Jim Goulding's Posts - The Wild Geese2024-03-28T14:02:19ZJim Gouldinghttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/JamesGouldinghttps://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/68528331?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1https://thewildgeese.irish/profiles/blog/feed?user=3ktzjivmlvqzu&xn_auth=noRodolfo Walsh: Defender of a Free Presstag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-05-17:6442157:BlogPost:934982014-05-17T14:00:00.000ZJim Gouldinghttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/JamesGoulding
<p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman"><font size="3"><b><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705673?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705673?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"></img></a></b></font></font></font></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><strong>An Irishman You Probably Never Heard About But Should Have</strong></span></p>
<p><strong>The banner said in Spanish: Kidnapped – March 25, 1977– Walsh,…</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman"><font size="3"><b><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705673?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705673?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></b></font></font></font></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><strong>An Irishman You Probably Never Heard About But Should Have</strong></span></p>
<p><strong>The banner said in Spanish: Kidnapped – March 25, 1977– Walsh, Rodolfo– We Shall Not Forget.</strong> It was printed by the Press Corps Union of Buenos Aires, Argentina and carried by members of their union as they milled about on the street after a parade held earlier that day. On the building above was another banner that said: “The worst opinion is silence” and another carried by a parade marcher: “The worst attitude is indifference”.</p>
<p>Who was this man, Rodolfo Walsh, with the Irish last name, that I had never heard about? What did he do and what did he stand for? And why was he kidnapped?</p>
<p>In 2006, while visiting Buenos Aires on the 30th anniversary of the March 1976 government takeover by the military junta, I watched a parade that lasted for several hours involving as many as a hundred thousand people, young and old, who came out to passionately proclaim that they would never again allow their country to be taken over by a military junta, the likes of which ruled from 1976 to 1983. This barbaric junta had left in its wake 15,000 people missing, 10,000 prisoners, 4000 dead and tens of thousands in exile. The voices of the marchers that day spoke loudly and with determination: <strong>This shall never again happen in Argentina.</strong></p>
<p>Many of the marchers that day carried banners letting the world know that they would not forget the thousands who had disappeared, had been thrown into jail at the Navy Mechanics School (known as ESMA and also as “The Argentine Auschwitz”) and tortured, killed and had their babies stolen and given to rich or high ranking military couples who often raised them without telling them the truth of their origins. Other thousands had been exiled from their own homeland fleeing for their lives. Judges, lawyers, journalists, artists, physicians, priests and nuns and others in a position to know about the darker side of the junta's barbarous activity, and who disagreed out loud with what was happening, were arrested and disappeared never to be seen nor heard from again.</p>
<p>Rodolfo Walsh was a popular journalist and author who had challenged the junta in his growing list of investigative works and articles. He was on their wanted list. On March 25, 1977, a year and a day after the junta took over, he published his famous “Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta” accusing them of all kinds of atrocities against the Argentine people. For this, a group of agents were sent out to capture him. Walsh, who had been disguising himself as an old man to evade the junta police, also carried a pistol for protection and so a firefight ensued. He was mortally wounded, his body dumped into the trunk of a car and taken away never to be seen again. This was the Rodolfo Walsh whose name I had seen and had been captivated by.</p>
<p>Rodolfo was born on January 9, 1927 in Choele Choel in Rio Negro Province, a rural area about 1000 kilometers southwest of Buenos Aires. As he described himself, he was the son of two lines of Irish immigrants, who came to Argentina in the mid-1800's escaping the ravages of the great Famine. One of five children of Miguel Esteban Walsh and Dora Gill, Rodolfo had three brothers, one of whom became a Naval officer and a sister who became a nun.</p>
<p>In the 1930's, like many other countries, Argentina was experiencing hard economic times. This, in addition to his father's gambling problem, necessitated that the Walsh children be split up at an early age. Two brothers went to live with their grandmother in Buenos Aires and Rodolfo and the remaining brother, Hector, were sent to the Capilla del Señor, a boarding school run by the Sisters of Mercy from Baggott Street in Dublin. From there he went on to study at the Fahy Institute in Moreno. These schools were institutions where the Argentine-Irish community sent their children to get a superior education and where Rodolfo said he learned “reading, writing and arithmetic from priests who never forgot how to use the stick”. From an early age his mother fondly nurtured a love of reading in him, and so he never adapted well to the method of learning by force used by the Irish Pallotine priests at the Fahy Institute. His rebellious nature grew stronger and he learned to fight back. He would later write about his difficult boarding school years in his short stories entitled: <em>Los Oficios Terrerestres</em> (Earthly Tasks) and <em>Irlanldeses detrás de un Gato</em> (The Irishmen After A Cat).</p>
<p>After working at a series of dead-end jobs, Walsh got a break when he landed a position with Hachette Publishing as a proof-reader and translator (English was widely spoken at home even among second and third generation Argentine-Irish families). At Hachette, Rodolfo put together his <em>Diez Cuentos Policiales Argentinos</em> (Ten Argentine Detective Stories). He seemed to have a talent for writing investigative types of materials and he fell right into the detective story genre. In 1950 he took second place in a detective story contest and that concretized his career path for the future. He married Elina Tejerina that same year and they had two daughters, Maria Victoria and Patricia. However his growing success in writing was counterbalanced by his failure in marriage and so the relationship lasted only a few years.</p>
<p><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705636?profile=original"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705636?profile=original"/></a>One night late in 1956, when Walsh was playing chess at his local club, a man whispered to him that “One of the men executed, is still alive.” He was referring to a massacre several months earlier of eleven men, friends who had gathered together in an apartment to listen to a radio broadcast of a boxing match between the top Argentine and Chilean champions. What these men didn't know was that earlier in the evening there was an attempted coup against the recently self-installed military junta which took place some miles away and the military had gotten a tip that somehow these men were involved. The junta had planned to declare martial law after midnight, but their henchmen appeared at the apartment in advance and arrested the eleven taking them out to a garbage dump and machine gunning them all down.</p>
<p>Walsh wasted no time pursuing the whispering man's tip. His detective’s instinct, which earlier had produced fictional short stories, now took him to investigate every angle of this real-life occurrence, another one of the many traumas on the psyche of Argentine society. He tracked down and interviewed the “dead man” with a hole in his cheek, a fellow named Juan Carlos Livagra, a bus driver, who told him that there were several other survivors who had escaped into the darkness that night when the machine gun fire rang out. Next he went to interview another survivor Miguel Angel Giunta. Walsh was deeply moved by his testimony:</p>
<blockquote><p>It kills you to listen to Giunta because you get the feeling that you're watching a movie that has been rolling in his head since the night it was filmed … Once he finished he's going to start again from the beginning, just as the endless loop must start over again in his head: "this is how they executed me."</p>
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<p>Walsh's investigation led him to write what has been considered by some as the best work in all of Argentine literature. <em>Operation Massacre</em>, published in 1957 by Ediciones Sigla, put both author and publishers at serious risk for their lives. No other writer or editor would publish anything about this unbelievable atrocity. But Walsh was cavalier about it all, writing in his introduction: “I happen to believe … in the right of every citizen to share any truth that he comes to know, however dangerous that truth might be.” His career as an investigative journalist of real-life events was born.</p>
