By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
A Vermont wedding, a Niagara Falls honeymoon, and a Utah divorce. What could it all mean?
That’s what I was hoping to figure out about my parents’ marital saga during my own trip to Niagara Falls on the American/Canadian border. It is a little strange to visit a place where you’ve got history but where you’ve never been.
The Niagara River (which really is a strait) and Niagara Falls—consisting of the American Falls, the Horseshoe (or Canadian) Falls, and the smaller Bridal Veil Falls—formed over 10,000 years ago as water from Lake Erie drained into nearby Lake Ontario. The name Niagara is derived from “Onguiaahra,” the name of the Iroquois people who settled there originally.
Europeans first learned of this unusual place in 1604, when the French explorer Samuel de Champlain described the Falls after a visit. Two hundred and fifty years later—thanks to the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-1800s—my immigrant relatives ended up living in Northern Vermont, only about 400 miles from Niagara.
In the late 1940s, right after World War II ended, my mother Kathleen Mavourneen Gleason and my father Kevin Peter O’Brien were sweethearts at Cathedral High School in Burlington, Vermont. After high school, they set a wedding date for September 22, 1951.
My father and his family overslept and were late for the early morning ceremony at St. Patrick’s chapel in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Mom was furious and planned to call the whole thing off.
At the last minute, however, she changed her mind and got married. The local Burlington Free Press described the 1951 nuptials as a lovely fall event at the stone church on a hill overlooking Lake Champlain.
My father did not have a lot of time off work back then, as he was juggling various stateside training assignments from his new gig with the United States Air Force. Still, after the wedding, the new couple ventured off to Niagara Falls for a short honeymoon.
Perhaps because the negative ions created by the Falls are said to be a natural aphrodisiac, happy newlyweds have been visiting Niagara Falls for two centuries, starting with Vice President Aaron Burr’s daughter Theodosia after her 1801 wedding. But Niagara has been a place for strange behavior and great sadness too.
Hundreds of people have gone over the Falls during stunts, suicide attempts, or accidents. Only 16 of them survived, the first being a schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor who took the dive in 1901 inside an oak barrel.
1951 was a particularly eventful year of both joy and sadness at the Falls.
Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip of Great Britain visited there in October 1951. Elizabeth—who became queen the next year after her father died—proclaimed the Niagara Falls “magnificent” and “tremendous.”
About a month before my parents got there, a 36-year-old daredevil from Ontario named William “Red” Hill died while trying to navigate the 165-foot high Canadian Horseshoe Falls. Some 200,000 spectators watched the raging water tear apart his barrel made from inflated inner tubes and fish netting.
Shortly after Hill died, both Canadian and American authorities made it illegal to ride the Falls in a barrel or any other way. Thankfully, my parents never tried.
They also never talked much to me about their 1951 honeymoon trip. Knowing virtually nothing about the Falls from my parents, before my 2025 trip I had to rely on lots of other good sources.
The Falls haunted writer Charles Dickens when he visited in 1842, the year before he published “A Christmas Carol.” He wrote, “The broad, deep, mighty stream seems to die in the act of falling; and, from its unfathomable grave, arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid, and has been haunting this place with the same dread solemnity—perhaps from the creation of the world.”
Six years later in 1848, Abraham Lincoln was awed by Niagara and wrote, “It calls up the indefinite past. When Columbus first sought this continent—when Christ suffered on the cross—when Moses led Israel through the Red-Sea—nay, even, when Adam first came from the hand of his Maker—then as now, Niagara was roaring here.”
Mark Twain was amused, as reflected in the short story titled “Niagara” that he published 150 years ago in 1875: “You can descend a staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and stand at the edge of the water. After you have done it, you will wonder why you did it; but you will then be too late.”
Niagara Falls haunted, awed, and amused me too. I could sense the ghosts of my divorced parents there, especially near any older buildings they likely saw too during their honeymoon.
No one can visit the Falls without feeling awe. I felt it from our 21st floor hotel window view as well as on board our river cruise, which took my wife Vicki and I into the tremendous mist generated by water falling at the rate of 750,000 gallons per second.
And it was fun to go to a place 12 million people from all over the world visit each year. The nearby historic town of Niagara-on-the-lake is a must visit too, to see all the wineries as well one of the original capitals of colonial Canada.
My parents probably did not talk much about their 1951 honeymoon trip because their marriage ended 19 years later in 1970. As a result of this rather difficult divorce that I had to navigate as a kid, I’ve almost aways had a negative view of their marriage too.
But that’s not really a fair perception. My own trip to Niagara Falls with my wife Vicki—75 years after my parents were there—has helped me understand why.
My cousin Michael Winslow, 15 years my senior, was my parents’ ring bearer at their 1951 wedding and he recalls watching them in some very passionate kisses. So, obviously, there was love in that relationship in the beginning.
It was that love—likely expressed at Niagara Falls—that created my older sister Moe, born in June 1952 almost exactly nine months after that forgotten honeymoon. Similar but later subsequent expressions of love account for my sister Karen and for my brother Pete.
And it created me too.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
