FAME A HANDICAP

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22373, 21 September 1934, Page 10

FAME A HANDICAP

AN AMERICAN’S EXPERIENCE VOLUNTARY EXILE SAN FRANCISCO, September 19. (Received Sept. 20, at 8 p.m.) Out of the realm of missing men there walked to-day one of the immortals of American football history, a man who found fame such a handicap that he went into self-imposed exile under an assumed name 15 years ago. Patrick John O’Dea, a slender Australian, came to America in 189(1 and made an enviable football reeorej at the University of Wisconsin. In 1919, after practising law and coaching football teams, he went into the interior of California to a lumber camp and assumed the name of “ Charles J. Mitchell.” He became a clerk, a position which he held for 15 years.

During these years the whereabouts of O’Dea was a much discussed topic in sporting circles. «A report that he joined the Australian troops in the World War and became one of the unknown dead was widely credited. To-day, in establishing his identity, he said: “I wanted to get away from what seemed to me to be all in the past. As Pat O’Dea I seemed very much just an ex-Wis-consin football player. I was very happy as Mitchell for a while. Mitchell was my mother’s name and Charley that of a cousin. Later I often found it rather unpleasant not to be the man I actually am, so I am going to be Pat O’Dea for the rest of my life. Perhaps I should never have been anything else.” ,