<p>From 1959 to 1961, during the first years of the Castro revolution, Walsh lived in Cuba. There with the assistance of the Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he helped found Prensa Latina, whose purpose was to counteract the propaganda that was being put out by the American press. One day while in the Prensa office, he got his hands on an encrypted CIA telex and with his investigative mind and his knowledge of English, he doggedly kept at the task of deciphering the message until he came up with what was advance notice of the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. The Castro government was happy to receive this information and planned accordingly to counteract the invasion once it happened.</p>
<p>His life experiences, including his almost two year stay in Cuba, had not fully radicalized Walsh up to this point in his life. Once back in Argentina, he found that social conditions had not improved. News of Che Guevarra's death (his countryman whom he had met in Cuba) and continuing violence at home, contributed to Walsh's ambiguity about his support for the Peron regime. Making sense of the Peronist era in Argentina was never an easy task. While Peron's first wife Eva (Evita) Duarte was passionate about supporting the <em>descamisados</em>, the shirtless ones – the poor, the workers, her husband at times used demagoguery to enforce his rule on the people. His chameleon-like approach engendered such spirited supporters on both sides of the political spectrum, that in 1973 when he returned from exile after several years in Spain, delegations from each side went to the airport to welcome him home and ended up having a shootout in which 13 were killed and 300 were injured.</p>
<p><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705758?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705758?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="683" height="399"/></a>Walsh never thought of himself as a true Peronist, but he seemed to lean toward Peron as the best hope to improve the plight of the working man. He joined the <span style="font-size: 13px;">Montoñeros </span><span style="font-size: 13px;">who initially supported Peron's vision for improving working class conditions, but Peron died a year later and was succeeded as president by his second wife, Isabel who tended toward the right side of the spectrum. The Montoñeros could no longer consider themselves as Peronists. Their tactics now veered off into a more violent approach against the government which did not sit well with Walsh. And as rightist as she was, Isabel's presidency was toppled by the even more right wing dictator- generals in March 1976 and the Montoñeros were now clearly considered as guerrillas.</span></p>
<p>The ruling junta was oppressive right from the start. It became dangerous to write about the abuses that were being perpetrated in the streets. Writers and their sources would sometimes disappear. So Walsh founded an underground news agency, ANCLA, that was affiliated with the Montoñeros . Many journalists chose the safer path of not reporting on incidents that occurred because if they did so, their lives would be in danger. As a result a segment of Argentine society was kept in the dark about what was really going on and another segment had their suspicions but preferred to be kept in the dark. Under Walsh's leadership ANCLA forged ahead although it had limited means of circulation.</p>
<p><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705808?profile=original"><img width="350" class="align-left" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705808?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350"/></a>Walsh's daughter, Maria Victoria, was also a member of the Montoñeros . In a street confrontation with the authorities in September 1976, she took her own life rather than be captured and tortured by the junta's henchmen. Her death deeply affected Rodolfo and he memorialized her in his <em>Carta a Mis Amigos</em> (A Letter to My Friends). He wrote about her “short, hard, marvelous life whose true cemetery is in our memory.” Her death undoubtedly reminded him about how precarious his own life was but that didn't slow him down. He started his Cadena Informativa (Informative Chain Letter) a two-page newsletter which he distributed by mailing out copies to random names he found in the telephone directory. He would end each edition with the words:</p>
<blockquote><p>Terror is based on the absence of communication, defeat it by breaking the isolation, so copy and circulate this information and be assured that pretentious dictators with bayonets and billy-clubs are fearful of spoken words and stimulating thoughts.</p>
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<p>Over the course of his career Walsh wrote numerous articles and books, the most celebrated of which were <em>Quien Mato a Rosendo</em> (Who Killed Rosendo) and <em>Caso Satanowsky</em> (The Satanowsky Case). In the first he recounted the death of Rosendo Garcia who was killed in a local pizzeria in a shootout between rival trade unionists. In the second he writes about the murder of lawyer Marcos Satanowsky, assassinated by government agents for attempting to litigate against them.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most important written piece of Walsh's life was his <em>Carta Abierta de Un Escritor a la Junta Militar</em> (Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta). Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez called it “one of the jewels of universal literature”. Walsh worked on his letter for more than two months in advance of the one year anniversary of the junta takeover. In it he accused them of:</p>
<blockquote><p>Toppling an elected government … banning political parties … hampering trade unions … gagging the press … installing the worst reign of terror ever known in Argentina ... imprisoning thousands of people without due process … brutally torturing and summarily executing them … disappearing 15,000 people and exiling tens of thousands more … throwing prisoners into the ocean from aircraft … creating concentration camps where judges, lawyers, journalists and international observers cannot enter … plunging millions of people into preplanned misery by destroying industry, freezing wages and increasing prices … without the hope of being listened to, I know that I will be hunted down, but I am faithful to the commitment I assumed to give testimony in times of difficulty.</p>
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<p>Unlike with other pieces and newsletters he had written, Walsh signed this letter and added his national ID number. No mistaking who authored this bold and direct piece. He knew his end was coming.</p>
<p><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705742?profile=original"><img width="350" class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705742?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350"/></a>The wheels of justice in Argentina turn very slowly. In 2011, after a two-year long ordeal of hearing 160 witnesses (79 of whom actually were interned and survived at ESMA), a three judge panel came down with a verdict of guilty on 86 counts in the trial of the men responsible for the crimes perpetrated at ESMA. Eleven of those who ran the terror operation there were given life sentences for their participation in what was the most oppressive period in Argentine history. Four others were given between 18 and 25 years in jail for their participation in these crimes. The trial focused on the disappearance of Rodolfo Walsh (which was finally declared a homicide), on the disappearances of Azucena Villaflor, the foundress of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) and two of her associates, and two French nuns Leonie Duquet and Alice Domon, who were thrown into the sea from a military helicopter.</p>
<p>In the San Telmo district in Buenos Aires, there is a small shrine-like display in the Rodolfo Walsh Plaza. The life-sized figure of Walsh wearing his usual sweater and heavy framed glasses is standing on a balcony gazing out at the street below. And in March 2013 the SUBTE (subway) station close by at the intersection of San Juan and Entre Rios Streets was renamed Entre Rios–Rodolfo Walsh by the city council. It is small consolation to honor the memory of the man who is one of the bravest giants of Argentine political literature.</p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705813?profile=original"><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman"><font size="3"><img width="750" class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705813?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></font></font></font></a></span></p>The Healys: One Extraordinary Familytag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-03-10:6442157:BlogPost:735592014-03-10T05:00:00.000ZJim Gouldinghttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/JamesGoulding
