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India Meets Ireland

Allyn Miner, tuning up

If you listen to Allyn Miner play fiddle in the Tuesday night Irish music session at the Shanachie Pub in Ambler, you’re hearing what one talented player can do with just four strings.

You ought to hear what she can do with 20.

In addition to her skill as a fiddler, Miner is a well-known player and instructor on the much-larger-than-a-fiddle traditional Indian instrument called the sitar.

(If you don’t know what a sitar sounds like, pull out your old Beatles Rubber Soul album. George Harrison plays the instrument on Norwegian Wood. You’ll recognize the distinctive metallic buzz, a kind of silvery sizzle, and the whining, hypnotic drone.)

A senior lecturer in Penn’s Department of South Asia Studies—she’s been there for 20 years—Miner began her long love affair with the sitar when she was still a junior in the Indian Studies program at the University of Wisconsin. Born and raised in Chestnut Hill, she grew up knowing how to play the violin. Sitar, when it came into her life, was not so much a departure, she says, but a way of building on musical skills she already possessed.

The path to sitar enlightenment evolved largely out of Miner’s enrollment in the University of Wisconsin, which had an Indian Studies program. The desire to attend school far away from the safe confines of Philadelphia came first, but the university’s Indian Studies was definitely an allure.

“My mother said I had that in mind before I went there (the University of Wisconsin),” says Miner. “Really, I was mostly interested in going to a different place, to another environment away from Philadelphia for a change. The university’s Indian Studies program was an attraction.”

Miner took Hindi to fulfill her language requirement, took courses in Indian culture, attended many of the department’s social functions. She found herself pulled more and more into this country 8,400 miles away.

“I guess I was first drawn out of curiosity,” she says. “I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I wanted to know more about it.”

When Miner got the opportunity, she signed up for the department’s junior year abroad in India.

She knew right away that she had made the right choice.

“It was a huge adventure, of course. I lived in Banares (now called Varanasi, in the country’s southeast.) It was a smallish town,” Miner recalls. “There were no telephones or refrigerators or even cooking gas at that time.”

For Miner, junior year in Indian was a total immersion learning experience, starting with the language. “Hindi was the whole doorway into everything. People didn’t feel comfortable speaking English, not the people I hung around with.”

In time, she met a teacher of sitar, Thakur Raj Bhan Singh. Before she left for India, she had taken some lessons from a teacher in Wisconsin. This new teacher was a very different. “My experience took a new musical direction when I found a good teacher. It sucked me in,” Miner says. “He took me under his wing. He had five kids but I became like a family member. He introduced me to all these other people, including his own teacher, this elderly man who gave me his instrument. None of his children played. It’s a very, very rare instrument. It’s one of a kind.”

When she first started to take instruction, Miner admits she was not “the quickest of students.” However, she persevered.

To be fair, the sitar probably is not the easiest of instruments to learn. (Many say it takes at least a decade to master.) First, there are the aforementioned 20 strings, stretching to the top of the instrument’s three-foot red cedar neck. The neck itself is about three and a half inches wide, with 19 widely spaced raised brass frets. The deep rounded base of the instrument is formed from a pumpkin gourd, and it is decorated with intricate carvings, often in a lotus design.

Traditionally, the sitar player sits cross-legged on the floor, with the neck draped across the right thigh. Miner is petite, and when she plays, the top of the keyboard is level with the top of her head.

Although sitar is a very different instrument, Miner found that her years of playing violin proved useful.

“It (the sitar) has a lot of strings, but it’s a single melody line, and all the rest of the strings are droning. Violin was great ear training. If you can hear intervals in a tune, you can just imitate.”

Unlike Western music, which is notated—violin players follow sheet music—sitar has no notation. There is a fixed scale, but sitar tunes—raags (pronounced roggs)—are taught by ear. Each of these raags has a basic core structure, Miner says, but then you improvise around it.

Complex rhythms also prove challenging.

“They have a long repeating number of beats—say, 16—and you improvise within that, but you have to keep track of where you are within the 16. The big thing is keeping track of where you are. That’s a skill that also takes a while.”

