BETTER THAN HEARSAY - A Couple of Keepers

EAST DURHAM - Among other things, such as their lilting music and literary mysticism, the Irish are well known for their blarney.

As it turned out, Mike O’Connor was not spreading it on thick when, many months ago, he promised this St. Patrick’s Day would be 45 degrees and sunny, hardly a safe bet for early spring in the Catskills.

O’Connor, though, was on the money and better, reviving the St. Patrick’s Day parade down in East Durham, last Sunday, after a 32-year hiatus.

In a way that it hasn’t been for a long, long time, the once bustling, valley resort town was jam packed from one end to the other.

Hundreds of spectators lined the parade route for volunteer firefighting departments, children’s Irish dance companies, high school marching bands, pipe & drum corps and extremely green floats.

“I had no idea it would be this big,” O’Connor confessed, watching the start of the hour-long procession, noting he went to church Sunday morning, seeing the thermometer was at a heavenly 45 under clear skies.

The warmth rose to over 50 degrees by step off although that changed in the blink of a leprechaun’s eye as a chilly and rainy squall rushed in, coming neither as a surprise nor a deterrent to anybody.

“We knew it would all depend on the weather and we lucked out,” O’Connor said, mentioning something else famously Irish.

“I’ve been going to St. Paddy’s Day parades since I was boy,” O’Connor said, telling why he decided to bring back the East Durham shebang.

“When I moved here full time, one of the first questions I asked was, ‘why isn’t there one here?’ and no one could give me a good answer.”

That was all it took, which is pure blarney. It required many hands and a joint effort from bunches of people working toward a common goal.

In April, 2023, the Greene County Ancient Order of Hibernians Mass Rock Division 2 and members of Our Lady of Knock Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians banded with the community and its business owners. 

The initial meeting was at the iconic Shamrock House, a cornerstone of the town’s tourist trade since the late 1930’s, founded by Patrick and “Winnie,” Kellegher, the mom and pop to parade grand marshal Neil Kellegher.

Neil Kellegher strode up Route 145 in the brisk breezes waving to the crowd and the whole scene again got me thinking about my family.

Last week, I wrote in this column about how my mother and father (who came over from Ireland, alone, when he was 19) met in East Durham, around the same time the Shamrock House was getting going.

I also had fun with my sister Buttons, whose given name is Eileen although we’ve never called her anything but her nickname, given to her by my parents, lovers of the song “Buttons and Bows.”

The column included a photograph of Buttons looking like she saw a ghost, posing with another sister and my brother in the early 1950’s.

What I didn’t know until now was there is more to the story. “I’ve always wondered why mom and dad kept me after that picture,” Buttons says, laughing, something the Irish in her does with ease.

I’d sent her my writeup and what I didn’t know beforehand was Buttons met her first husband in the exact same spot my parents first locked eyes, a place called Hillside Farms, an old East Durham resort.

My mom lived there in the 1930’s and 40’s, then moved back to East Durham following the death of my father on Valentines Day in 1968.

My mom felt at home here in the mountains. Buttons and my younger sister Moe were helping her get settled in her new digs, in the summer of 1969, when they went to hear two Irish singers performing at Hillside Farms (which was then operating as Connelly’s).

When the show was over, they gave the lads a ride home, stopping along the road to keep singing and that was that, romantically speaking.

Buttons married the one named Brendan and a person has to wonder if what maybe caused the eventual change in their relationship was him seeing that picture of her from the 1950’s.

That would scare the wits out of anybody but like the Irish are wont to do, my sisters and brother found the humor in it, replicating the photo years later, making it easy to see why my mom and dad kept the lot of them.