<p><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qa0kprS3KmY/UomnePED8vI/AAAAAAAABIk/XbfuGuS4djs/s1600/The+Healy+Family+of+Georgia+(3).jpg" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2F4.bp.blogspot.com%2F-qa0kprS3KmY%2FUomnePED8vI%2FAAAAAAAABIk%2FXbfuGuS4djs%2Fs1600%2FThe%2BHealy%2BFamily%2Bof%2BGeorgia%2B(3).jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image%2F*&width=400" width="400"></img></a></p>
<div><p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;">H</span><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ow many families have you met in which there were nine children</span></strong><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">, of…</span></p>
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<p><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qa0kprS3KmY/UomnePED8vI/AAAAAAAABIk/XbfuGuS4djs/s1600/The+Healy+Family+of+Georgia+(3).jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2F4.bp.blogspot.com%2F-qa0kprS3KmY%2FUomnePED8vI%2FAAAAAAAABIk%2FXbfuGuS4djs%2Fs1600%2FThe%2BHealy%2BFamily%2Bof%2BGeorgia%2B(3).jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image%2F*&width=400" width="400" class="align-left"/></a></p>
<div><p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;">H</span><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ow many families have you met in which there were nine children</span></strong><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">, of which three became priests (one a bishop) and three became nuns? And another son became a renowned ship captain guarding the coasts of American territory in Alaska. Must have been an Irish family. Right? And how about if the father was Irish born and the mother a mulatto slave? Never heard of such a thing, you'd say. Well, meet the Healy family of Georgia.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Michael Morris Healy immigrated to the US from County Roscommon, Ireland in 1818. Within a few short years he became the owner of 1,500 acres of fertile land near Macon, Georgia. He also accumulated 49 slaves to farm the cotton on his plantation. Among them was one, Mary Eliza Clark (sometimes referred to as Smith). She was to become his common-law wife and the mother of his nine children. In Georgia at that time, marriage between whites and blacks was not only illegal but any children of such a union would be considered to be slaves. So mother and children of the Healy family were all legally slaves. This presented a danger and a dilemma to Michael Healy. In such a society the children could not be educated in white-only schools and there were no schools for slave children. So Michael designed a plan to send all his children to the North where slavery did not exist and where they could get a quality education. </span></p>
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<div><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><b style="font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703281?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703281?profile=original" width="186" class="align-left"/></a></b></span></p>
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<p><b style="font-size: 13px;">James Healy</b><span style="font-size: 13px;"> was only seven years old in 1837 when his father took him north to a Quaker school in Flushing, New York. He and his brothers, Hugh and Patrick, remained there a year or two and later transferred to another Quaker school in Burlington, New Jersey. A chance meeting between the elder, Michael Healy and Catholic Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick on board a ship traveling from New York to Boston, was to change the direction and the fate of the Healy children for the rest of their lives. Healy told the bishop about his family and Bishop Fitzpatrick recommended that the Healy boys be enrolled in the newly founded College of the Holy Cross run by the Jesuits in Worcester, Massachusetts. This college initially offered even elementary school grades and so in 1844, James 14, Hugh 12, Patrick 10, and Sherwood 8, went to Massachusetts where they were baptized by the Jesuits of Holy Cross and began their studies at the college. Young Michael Healy followed his brothers to Holy Cross in 1849.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The four eldest Healy boys were high academic achievers. In 1849 James was the valedictorian of the first graduating class at Holy Cross. He ranked academically at the top of his class and Hugh came out fourth. Patrick ranked first in his class and Sherwood was second in his. The fact that the boys did so well in their studies undoubtedly compensated in some way for the fact that they were mixed-race children in an all-white society. Also their sponsorship by Bishop Fitzpatrick, who was by now head of the Boston diocese, went a long way toward gaining acceptance for them in what could be a clearly intolerant society. Others around them could fairly easily discern that they had Negro blood. In most of them it was evident to a greater or lesser degree. But Bishop Fitzpatrick saw their potential and he began grooming them for a higher calling.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">In May 1850, their mother Eliza died unexpectedly. And their father Michael died only four months later. There were still three minor children at home so their brother Hugh, only 18 years old, traveled down to Georgia (they were still all considered slaves and could have been picked up as runaways) and clandestinely brought his siblings north to safety in Boston.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">James expressed interest in becoming a priest so Bishop Fitzpatrick sent him to seminaries in Montreal and Paris. In 1854, James Healy was ordained in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France. On his return, the bishop now faced a dilemma: whether to place him in a position where he would be highly visible and possibly rejected because of his race, or to send him to an obscure location where he might be less visible. Bishop Fitzpatrick took a bold step making Healy his own secretary and chancellor of the Boston diocese. And because of Healy's great interest in and compassion for the poor and the immigrant, of which the vast majority of Catholic Boston was, he was positively received by most people. In 1866 James Healy became pastor of S. James' Church, then the largest parish in Boston. At St. James he was known to often visit the homes of poor Irish immigrants with baskets of food.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703326?profile=original" width="159" class="align-left" height="229" style="font-size: 13px;"/></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">In 1875 James was ordained bishop of the diocese of Portland, Maine, which at that time covered the territory of Maine and New Hampshire. Prior to his ordination, a priest of that diocese wrote to the Vatican complaining that the people would never accept a mulatto to be their bishop. The writer never received a response.</span><br/></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><span style="font-size: 13px;">Bishop Healy headed the Portland, Maine diocese for 25 years. Under his leadership the diocese expanded greatly, opening 60 new churches, 68 missions and 18 convents and schools. He celebrated his Silver Jubilee as bishop on June 29, 1900 and five weeks later he died. As he had requested, he was buried not in a bishops vault, but in a simple coffin in Calvary Cemetery. A Celtic cross, placed by his own parishioners, marks his grave.</span>In 1875 he was ordained bishop of the diocese of Portland, Maine, which at that time covered the territory of Maine and New Hampshire. Prior to his ordination, a priest of that diocese wrote to the Vatican complaining that the people would never accept a mulatto to be their bishop. The writer never received a response.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><b>Hugh Healy</b> was the second eldest son. Although he too did very well at Holy Cross, he was not interested in the priesthood as was his brother James. He had a more entrepreneurial spirit. He was working in the hardware business when he was involved in boating accident. A resulting infection was the cause of his death at the young age of just 21 years. While we don't know a lot about him, we can speculate that he truly had a daring spirit to have gone to Georgia to rescue his two little sisters and brother after their parents deaths. The fact that they were still all legally slaves and would be at great risk on the journey back north, and that he himself was only 18 years old, is almost beyond imagination. How he brought them or arranged to have them transported north is something that history has not recorded. </span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><b>Patrick Healy</b> was the next in line. From all reports he had almost no discernible features from his mother's mulatto heritage.<a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703359?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="143" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703359?