Mike Powers Mike lived on Mitchell Ave in Elmhurst just a block south of my parents. On his 8th birthday (Nov 8th 1950) his mother died. Three months later his father brought home his new step mom. As a kid I didn't make any big deal of how Mike was usually at my house for breakfast but I was to learn later it was because his step mom wasn't making breakfast for him. He was a natural athlete that excelled at baseball and basketball. We played baseball in my next door neighbor's back yard. Mike taught himself to switch hit and was great from either side of the plate. He played on the Little League all stars and played at Thillens Stadium in Chicago. Later in life he was a hitting coach for the high school team in Missouri and used a 16mm film of Ted Williams to teach kids how to hit like Mike's idol. He played basketball for IC High School. Him and Coach Strasser. never got along and he claimed to have an imprint of Strasser's Notre Dame ring on his head as proof of their on going struggles from sophomore year. Mike went to St Joseph's College for a year and then lived in Chicago working at the Ambassador East Hotel while living with crazy guys at 19 East Division. He then went on to Southern Illinois University. Mike had a career in the hotel business. He worked in St Louis and several cities in Illinois. He was a turn around specialist in taking hotels out of bankruptcy. He was named manager of the Holiday Inn just east of O'Hare airport and had just started working there on a Monday morning when the FBI showed up wanting to question a celebrity that had checked in the night before about a murder in Los Angeles the day before, OJ Simpson. Mike was then named the manager of the Ambassador East Hotel where he was the night clerk decades earlier. Mike was so proud of the fact that he had lived "one day at a time" in AA for the past twenty plus years. He was on the AA speakers tour and had several tapes of the talks that he gave. He gave me several of those tapes where I found out that he "was always jealous of little Johnny that lived down the block from him as a kid since Johnny had a mother to take care of him". I visited Mike last spring in Springfield MO. Even though our political views were drastically different we had a good talk and shared some AA experiences. "Irish Mike" was a good guy and will be missed by many. RIP Johnny