Sitar also appealed to Miner’s sense of creativity. There are rules and structure to a raag, but there is freedom as well, she says. “Those rules are free enough that you can do anything. You can do what your teachers taught you or you can take off from there. You have to create your own style, so you’re not reproducing anyone else’s music. You’re creating your own music.”

As Miner’s Wisconsin Year in India came to a close, there was little doubt that the country held her in thrall. She stayed another year in India before returning to the university to finish her degree, then headed back to India for a long stay, with the assistance of Fulbright and Rockefeller scholarships. In all, she lived in India nearly 11 years, receiving her Ph.D. from the Department of Musicology, Banaras Hindu University, in 1982.

After Miner’s return to the United States, she became a lecturer in ethnomusicology at Temple University, and in 1987 became a lecturer in South Asian studies at Penn. (She also received another Ph.D. from the university’s Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in 1994.)

Like most good musicians, though, Miner always had room for other forms. Music is music. A few years ago, quite another culture and style of music intruded on Miner’s consciousness. One of her friends had traveled to Ireland and she had taken some Irish fiddle lessons. The friend asked if Miner wanted to take some lessons, too, and she said yes, never knowing where it would lead. So she went and learned a tune from another friend up in Boston. That tune was a jig called “Dan the Cobbler.”

Then, she looked for places where Irish music is played. She found the Sligo Pub in Media. “I just wanted to see an Irish music session. I’d never been to one before, and the one at Sligo was good-sized, maybe eight or nine musicians.”

Miner hadn’t brought her fiddle along, but another fiddler lent her his and invited her to play her one and only tune.

“And they all joined in and I was hooked,” Miner recalls. “Completely, totally, thoroughly. They all just joined in and I thought: I’m in heaven.”

After that, she took lessons from local fiddler (now in Boston) Brendan Callahan and later on from Padraig Keane and local teen phenom Caitlin Finley. (She remembers thinking: “Omigod, my idol is a high school senior.”)

Since then, Miner has become a regular at local sessions—the Shanachie in Ambler and the Plough and Stars in Old City, in particular.

That she should pursue two cultures and two different musical forms seems not at all unusual to Miner. Both are forms of folk music. Indian music does differ from Irish music in one key way, she says: Sitar music is mostly a solo performance. “You play with a drummer, but not a group ever,” she says. There’s a lot of pressure when you’re performing. You have to create the performance right on the spot. That’s a big responsibility.”

In contrast, Miner says, Irish musicians play in a group, and they play for each other. It’s a more social activity.

Miner remains devoted to Indian music in all its haunting loveliness. She continues to be renowned for her teaching and playing. But there’s always room in life for more passion. And Miner found it, she says, when she discovered the music of Ireland.

[kindlethis]

July 8, 2011 by Jeff Meade

Arts, People

5 Questions With Colin Quinn

Colin Quinn (photo by Carol Rosegg)

History class is in session. It’ll only take 75 minutes, but at the end you’ll know everything.

You’ll know how empires rose and fell. You will learn how the British conquered the world through the sheer force of their withering contempt, why the Chinese just couldn’t stop building that wall, and why there are fewer countries more irrelevant than Australia.

And it’ll all be lots funnier than history as taught by Sister back in the fourth grade. She was a humorless cow, anyway.

“Long Story Short,” Colin Quinn’s acid interpretation of the events that shaped great nations and then brought them to their knees—punch-drunk, bewildered and condemned to keep committing the same disastrous mistakes over and over again—comes to the Susanne Roberts Theatre this week. The one-man show, directed by Jerry Seinfeld, runs from June 28 through July 10, 2011.