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="185" class="align-right" height="184"/></a> But he knew who he was and always carried a certain sensitivity within himself. He was received into the Jesuit order and after two years he was sent back to Holy Cross in Worcester for his internship to teach. Because the students knew who his brothers were, they passed racially insensitive remarks at times “which wound my very heart” he wrote to Fr. Fenwick, an old mentor.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">Patrick progressed and went on to study at Louvain in Belgium where he earned his doctorate degree. He was ordained a priest in September 1866 and returned to the US to teach at Georgetown University. The Jesuits were concerned that because of his racial background he might not be accepted by the general student body comprised of many southerners. For that reason, at first he was assigned to teaching just Jesuit scholastics. After a year or two he became a philosophy professor teaching the general student population and in 1874, at 39 years of age, he was named the 29</span><sup>th</sup><span style="font-size: 13px;"> president of Georgetown University.</span> </span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">In spite of his great talents and accomplishments, Patrick still sometimes experienced offensive moments because of his racial background from those who knew who he was. In his role as university president he traveled extensively often staying in Jesuit houses. Once an old Jesuit remarked that some houses would not welcome him because no one would be willing to sleep again in the bed he had occupied. On the other side of the coin, one of his Georgetown students, the son of a Confederate general, who did not recognize Patrick's racial background, said of him that he was “a finished scholar, a remarkable linguist, and the clearest thinker and expounder of his thoughts that I have ever met.” </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><b style="font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703427?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="170" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703427?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="170" class="align-left"/></a></b></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><b style="font-size: 13px;">Alexander Sherwood Healy</b><span style="font-size: 13px;"> (always called Sherwood) was the fourth son. Bishop Fitzpatrick was certainly a strong advocate for the Healy brothers. But when the time came to advocate for Sherwood, the bishop saw it more difficult because of his more pronounced Negro features and because of the anti-Negro sentiment that was growing in Boston society.</span></span></p>
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<div><div><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">Like his brother James, Sherwood studied at the seminaries in Montreal and Paris and was ordained in Notre Dame in 1858. But when the time came for his return to the US, Bishop Fitzpatrick sensed Sherwood's reticence. The debate over slavery in the US was reaching a crescendo just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. “He feels an unwillingness for reasons which I cannot condemn, to return to this country” Fitzpatrick told a papal official. And so Sherwood to went to Rome for advanced studies.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">A year later there was an opening for the position of rector of the new North American College in Rome, and again Fitzpatrick hesitated, writing in a letter that it was “useless to recommend him” because “he has African blood and it shows distinctly in his exterior” fearing that because of his race, the seminary students might not respect him. Had Bishop Fitzpatrick not hesitated, Sherwood might have become the first rector of the North American College in Rome. Instead he returned to the US with his doctorate degree in Canon Law and an expertise in Gregorian chant.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">In his early years back in Boston, Sherwood was chaplain to the Angel Guardian home and worked with his brother James who was chancellor of the Boston diocese. His expertise in church law and church music certainly came into play in this assignment. By 1870 he had been appointed rector of the new cathedral of the Holy Cross which was still under construction. Later he was appointed professor of Moral Theology and director of student discipline at St. Joseph's Provincial Seminary in Troy, New York. Sherwood's career in the priesthood was cut short by his death in 1875 at the age of 39 years.</span></div>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><b style="font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703396?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="159" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703396?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="159" class="align-left"/></a></b></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2"><b>Michael Healy</b> was the rebellious brother. In 1849 he was enrolled at Holy Cross in Worcester like his older brothers before him. But it became evident early on that the studious life didn't suit him. In 1854 he was sent off to the seminary in France but lasted only a short time there. He ran away to England and became a merchant seaman. The seafarers life seemed to be a better fit. He continued working on the ships until he returned to the US in 1863 with the intention of joining the Revenue Cutter Service, the predecessor of today's US Coast Guard. Because of his seafaring experience, a year later he became a commissioned officer (his commission was signed by President Abraham Lincoln) and was soon given command of a ship patrolling the waters around the newly acquired Alaskan territory.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: 13px; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">Because Michael's complexion did not reveal his mother's mulatto heritage, he easily passed for white. In 1865 he married Mary Jane Roach, the daughter of Irish immigrants, and they had one son. He was accepted into white society apparently as an Irish-American with no hint of his African bloodline. According to Boston College professor, James M. O'Toole, Michael Healy had so conscientized himself as white that he referred to white settlers in Alaska as “our people”. This same identity was apparently passed on to his son who while accompanying his father on an Alaskan patrol in 1883, scratched his name onto a rock on an island off the coast. He wrote into his diary that he was the first “white boy” to do so.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">Michael Healy's wild side never left him even in the Revenue Cutter Service. He had a reputation as a highly skilled seaman and had a knack for contending with wild people and the even wilder weather of what was then the still unexplored Alaskan coast. He engineered several successful Arctic whaling ship rescues in the most challenging weather conditions. Ice was one of the most treacherous factors that a ship captain had to face in these waters and Healy became adept at dealing with it. In addition, effectively dealing with some of the most unsavory characters in a part of the world as yet somewhat uncivilized, “Hell-Roaring Mike” as he was known, became the symbol of law and order to his men on the ships and to the population on land. Once in a heated shipboard altercation, a crewman to whom he laid down the law, threw the worst epithet he could at him saying that he was “a God-damned Irishman”.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: 13px; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">It was because of his stern and often severe approach that he was once court-marshaled for cruelty to his crew. He was acquitted of this charge but later in 1895 again he was court-marshaled, this time for drunkenness, for gross irresponsibility and “scandalous conduct.” Sidelined for a while, Healy returned to service again as a captain after the Alaskan gold rush. He retired in 1903 and died a year later.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">In January 2012 when the Alaskan town of Nome on the Bering Strait was running low on fuel oil because of an early ice floe blocking the coast, the US Coast Guard Cutter <i>Michael A. Healy</i> opened the way through 300 miles of packed ice up to five feet deep for a Russian tanker to deliver the needed oil to the town. The legacy of <i>Hell-Roaring Mike</i> still lives!</span></p>
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<table align="center" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container">
