The Delco Gaels Feile Team in Ireland this week.
The birthday boy
If you’ve seen “White Christmas,” you know the fluffy plot: Two song-and-dance men, Wallace and Davis, want to put together a show for kindly old general Waverly who led them in battle during World War II. And to really make it a swell party, one of the hoofers goes on nationwide TV to invite everyone who served with them in the 151st division. The other hoofer distracts the old guy so he misses the show.
(Stick with me. This really is going somewhere.)
There’s a really big party this Sunday at the Philadelphia Irish Festival down on Penn’s Landing, and it’s for one of our favorite guys: Emmett Ruane, who for 37 years ran Emmett’s Place, a well-known and loved Irish haunt in the Northeast. It’s his 75th birthday, and this party is a surprise. And all of those hundreds of you who attend the festival? You’re invited.
(Now, everyone join me in singing, “We’ll Follow the Old man Wherever He Wants to Go.”)
No worries that Emmett will catch on, just because the big do is now officially online and about as not secret as you can get. Emmett’s son Michael says he doesn’t go online. And even though he has a Facebook page, it’s Michael who manages it on his dad’s behalf. Michael assures us that this is one surprise that will stay a surprise.
If you’re going to the festival—and if you aren’t, you should be, just on general principles—here’s your reason to head for the Delaware.
Zero hour is 2 p.m., give or take a few minutes. The Hooligans will be onstage, and singer Luke Jardel will announce the birthday and lead the crowd in singing “Happy Birthday to You.” Radio host Marianne MacDonald will will wrap things up with a birthday cake for Emmett and his nearest and dearest, at the “Come West Along the Road” tent.
Michael also passed along a couple of fabulous old photos of the man of the hour, and we tossed in one particular favorite of our own.
See you Sunday!
Joan Waychunas sets up the sign for the Team Fiona 10th Tee Fundraiser.
Last year, Philadelphia’s trophy-winning Gaelic footballers, the Mairead Farrells, brought home their second national championship in a row. But the tournament, held in San Francisco, left them in the hole.
So this year, with the Gaelic championships in Philadelphia’s Pennypack Park over the Labor Day weekend, their annual fundraising golf tournament, held on Sunday, May 20, allowed them to play a little catch-up on last year’s bills since travel expenses will be minimal this year.
It also allowed them to do a good turn for a fellow footballer.
The tenth tee at the bucolic Edgmont Country Club in Delaware County was dedicated to Team Fiona—the name chosen by the group of friends and former teammates of Fiona Kealy who are determined to raise money to help the County Down native and mother of a toddler pay for her cancer treatment.
Team Fiona, which numbers 14 so far, will be competing in the Team Livestrong Challenge Philly race on August 17-19. There’s a 5K and an 10K walk/run, along with a bike ride up to 100 miles.
“Fiona and I were teammates on the old Emerald Eagles,” said Mairead Farrell’s coach, Angela Mohan. “That was back when we won four national championships in a row. When she was diagnosed with cancer last year, we knew we had to do something.”
Several dozen golfers came out for the yearly event. At the 10th tee, they were asked to bet on whether they’d be able to put their ball into a ring set up on the faraway green. All the losses were going to Team Fiona. And some of the wins too.
Team Fiona has also scheduled a fundraiser on June 22 at Paddy Rooney’s Pub, 449 West Chester Pike, in Havertown, featuring jewelry from Newbridge Silver, an Irish company with strong ties to the Philadelphia area.
The participants in the Saturday morning “Boot Camp” run by Mohan, who is a fitness trainer, are all contributing to Team Fiona too. Last year, “Angel’s Army,” as they called themselves, used money donated via the Boot Camp to buy toys and books for children at Nemours/Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware. “This year the money from the camp goes to Fiona,” said Mohan.
It’s only fitting, says Joan Waychunas, like Mohan, a native of Tyrone and a former footballer, who ran the 10th tee fundraiser. “If it was anybody else, Fiona would be doing the same thing,” she said.
View our photos from Sunday’s golf tournament.
St. Patrick's Day Parade Director Michael Bradley with two of the Rainbow Irish Dancers, Colleen, left, and Noreen, right.
The ladies were insistent. Michael Bradley, director of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, had to get up and learn an Irish step dance with them.
“You don’t want to see that,” joked Bradley, though he followed them half willingly to the dance floor, where, in the confusion, he managed to sneak away before the music started.