You’ll remember Quinn from his five-year stint on Saturday Night Live. His face redefines the meaning of craggy, and his widow’s peak carves out an impressive capital letter M across his forehead. Quinn has amazingly literate comedic sensibilities, and he offers up some head-spinning observations on the human condition, but the lines are delivered in a streetwise Brooklyn-ese, with a voice that sounds like a truck dumping a load of crushed rock. He stalks the stage (with a crumbling Roman amphitheatre as a backdrop), making some astonishing points as he goes along. For example, a riff in which he compares Antigone of Greek mythology to “Jersey Shore’s” self-obsessed Snooki, or re-envisioning Caesar as Goodfella mobster Ray Liotta. The show is fast-paced—in Quinn’s world, each empire rises and falls in about ten minutes’ time.

Of course, you’re not meant to take any of it seriously. Scott Brown, writing for New York Magazine, recalled a quote from director Seinfeld in which he described the making of “Long Story Short” as “taking a fatuous premise and proving it with rigorous logic.”

We chatted with Quinn by phone this week, and here’s what he had to say about the show and his Irish-American upbringing.

Q. A headline for the Hollywood Reporter review described your show like this: “The History Channel meets Comedy Central.” It was actually a pretty good review, but that kind of Hollywood pitch line description doesn’t really measure up to what you’ve done. The history of the world in 75 minutes is an Olympian task. How hard was it to pull all of that material together and make all the connections?

A. It like to play around with this stuff, anyway. I always think in terms of “combinations.” It’s always in my head somehow. It’s all people stuff to me. Altogether, it took a few months to bring together—different hours, different times.

Q. If you’re going to talk about the British Empire and the Roman Empire (and more), you really do have to have some sense of history. You couldn’t have tackled the “demise of empires” with just a Cliff’s Notes knowledge of history. So I suppose I could put this more delicately, but how did you get so smart?

A. Most of it, I feel like its common enough knowledge. And we (comedians) have a lot of free time. We can read any time we want. I read a lot. I don’t reads that much history—I was never all that interested in history. I’m really more interested in the global village. I feel like everything else. These connections have been going on since time began.

Q. For those who haven’t seen the show, how did you figure out that you could make the connection between Antigone and Snooki?

A. That junction is just based on the fact that what people used to watch is not like what people watch now. (Now) we see Snooki crying on her knees over the loss of her cell phone.Most people wouldn’t know who Antigone is, but I went to a few acting classes so I know my stuff.

Q. You’ve probably been asked this before, but did you have any qualms about how or whether stand-up translates to a long-running Broadway monologue—the kind of story-telling that has been compared to the work of Spalding Gray? What were the challenges?

A. My own form of comedy is long-form, rambling comedy. I just wanted to do something thematic for a change of pace. To me, that was really like a natural state. It wasn’t like I was doing a bunch of one-liners before that, anyway.

Q. We’re an Irish web site, so of course we need to ask you something Irish. Happily, you’ve already gone there with an earlier show, “Colin Quinn: An Irish Wake.” And here again you’ve been lauded for your story-telling powers. The New York Times review described you as a kind of modern-day incarnation of the Irish “seanchai.” (“Story-teller,” in the Irish language.) You grew up in Brooklyn, coming from an Irish family, and knowing a lot of the local Irish–evidently providing you with a wealth of material. Can you tell us how growing up Irish influenced you?

A. Irish people, they like to read more than most people. I feel like that helps a lot. And I feel like Irish people are very verbal. I definitely feel like my Irish blood helps me to be a performer and a writer of comedy.

For more information on the show, check out the Philadelphia Theatre Company Web site.

June 23, 2011 by Jeff Meade

Arts

Preview: The Pride of Parnell Street

Kittson O'Neill and David Whalen

The watershed moment in Joe and Janet Brady’s ostensibly happy marriage comes when Joe returns home from Ireland’s 1990 World Cup defeat to viciously attack Janet.

Sebastian Barry’s “The Pride of Parnell Street” is harrowing stuff; a tale of love perhaps never completely lost, and redemption. The couple’s turbulent history is methodically revealed in alternating, interwoven monologues by Joe and Janet. It is more like picking at a scab than exposition.

The events of “Pride” unwind against the backdrop of an ever-changing Dublin, and Joe and Janet’s story has a distinct, direct Dublin accent—about as subtle as a brick tossed through a shop window—and yet it remains delicately nuanced, darkly humorous, starkly beautiful. In Barry’s hands, a New York Times reviewer noted, this “rambling, vernacular talk assumes the music and patterns of poetry.”

