MOUNT CARMEL - There are two very distinctive branches on Tom Doyle's family tree.
On the one side - as you might expect, judging by his last name and Mount Carmel residence - you'll find immigrants from the Emerald Isle who worked as miners in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields.
On the other side are pioneers of the American West and, quite possibly, Native American royalty.
In the mid-1940s, the two worlds collided - and Doyle and his five siblings were the happy result.
Here's what happened:
Tom Doyle's father, Cletus, served in the Army in Burma in World War II with Frank Banach, a friend from Mount Carmel. During an earlier leave in San Francisco, Banach met and subsequently married Jessie Wingfield Robertson, the woman who would eventually become Tom Doyle's grandmother.
Banach told Cletus, "You really should meet my stepdaughter," or words to that effect, and it wasn't long before Cletus and 14-year-old Vera Dean Robertson became faithful pen pals.
The letter-writing continued, but the two never met face-to-face until after the war when Cletus sent Vera, who was 16 by then, a one-way bus ticket from San Francisco to Mount Carmel. Although Vera was young and Cletus was seven years older, what the two had was obviously the "real thing," Tom Doyle said. The couple married in 1947 in the Church of Our Lady in Mount Carmel, and then lived happily with their children in the borough for 20 years until Cletus' death in 1967.
"My mother was a very beautiful woman," Doyle said.
Vera's father, Donald Robertson, was half-Native American. Doyle has no definite proof yet, but it's widely reported in family circles that Robertson's mother (Tom Doyle's mother's grandmother) was a princess of the Osage tribe.
Vera grew up in California, but was born in Arizona, and that was where the family homestead remained.
In 1962, at the age of 12, Tom finally got to meet his Arizona relatives. His dad had contracted tuberculosis (possibly as a result of his time in Burma) and silicosis, and doctors strongly advised him to give up work as a miner.
"My mother's grandfather, Robert Wilson Wingfield, heard about our family's plight and sent $1,000 for the entire family - my parents and their six children - to come out there. So, Mom, Dad, Pat, Dennis, Ronny, Kathy, Karen and I spent three days on a train traveling to Arizona," he said. Doyle still remembers that train ride as one of his life's most memorable adventures. When the train pulled in to Dodge City, Kansas, Doyle looked in vain for "Gunsmoke's" Matt Dillon, Miss Kitty, Doc and Chester.
Wingfield, who was 81 years old when Doyle met him, was a true pioneer of the American West. His family had enjoyed great success in cattle ranching and mercantile business in the area near Camp Verde, an Army Cavalry fort between Apache and Navajo reservations, 30 miles south of Sedona.
The Verde Independent, Cottonwood, Arizona, which reported Wingfield's death, at age 85, on the front page of its Sept. 22, 1966, edition, recounted how Wingfield's father, William Gilmore Wingfield, came to the Verde Valley in 1875 by ox-drawn wagon. Doyle believes William, his great-great-grandfather, decided to leave Virginia after the Civil War. When he got to Arizona, he started ranching near the Army fort. The longtime brand of the Wingfield ranch was a hatchet.
For a year, the Doyles stayed at the Wingfield ranch in the ranch hands' quarters.
"I'll never forget turning on the light the first night we were there and seeing a scorpion run across the floor," Tom said.
Wingfield, by then, was a legendary figure around Camp Verde. His mercantile store, the first in the Verde Valley, sold practically everything (or, as his newspaper obituary reported, "everything under the sun, from bear traps to ostrich feathers, from horse shoes to bolt cloth," adding the one thing Wingfield, a man of principle, refused to sell was intoxicating beverages because he did not want to be responsible for any injuries or misfortunes resulting from their use).
Doyle said Wingfield was responsible for the first bank, the first post office, the first gas station and, significantly, a one-room schoolhouse where the teacher was Tom's great-aunt, Margaret Hallet Winfield.
Doyle said because his great-grandfather did business with Native Americans, Wingfield became fluent in 26 languages and dialects, including Navajo, Puma, Paiute, Hopi and Apache. It was through Wingfield's efforts, Doyle said, that the Black Canyon Highway (later Interstate 17) was built between Flagstaff and Phoenix.
"He wanted the highway constructed because of his cattle interests," he said.
Tom, who was one of 25 great-grandchildren at the time of the patriarch's death, remembers Wingfield as a kindly old gentleman who loved to play pranks. The 12-year-old was blown away by Wingfield's recollection that, as a young boy, he knew Geronimo and Wyatt and Virgil Earp. While the Doyles were in Arizona, Tom's dad once gave a ride to a Native American man who claimed to be Geronimo's nephew.
Doyle, a chef by profession, got his start in the culinary world by learning to cook in the Verde Cafe. First, he washed dishes for $1 an hour, and then jumped at the chance to cook when he was told his pay would double.
The Doyles only stayed in Arizona about a year. Even though he had been advised to find another kind of work, Cletus worked at a gypsum mine in Arizona and missed the coal mines so much he decided to come back to Mount Carmel. Cletus and his brother, Cyril, owned a bootleg mine near Wilburton, and they also operated Doyle's Bar in Atlas.
Cletus' death in 1967 left Vera a widow at age 39 with children ranging in age from 3 to 20. She stayed in Mount Carmel and died in 2007.
Doyle said Robertson, his mother's father, once visited the family in Mount Carmel.
"He was nice to us kids. I remember him giving me and my brothers holsters with toy pistols," he said.
Doyle graduated from Mount Carmel Area High School in 1969, but it didn't take long for the lure of the West to reassert itself. Three days after his high school graduation, he hitchhiked to Arizona.
Doyle eventually attended and graduated from the California Culinary School. Massimo's in Fremont, California, is among the restaurants where he worked. There he had the opportunity to meet many sports celebrities, include pro football players Jim Plunkett, Ken Stabler, Jim Otto and Fred Biletnikoff and the incomparable Muhammad Ali.
Doyle returned to Mount Carmel in 2002 to attend his brother's funeral, and wound up staying for good. He works as a cook during the summers at the Alamo Restaurant at Knoebels Amusement Resort, Elysburg, and enjoys taking trips in October to visit his son and daughter in California and other family members in Arizona.
As proud as he is of his ties to the Old West, Doyle doesn't hesitating in proclaiming, "I myself am not a cowboy, but a Coal Cracker, and as Irish as they come."