“That one,” he said, nodding toward one of the women, “told me when I came in that she was the best dancer.”
“That one” was Colleen O, one of the Rainbow Irish Step Dancers and a resident, like the rest of the troupe, of Divine Providence Village in Springfield, Delaware County, an Archdiocesan cottage-style residence for women with developmental disabilities.
Bradley, along with John Dougherty Sr. and Brian Stevenson, business agent for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Union Local 98, were at Divine Providence Village on Monday night on a very special errand. For their first appearance in the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Parade in March, the Rainbow Irish Step Dancers won the newly created Mary Theresa Dougherty Award, which will be given each year to an organization “dedicated to serving the needs of God’s people in the community.”
The award is named for the mother of John Dougherty Jr., business manager of Local 98 and this year’s parade grand marshal. The senior Dougherty presented the troupe with their plaque.
Kathleen Madigan, a former nutritionist at Divine Providence, is the troupe’s dance instructor. “The day of the parade was amazing,” she said. “The families were following us along the parade route, but so were people we didn’t know. When I asked some of them why they were following is they said “we just wanted to be with you and cheer you on.’ They were clapping for us all along.”
Madigan never set out to form a dance troupe at Divine Providence. The women were the standouts in a class Madigan gave every other Saturday. When she saw their determination, talent, and joy as they danced “Shoe the Donkey” and “Bridge of Athlone,” she decided to turn a social activity into something more serious.
The young women have mastered several dances and are learning several more. “They know their steps,” says Madigan. “Sometimes their heads and their feet don’t always work together, but they remember the steps. I can hear them repeating the steps out loud.”
A few of the women appear to have been born for show biz. Two are avid line dancers who go out a couple of times a week. Another is a performer with the State Street Miracles in Media, a troupe that highlights the artistry of adults with developmental disabilities.
And then there’s Colleen. Born with Down syndrome, Colleen (“I’m Irish, you know”) has the comic timing of a professional stand-up. When Bradley announced to the women that they would be attending Irish Heritage Night at the Phillies on June 19 and dancing on the field, the women broke into applause and hugged each other. “I’m going to teach the Phillies to dance,” announced Colleen, who waited for the laughs before she smiled too.
Bradley was visibly moved by the event. “It means a lot to me. I had a brother who had Down syndrome,” he said. That’s one of the reasons why, for more than 20 years, Bradley has been the basketball coach at the nearby Cardinal Krol Center at Don Guanella Village, working with the developmentally disabled young men who live there. “This is the kind of thing that makes everything I do all year worthwhile.”
Maureen Malloy (Photo copyright 2011 David Hinton Photography)
When Maureen Malloy was a kid growing up in East Falls and attending Central, WPEN was on all the time, which meant countless airings of “Fridays With Frank” and “Sundays With Sinatra,” along with the music of the big bands, and standards of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. So you might say she had a head start on what would ultimately become her job and her passion: jazz program director and on-air personality at WRTI, Temple’s hybrid classical-jazz station.
Malloy (family roots: Mayo) started hosting jazz shows at the station in 1999, when she was still a student, and she was hooked from the start. She found that she was already well-versed in the Great American Songbook, so it really wasn’t a stretch at all.
We caught up with Malloy this week, in the depths of a pledge drive. Every time we tuned in, it seemed like she was on the air, so we’re grateful for her time.
Here’s what she had to say about her life, her career on radio, and her love of jazz.
Q. Who were your mentors? I assume the great Bob Perkins is one of them. How did they take to you? What did they teach you?
A. Of course B.P. is my mentor! He always would invite the students at WRTI to sit in during his air shifts. Bob is so easy to learn from, because he was able to meet and host for so many of the jazz greats. He just tells me stories about them, and they are good stories, so they stick. He is also a genuine person. When you meet him, it dispels the misconception that jazz deejays always try to act “cool.” Being knowledgeable is cool.
I also must mention Tony Harris and Andre Gardner from WMGK. I worked there a few years back, and those guys taught me so much about the radio industry. Their knowledge of music is borderline ridiculous.
Q. There are so many different jazz genres. Do you have a favorite, and if so, why?
A. When it comes to jazz, it is so hard for me to pick a favorite anything! Being a programmer, I am always more concerned with what the listeners want to hear. If I listed my favorite piece/artist from every genre, you would run of space on this page. I can tell you that my favorite standard is “It’s Only A Paper Moon.” I’m not sure why … I just always like it. I am also a huge sucker for big bands. It doesn’t matter what they are playing. Whatever it is, I’ll listen.
