Dana White, King of MMA

and didn’t look up or at my dad — kind of be invisible even though I was in plain sight
— I might make it through dinner.
When Bert died rather unexpectedly, our lives changed greatly. My older brother,
Dennis, moved to New York City at eighteen. After a visit there one weekend, I knew I
could not stay in Windsor Locks, Connecticut any longer, and so at seventeen, I moved
to Boston.
Living in Boston did not last long. Most of my acquaintances were a rogues gallery
of gangsters, bank robbers, drug dealers (it was the 60s), and gunrunners — a very odd
assortment of people who had fallen rather haphazardly into my life. When I left
Boston, I hitchhiked across the country to California, California was calling me, and it
was the glory days of Haight-Ashbury. It was simply time to move on, but that trip
could be another whole book unto itself. If by some twist of fate my dad had not
died, I would still have been in high school and probably getting ready to go to
college.
Dana’s great grandfather, Albert Wills, was a man of vision. Albert was a streetcar
conductor in Boston, but shortly after the automobile was invented, he opened car
dealerships to sell cars and garages to repair them. He was born in Maine, and after
getting married, he moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts with his wife. There they
raised four sons, Bert being the oldest, and the wild child. Albert had become very
wealthy, and they lived quite a privileged and comfortable life. Like so many others,
however, he lost the vast majority of his money and many of his possessions in the
Great Depression.
Dana’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn, is still alive today at 93 years old. She
was raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts and worked as a schoolteacher in Hartford,
Connecticut. Her father’s older sisters had brought Madelyn’s father, Michael O’Neil,
to the United States from County Cork, Ireland. His sisters had immigrated to America
as household help. Michael was an overseer in the Pacific mills wool shop for most of
his life, and Dana’s great grandmother, Theresa Donovan, was a stay at home mom
who cared for the family and raised their five children. Her family had emigrated
from Ireland to Silver Lake, Pennsylvania, where they farmed until moving to
Methuen, Massachusetts.