Harriet Power was one of the first to read some of Barry’s powerfully moving lines. Power is a professor of theatre at Villanova who befriended Barry when the playwright served as the Heimbold Endowed Chair in Irish Studies at the university in 2006. They became good friends during his stay, and one day he asked her if she wanted to read a first draft of a new play—this new play, as it turned out. The language and emotion, she recalls, fairly leapt from the page. “I said, before I die I will do this play.”

Power’s bucket list wish is being granted. Wearing her other hat—associate artistic director at Act II Playhouse in Ambler—Power is preparing to bring this penetrating play to life later this month. David Whalen portrays Joe; Kittson O’Neill, in her Act II debut, plays Janet.

For Power, her friend’s use of the language is transcendent. “He’s really, really good at capturing what the soul sounds like,” she says. “He captures the poetry in the everyday without seeming to do anything at all.”

Of the two, Janet is the more successful survivor. Joe has weathered countless failures and indignities, and spends the play speaking from a hospital bed.

What appealed to O’Neill about her character was the shining spirit that lay beneath surface ordinariness.

“She’s a cleaning lady in a factory,” she explains. “She’s a single mom with two kids. She does not bear the external markers of success. What makes her exceptional is that she has a mind that is wide open to the world and the joys in it.”

Clearly, the deeply troubled Joe obviously is least sympathetic. Says Power, there is something about him that says, “I dare you to feel anything but repelled by me.” But even here, she adds, Barry has left open the possibility of forgiveness, if not a second chance—even when you’ve really blown it.

Whalen concurs. What Joe has done, he says, “was a terrible mistake. It (domestic violence) happens more often than we might say.” Given the nature of that “terrible mistake,” he adds, it’s difficult to see how any of it could end on anything other than a dismal note.

And yet, some sparks of love still unite this couple. For Whalen, that is what most appeals to him about “Pride.”

“For me, this play is such an incredible, transcendent love story,” he says. “When I read it, it blew off the pages for me. The last moment of this play always gets to me.”

And we’ll leave that last moment for you to discover on your own.

The show runs from March 22 through April 17. Details here.

March 11, 2011 by Jeff Meade

News, People

Monsignor Joseph McLoone Takes on a Difficult Task

Monsignor Joseph McLoone

The circumstances under which Monsignor Joseph McLoone assumes temporary stewardship of St. Joseph Parish in Downingtown are difficult, to say the least. But

McLoone—one of the best known and respected members of the Philadelphia’s extended Irish family—believes he is up to the task.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia this week appointed McLoone parochial administrator pro-tem of St. Joseph’s, following the release of a grand jury report alleging that the parish’s pastor, Monsignor William Lynn, 60, hid sexual abuse by other priests. The archdiocese placed Lynn on leave.

McLoone remains pastor of St. Katharine Drexel Parish in Chester, even though he will be spending most of his time ministering to the laity of St. Joseph’s. He is a 2010 inductee into the Delaware Valley Irish Hall of Fame, and he has served as chaplain to that organization for a decade. He also is chaplain of the Donegal Association. McLoone is a 1984 graduate of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary.

An Olney boy, McLoone has spent most of his adult life ministering in city parishes. The ethnically diverse St. Katherine’s is a good example of that 13-year trend. “This will be the first time in my life that I will have ‘sub’ in front of ‘urban’,” he said in an interview Thursday. “It’s going to be a challenge for me. I like living in a city.”

St. Joseph’s is more culturally more homogeneous—and it is quite large, with 4,200 families. It is one of the top 10 parishes in the archdiocese, said McLoone.

Although McLoone recognizes that the parish is very different from what he’s used to, he welcomes the opportunity to minister to the people of St. Joseph’s. He has no special plans for dealing with the parish’s troubles. “I hope to just be there,” he said. “That’s the first step. They just need someone to be there with them. Sometimes you don’t need to do much more than that. You just walk with them. Sometimes that’s all you can do.”

