Life, love and leadership from the late "real" Santa

No one ever simply met Jack Kearney. Everyone came away with a story.

For some, he was the shirtless, shoeless, shock of white hair and beard that could be seen walking the streets of Cardiff, waving enthusiastically to every honking passer-by while squinting to see who it was. He loved to tell how once, when walking the Blue Mountains, he rounded a bend to see a fellow hiker look up in utter shock and exclaim ‘‘Jesus Christ. It’s a Yeti’’.

Perhaps you knew him as the World War II veteran who saw action in the Middle East and Papua New Guinea and who walked the streets of Hiroshima after the devastation of the atomic bomb. To fight the cold he souvenired a kamikaze pilot’s jacket found in a box that survived the explosion. The original owner had been visiting family one last time before his suicide run when Little Boy was dropped.

‘‘Fat Boy’’ Kearney obviously earned a respect that belied his nickname. In his six years of infantry and artillery service in World War II, he rose from private to the highest non-commissioned rank of warrant officer. He knocked back an offer to become an officer; it’d have meant leaving the men.

Precious photo albums showcase Boys’ Own adventures that would make Indiana Jones jealous; from India in the 1940s to the outback in the 1980s.

More recently, you may have been treated to one of Jack’s bawdy tales about laddish wartime exploits featuring beers and brothels which miraculously managed to scandalise all and incriminate none, including him.

It’s possible you knew him as the buttoned-down shopkeeper from Main Road, Cardiff, decades ago. His meticulous attention to detail and commitment to service in those days irreconcilable with the unkempt eccentric of more recent years.

Perhaps you slow clapped one of his touchers at lawn bowls, or misread one of his off-breaks in the City and Suburban lower grades. He swears that as a young man he put a six through a window the other side of Edward Street with a pull shot at Morpeth Park.

I believe him because he so impressed playing hooker for the Australian Army rugby league team during World War II he was offered a contract with the South Sydney Rabbitohs.

He knocked that back because he had to make an honest woman of my nan.

There aren’t many left who remember him as a young apprentice butcher in Morpeth in the ’30s, but plenty of you who would have heard him boom ‘‘Greetings’’ at your front door as he arrived with a delivery of Meals on Wheels or St Vincent de Paul goodies. If you were really fortunate, you may have received one of his elegantly handwritten letters recalling minute details of your life even you had forgotten.

So many of you, though, know Jack ‘‘Santa’’ Kearney.

LOOK on the mantelpiece in countless homes across the Hunter and you can witness decades of family history unfold on Jack Kearney’s knee. Generation after generation would seek out the ‘‘real’’ Santa with the Aussie accent and the beard that was as real as the presents on Christmas morning.

He could be found for many years on the streets of Wallsend and at Waratah shopping village. But over half a century there was barely a Christmas bash from Branxton to Boolaroo that didn’t know his raucous effusiveness.

Just this week I heard from a mum who returned home from visiting her comatose eight-year-old daughter in hospital to find a message on the answering machine from Santa, assuring her he was well aware of her plight and wishing her a speedy recovery by Christmas.

He didn’t buy into the mythology much. The North Pole, the elves and the workshop rarely got a mention. He never tried to change the mind of a doubter. He simply lifted little people of all shapes and sizes on to his lap, smiled at them and spoke with them. He became whatever they imagined him to be, because to sit on Jack’s knee was to have an audience with the ‘‘real’’ Santa.

And he would invariably finish: ‘‘Now on Christmas Eve, don’t leave Santa biscuits and beer. He doesn’t need ’em. Put out a glass of cold lemonade and a SAO biscuit – and a carrot for the reindeer.’’

‘‘Santa’’ Jack Kearney, AM, was also my grandfather.

He died last Sunday.

He was 92.

His final 24 hours were a procession of warmly greeted loved ones. I shared his final moments with his sons, my father Mal and uncle Kev. A man famous for saying he was ‘‘just happy to wake up this morning’’ decided he didn’t need to wake up that morning.

No person has had more profound influence on me. My love of sport and storytelling, my ambivalence about money, love of foreign lands and fascination with the human condition, my curiosity, my sense of social justice and whatever little empathy I may have, even my inevitable march towards eccentricity are all directly traceable to him. I’m thrilled I have his hair. Every day I battle his belly.

My earliest memories include wandering behind him in his garden listening to his stories of Morpeth and Milne Bay and Main Road. He didn’t want to be Pop or Grandpa. He told me to call him Jack.

He loved his time in the war, the friends and the experiences, and yet was a passionate pacifist. He protected me from the worst of war stories but always engaged with my questions. I absorbed from him a sense of adventure, not of violence.

Jack would recall how when he saw a dead enemy soldier all he could think of was the Japanese mother back home who once suckled a baby at her breast, and he imagined her pain as she learned of her boy’s fate.

My three sisters can recite word for word the story of the best ‘‘feeds’’ he ever ate. He valued food and family, friends and the fragile. He loved nature and people and ideas and books, not things.

He once sat for hours, quietly smiling his way through Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with his great-granddaughter Mia alongside him. As the final credits rolled I said ‘‘Did you enjoy that?’’.

‘‘Not one bit,’’ he beamed back.

I knew his moral code. I knew his expectations. But for all the thousands of hours we spent together never once did he tell me what to do or how to do it. Not a single lecture. Not a moment of preaching. He was true to his values and used the power of example to help me find mine. Such wisdom. Such control.

Jack was no saint. He’d scoff at the absurdity. He wore his imperfections like a badge. He snored like a bandsaw next to a megaphone, ate off his grandkids’ dinner plates and derived altogether too much pleasure in teasing the love of his life and wife of 60-plus years, Joy, by using old pantyhose as a makeshift belt.

As I grew older he shared with me the odd regret. He wished he’d been less harsh on his boys when they were growing up. He’d have bad dreams about the things he’d seen. But even as he was lying in hospital, a cacophony of birds assembled on the porch outside his unit awaiting their daily feed. He never stopped giving, yet it never seemed an effort.

Some boys never get to meet a single good man. I got to grow up in the shadow of one of the great men.

He was perhaps my best mate, certainly my oldest friend. I’m forever grateful that destiny placed me in his gene pool. But I’ve now fully realised for the first time that he doesn’t just belong to me, or my dad and uncle or my sisters. He belongs to every single person who ever sat on his lap, snapped his picture, felt his embrace, pulled his beard, ate his food, read his letters or heard his wisdom.

After half a century of playing a magical, mythical figure, he has become one – an unforgettable character that people love to tell tall tales about.

Whatever your Jack Kearney story is, please keep telling it. And maybe, on Christmas Eve, you’ll do as Santa said, and pour him a cold glass of lemonade.