Hawaiian shirts and "Happy Trails": For Thom McNamee, RIP

Hawaiian shirts and “Happy Trails” on the holy cards. Bagpipe music at sunset. A rendition of “Amazing Grace” at the service that left nary a dry eye on a rainy day. A song from “Willy Wonka” sung by a Smoking Pope. A simple pine coffin adorned with a pair of well-worn work boots and a Celtic harp.
Those are some of the images from the wake and funeral of Thom McNamee. And while there aren’t any more High Kings of Ireland, McNamee was, at the very least, the dearly departed Duke of Dundee. McNamee lived large, a big fish in a small suburban pond, and a true character in the best sense of the word. In a world with way too much beige vinyl siding about it, the daily blur of the busy blandness dragging us down, he added splashes of color to brighten things up.
Heck, check out the paint job on one of his joints, Bandito Barney’s, 10 N. River St., East Dundee for metaphorical example. Take a tour of the beer garden where you’ll find an elephant spewing water that once stood at now-defunct Santa’s Village. Other attractions include a wall from a barn built 150 years ago in Iowa, stained-glass etchings de picting wildlife, the top of a column that once was part of First National Bank of Chicago, a 2,000-pound street lamp, a waterfall flowing into a moat, a 200-year-old wrought-iron gate, and a castle turret.
It’s like having a drink in someone else's dream, but somehow it all sort of works. And it’s there because it all had meaning for McNamee. Take the etchings as example. McNamee was friends with two squirrels, Perry and Buster, whom he would welcome into his home and feed. And he was known to keep the company of raccoons, too. A photo of McNamee with a mom raccoon and her litter hung above his casket at the wake, then at a gathering of friends at Bandito’s last week.
There were also photos of Mac from his male model days in Australia and New Zealand. That’s where he picked up the habit of calling people "mate.”
The blown-up photos showed there is something intrinsically funny about 80s hair and men with pouting faces as with McNamee posing in a pants ad with a woman at his feet, or “Top Gun” style in a motorcycle ad. He was on a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, too.
It was quite the life for a poor kid from a big Irish family that moved to Carpentersville from Chicago. The modeling came after working his way through law school as a hot roofer with his twin brother Tim.
And the brothers, with their buddy George Karas, opened Wall Street in 1978, which would become Bandito’s, but not before a fateful night 22 years ago when William Nally gunned down Tim in front of Tim’s law office along Route 31.
Nally reportedly intended to kill Tim’s law partner Tim Mahoney, with a rifle he stole from the Dundee VFW post, for the most convoluted of reasons: It was supposed to scare the father of Nadine Walter's young child into bringing the child back to Illinois. Nally did it for love.
A close as twins can be, the murder haunted McNamee, who eventually built a gazebo in a small park along the Fox River to honor Tim. Ghosts aside, McNamee built a life in the Fox Valley with a vengeance.
Thom became the Donald Trump of Dundee, buying and renovating properties and partnering in businesses including the local Dairy Queen, the salon La Femme Fatale, which is run by his wife, Heather, and Rosie O’Hare’s, a beautiful pub sprung from an ugly duckling of a place near the footbridge along the Fox River in East Dundee. For the last few years, come the Saturday before or of St. Pat’s Day, you’d find McNamee leading a parade he helped found that wound its way to Rosie’s.
Though he wasn’t much of an athlete himself, you could catch him playing sports on “Irish Rebel” teams made up of jock friends. And he played golf in the rain, because he loved the rain. One time he rescued some orphan raccoons during a round.
Every summer he hosted his own fireworks show and later in the year threw a ball, an event not quite as fancy a s the one he had back in the day at the Field Museum, but elaborate by local standards.
You could find him tooling around town in a beat-up old pickup truck with Wyoming plates. He had a place near Jackson Hole, where he’d bring his buddies, George Clooney-style, often around Super Bowl time.
On one of those trips West, he flipped a snowmobile. Much to the amazement of friends, he shrugged off the experience, saying that’s why there’s insurance.
That’s how it goes when you seem larger than life. But no one is, really.
McNamee fell off a ladder last year, while working on the roof at Rosie’s. He came crashing to the ground, breaking his nose and thumping his chest. X-rays revealed the brain tumors which would eventually lead to his death at the age of 56.
An Irish raconteur by nature, McNamee withdrew from the local limelight during the last few months of his life, traveling for treatment, staying at home getting things in order and spending time with his wife and a handful of close friends.
His last notable public appearance was in the aforementioned St. Pat’s parade. Resplendent in a kilt and a big blue and green sweater, his grin beamed like the luckiest of leprechauns in a photo from his final parade.
His own wake and funeral were subdued compared to those for Tim. There was no taking the corpse around town to old haunts, no presentation of the body laid out on a vintage Corvette.
Times change, people get older and maybe a touch wiser and learn the value of subtler but no less significant touches. That’s to say, sad or not, you can’t help but smile when you see a sea of people in Hawaiian shirts. And if you can get people to smile at your funeral, then it’s quite a life you’ve led.
Happy trails, my friend, happy trails indeed.
Note: Donations can be made t o the Timothy R. McNamee Science Foundation at 10 N. River St., East Dundee, IL 60118.