He isn’t sure why he was chosen to take on this new task, but he suspects it is partly because St. Katharine’s is so stable. “And maybe it’s my personality,” he added. “I’m a happy, upbeat person, and I can keep the parish going forward.”

Without commenting directly on the situation at St. Joseph’s, McLoone said he finds the allegations of pedophilia by brother priests to be profoundly troubling. “It’s disheartening. It’s saddening,” he said. “”It’s evil, an abomination. But at the same time, I know Christ has called me to be a priest. Life has to go on.”

As of Thursday, McLoone has moved into a guest room in St. Joseph’s rectory. His temporary successor Rev. Stephen Thorne moved into a guest room at St. Katharine’s the same day. Even though he has his hands full in his new assignment, St. Katharine’s remains a vital part of his life. “I won’t be able to come back for everything,” he said, “but I’m still pastor here. I have my own bed here. There’s nothing like your own bed.”

February 25, 2011 by Jeff Meade

Music, People

Halfway to Spring: The Midwinter Festival Arrives!

Festival organizer Bill Reid gets a bagpipe lesson from Rathkeltair's Neil Anderson.

When I caught up with Bill Reid on his cellphone early Monday morning, he admitted he was “in panic mode.”

By next Friday, the first of thousands of people would be coming to the Valley Forge Convention Center for the opening concert of the Mid-Winter Scottish-Irish Festival Reid and his wife, Karen, have been organizing for 19 years. This year, he bagged his mailing list because he thought it was too old and used the list compiled by the organizers of Irish weekend in Wildwood. Some of his regulars didn’t get their usual postcards and they were calling. “Aren’t you having the festival this year?”

Yes he is. And it’s bigger than ever. And I have to say, for a guy in panic mode, Reid is really funny. I may call him every Monday morning to get the week off to laughing start.

The best part of this year’s festival: “There’s nothing downstairs,” says Reid, who is of Scottish ancestry. That means no pet lovers, computer geeks or swingers competing for parking spaces in the convention center lot or stools at the local bar. There’s only one convention in the building and it’s Celtic.

That sent Reid off on a trip down memory lane. The Pet Expo was a mess, he says. Really. And you know what he means. But the swingers’ group provided an even more embarrassing moment for Reid.

“I came in to the pre-convention meeting and was sitting with everybody and I innocently asked, ‘Where’s the swing group’s band?’ They all looked at me and someone finally said, ‘Billllll.’ Not those kind of swingers. On the bright side, at night after the festival is over we usually go over to the bar and there was plenty of room. They were off doing what they do.”

Then there was the gay and lesbian group who held a pajama party one night on the floor of the convention center. “If anybody else had walked around the corridors the way they were dressed—or not dressed. . . .” He laughs.

He’s had to handle plenty at his own festival too. “One year we had the Daughters of the British Empire take a table and we put them next to an AOH group. The first thing the ladies did was put up a picture of the Queen and a Union Jack. The AOH guys came to me and said, ‘Hey Bill, we thought there was no politics here.’ So I went over to the ladies and said, ‘do you know where you are?’ They were nice about it. They said, ‘Maybe we can take the flag down.’ What I about the Queen? I asked. The guys said, “Oh no, she can stay.’ By the end of the weekend the ladies were feeding them biscuits and the guys were helping them take down their display.”

At this point I’m thinking that maybe they should have tapped this Scotsman who traces his roots back to Paisley, near Glasgow, Scotland, to hammer out a peace accord in Northern Ireland. He accomplished in three days at Valley Forge what it took decades there. He even handles the division of labor among the vendors. “I like to be on the floor at 6:30 AM to make sure that the husbands who are there to help their wives set up help their neighbor instead. The woman there won’t yell at the guy and he won’t yell at her. It’s all peaceful then.”

