thomas jerome o'hara

Family, friends, neighbors, cops, demographic emergence, fledgling integration, attacks by bullies, attacking bullies back, twelfth floor water balloons, coconut launchers, nail launchers, Cohiba cigars, .22 calibre starter pistols and root beer balloons at the movies, fuse delayed explosives, wilderness and wildfire, getting chased, getting caught, convenience store bullets, rifles, getting paid to race rental cars, crime, combat, the Sixties.

Boomers ten years older or ten years younger missed the window to a transition that passed through a perfectly imperfect parallel universe, where the time lapse between relaxed rules and official corrective enforcement was wide open, when the acknowledgement of a second class demographic was beginning to open, and before that window of transition ultimately closed forever.

Liberty flowed through the O'Hara Brothers and other unwitting youngsters as a catalyst that inspired multiple forays into an experience spectrum ranging from the hilarious to the horrific. Participants of these unlikely forays were safeguarded into adolescence by a dominant but vulnerable middle class culture rooted in family, faith, trust, and tolerance.

WEST PALM GRAFFITI is a mostly happy, sometimes violent fictional journey through the vanished transitional era of an idyllic neighborhood in small town southeast Florida. Foggy memories of fast moving events and independent attitudes are depicted through a perspective limited by adolescence, mobility, and demographics.