Jim Dougherty, parade chairman Jim Gallagher, and Doc's wife Jane.
Conshohocken loves a parade, says this year’s Montgomery County St. Patrick’s Day grand marshal Jim Dougherty. And if anyone should know what they love in Conshy, Dougherty should.
Except for a two-year hitch in the Marine Corps, including a year in Vietnam, Dougherty has lived all his life within that Conshohocken ZIP code. He spent his early years on Hector Street. His dad Matthew was a Conshohocken police officer, later working for the Montgomery County sheriff’s department. After the young Dougherty returned from the service in 1981, he became a Conshohocken police officer, rising through the ranks to become a detective and, later, the department’s chief. (He retired in 1994.)
So six years ago, when the Ancient Order of Hibernians Notre Dame Division in Swedesburg went looking for a point man to help them move their annual parade from Norristown to the neighboring river borough of Conshohocken, they turned to their old friend “Doc” to help them gain all the necessary local approvals.
Says Dougherty, it was not a hard sell.
“I took it before the council. The vote was seven to nothing in favor,” he recalls. “That’s how tough it was. Most of the people on council were Irish, anyway.”
And with that, the first parade marched down Fayette Street on March 11, 2006. It’s been a popular event from one year to the next, with crowds lining the street from one end to the other. “It’s still wall to wall,” says Dougherty, and each year the crowd gets deeper.”
That the parade is now in his home town is gratifying to Jim Dougherty. He has never stopped loving and caring about that scrappy little borough, and the local attachments run deep.
“My family’s there and that’s where I’ve stayed,” he says. “It’s been redeveloped, but it’s still the same way it always was. It’s a quiet, quaint town. In Conshohocken (when he was a kid), everybody knew everybody. It was the kind of place where, if you got in trouble with the police department, your father and mother knew about it before you got home. And basically, it’s still the same way today—everybody still knows everybody.”
So when his friends in the AOH came calling with the idea to move the parade to Conshohocken, it wasn’t a tough sell for him, either. And he’s quick to add that it wasn’t all through his efforts that the parade came to town.
He recalls the event (AOH Notre Dame Appreciation Day on December 18) at which parade chairman Jim Gallagher read out all of his accomplishments and spent some time talking about his role in the move from Norristown to Conshy. “It was all true,” he says, “but there were other people in town who did a lot, too. We all brought the parade to Conshohocken.”
Dougherty will be honored and officially sashed as grand marshal at the Grand Marshal’s Ball on March 5 at the Jeffersonville Golf Club Ball Room. Any Irish organization that wishes to take part in the parade in Conshohocken please e-mail Pete Hand at hjerrylewis@comcast.net.
