By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Using online old newspaper archives, I’ve been traveling through a time machine anticipating my landmark 65th birthday. At one stop, I discovered that Don O’Brien—the grandfather I never met—wrote about me…or at least my name…several years before I was born.
And the story Don retold is one of the strangest tales I’ve ever heard.
From the roaring 1920s to the hip 1960s, my grandfather worked in marketing, public relations, and journalism. Living near New York City, he even helped promote a presidential candidate and the 1939 World’s Fair.
Eventually, he returned with his family to his native Vermont. For almost a decade, Don penned a weekly column for The Burlington Free Press, writingabout current events, local history, and his memories of the past.
In October 1953, someone sent Don a clipping about Michael Patrick O’Brien—the “man without a country” mentioned recently in the news. The sender asked if they were kin.
Don demurred, “We had none by that name in our family as far back as I can go.” (A mere eight years later, he’d have to retract that statement when I was born.)
According to several The New York Times reports over the previous year, this other Michael Patrick O’Brien had spent 315 days living on a ferry that traveled back and forth between Hong Kong and Macau. Neither destination would admit him without proper travel papers.
Although this O’Brien said he was born in Tacoma, the United States denied he was an American citizen. Instead, State Department officials said he was a Hungarian named Stephen Stanley Ragan who was deported after stints in an American reform school and prison.
While not expressly denying that colorful backstory, O’Brien acquired his new (and quite lovely) Irish moniker when he owned a bar called “The Shamrock” in Shanghai. He said he bought the name, along with matching papers, from a seaman for “a hundred bucks.”
O’Brien also claimed he had a Russian wife living in China and was just trying to get back to her after traveling. Because he somehow lost his credentials, however, he got stuck on the boat.
“The first few weeks [on the ferry] it was a joke,” O’Brien told The Times, but “now it is as monotonous as hell.” Fortunately, a friend paid his food bill and the ferry company did not charge him fares for the daily boomerang boat trips.
The meandering aspiring Irishman spent his days reading western paperbacks and mystery stories, talking to fellow passengers, and “having a few drinks.” At night, O’Brien slept on a couch in the ship’s lounge.
To celebrate Christmas 1952, a couple of newspapermen brought him a bottle of brandy. When asked for comment on the strange situation, a Hong Kong official said, “He’s probably better off on the ship than he would be in jail.”
The Times said the United Nations High Commission for Refugees spent months trying to help the nomad with the adopted Irish name. Eventually in July 1953, O’Brien was allowed into Hong Kong “only to be whisked off by plane to Genoa with a landing permit for Brazil,” where his Russian wife had gone.
Brazil, however, would not let him in that country either, so he went to Marseilles, but the French said no to him too and then sent him to Genoa where the Italians also refused to admit him. The Times asked, “Is there really no place in the free world where such a man can set his feet on dry land and be left in peace—so long as he behaves himself?”
According to my grandfather’s October 1953 article, Michael Patrick O’Brien ended up in the Dominican Republic “after crossing the Atlantic three times” during a “strange voyage on the stormy seas of diplomacy.” Parade magazine helped him land there and later told his tangled tale in a November 1953 edition.
The clipping sent to Don said, “The man without a country has been enfolded to a luke-warm bosom that has a reputation for not being particular whom it enfolds.” My grandfather was not impressed.
For Don, that Michael Patrick O’Brien’s inauspicious arrival in such a place with nothing to show for it proved there was no possible familial connection between them.
Don sniffed and wrote, “He can’t be an O’Brien. [If he was,] by this time, he’d be the top man or at least in charge of one of the important departments.”
Although the international faux Irish wanderer who bought my name never achieved any lofty posts, in 1958 an envoy updated a Canadian newspaper about the strange story. The diplomat said that this other Michael Patrick O’Brien was doing just fine in the Dominican Republic, “living a quiet life, well fed and well employed in a delightful climate.”
Perhaps ‘tis the luck of the wanna-be-Irish. And really, not a bad return on a $100 investment.
*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.