<tbody><tr><td><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uGR0D5HJhWw/T5iOS8pt0EI/AAAAAAAABAc/xpmG2i900gg/s1600/coastguard_620x350.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F-uGR0D5HJhWw%2FT5iOS8pt0EI%2FAAAAAAAABAc%2FxpmG2i900gg%2Fs400%2Fcoastguard_620x350.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image%2F*&width=750" width="750" class="align-center"/></a></span></p>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption"><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-1"><em>US Coast Guard Cutter Healy (left) opening the way for Russian tanker Renda</em></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">Of the remaining four Healy children, three girls and one boy, we know much less than about the older boys. The girls were said to look more like their mother but there are no surviving photographs to verify that. On the recommendation of Bishop Fitzpatrick, the three girls went to school at the Congregation of Notre Dame convent in Montreal. And after they graduated all three wanted to be nuns. </span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">Martha was the oldest and she entered the Congregation of Notre Dame in 1851. She stayed only a short while and left religious life to return to Boston. She eventually married Jeremiah Cashman, an upwardly mobile Irishman.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">Amanda Josephine joined the Religious Hospitallers of Saint Joseph in Canada. She died at the young age of 39 years.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">Like her older sister Martha, Eliza Dunamore joined the Congregation of Notre Dame in Montreal. Known as Sister Mary Magdalene, she taught for a number of years in Quebec and Ontario. In 1903 she was appointed Superior of the Villa Barlow convent and school in St. Albans, Vermont. This was a school for the daughters of the New England upper crust society. As headmistress she pulled the school out of debt and reorganized the faculty and curriculum. After 15 years there, Sister Mary Magdalene was transferred to the College of Notre Dame in Staten Island, New York again as community superior. She died there in 1918 from cancer.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">All that is known about Eugene, the youngest Healy child, was that he did not have success in life. Never really establishing himself, he went from one job to another and occasionally landed in jail.</span></p>
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<p><span class="font-size-2"><b style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">A Postscript</b></span></p>
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<div><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">Reading through the material on the history of the Healy family, it is to be noted that while they surely knew of their African American roots, they all lived and worked in a basically all-white society. None of them ever expressed interest in the plight of the African slave in the 19<sup>th</sup> century United States. And interestingly too, while they undoubtedly knew of their father's Irish heritage, they didn't overtly identify with being Irish either. They immersed themselves completely into the society to which fate had delivered them, even with their personal hesitancy and fears. Several suffered the injury of insults because of their racial background, but none of them ever seemed to fight back. I am sure that many reasons may be put forth to explain why this happened, but because we can never know what they felt and thought on the inside, the explanation for their outward behaviors in this context will remain a mystery.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">In his book, <i>Passing for White: Race, Religion and the Healy Family, 1820-1920</i>, Professor James M. O'Toole points out that while Eliza Healy and her children were legally classified as slaves, they were never treated as such. Of course they had to be careful not to cross swords with the legal authorities who could make trouble for them because of their status. But the fact that Michael Healy thought of Eliza as his “trusty woman …. the mother of my children” and that he lived with her as a husband with his wife, and that he cared for the welfare of his children and their educatiron, made a great difference. In addition, the fact that he had the financial means to do so, also greatly enhanced their chances for a better life.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" class="font-size-2">According to O'Toole, the Healy children <i>became white</i> at a time when racial issues were reaching an all-time high in the ante-bellum years. And they were able to do so not only because their skin complexions were not very dark, but because they had the support and patronage of Bishop Fitzpatrick and the Holy Cross Jesuits. The church itself had not been a bastion of anti-slavery up to that point. In fact the views and practices of many church communities were very pro-slavery. But thanks to the particular church people they met and who interceded for them, and also because of their own intelligence which was recognized by the church, they were able to <i>pass for</i> <i>white</i>.</span></p>
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<p><em><span class="font-size-1">This article first appeared in my <strong>Footnotes to Irish History in the Americas</strong> blog: <a href="http://irishamericanfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/04/healys-extraordinary-family.html" target="_blank">http://irishamericanfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/04/healys-extraordinary-family.html</a></span><a href="http://irishamericanfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/05/father-anthony-dominic-fahy-irish.html" target="_blank"><br/></a></em></p>
</div>Anthony Dominic Fahy, Irish Chaplain of Argentinatag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-02-18:6442157:BlogPost:715262014-02-18T05:00:00.000ZJim Gouldinghttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/JamesGoulding
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703173?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703173?profile=original" width="241"></img></a> A</span>s you enter the main gate of the Recoleta Cemetery</strong> in Buenos Aires, continue walking straight in and on the right side perhaps within 100 yards, you will find a monument, the burial place of Almirante Guillermo (Admiral William) Brown, the Irishman who is considered to be the…</p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703173?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703173?profile=original" width="241" class="align-right"/></a>A</span>s you enter the main gate of the Recoleta Cemetery</strong> in Buenos Aires, continue walking straight in and on the right side perhaps within 100 yards, you will find a monument, the burial place of Almirante Guillermo (Admiral William) Brown, the Irishman who is considered to be the Father of the Argentine navy. On the left side, a bit further in, you will find an ornate monument with an angel facing forward and holding a plaque in his hands that simply says <strong>“Father Fahy”.</strong> This is the burial place of Father Anthony Dominic Fahy, OP, the most famous Irishman in nineteenth century Argentina.</p>
<p>Anthony Fahy (or Fahey as he himself preferred, but it never stuck) was born in Louchrea, Co. Galway on January 11, 1805. His parents, Patrick Fahy and Belinda Cloran were proprietors of a brewery in the town. They had seven children before Patrick passed away. Belinda subsequently married a cousin of her first husband also surnamed Fahy in 1816 and they had 3 children. Of Belinda's ten children, five went into the priesthood or religious life. At age 22 Anthony entered the Dominican Order and did his novitiate year in Athenry, pronouncing his first vows in August 1829. Then he went on to Rome for his philosophy and theology studies. He was ordained a priest in Rome at the Basilica of St. John Lateran on March 19, 1831. For the next three years he remained in Rome advancing his studies.</p>
<p><img width="200" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703317?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="200" class="align-left"/></p>
<p>In 1834 he was missioned to St. Joseph's in Somerset, Ohio, which was then a backwoods kind of place where the priests had to travel long distances on horseback to reach their flocks. Father Anthony lasted only two years in Ohio, when in 1836, because of “broken health” he returned to Ireland to recuperate. After a two year hiatus, he requested to be sent back to Ohio but his request was denied. Instead he ministered in a parish in Galway for the next three years. In 1839 he was appointed Prior of the Dominican community of Black Abbey in Kilkenny.</p>
<p>Beginning in the 1820's the Archbishop of Dublin, Daniel Murray, was responsible for sending a priest to minister to the spiritual needs of the growing Irish immigrant community in Argentina. In 1843 this chaplaincy had been vacated but the archbishop didn't have a priest to spare so he requested the bishop of Ossory, William Kinsela, to look for a replacement. Kinsela knew Anthony Fahy and remembering his desire to return to the missions in America, offered him the opportunity in Argentina and he readily accepted. Father Anthony Fahy sailed into Buenos Aires harbor on January 11,1844, his 39th birthday.</p>
