Daily News | Thomas Francis O’Brien, endearing bar owner and host at Roache & O’Brien, has died at 74
Thomas Francis O’Brien, 74, of Bryn Mawr, endearing bar owner and longtime host at Roache & O’Brien on Lancaster Avenue in Haverford, died Wednesday, Sept. 28, of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and cancer at his home.
Friends said Mr. O’Brien “made everyone feel welcome” and treated even strangers “like you were a part of the family.” They called him a “Main Line legend” and said his death marked “the end of an era.” Roache & O’Brien opened in 1933, and Mr. O’Brien started out by cleaning the place on Sundays when he was a teenager. Not much changed after he took charge. “I figured I would take it over for a couple years and then sell it,”And he still did much of the hard work. On especially grueling nights, he often iced his aching knees with bags of frozen french fries and wound down with Canadian Club whiskey and water.
However, many of his best customers were students and professors at Villanova, which is less than two miles west on Lancaster Avenue, and they all reveled in the rivalry. “No words can capture the 30-some years he and we bantered over the ‘Hawk will never die,’ and why Villanova betrayed the Big Five,” a friend said in an online tribute.
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