Q. You’ve done many different things in broadcast, but let’s talk about WRTI. What’s special about ‘RTI to you? What do you love about going into the studio?
A. Every so often I will pull a vintage recording out of the library that I know has not been played in a long while. Halfway through the piece of music, the phone will ring, and it might be a listener who is extremely excited because they haven’t heard that tune in 20-plus years. You must understand, a large percentage of our audience are true jazz-heads, so a call like that means that I am doing my job well.
Now, take that same piece of music, but this time the phone call is a listener telling you about an important moment of their life for which that song was the soundtrack. We are very connected with our listeners at WRTI because there aren’t too many of us around with such a huge passion for this art form.
Q. And as a follow-up … if you had a desert island disk, what’s the one tune that would have to be on it, the one you just couldn’t live without? Or maybe it would be easier for you to answer: which record?
A. The one tune I would need to have on that island disc (other than the one I have already named) is Coltrane’s “Equinox.”
Q. Are you a musician? Do you have a musical background?
A. I played piano as a kid. Like many kids, I decided to quit once I entered the teenage years. I wanted to play basketball with my friends. Then, I topped out a 5 foot 6 inches, so the basketball career went right down the drain. I should’ve stuck with the piano!
Randal Bays with Davey Mathias
Randal Bays coaxes the sounds of Clare and Galway from his fiddle as though he had been born there. But when he starts to speak, it’s with the remnants of a Midwest accent reshaped by years in the Pacific Northwest.
When Bays talks about back home, like the song, it’s Indiana.
Randal Bays will be in the Philly region next weekend for two shows: the first, on April 27, is a house concert in Lansdale with singer/guitarist Davey Mathias, then the two will do a concert on Saturday night at the Coatesville Cultural Center in Coatesville. He and Mathias are also offering free—thanks to Kildare’s of West Chester—workshops on Sunday at West Chester University, then playing the Kildare’s session from 7-9 PM. See our calendar for details.
I asked Bays if people hearing him for the first time are surprised that he’s not from Ireland. But Bays, who’s been part of the Irish music scene since the mid-1970s, says he doesn’t notice it any more.
“I used to play with [Derry-born guitarist and singer] Daithi Sproule a bit and after an intermission at one of our gigs, he was talking with this guy who said, ‘It’s great that after all these years in America you still have that Irish accent.” Daithi said, ‘Yeah.’ Then the guy says, ‘But your friend has completely lost his.’”
Bays laughs. He doesn’t hear that kind of thing much any more—and when he does, he considers it a compliment–because Irish trad aficionados know that Bays is the real deal—or “the genuine article,” as one music reviewer put it–no matter where he comes from. No matter that he’s not even Irish.
“The problem with me is that I ain’t got no ethnic,” he confesses, laughing. “My mother’s and father’s families have been here since the 1600s and both sides were Welsh. My mother’s family was transported convicts from Britain. Australia was the big penal colony but the reason it opened up was that we got uppity. The American colonies had been the dumping ground for convicts, part of Britain’s social engineering policies that got rid of all their undesirables. Then the undesirables decided to have their own country, by god.”
He jokingly says he sometimes thinks that he’d get more people at his shows if he made up a story—that he was born in “the misty mountains of Clare,” like his friend, fiddler Martin Hayes, with whom he’s performed on several CDs, including Hayes’ first, where Bays accompanied him on guitar.
“I lived in Seattle and had a friend who was Martin’s booking agent then, Helen, and Martin was a total unknown at the time,” Bays says, weaving yet another story in the Irish style. “He had a house concert and wanted a guitar player to play with him. All the real guitar players in Seattle couldn’t make it so she called me. She said, ‘You used to play guitar, didn’t you?’ Then she told me that Martin Hayes was [Tulla Ceili Band fiddler] P.J. Hayes’ son and as soon as I heard that I was on board. I met Martin, had an instantaneous connection—we related musically as well as personally—and when we sat down to play it was an easy fit.”
They knew all the same songs, songs Bays had learned over the years from the likes of friends Kevin Burke, James Keane, Daithi Sproule, and Micheal O’Domhnaill after his first introduction to Irish music—“on a dark and rainy night as it usually is in Portland”—at a session in a small pub. “It was full of smoke, there was beer everywhere, and people playing passionately, and I went crazy for it on the spot,” says Bays.
