Walking tall in Springfield.
In this most Irish of Pennsylvania counties–make that, counties anywhere–they really know how to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Their parade is one of the great old hometown traditions, and the people come out for it in very respectable numbers.
If you were there, then maybe you’ll see yourself in this photo essay by Bob Fogarty. If you weren’t there, here’s what you missed.
Now, this is a man who knows how to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.
Pipers, mummers, scouts, cheerleaders, AOHers, firefighters … everybody gets into the act at the Conshy parade.
The 2011 parade stepped off under partly cloudy skies and cool temperatures, but by the end the sun was shining and the crowds were lining up at Scoops ice cream stand on Fayette Street.
Here are our pics.
The Ireland Dancers
Well, we couldn’t shoot video of everybody and everything. Still, we think we’ve assembled a nice little sampler.
It includes Jamison, winners of a best Irish band contest, stopping to play in front of the reviewing stand. You’ll also see the DeNogla Dancers, who really didn’t hold still from the start of the parade to the very end. We’ve also tossed in a brief clip of the Ireland Dancers, who never fail to disappoint. And with their bright yellow sweaters, they’re hard to miss.
Hope you like it!
Pearse Kerr, waving to the crowd.
Pearse Kerr rode down High Street, perched on the back seat of a bright blue convertible, his wife Liz at his side. He wore sunglasses to shield his eyes from the glare of the afternoon—a balmy day in the low 60s. He also wore the tricolor sash of the Burlington County St. Patrick’s Day Parade grand marshal. It looked good on him.
That was the happy start to the region’s first St. Patrick’s Day parade. Like most parades of the type, it was filled, beginning to end, with perky Irish dancers and serious-looking pipers, hordes of Hibernians, and local paddy rock bands playing on flatbed floats. There were precious few missteps, with the exception of the Guinness man—some dude wearing a kind of soft-sculpture pint glass—who held up the parade for blocks (just like every year), as practically everyone ran into High Street to have their picture taken with him. At one point, a Mount Holly patrolman stepped forward to hurry him along. (“I warned him about this last year,” he grumbled.)
The crowd was three deep in some places, with folks wearing cardboard Irish top hats and green plastic shamrock beads.
All told, another grand day. We have the pictures. Check out the slideshow (above), or the photo essay here.
Here's one very happy little Mount Holly parade-goer.
We’ve covered many a Mount Holly St. Patrick’s Day Parade … enough to know that they usually have the luck of the Irish when it comes to weather. Will they have that luck this weekend? Maybe not. But a little rain has never been known to dampen the spirits of parade-goers in Burlington County.
This year’s parade is scheduled for Saturday at 1 p.m. in downtown Mount Holly. In the meatime, here’s a look back at several years’ worth of Mount Holly parade pictures. Strap on your shamrock deely-bobbers and march along.
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.”
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.
Dog shown actual size. (Just kidding!)
Saturday was a beautiful day for a parade, and the people of Springfield proved it by coming out in huge numbers to line the parade route through this small town in Delaware County.
There were dancing girls and boys, decked out dogs, high school bands, men in kilts, music, leprechauns, and more green hair than we’ve seen. . . ever.
Come join the fun through our photo essay.We took lots of pix!