I gotta get up to Boston one day. I'm from Mass, my mother is buried in Chelmsford along with her parents and siblings. I suppose I should get there one day.
Well she just posted that she's 15/16th Irish.. how could she not be a covert IRA agent?
Yes, and I look like Valerie Plame too!
Imur, I meant San Francisco..
nimh wrote:Well she just posted that she's 15/16th Irish.. how could she not be a covert IRA agent?
...and 1/16th Welsh. You can never be too careful....
ossobuco wrote: ........
Imur, I meant San Francisco..
Whoops! :wink:
Interesting how many Americans claim Irish heritage given the torrid racism in early days. I was a little shocked whilst my daughter was researching Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) at the level of abuse the irish put up with. Paid a pittance for 12 or more hours a day of slave labour. Jobs withinin domestic service and other areas often carried the rider NO IRISH NEED APPLY.
Yet here we are celebrating an Irish national day and all competing to see whos got the most irish blood. (except for dys whos just a grumpy old poopety head).
They came they saw they kicked some arse.
Diddle de de potatoe.
Me? I'm Australian. Get used to it.
My mother was born in Boston (well, actually Watertown) in 1901. I used to hear tales of "no irish need apply". And more tales of when the family moved to California in the early 1920's, people looked out their windows as the family walked to mass. I didn't connect to that, I didn't know anyone who might make snide remarks about the irish. I didn't really catch on until I was much older that being irish was considered by some to be such a lowly trait.. since by the time I was a young woman in a big city that was extremely multicultural but without zillions of people of irish heritage (Los Angeles) those tales of my mother seemed to the young me to be from the dark ages. Plus, early 20th century Los Angeles had as one of its biggest industries the movie business.... and some of my relatives did very well in it, quite early on.
I've read more, have a rounder view now about what people went through, in Ireland and also over here in the US.
On being irish or american or a world citizen, I'm all of those, but really a californian, wherever I may be... an italophilic californian who lives in New Mexico.
I guess that sounds quite separated from the pain. But... I did write an essay from what my parents told me, might have been in fourth grade, about my father's family leaving county Mayo and coming over on a raft. Which now sounds rather suspect, except some of those boats might have been near rafts, as I read at some point. That essay was in a box - the one with the silver - that was stolen from an art gallery/living quarters rented out as theater, for part of the week, that I had in the early seventies, by (I surmised) the coke addicted theater director, or, perhaps someone else, perhaps the coke addicted son of my business partner... (you get the idea). I'd sure like to see my fourth grade essay one more time, for the details.
One of Nuala O'Faolain's early books got to me.
littlek wrote:I thought we met that time in the German restaurant/bar...... either way, it was a damn fine time.
Merry Andrew wrote:Li'lK's memory is better some other people's (who shall remain nameless). As I recall y'all had dinner at Jacob Wirth's (or Jakey's as we locals call it) and I wasn't able to make it because it was a Friday night and I had another commitment. Jacob Wirth's has been doing business as a Deutsches Gesellschaft since the 1890s at the same location and I have it on good authority that even during Prohibition you could get real beer there (and probably schnapps as well) if you knew the waiters. (This information, btw, from an old-timer, now deceased, who used to work as a waiter there during Prohibition. By a further way, he happened to be Irish, not German.)
German, Irish, they all look the same to me.
Eyeah! Good memory, that's me! But, it was the German place. Irish bars are darker, at least all the pubs in Boston are. And, I didn't know that about the place during prohibition. But, I did just hear that it was the immigrants, especially the Germans, who actively opposed the prohibition.
