Thomas Moriarty

Tom Moriarty passed away Wednesday, July 3, 2024, at the age of 93. He was born on October 17, 1930, at the family home in Mullagh village, Ireland, the son of Patrick and Johanna Moriarty. Tom used to say, “Growing up in Mullagh, we never had a chance.” Born on a subsistence sheep farm, with no money, an ill mother who would die when he was young, rain all the time and no prospects, he had a point. But he had character, a quick wit, a family that stuck together, and a father who was the man he admired most in all the world (and who would be the role model that made Tom his own children’s most admired man). Starting with nothing, Tom died with all that a man should want.

When Tom was 10, a grand aunt who had worked in America saw something in him and provided money to take him out of the local school and send him to the Christian Brothers school in Dingle. There he did well enough to earn a place in the Christian Brothers training program for teaching brothers in Dublin. Soon before he was to take vows, he suffered what appears to have been a case of septicemia, which almost killed him and left him in such a debilitated state that the Christian Brothers would not take him. His family brought him home to Mullagh, where he spent almost a year and a half before he was ready to go back out into the world.

In 1952, Tom returned to Dublin and got a job that he was happy with in the office at the national peat company, but was laid off after several months when demand eased. Deciding that there was nothing for him in Ireland, Tom liked to say, “I was on the boat to England that night.” Having cousins in Birmingham, Tom made his way there after a week in England without finding work. One of them suggested he try the bus company, where he worked six days a week as a conductor and spent the seventh learning to be a driver until he got his license. As a driver, he learned his lifelong aversion to bicyclists on the road when one of them tumbled under his bus. In a turn of luck that would last for the rest of Tom’s life, this worked out fine for him, as the wheels somehow missed the bicyclist and no harm was done. After a year as a driver, Tom’s life changed when his brother, Michael, in Ireland recuperating from his wounds in the Korean War, asked him if he “had ever thought about coming to America.” Tom hadn’t, but deciding that there was no future for him in England either, he decided to come.

Six months later, Tom joined Michael in America. Six weeks after that, he met Helen, the love of his life, at a gathering in the Bronx. One or both of them unaware of the subway line that could have brought her back to her apartment in Manhattan in 10 minutes, he offered to walk her home, and reported of the several mile walk that, “We were all talk all the way home.” And so it continued for the rest of their lives together with the only interruption being his army service while they were engaged. In accordance with his newfound luck, Tom was assigned not to the Korean border, where many of those drafted in that time were sent, but to a base outside Venice, where he enjoyed good weather and travels to see the canals, Rome and the Pope.

Tom and Helen married when he returned from the army and in short order began accumulating children and happy memories. Tom worked for thirty years with “a great bunch of guys” in the buses at the MTA, and he enjoyed life for sixty years with Helen, raising their children on Long Island, then moving to Ohio to help raise grandchildren there. So, blessedly, a truly wise man, he saw the world with the wife that he loved, and he enjoyed his working years, he enjoyed his retirement years, he enjoyed the years with children, and he enjoyed the empty nest years (though it was never particularly empty). In the end, he met every challenge and left every part of this world that he touched a better place.

Tom was preceded in death by his wife and love of his life, Helen, his parents, all seven of his siblings and his beloved son-in-law, Edward Roehrig. He is survived by his four children, Patrick Moriarty (Elizabeth Philipp), Maryanne Roehrig, Thomas (Erin) Moriarty, and Gerry (Matt) Partin, his eleven grandchildren, one great grandchild on the way, and numerous other family and friends.

The viewing will be between 4:00 and 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 9, 2024, at Schoedinger Worthington Funeral Home at 6699 N High Street, Worthington Ohio. The funeral mass will be held at 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, July 10, 2024, at St. Joan of Arc, 10700 Liberty Road, Powell, Ohio, with a graveside gathering to follow at Resurrection Cemetery for military honors and burial.