Miles Murtha O'Brien

In June 1905, a census taker recorded the household at 174 Milford Street in Brooklyn: Miles Murtha Lawrence O'Brien, age 33, a scale maker. His wife Margaret, also 33, born in Ireland. And their five children, ages one through six — all living.

One of those children was a one-year-old boy named Miles Murtha O'Brien.

Eight months later, on February 16, 1906, Margaret Mary Egan O'Brien was dead. She was 34 years old. The cause: heart failure brought on by acute lobar pneumonia.

Miles was two years old when he lost his mother.

His father, Miles Murtha Lawrence O'Brien, had been orphaned at nearly the same age — losing his own mother Cornelia Bedell when he was just eighteen months old, and his father Terrence six months after that. Now the pattern repeated: a toddler left motherless, a father left to raise young children alone.

The family believes it was the Chrysler Building — the timing fits, and the story has been passed down for nearly a century. What we know for certain is this:

Miles was working on a scaffold in an elevator shaft. Someone above him dropped a brick — or a concrete block. It struck him in the head. He was knocked unconscious. He fell several stories before his body came to rest.

When they reached him, it seemed like a miracle: nothing was broken. But he was badly bruised and battered, his body a canvas of purple and black. He was taken to the hospital.

The treatment was simple — there wasn't much else they could do in 1930. They wrapped him in Burow's solution, an aluminum acetate compound used to reduce swelling and ease bruising. And they gave him time.

He could not work for weeks — perhaps months. There was a lawsuit; court documents were said to exist, passed between cousins in New Jersey and Florida, but they have never surfaced. What we have instead is something more durable than paper: the story itself, told and retold across generations.

And one lasting consequence that would shadow the rest of his working life.

From that day forward, Miles saw two of everything.

Two nails. Two boards. Two hammers. Double vision — permanent, unrelenting, for the rest of his life.

After the fall, Miles always worked alone. His Dodge 100 truck, with its hand-painted lettering, was a fixture in the West Essex area for decades:

Among his projects: Medical offices for Dr. Severino Ambrosio in Parlin, New Jersey — his son-in-law, married to his daughter Lillian. A kitchen renovation for his daughter Barbara in Plainfield, New Jersey — no easy job in an older house with plaster lath. Barbara's daughter Mary cried when the family moved to Ohio just after he completed it.

Self-employed his entire career. The 1942 draft registration describes him as "Self-Employed, Carpenter Contractor." The 1950 census lists him as "Carpenter, Private Building." His death certificate, fifty years after the fall: "Self-Employed, Carpenter."

All those years. With double vision. Working alone.

"How did he hammer a nail when he saw two of them?" his grandchildren would ask. No one ever got a good answer. He just did.