<p>At the time of Fahy's arrival in Argentina there were an estimated 3500 Irish people living in Buenos Aires. He took up residence at the Santo Domingo convent and started celebrating Mass at the church of San Ignacio where his predecessor, Father Patrick O' Gorman had made arrangements to have the Irish community gather weekly. Later he relocated the community to the Franciscan chapel of San Roque where there were benches, pulpit, confessional and organ. He also moved into another home given to him rent-free through the generosity of Thomas Armstrong, a wealthy Westmeath-born Protestant who arrived in Buenos Aires in 1817.</p>
<p>Father Fahy's activities on behalf of the Irish community quickly became all encompassing. He made himself available to assist his people in every human capacity, as financial adviser, marriage counselor, judge, interpreter, employment agent and especially as matchmaker. When he saw that there were not enough marriageable women in the Irish community, he wrote back to Ireland and arranged for a large number of young ladies from his own Loughrea area to emigrate to Argentina.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703354?profile=original" target="_self"><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman"><font size="4"><img width="200" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703354?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="200" class="align-right" style="padding: 10px;"/></font></font></font></a></span></p>
<p>As time progressed Father Fahy achieved numerous accomplishments. In 1847 he launched the Irish Relief Fund to aid famine victims in Ireland which was then in the throes of the great famine. He collected and sent 411 Irish punts to the Archbishop of Dublin. In 1848 he opened the Irish Immigrant Infirmary to assist sick newcomers. So many new arrivals were coming off the transatlantic ships overwhelmed by fatigue, malnourishment, and other ailments from the long journey that he saw this as a necessary response.</p>
<p>In the same letter that Fahy wrote to the Archbishop of Dublin with the famine relief funds, he also strongly encouraged that more Irish people consider immigrating to Argentina. He wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>"May God bring Irish immigrants to this country instead of going to the United States. Here they will feel at home, will have plenty of work and experience the friendliness of the local people; very different from what they are experiencing in the U.S. Which forces them back to Ireland. There is no better country in the world to come especially with a poor family. The vast plains lying idle, eager for hands that want to cultivate. The government offers all kinds of protection and encourages people from abroad."</p>
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<p>Fahy also encouraged the poorer laborers who remained living and working in the city of Buenos Aires to consider moving out into the <em>pampas</em> (the plains). On his trips to the countryside, he saw that the folks out there were better off than those in the city. He encouraged these city folks to save some money and invest in land and to raise sheep in the countryside. He often even accompanied them on their first visit to the bank to open savings accounts so that they might achieve their goals.</p>
<p>By 1848 it was evident that Fahy was achieving great success in his ministry and outreach to the Irish community of Argentina. He made it his business to know all the right people in high places so that when necessary he could use these contacts to aid the members of the Irish community. However, two matters arose which cast long shadows over his influence and his role in Irish-Argentine society.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703346?profile=original" target="_self"><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman"><font size="4"><img width="200" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703346?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="200" class="align-left" style="padding: 10px;"/></font></font></font></a></span></p>
<p>The first had to do with a young lady, Camila O' Gorman, a twenty year old from a very well-to-do family who fell in love with a young priest, Ladislao Gutierrez, and became pregnant. The two eloped and traveled north intending to cross into Bolivia or Brazil. Because the president, Juan Manuel de Rosas, a ruthless dictator by this time, saw their actions as an affront to his campaign to uphold his code of morality and honor, he put out the alarm for their capture. They assumed new names and tried to remain hidden. After a time when things had cooled down and the alarm was called off because the authorities thought that they had escaped, they set themselves up as teachers in a remote town still in Argentine territory where they were favorably received. At a party in their honor they were recognized by another priest who turned them in. After a short imprisonment, Rosas the dictator, ordered them to be executed. They had no trial and no opportunity to present testimony. Rosas consulted Father Fahy about the matter and Fahy concurred that such actions warranted <em>“exemplary punishment”</em> for <em>“the priest who had sullied his church and the wayward girl who not only lead a priest astray but also gave the industrious and well regarded Irish-Argentine community a bad name!”<span style="font-size: large; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> </span></em></p>
<p>Camila O' Gorman, eight months pregnant, and Ladislao Gutierrez, the priest, tied to chairs side-by-side were executed by a firing squad in August 1848. Many people were horrified and repulsed by this barbaric act so much so that the dictator never really recovered from this horrific event and four years later fled for his own life to England where he died in poverty.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703437?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="200" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703437?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="200" class="align-right"/></a>The second matter also had to do with the dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas. By 1849 the world-at-large had become aware of the ruthless and bloodthirsty tyrant who with his iron fist was ruling Argentina. An article in the <em>Dublin Review</em> accused Rosas of great cruelty and unbelievably Fahy wrote a rebuttal in <em>La Gaceta Mercantil</em> (Rosas' official government paper) saying:</p>
<blockquote><p>“All that is stated in the libel inserted in the Dublin Review in regard to supposed crimes and assassinations of a Mazhorca Society in the service of the police, which are fancied in that production as proved at former periods; all that is said of the profanation of churches and sanctuaries and the other suppositions of this stamp … are but a tissue of contemptible falsehoods.”</p>
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<p>Needless to say, Fahy's rebuttal to the Dublin Review article was very well received by Rosas. It was published in two different editions in one week. Then a few days later a special edition was published with the Fahy response and several editorial comments all in Spanish, English and French for world-wide consumption. Fahy had endeared himself to the regime but he must have left many people wondering why he chose to defend Rosas. A man of the gospel condoning the policies and actions of a tyrannical dictator left many people in this Catholic society wondering what was really in Fahy's mind.</p>
<p>But somehow Father Fahy escaped the recriminations of his flock. While they feared and felt only contempt for Juan Manuel de Rosas, Fahy continued to gain the admiration of his people because of his total dedication to their every human need.</p>
<p>In 1854 Father Fahy sent a sizeable sum of money to All Hallows college in Dublin to educate six young priests for the mission in Argentina. He was concerned about the quality of Argentine priests and wanted his priests to be trained in the classical Irish tradition. Of the non-Irish priests he said that they were “adventurers from Europe whose ambition is to make money and often give more scandal to religion than edification.”</p>
<p>Fahy's six new Irish priests began to arrive in 1860. At first he had them stay in his house while they were adjusting to their new environment and learning Spanish. After this orientation period Fahy sent them out to the various areas where the Irish community lived.</p>
<p>At Fahy's behest eight Sisters of Mercy of Baggot Street, Dublin, arrived to a great welcome in February 1856. They were to work in the Irish Immigrant Infirmary. In time the infirmary became transformed into the educational institution called St. Bridget's College. The sisters also opened a girls home, another college, Mater Misericordiae Academy and three more schools in regional towns.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><span style="font-size: 13px;">Sometime around 1860, Fahy's outlook took a pessimistic turn on the conditions for the further Irish immigration to Argentina. In a letter back to Ireland he stated that</span> <em style="font-size: 13px;">“this is a most unfortunate country … The liberty, or rather unbridled license of the press has corrupted the people dreadfully, and the influx of the dregs of Spain and Italy has added considerably to the immorality of the nation.”</em></span></p>
