Daily News from New York, New York • 82

1 I life resnennl Kinross TICKETS NOW ON SALE FOR THE 1st OFFICIAL NATIONAL EXHIBITION FROM I THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF i i I -GW- at krffl NEW YORK COLISEUM Paul O'Dwyer loses mate of 45 yeare DHE HAD BEEN through hundreds of them for others and now Paul i 1 O'Dwyer was there for himself yesterday, in the center of a funeral Li chapel, with his wife, Kathleen, in a coffin and his friends staring at the floor. In Dublin the other night, Kathleen stood up in the hotel room and told her husband that she was dying, and before a doctor could get there she was gone, taking 45 years of marriage with her. Yesterday, in the Frank E. Campbell funeral home on Madison O'Dwyer stood in the middle of the room and the ones around him spoke quietly. "Whisky's no help," somebody said.

"Not for something like this," O'Dwyer said. "It's just an excuse. It gives you false warmth and you pay for it 10 times over." "Then why did they drink so much at the wakes in Ireland?" somebody asked. "They never did," O'Dwyer said. "I thought that's all they did," he was told.

"When a person died, there was an all-night vigil," O'Dwyer said. "Sometimes, it would.be cold and old people would have walked a long way to the wake. Or the old people would be upset and confused at the wake. They were taken into another room and given something to drink, poteen I guess. But only a very little to drink.

And that was just for the old people. I don't remember anybody else ever getting a drink." "Where did the 'Irish wake' come from, then?" he was asked. 'IT'S A FABLE," PAUL said. "Because the vigil lasted so long you remained all through the night the younger men would play a game to stay awake and pass some of the time. You'd put a hand behind your back Dec.

6 through Dec. 21 CONTINUOUS" LIVE PERFORMANCES AND DINING Music Martial Arts Folk Dancing Artisans Chefs BUY HOLIDAY GIFTS FROM CHINA at The Bloomingdafe's People's Market, the only store at the Exhibition with treasures large and small never before on sale in the USA Each. Exhibition day is divided into three. 3-hour periods. BUY TICKETS for any of these viewing periods: Early afternoon 12 noon to 3 p.m.

Lote afternoon 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Evening 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Everyday.

Saturday. Dec. 6 through Sunday. Dec. 21.

7 just don't remember ever smiling when somebody died. JIF.1MY Paul O'Dwyer Weekdays: $4 CO in advance Saturdays and Sundays: $5 OO in advance $4.75 at the door $5.75 at the door li All days: Seniors (65 and older); Juniors (3-12) Handicapped Persons, $2.00 in advance $2.75 at the door Children (under 3) admitted FREE BUY TICKETS NOW AND SAVE At any Ticketron at all Bloomingdale's in the New York area, and by dialing C-H-l-N-A-E-X or (212)244-6239. and everybody would slap it as hard as he could. The idea was to see how much you could take. But that was all there was.

The rest of the wake was the same as this right here. Never any gaiety." Somebody remembered reading the long, famous Irish wake passage in Edwin O'Connor's "The Last Hurrah" and O'Dwyer, in politics all his life, shook his head." "I just don't remember ever smiling when somebody died," he said. A gray-haired woman in a mink coat, the mother of actor Carroll O'Connor, came up to him. Then there was a judge, Frank Smith, and a taxicab guy, Jim Gillen, and Jim Meehan from the transit police and a lot of others; you knew they were O'Dwyer people because they complained about the subway rides to the funeral home. Forty-five years," one of them said.

O'Dwyer nodded. "How do you keep a marriage together for that long?" somebody asked. "The woman had the patience and understanding," O'Dwyer said. "I don't know how you explain it after that" HE MET HER AT A St. Patrick's Day dance in 1934.

A couple of weeks later a man promoting the Mayo dance hall on Lexington named for the county in Ireland in which O'Dwyer was born, asked Paul to judge a beauty contest He said no, because the boyfriends of the losers would attack him. He showed up anyway and the girl from the St. Patrick's Day dance was there and she won the contest on her own. Her name was Kathleen Rohan and O'Dwyer asked her out For their first date, he took her to an affair at the Renaissance ballroom in Harlem. Kathleen Rohan came from Yorkville, where, in those days, if a black ever was able to get a drink in a bar, the bartender immediately took out a hammer and smashed the glass.

Now, on her first night out with Paul O'Dwyer, Kathleen Rohan was in Harlem, where whites and blacks were dancing together. "She went out on the dance floor and enjoyed herself and never mentioned that there was anything different about the night," O'Dwyer was saying yesterday. "She was a young girl, but she didn't have a thing wrong in her head or her heart and she never changed the rest of her life." Her life was one of political campaigns that mostly lost and were comprised of the poor, the blacks and Hispanics. Usually there were only a few Irish, for she and her husband worked the other side of the street from them. Oh, it could have been so easy to please and succeed: The Irish had big numbers in this town.

But Kathleen O'Dwyer and her husband came the unpopular way, and it was tough at the polls but a lot easier on the heart Which was the shock about her dying, for her heart was the last thing you'd expect to go. But yesterday she was gone and Paul O'Dwyer, now 73, stood in the middle of the room and knew that the things that are supposed to help the Irish at this time are merely fables. Whisky only betrays. And a wake is not a gathering; it is a place where a person must stand and feel death. i 5- 1 lj I OS EllIIIIEFMiEilS it 'iff blGDmingdQle's Now orvj lOOO THIRD AVEMUE.

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