That may be the only time during the three-day festival that’s it’s peaceful. Reid keeps the music cranking all day and all night long, with headliners such as the Kansas City-based group, The Elders, who describe themselves as “arse kicking Celtic Music from the heartland;” The Young Dubliners, who hail from L.A.; Seven Nations, a Florida-based Celtic/punk/metal band with longevity (around since 1993, the year the Reids launched their festival); and Albannach, whose warlike tribal music (heavy on the drums) every year draws the kilted goth crowd wearing the traditional t-shirt that reads “Outlawed tunes on outlawed pipes.”

Albannach almost got Reid into trouble with his 90-year-old mom. “She’s learned to do the Internet, email and all this. One day she went online and put in our company name, East of the Hebrides. The next thing you know my sister gets a call. ‘What is your brother doing with those tattooed men?’”

One festival regular, Brother, an exciting band with an unusual sound, is especially near and dear to Reid’s heart. Formed by a group of Australian brothers, it combines tribal drums, bagpipes and didgeridoo, a wind instrument invented more than 1,000 years ago by aboriginal people in Northern Australia. Brother’s didgeridoo player is not Australian however. He’s a local native known widely “DidgeriDrew”—and he’s the Reids’ son, Drew.

“He’s the only American,” says Reid proudly. “We were once on a plane with Solas and they wanted to know, ‘how come you never hire us?’ I said, ‘Because you’re too expensive.’ We were on our way to Denver to an Irish festival to see our son and we told them he plays with a band called Brother. Winnie, their fiddler, looks at us with surprise. ‘Your son is DidgeriDrew!’ We ran into Joanie Madden of Cherish the Ladies and she said the same thing. Turns out Drew had backed up Cherish the Ladies. That’s when I realized that I was no longer important.” He laughs.

Also on the bill this year are rockers Rathkeltair of Florida and Hadrian’s Wall from Ontario; the McLeod Fiddlers (an amazing group of young musicians from Canada); the Paul McKenna Band from Scotland; Scottish folkies, the Tannahill Weavers and Annalivia, a fiddle band drawing on musical traditions from Appalachia, Cape Breton, Scotland, Ireland and England; and local talent Seamus Kennedy, Charlie Zahm, Jamison Celtic Rock, and the Hooligans. There are also plenty of workshops , including dance classes with Rosemarie Timoney on the Irish side and Linette Fitch Brash on the Scottish end; fencing lessons; Irish lessons; a didgeridoo-making class, and a session with Hadrian’s Wall (bring your own instrument). There’s even a workshop called “What the heck is a bagpipe?” for those inquiring minds who’ve always wanted to know and, as always, Scottish and Irish whiskey tastings. And, of course, vendors—about 40 of them, hawking everything from fine Celtic jewelry to rude t-shirts.

You’ll also see Bill Reid running around, putting out fires and occasionally starting some. He’s sharing emcee duties next weekend with Dennis Carr of the Brigadoons of Canada.

And he assures us that most of the “snowbergs” are gone from the parking lot so there are plenty of spaces. Planning a festival whose first name is “midwinter” can be fraught with anxiety. “I got an email today from someone who asked me if I was worried about the weather,” says Reid. “I said, ‘Did you have to bring up that word?’”

The 19^th Annual Mid-Winter Scottish-Irish Festival kicks off on Friday, February 18, with an evening concert with Albannach, the Young Dubliners, the Hooligans and Jamison, and runs through Sunday at the Valley Forge Convention Center at Gulph Road and First Avenue in King of Prussia, just off the Valley Forge exit of the Pennsylvania turnpike. Check out our calendar for details or go to the East of the Hebrides website.

Check out some of the action from past festivals.

February 11, 2011 by Denise Foley

People

A Compelling Story, a Great Honor

Liz and Pearse Kerr

As a Catholic and a nationalist living in the Cliftonville neighborhood of North Belfast in the late 1970s, young Pearse Kerr was accustomed to being treated with suspicion and contempt—and often brutality. Orangemen forced his family out of their first home, threatening to burn it down. Out on the streets, British soldiers frequently stopped, questioned and searched him, even though they knew him by name and had stopped and questioned him many times before. Once, on his first day of high school, a soldier struck him with a rifle butt, knocking him over a wall.