<p>Writing to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda in Rome in 1861, Fahy said <em>“having resided in this Province for the space of seventeen years, I am able to form a sufficient idea of the wants of the Churches in this Country and the only remedy for its innumerable evils.”</em> He said that Argentines had no real interest in the Church and blamed this on <em>“the philosophy of the last age and all the bad books of France.”</em></p>
<p>What was happening was that Irish immigrants of the earlier era came and worked hard to save some money, and then moved out of the city to buy or rent large tracts of land to raise sheep. Once all the cheap land was bought up, the more recent newcomers who came without capital to invest, could only find work as laborers in the cities or in the countryside and so seemed to have little hope of upward mobility. More recently arrived immigrants were having a tougher time than the earlier ones. This Fahy reflected in his statements such as:</p>
<blockquote><p>“The Irish are being elbowed out by the Italians. Our people have given themselves entirely to sheep-farming which until recently has been quite profitable as well as easy. But the best land for grazing is also the best land for tillage, and the Italian comes and offers a higher rent for the land, and so ousts the sheep farmer.”</p>
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<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703488?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="320" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703488?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="320" class="align-left" style="padding: 10px;"/></a></p>
<p>This is the same cycle that occurred in the American West. Once all the land was claimed, there was no more to buy and to gain wealth from. And so less supply means higher re-sale and rental prices for the land. Add to that the always present difficulty for the newly arrived Irishman to have to learn a new language in this new land. The Italian could pick up the Spanish language more easily and so had less of a disadvantage. And if he came with some financial resources, he was much better off than the Irish immigrant who was coming with nothing from a country just recuperating from the Great Famine.</p>
<p>By 1870 - 1871 the yellow fever epidemic was rampant in Buenos Aires. More than 13,600 people died. Father Fahy was busy ministering to the sick and the dying when he himself passed away on February 20, 1871. The newspapers reported that he died of yellow fever after ministering to a sick Italian woman. However his death certificate clearly states that “ … he died from heart disease.” His remains were initially entombed in the vault of the diocesan clergy in Recoleta cemetery but later moved over to the monument built by the Earley sculptors of Dublin.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em>This article first appeared in my <em><strong>Footnotes to Irish History in the Americas</strong></em> blog: <a href="http://irishamericanfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/05/father-anthony-dominic-fahy-irish.html" target="_blank">http://irishamericanfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/05/father-anthony-dominic-fahy-irish.html</a></em></span></p>
<p></p>Letters: Lifelines to the Old Countrytag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-01-21:6442157:BlogPost:731122014-01-21T13:30:00.000ZJim Gouldinghttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/JamesGoulding
<p> <a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703394?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-center" height="192" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703394?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="702"></img></a></p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;">W</span>e live in the age of the instantaneous.</strong> Emails, instant messaging, phone calls and video Skyping put us in almost immediate contact with our loved ones and our friends. Even if they live an ocean away, thanks to modern technology, the means of instant communication is…</p>
<p> <a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703394?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703394?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="702" class="align-center" height="192"/></a></p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;">W</span>e live in the age of the instantaneous.</strong> Emails, instant messaging, phone calls and video Skyping put us in almost immediate contact with our loved ones and our friends. Even if they live an ocean away, thanks to modern technology, the means of instant communication is always at hand.</p>
<p>When I was a little lad the communications media was very different. In my early years we had no phone at home. Then in the early 1950s we finally got one but we used it for local calling only. Long distance was costly and used very seldom. International calls were unheard of. If someone died, the Western Union man would come around with a telegram bearing the bad news. If a baby was born, a telegram with congratulations for the new arrival would come. But the principal means of communication with the family in Ireland was by letter.</p>
<p>Growing up in New York I remember my parents, both Irish born, writing and receiving many letters to/from Ireland. Surely letters would be sent and received for Christmas, at Easter and three or four times more during the year. Often such letters would contain photos and of course around March 17th a sprig of dried shamrock would be tucked into the folds of the writing paper. A letter from Ireland was always the highlight of any day. We received many letters from my grandmothers, and from aunts and uncles. We were kept up to date on the achievements of the younger folks and we heard all about the ailments of the older ones. And of course, we got the news about who had recently visited the family homesteads in both Cork and Clare.</p>
<p>Needless to say when a letter was received, Mom and Dad treasured it. They would read it several times the day it arrived and would go back to it again at different intervals. They collected those letters keeping them in the kitchen cupboard. Every once in a while, they would go through them because they had to clean things out. They couldn't keep everything, but certain ones went into a shoebox in the bureau drawer for safekeeping. I still have a few of those letters. I even have some that were written years before I was born. And even more amazing, before the days of photocopy machines, my Dad would sometimes write a second copy of a letter he was sending for his own safekeeping if he thought it to be really important. I still have his copy of the letter he sent to my mother's parents asking for her hand in marriage along with my grandmother's letter of their response. What a treasure!</p>
<p>Old letters tell us of a family's history. Not only are they a joy to read but they document for us what actually happened, when and where (in the writer's perception, of course). They remind us that such and such a thing happened in a certain year, rather than when we think we recollect it happening. And a series of letters can be like a book with numerous chapters. We can see the progress of the family: the children growing up, going to school, getting married. We read about when the hay was brought in, the turf was cut, the quality of the crops that year, and most importantly how the weather was. But even beyond the events that took place, we learned of the concerns of the family, what they were thinking about certain things, what was on their minds. These old letters are a link to the past that help to keep the family story alive.</p>
<p>I present to you here two of our family letters that I consider to be very special, the first because it came across the Atlantic on the first airmail flight in 1939 (as is documented by the franking on the envelope) and the second because it is the oldest one I have (dated in 1900 or 1906 – the last digit is not clear).</p>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703605?profile=original" target="_self"><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman"><font size="3"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703605?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="419" class="align-center" height="338"/></font></font></font></a></p>
<p></p>
<p>This first letter was written by my paternal grandmother to my father in June 1939. She begins:</p>