He’d been a professional musician since he was 14, playing country-western guitar on a doughnut commercial on a local radio station in Indiana. By then he’d traded in the trumpet he’d been studying since the age of eight. Bays went to music school, but left after two years to earn his living making music—all kinds of music, from rock to blues, to classical guitar—in the Northwest, after leaving Indiana behind at 20.
His meeting with Hayes led to two recordings, the eponymous “Martin Hayes” in 1992, and “Under the Moon,” in 1995, both on the Green Linnet label, on which Bays played guitar. (He’s also featured on “Masters of the Irish Guitar.” He even toured with Hayes, leading to yet another funny story, this one taking place in Ireland where Bays was on stage with Martin and P.J. Hayes.
“Everybody loved us, but when we came off the stage, this old man came up to us and said, ‘It’s the Hayes’s and Bays’s, bejaysus.”
But Bays’ heart wasn’t in guitar accompaniment. He wanted to play the fiddle, so he parted ways with his friend and concentrated on fiddling. You can hear the results of that on his critically acclaimed CDs, including “Katy Bar the Door,” “Oyster Light,” “The Salmon’s Leap,” and “Dig With It.”
He didn’t intentionally lean toward the Clare-Galway style. “You listen for what you care for,” he says, “you go toward the musicians you feel something from. When I first got going, I was meeting Clare and Galway fiddlers at every turn. People would go to sessions in Doolin and Miltown Malbay [home of the famed Willy Clancy music festival] and bring me back cassettes and I cut my teeth on that. I lived and breathed tapes I had of P.J. Hayes so when I met Martin it all synched up in that way.”
Bays lives the semi-nomadic life of a musician, performing at venues large and small across the country, and teaching, including at the Catskill’s Irish Arts Week, at Swannanoa in South Carolina, and, until recently, his own Friday Harbor Irish Music Week in Roche Harboro, Washington.
He met his current partner, Mathias, at Swannanoa. He had been part of a Celtic trad group called The Corner House with his wife, Andi Hearn, though Mathias is also part of a long-running punk rock band.
“Oh no, all the trad heads are going to be saying, ‘Punk rock? I’m staying home.’ But it’s the wild spirit he brings to trad too,” says Bays. “Davey’s pretty good, as long as he doesn’t break parole.” He laughs heartily. “”He’s an unusual guy who learned the music just by hearing it. He has a great ear as well as a great spirit.”
But Mathias—and Bays himself—don’t bring elements of their other musical influences to trad. Bays doesn’t like Celtic rock. “Daithi said a funny thing one time about Celtic fusion. He hates to say anything negative. But he said, ‘If people fuse two kinds of music they should be able to play at least one of them well.’”
Bays says that electrifying Irish traditional tunes isn’t something he wants to do. “What I’m looking for in music is power, but I just don’t believe in getting it through volume any more. It’s not a function of age. I’ve been that way since I was in my 20s.
“The power of Irish music,” Bays says, “is in one fiddle player sitting on a chair, all the harmony and beauty of those melodic lines. When it’s working, it’s a rare thing in music. Pop music played at high volume with a strong beat and bass functions differently. It’s meant to overwhelm you. That’s a good thing. You can’t converse, you can’t think, you’re overwhelmed by it and go with it. Irish traditional music requires listeners to be able and willing to reach out with their minds and hearts to meet it halfway. That’s what attracted me to it and what I still love about it.”
Thomas LaVelle, right, with Paul Phillips, as La Velle receives the first Paul Phillips Award honoring outstanding parade marshals.
The Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day was more than a month ago but its spirit lingers on.
On Wednesday, April 18, prize winners picked up their awards at Finnigan’s Wake in Philadelphia, where the presidency of the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Observance Association passed from Kathy McGee Burns to Bob Gessler, founder of the Hibernian Hunger Project.
The Vince Gallagher Band and singer, Karen Boyce McCollum, provided the dancing music at the event, which was attended by members of the CBS3 parade coverage team who also handed out awards.
We were there and have lots of photos.
Inside the Paoli Presbyterian Church kitchen, the air is heavy with the sweet scent of vanilla, orange and chocolate. Easy listening music blares from a boom box in one corner of the room, and in another corner, the industrial-sized twin Blodgett convection ovens emit a low roar.
