67-Year-Old to Swim For Sick Hopatcong Boy

Bill Bulger's personal tragedy will help a Hopatcong family endure its own nightmare on Thursday.

Bulger will swim across Lake Hopatcong to raise money for the family of Kyle O'Brien, an . The 67-year-old will start at the Jefferson House in Jefferson at noon and end the 5-mile swim at KaBob's in Hopatcong around 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.

"It's going to be hot as hell," Bulger said. "I'm going to want to get out of there."

Bulger has never met Kyle or his parents, Jen and Patrick. But he knows something about family heartache.

About 30 years ago Bulger's mother was in grave condition after a horrific car accident in Florida. Doctors told Bulger and his siblings they didn't think she would live through the night.

"But when I got there she had a miraculous recovery. The one doctor called her Lazarus," Bulger said, referring to the Biblical character Jesus resurrected from the dead. "When he was taking her pulse with the stethoscope she reached up and grabbed his hand. He called her a witch."

While visiting the St. Petersberg hospital, Bulger's sister, Sheri, stayed at a Ronald McDonald House across the street. Bulger would nap there between hospital visits. At first, he said, he didn't want to talk to the children. But he quickly found himself playing games with them.

"Kids have more intestinal fortitude than adults do," he said.

When the family returned to Hopatcong, Bulger said he wanted to find a way to give back after his mother's recovery. He said Sheri suggested he swim across the lake and raise money for the Ronald McDonald House.

He's done it 25 years since then, skipping just two occasions—last year when he had kidney stones and a benign neck growth and five years ago when his wife had a stroke. He's also raised money for many different causes, from St. Jude's Children's Hospital to a local boy with cancer.

But Bulger never had a long-distance swimming background. Or at least he didn't think so.

Bulger, who grew up in Brooklyn, was a sprinter on his high school swim team. But only recently he realized his father was a natural long-distance swimmer, since he would bring his boys to Lake Hopatcong when they were young and swim for hours with them on his back. It was in his blood, Bulger said.

Reached by phone Tuesday, Jen O'Brien said she was thankful for people like Bulger and others who have raise money for Kyle.

"It's overwhelming the support that we've gotten," she said. "We can't thank people enough for their generosity."

The money from Bulger's swim will help Jen and Patrick O'Brien stay in Philadelphia, where Kyle's been undergoing proton radiation—a producer more exacting than regular radiation—on his spinal chord tumor, the result of juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma, which he was diagnosed with two years ago. Jen O'Brien said Kyle's treatment has been steady so far and that the family spends between one and two hours a day at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, one of just three medical centers in the nation that could provide the procedure.

Bulger said he's already received almost $1,000 in donations for Kyle's family, and expects the glut of them to come soon after the swim. He said nobody's turned him down so far, and that he's gotten mail with money from towns far away.

"Everybody knows somebody who needs help," Bulger said. "I can't do this without the help of the people of Hopatcong."

Send donations to Jennifer O'Brien C/O Bill Bulger, 106 Camp Tr., Andover, N.J. 07821.