He wasn’t even surprised when, in the early morning hours of August 18, 1977, British soldiers smashed the door of his house at 233 Cliftonville Road, rousted him out of bed and hustled him off to Castlerea Interrogation Center. Nor was he surprised by his treatment once he got there. “It might sound bad, and it was,” he says. “”They broke my wrist, dislocated my neck, fractured a rib, choked me unconscious, and generally pushed me around… It was nothing out of the ordinary at the time. They beat me pretty good … but they didn’t kill me. It was well-known what was going on. It wasn’t shocking or anything. It was just part of life over there.”

Kerr spent three months in custody. He was in Castlerea Interrogation Center for seven days, then transferred to Crumlin Road Prison. All told, he was incarcerated from August 18 to November 26. Unlike many prisoners of the time, Pearse Kerr—named after the Irish nationalist and leader of the 1916 Easter Rising Pádraig Pearse—was an American. His parents Brendan and Betty Kerr, originally from the Falls Road in Belfast, had moved to Philadelphia in 1957. Pearse was born not long thereafter at Temple University Hospital. Given his status as a U.S. citizen, Kerr’s imprisonment triggered a huge backlash in the Philadelphia Irish community, and he was released thanks to the intervention of Daily News columnist Jack McKinney and Northeast Philadelphia Congressman Joshua Eilberg.

Kerr’s harrowing story, together with his continued activism here after his return to the States, rarely fails to move people who come to know him. Evidently, Kerr’s experience caught the attention of the committee organizing the 2011 Burlington County St. Patrick’s Day Parade. They recently named him their grand marshal.

Arguably, given that St. Patrick’s Day represents all things Irish, it was a good choice. Few local people could better symbolize Irish pride.

In Kerr’s household, that pride always came first. While living in the States, his father was one of the founding members of Irish Northern Aid and was active in Clan na Gael, another Irish republican organization.

“I was brought up with an Irish nationalist mindset, he says. “There’s no taking that away.” He also knew well that his first name stood for something. (It certainly meant something to the British in Belfast, he says. “When that’s your name, spelled like that, they know exactly who you are.”)

For Kerr, his time in prison left no lingering scars, but it did affect the way he looked at life: “It was maybe a solidification of what I was always taught.”

He also knows how lucky he was. Many prisoners were not nearly so fortunate. Even at the time of his release, he was uncertain what fate had in store for him. His jailers entered his cell, tossed a bag at him and ordered him to pack his clothes.

“Nobody said to me, you’re getting released,” he recalls. I thought I was being sent to Long Kesh (site of the 1981 Hunger Strike). They took me to a court in the city center. When I got to the courtroom, I was standing in the dock and, out in the foyer, I could see my father. And I knew I was going to be released.

“We got a taxi and we went to my grandmother’s house. The following day I flew to Philadelphia for a “Free Pearse Kerr” rally … which I had the pleasure to attend.”

Even though he has been in the States for years, the experience still resonates, and his Irish pride continues to make itself known through his many local activities, including Ancient Order of Hibernians Division 25.

That’s why the Burlington County honor means so much to him.

“I had no idea. I didn’t know I was in the running,” he says. “I was shocked, I really was. It’s such an honor to be chosen. I love Ireland and I love the AOH and I love the Irish republican movement. To be able to represent all that means the world to me.”

February 4, 2011 by Jeff Meade

People

Kathy McGee Burns: Blazing Her Own Parade Route

Kathy McGee Burns, receiving the Inspirational Irish Women award.

On Sunday, March 13, when Kathy McGee Burns officially presides over the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Parade, as only the second female president since its 1771 debut, she is going to have some very special guests marching with her.

The little girl who grew up in the Philly suburbs with no knowledge of her Irish roots is now the woman leading the parade. And joining her will be her McGee cousins from Donegal.

That moment has been a lifetime in the making. Because the same father who instilled in McGee Burns the belief that she could be anything she wanted, do anything she put her mind to, was the equal to anyone … was the same father who, like so many of his generation, denied his own Irish-ness.

