The Gra-a-nd Parade (February 1969 | Volume: 20, Issue: 2)

The Gra-a-nd Parade

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Authors: Joe McCarthy

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February 1969 | Volume 20, Issue 2

 

The emotion stirred up in Irish hearts by New York City’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade, probably the oldest and largest annual ethnic demonstration in America, was described a few years ago by the late Tim Costello. Tim was a dignified saloon keeper who frowned on most of the usual outbursts of Gaelic sentimentality; the singing of “Mother Machree,” for example, left him unmoved. “Nobody ever mentions Father Machree,” he often complained. “The poor man was undoubtedly working himself to the bone, trying to hold the family together, while Mother Machree was gabbing with the neighbor women, and all the dishes piled up in the sink.”

But Saint Patrick’s Day parades moved Tim deeply. He cherished a comic cartoon, which hung behind his renowned bar on Third Avenue, depicting such a parade in Atlanta, Georgia. The sketch shows thousands of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen massed on the sidewalks of Peachtree Street silently watching a procession which consists of two Negro musicians, one blowing a trumpet and the other beating a drum, with one small and solitary Irishman, bedecked with shamrocks, marching proudly behind them. On the Saint Patrick’s Day when Costello was discussing the emotional impact of the Irish parade in New York, he had risen from his bed in the morning determined to get through the day without too much drinking. A friend who greeted him late that afternoon in the overcrowded Costello saloon noticed that his resolution had gone to pot and asked him what had happened.

“I was doing fine” Tim said unsteadily, “until I decided to go over to Fifth Avenue and watch some of the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. I was standing there on the sidewalk, behaving myself, when who do I see coming marching up the avenue but an old fellow I know who must be eighty years old. He’s wearing a tall silk hat with green ribbons draped around it, and he’s leading a band of pipers, waving an old Irish blackthorn stick. I take one look at him, and the next thing I know I’m in the bar at the Biltmore, weeping and buying drinks for everybody in the house.”

For anybody with a touch of Irish in his ancestry who finds himself in New York on Saint Patrick’s Day, the lure of the big parade on Fifth Avenue is irresistible; it even draws fugitives out of hiding. In 1921, near the end of Ireland’s rebellion against the British, three Irish Republican Army gunmen came to New York seeking a traitor who had fled from County Cork after betraying a group of rebels to the Black and Tans. The task of finding the Judas among Manhattan’s millions of people seemed impossible until one of the pursuers reali/ed that March 17 was only a lew days away.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll see him at the parade for sure. Hc may be a bloody informer, but he’s still an Irishman, isn’t he?”

Sure enough, a member of