Legal holidays are a wonderful thing. The Italians have Columbus Day to celebrate their heritage, and African Americans have Martin Luther King Jr. Day to celebrate theirs. The government gives everybody the day off to ponder the contributions to American society made by these wonderful ethnic groups, and people have picnics or church suppers.
Columbus Day was officially made into a federal holiday back in 1937, while Martin Luther King's birthday became a holiday in 1986. It is impossible to say whether Americans of Italian and African descent wanted the holidays as much as the unionized government employees who got another paid day off, but since the banks are closed and there's no mail delivery, Jan. 20 and Oct. 12 are simply two among many days when businesses in this country aren't permitted to make any money.
Both Columbus Day and Martin Luther King Day have been met with opposition over the years.
Three states -- Hawaii, South Dakota and Alaska -- refuse to recognize Columbus Day. You can say what you'd like about Columbus, but he never discovered any islands in the South Pacific, and Alaska was pretty much a part of Asia back then. As for South Dakota, the state's large Native American population regards Columbus in much the same way the rest of us think about Charlie Manson.
There was so much resistance to Martin Luther King Day that it wasn't observed in all 50 states until 2000, a full 14 years after President Ronald Reagan signed the holiday into law. In Arizona, the proposal went down 76-24 percent when it was put to a public vote, but the will of the people came in second to political pandering, and Arizonans were forced to observe the holiday they didn't want anyway.
The Irish don't have any legal holiday here in the United States to celebrate their proud heritage, and they don't need one. When an Irishman wants to take off work, he does so.
St. Patrick's Day has been celebrated for longer than Columbus Day and Martin Luther King Day put together. It is also much more fun. That's because the Irish are the most fun people in the world, provided you don't run into them when they're all morose and reading Yeats, or angry and talking trash about the Brits, or teary-eyed and listening to "Danny Boy" or any one of a thousand sad Irish songs.
Nobody opposes St. Patrick's Day in the way they oppose Martin Luther King Day or Columbus Day. This is not only because of the fun factor, but because of the great likelihood that some morose, angry, trash-talking, teary-eyed mick would likely beat the stuffing out of anyone insensitive enough to oppose the great day.
There are more than twice as many people claiming Irish heritage in America than Italian, and there are nearly as many Irish Americans as there are African Americans. Twenty-two presidents of the United States -- including Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan -- have been at least partly Irish, and our tragic martyred President John F. Kennedy was 100 percent full blooded.
Niagara Falls was incorporated as a city on St. Patrick's Day, 1897, in honor of those who actually built the place, despite the impression one might get from looking at subsequent demographic patterns. After creating it, the Irish mostly left for greener pastures, as they say.
Today, our fair city is known for having the shortest St. Patrick's Day parade in the country. As a source of pride, it's not much, but if anyone went around looking for a source of pride in Niagara Falls without visiting the state park, a five-minute, one-block "parade" is probably as good as anything you could hope for.
The best place to celebrate the day is Manhattan, which, like Ireland itself, is an island. In fact, the people of western Ireland refer to the city as "the next county over."
I was fortunate enough to cover seven St. Patrick's Day celebrations there as literary correspondent for the Irish Echo, a fine newspaper full of tradition. I could write a book about that week of St. Patrick's Days, but there's a lot of things I don't remember, so this column will have to do.
With my then-editor, Kevin McHugh, charging up the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue to hear Irish Republican Army Commander and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams speak on the Northern Ireland cease-fire that had been recently brokered by President Clinton, and then interviewing author and journalist Pete Hamill about what it all meant.
The parade had already commenced by the time Mass ended, the greatest parade in the world. Bigger than Dublin's, even.
And then listening to Marianne Faithfull sing with the Wolfe Tones that evening; later bowing deeply to kiss her soft white hand as we were introduced in the green room at Rockefeller Center.
Did all those things actually happen on the same St. Patrick's Day? It's hard to say. Now, years later, they seem like they might have, but Paddy's Day in Manhattan also included the swank Bushmill's press brunch -- at which bottles of Black Bush, their premium whiskey, were passed out as party favors. We'd go straight from there to the press luncheon being thrown by the Guinness Brewery, and by the time we made it to the parade, things were a little shaky.
But the doormen and musicians and barmen and newspaper guys I'd spend the day with then always made sure we came out all right and that everyone got home safely, though sometimes not for a couple of days.
I remember one morning, well after the official celebration had come and gone, a bunch of us returning to Sunnyside, Queens, splayed out on the bench seats of the N Train singing "In the Valley of Knockanure."
There were a couple of uniformed cops in the car and one started toward us when the other one stopped him.
"Irish," he said, and they turned and moved to another car.
Those guys are all gone now, back to Ireland or back to wherever it is we all come from, that Great Beyond we'll each visit for ourselves soon enough.
I'll think about them this Saturday, St. Patrick's Day 2012, and toast their memory with a glass of Pellegrino water.
I'm about as far away from Manhattan as you can get these days, and I'm not drinking this year. Only the green of the palm trees here makes me think about Ireland at all.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 13 2012 |