May the road rise up to meet you

O'Connell coat of arms

"When laws can stop the blades of grass from growin' as they growAnd when the leaves in summer-time their color dare not showThen I will change the color too I wear in my caubeenBut till that day, please God, I'll stick to the Wearin' o' the Green. "


This day could not pass without a homily regarding St. Patrick’s Day. (A caubeen, by the way, is an Irish soldier’s headgear.) I am about 3/8 Irish, another1/8 or so Celt – Welsh and Scotch – English, though their antecedents were Norman and probably the “Danes” who settled in East Anglia in the 600s, and the rest German.

I love being Irish. The Irish fight back, they talk back, are quick witted and quick tempered, I might add, and love story telling. My father, half Irish, was one of the best story tellers around. Surnames in my ancestry include O’Connell, Kenney, McGinty, McKee, O’Rourke, Dunn and Slattery. Most of my Irish ancestors came to the United States in the 1860s and ‘70s, first to Boston, then to Chicago and over then to Michigan. That was my father’s side, anyway.

My mother’s grandfather was born in the Finger Lakes region of New York in 1867, his parents having come here from County Tipperary, Nenagh to be exact. They both died when he was three years old. An influenza epidemic, I believe, was the cause. He was raised by a mean aunt and took off for happier horizons when he was 12 years old, walking to Chicago from Lima, Livingston County, New York, with a friend. When they arrived at the friend’s relatives, they shut the door on my great grandfather, Patrick George Kenney, so he made his way to Michigan, where he lived (and eventually prospered) to the age of 101. He was a Justice of the Peace, an ardent Democrat and a heller all his life. Everyone knew him.

Dad’s mother was Katie O’Connell and a very sharp woman. She was the only child of Richard and Mary Slattery O’Connell, who married quite late for those years. Mary was 40 or 41 when my grandmother was born. They lived in an Irish enclave of the city of Niles, Michigan, a great railroad town which featured a magnificent train station made of glittery granite and beautiful gardens all around it.

As near as I can figure out, my grandfather, who was a mason by trade, must have met my grandmother through her father, also a mason, who I believe worked on the Notre Dame cathedral in South Bend. They were prosperous enough to have dedicated several stained glass windows in the St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Niles, which fact we discovered only a few years before my father died.

For an only child, there were many expectations, I suppose, but chief among them was to marry another Irish Catholic. Instead, my grandmother married a German Lutheran, and her father, Richard O’Connell, disinherited her. (Her mother had died when she was 15.) Maybe Richard was bitter. Who knows, but the Irish are very serious about their Catholicism. Richard, too, died in an influenza epidemic, the one accompanying World War I.

Richard’s arrival in America was not greeted with joy by his siblings who had made the journey before him. As the youngest child, Richard had been expected to stay behind in County Kerry to attend to the aging parents, thereby making it impossible for him to marry. One day he took the pigs to market, bought a passage from Cork and came to Chicago. He, too, was a character, and I have many stories about him passed down by my father, who never met him.

Richard’s cousin, Billy Casey, ran a saloon where my dad would go occasionally on an errand for his dad, and he remembered that Billy Casey always gave him a ham sandwich and root beer before sending him on his way. Billy lived in a splendid house which still stands and was always generous, another man who made good in America after an eons of mistreatment in Ireland under the British. I wish all the Irish in the United States would remember a little more of their heritage than the green beer and Leprechauns.