“It’s incredible to me,” McGee Burns marveled. “I see my whole life as a journey. I don’t know how I got here, but I did.

“I always had this draw to being Irish …. Wondering, where was I from, where could I claim as my heritage? But my father, Timothy McGee, never talked about his family.

“He grew up very poor. His father, Hugh McGee, was the black sheep of the family. He was an alcoholic who left the family. My grandmother, Mary Jo Callahan, raised my father and his brother with the help of her mother and sisters. She cleaned houses to put food on the table.

“My father was a very well-known high school athlete, but he couldn’t pursue any of the offers he got along those lines. He had to take care of his mother and her sisters. So, he started as a clerk in the Acme. He prided himself that you could come to his counter, and he would add up all the prices in his head–this was before there were machines to do it.

“He started making bouquets of flowers to sell in the store. And from that, he built up a business as a wholesaler florist. He became a successful businessman, and created a life for his own family that was far different from the one he grew up with. He had a house at the shore, was a member of country clubs. We were very comfortable.

But he wouldn’t talk about his Irish roots.

It wasn’t until he was on his deathbed that McGee Burns was able to get a tiny clue from him about how to go about finding her family. He told her that all the relatives lived in Bridgeport: “Kathleen, every McGee in Bridgeport is related to you.”

By this time, McGee Burns was married and raising nine children of her own. And her nagging desire to acknowledge and embrace her own Irish-ness had been heightened during the dark days of the 1981 hunger strikes.

“There I was, watching Bobby Sands starve to death while my own son, Tony, who was the same age, was going to college in Chicago. I kept thinking about Mrs. Sands, how heartbroken she must have been…and how my own son was just starting his life.”

“My country, the country of my ancestors, still wasn’t free.”

McGee Burns began her journey. And her first step was to get out the phonebook and look up every McGee in Bridgeport. She sent a letter to each one of them. And she got the response she was looking for.

“Once I had enough information to trace my roots back to Donegal, I decided to join the Donegal Society. The first time I went to a meeting, I literally walked in as a stranger. They asked me who my sponsor was,” McGee Burns laughed. “I didn’t even know I needed a sponsor!”

But from that inauspicious beginning, she went on to become the first female president of the Donegal Society. And she continued on her path to discover exactly where she came from.

On a trip to Donegal about 10 or 12 years ago, a friend had a surprise for her. He told her, “I found someone who can help you find your roots. We have an appointment with him at Gallagher’s Hotel in Letterkenny at 1:00.”

Kathy won’t forget that moment: “A man came walking towards me. He looked just like my brother. He said, ‘Hi, my name is Hughie McGee. Does that name sound familiar to you?’ Well, my brother, my uncle, my nephew, my grandfather and my great-grandfather were all Hughie McGees. We sat down and did a study of our families. We both had a great-great grandfather named Cornelius McGee. His Cornelius McGee married a Kate Cannon; mine married a Kate Brogan. We had all these similarities, but couldn’t pinpoint where our families intersected.”

It wasn’t until this past summer that DNA was able to accomplish what a paper trail had failed to do: prove beyond a doubt that these two McGee families are closely related. The McGees from Gweedore, County Donegal, donated their DNA for comparison with McGee Burns’ own brother Hughie, and with the results, a once lost heritage was reclaimed.

The circle will be made complete on March 13, when Hughie McGee, his brother Paul McGee and wife Noreen, and nephew Paul McCool and wife Roisin join Kathy McGee Burns and her family, including her brother Hughie, in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

“Someone has been directing this from somewhere–either from up above, or down below,” McGee Burns laughed. “But the feeling I will have as I march up that aisle to address the congregation at St. Patrick’s Church for the parade Mass will be for every McGee and every Callahan that came before me.

“I represent a culmination of all their dreams, hopes and wishes. We are all going to be in that Church together. And I’ll be saying ‘thank you’ to all my Donegal ancestors.”

January 28, 2011 by Lori Lander Murphy

People

Local Boy Makes Good

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.

January 13, 2011 by Jeff Meade

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