Snooky was my grandfather’s nickname. He loved baseball. My mother thinks the moniker came from his playing days. James Victor O’Connor was born in 1906 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the son of two Irish immigrants from the city of Cork. In 1910, his family moved to Providence, Rhode Island. Snooky was a truck driver for the Providence Journal Bulletin newspaper when he married Helen O’Keefe, also the daughter of Irish immigrants. After a decade or so with the paper, he worked for the city briefly, and then, for the rest of his life, as a bartender. He spent a lot of time on the other side of the bar, too. Snooky was the kind of guy you see in those pictures that fill the walls of old saloons. Actually, he and his brother Frankie were on the wall of regulars at Blake’s Tavern, downtown; I found the photo in my college days.
In 1960, my grandfather tended bar here in a place called McKenna’s Theatre Tap. It was, and still is, one of a number of storefronts that run along the side of The Loew’s State theater—what was once the grandest movie palace in downtown Providence, built in 1928. They’re empty now—the space perhaps used by the theater (now known as the Providence Performing Arts Center, or PPAC. The building was almost torn down in the 1970s, but luckily was preserved and nicely restored. PPAC, host to many Broadway musicals, is an important part of the cultural life of the city.
Visiting the Relatives 