding they’d had enough, O’Dea’s parents told him to leave the family home when he was in his early 20s. He went to Toronto and held a sales job for a few weeks before sliding into a life of poverty and alcoholism on the street.
The book documents how O’Dea had an epiphany in December 1971, realizing he would die if he continued his hopeless lifestyle. He wnt to a self-help group in Toronto and began the process of turning his life around.
Four years later, he and Tom Culligan, a man he met while working on a political campaign, were founding the first Second Cup outlet in a Toronto mall. O’Dea describes a process that most entrepreneurial experts would never advise.
“We didn’t do any market research,” he recalled during last week’s interview. “If we had, we wouldn’t have started the business. A management consultant would have advised us against it because at the time, coffee consumption was declining 14 per cent a year. The only place people drank coffee was in restaurants with meals.”
The book tracks O’Dea’s corporate rise and tells the story of how, 10 years into the venture, he and Culligan were no longer compatible and Culligan bought out his partner.
O’Dea experienced an existential crisis when he became suddenly unemployed, albeit wealthy, and visited a Jesuit retreat to decide what to do with his life.
He says the plight of street children in developing countries resonated with him and he worked with Street Kids International to get services for youths. He also worked tirelessly on a campaign to disarm landmines in former war zones.
The most powerful parts of the book, however, track how he doggedly repaired his life.
O’Dea, who lives in Ottawa with his wife, Nancy, and two daughters, says he also hopes the book will resonate with parents.
“My message to all parents is to find a way to connect with your children,” he said.
O’Dea attributes much of his success in business to the fact he surrounded himself with “good people.”
Despite all his success in the business world, perhaps the most astounding thing O’Dea has created is a sense of hope. His life story is all about the fact even people who appear to have no hope at all can redeem their battered souls and achieve greatness.
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/business/story.html?id=481a92cc-3ca1-4b23-bb51-1cc529571bcc&k=19326&p=1