Perched on cooling racks near an open screen door rest close to two dozen four-inch bundt cakes, a big 10-inch granddaddy bundt, and a coffee table-sized sheet cake. These tantalizing golden-brown confections are the result of a couple of hours’ labor by the exceptionally well organized Deborah Streeter-Davitt, the self-described “head caketress” behind MacDougall’s Irish Victory Cakes. She has help from her father, the Rev. Richard Streeter. (A former pastor of the church, he describes his role in the enterprise as “chief orange squeezer.”)
You might have seen, and tasted, Streeter-Davitt’s handiwork at a local Celtic festival. Her cakes are also available in more than a dozen small markets and farmers’ markets throughout the Delaware Valley. They’re also available online.
The success of MacDougall’s Irish Victory Cakes marks a kind of victory for Streeter-Davitt, who pursued a dream and became a baker following a layoff about three years ago from her longtime job in the financial services industry.
“Necessity breeds creativity,” laughs Streeter-Davitt, who seems not to break a sweat in the 80 degree-plus commercial kitchen, which she rents on Tuesdays and Thursdays from the church. (A local biscotti maker also leases the space.) Her green apron bears the imprint of floury hands. and she tucks her dark, wavy hair into a little heart-decorated painter’s cap, from which an uncooperative loose tendril escapes. Whisking flour and sugar into eggs, melting and stirring chocolate, scooping yellowy batter into heavyweight Nordic Ware pans, manhandling sheet cake pans into the oven, Streeter-Davitt seems the very picture of contentment.
The work consumes many more hours than she was used to devoting to her previous profession, but for Streeter-Davitt, it’s all worthwhile.
The layoff coincided with another imminent turning point in her life. “I was turning 50 in a few years, and I thought … hmmmmmmm. That was two and a half years ago. Up to that point, there was always something missing. Salary and travel all over the United States couldn’t fill that hole. I didn’t realize how fulfilling this would be. Now, I feel like I’m doing something I’m meant to be doing.”
Streeter-Davitt has been baking since the ‘80s. She says that’s when she came into possession of a recipe for a simple but rich, dense, buttery cake. The recipe belonged to her great-grandfather James MacDowell (of the MacDougall Clan) from Belfast. Before World War I, MacDowell had gained no small measure of fame for his delicious, lavishly decorated cakes. He baked for kings and queens. Just after the war, he left his fame behind and moved to the Syracuse, N.Y. area, where he toiled away in a tiny, neighborhood bakery. MacDowell decorated cakes for all the local wealthy households—all so his grandkids would have the opportunity for an education.
MacDowell’s story is the “victory” in the victory cake, says Streeter-Davitt. “It was his victory to bring the family here to the United States. He was a famous champion baker back home, but he gave it all up for his children and grandchildren.”
Streeter-Davitt, for her part, has taken some liberties with the basic butter cake recipe. She adapted the base recipe to create several distinctive, and distinctively named, flavors, from Dassie’s Traditional (with Wilbur chocolate and butterscotch chips) to Skeeter’s Grand Slam (chocolate, butterscotch, peanut butter and marshmallow) to Albie’s Loopy Leprechaun (chocolate, butterscotch and “two cheers of whiskey”). Many of the ingredients are local, and all cakes include at least a kiss of whiskey.
When the local appetite for Victory Cakes is at its greatest, it’s all hands on deck—mostly meaning “relatives, and friends of relatives.” It’s a huge amount of work, baking cakes in large quantities. For a batch, think in terms of two dozen eggs, a pound of butter, a pound of sour cream, five pounds of flour, and six cups of sugar. (And there are a few secret ingredients in the mix that make the cake deliciously different.)
St. Patrick’s Day, of course, is a major undertaking. “We probably made close to 800 minis (the four-inch individual cakes), 150 petites (the two-pound cake), and 20 mighties (the five-pounder),” Streeter-Davitt says.
Baking, she adds, is only half of the job. There’s frosting and decorating, wrapping and labeling, transporting, marketing and more. Yeoman’s labor, but all infinitely worthwhile to MacDougall’s energetic head caketress, both on a professional and a personal level.
“What’s fun about this job is that I get to work with my dad, and carry on his granddad’s legacy. You can’t put a price tag on that.”
More info:
610-608-6889
macdougallscakes@aol.com
www.macdougallscakes.com
PO Box 563 Malvern, PA 19355