<blockquote><p>“As there is an air mail liner going from Eire to USA on Wednesday I thought I'd give you a bit of a thrill and let you have a letter by it as it is the first public air mail from here to US. I saw in the paper that the letter posted here on Tuesday should be delivered in NY on Thursday and that you should keep the stamp to show your grandchildren hereafter.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At the time she wrote this letter, my father had not yet married, and unfortunately his grandchildren were only born after he himself had passed on from this life. But they have seen her letter and gotten their own thrill from it.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703548?profile=original" target="_self"><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman"><font size="3"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703548?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="603" class="align-center" height="372"/></font></font></font></a></p>
<p>Grandmother's letter continues:</p>
<blockquote><p>“We are all pretty well here at present only Rita (one of Dad's younger sisters) is not quite alright yet. I have her staying at Xhaven (Crosshaven, a village looking out at Cork Harbor where grandma had a summer place) for the past 3 months."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don't have other letters from the preceding time period, so I don't know if Rita's ailment had been previously explained. Nor do I recollect that her ailments were ever a topic of discussion at home. Given the prevalence of TB (consumption they called it) in Ireland in the 1930's and that there would be good sea breezes at Crosshaven to clear one's lungs, I wouldn't be surprised that TB was what ailed her.</p>
<p>She goes on to tell that Rita ...</p>
<blockquote><p>"got engaged at Xmas to John Kneafsy and they were thinking of getting married sometime about August or September but now she has changed her mind and won't get married atall this year. You know who John is, his Father came from Roscommon and is now living at Glengarriffe, his mother RIP was a daughter to J. Nicholas Roskerrig, his aunt Nellie Nicholas is married to Dick Hurley in America.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rita did not get married that year and unfortunately succumbed to her illness and died the next year in June 1940. She was just 26 years old.</p>
<p>The letter continues:</p>
<blockquote><p>“You will be surprised to hear that Tom (Dad's youngest brother) is gone to England, he was intended to join the Air Force as pilot and passed both medical and educational exams but when he was called they said there was no vacancy for pilot and that they would take him on as Air Observer which only carried a gratuity of £100 after 5 or 6 years service and the pilot would have £500 so he did not accept it atall ...”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Uncle Tom never did become a pilot, so he returned to Ireland where he worked as a Garda superintendent in Dublin for many years. However, his eldest son Thomas (known as TJ), in later years did become a captain for Aer Lingus and flew their planes across the Atlantic and wherever else they went for more than 30 years. Sadly, after only two years in retirement, TJ died last August, a big loss to his family.</p>
<p>Before closing, Grandma informs that:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Paddy (his other brother) has been working constant for a year and likely to continue please God."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don't know what job she was referring to, but Paddy was a bus driver for the CIE for many years and I heard it said that he knew every lane in Cork City and all the boreens in the west of Ireland from his driving experience.</p>
<p>Grandma's letter concludes:</p>
<blockquote><p>“I must close now as I want to get this away and trust ye are all well. I remain yours lovingly. Mama”</p>
<p></p>
</blockquote>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;"><font color="#000000"><font face="Arial, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font size="3"><font face="Segoe Script, sans-serif"><b><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703657?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703657?profile=original" width="200" class="align-center"/></a></b></font></font></font></font></p>
<p align="left"></p>
<p>My maternal grandfather was one of nine siblings, all born in the mid to late 1800's. They lived on a small farm on the edge of the Burren in Co. Clare where their predecessors had paid rent before they took possession of the land. My mother and her 4 siblings were born and raised on this farm. In recent years an ancient dolmen and a piece of the famine road have been discovered in one of the back fields. The farm is still in our family today.</p>
<p>Sometime in the late 1800's two of granddad's sisters emigrated, one to America and the other to Australia. This second letter was written on May 8, 1900 or 1906 by Katie from Brisbane to her sister Maggie in New York.</p>
<p></p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703774?profile=original" target="_self"><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703774?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="599" class="align-center" height="416"/></font></font></font></a></p>
<p>Katie begins by saying that ...</p>
<blockquote><p>“you must think me very long winded not to answer your letter before now. I was doubly pleased to hear from you.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She continues by saying that she wishes that Maggie would</p>
<blockquote><p>“save up and take a trip to Queensland,"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>and that</p>
<blockquote><p>“if you come I might go back with you."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She adds that</p>
<blockquote><p>“if I had a home of my own, then I would insist on you coming, but as it is I have no home to offer to you.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But hope springs eternal:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Never mind things might change for both of us some day” implying that they might both get married (neither ever did).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Katie continues on:</p>
<blockquote><p>“You never told me about Ellie (another sister who stayed at home) getting married. I do think they might have told us about it and also send us a bit of the wedding cake...”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She continues,</p>
<blockquote><p>“Ellie was married to a Mr. O'Donohue, can you call him to mind.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Further on she says:</p>
<blockquote><p>“I haven't much news to tell you that is anything interesting to you. I have no notion of getting married and no likelihood of anything in this live” (sic).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At this point Katie interrupts the flow of the letter. She asks:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Have you got the dengue fever over in America? As for Queensland every person here is either having it or is down with (it). I am over it for the last 3 weeks... There was one Sunday where there was no priest to celebrate Mass owing to their being laid up with the dengue”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Again she changes gears:</p>
<blockquote><p>“You never said whether you got my photo or not. I sent you one about 12 months ago, but that is all I heard about it. Surely it was worth a thank you. When you write to me again let me know whether you got it or not”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thinking about the family at home, she writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>“the last letter I had from home, they said father (my great grandfather)was just about the same. Should father die, I hope they will get cards printed and send you and I one each. Their father was about 90 years old at that time. She goes on:“I do think it was very good of you to send all that money home. I know that I couldn't afford it. You must be getting good pay”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Maggie (Aunt Margaret as we knew her) worked as a housekeeper for a Park Avenue family for most of her years in New York. As good a salary as she might have gotten, she always lived a frugal life and died with almost no assets to her name. She was always a great correspondent with the family back in Clare, so I wouldn't be surprised if she was continually sending money to the family back home.</p>
<p>As she continues, it is apparent that Katie is lonely for her family back in Ireland. She says that if Maggie would only come out to see her in Australia, that she would</p>
<blockquote><p>“never ask you to stay in Queensland as it is not a good place for girls, but I would like you to come over on a visit to see me, I am sure you would find a young man on the voyage and you would be the next to be married. What do you think?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She has marriage and relationships on her mind and is feeling the loneliness.</p>
<p>Katie closes her letter:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Wright (sic) me a long letter next time. I will close now with heaps of love & kisses to Maggie. From your ever loving sister Katie”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Family oral tradition has passed on the information to us that Katie did leave Australia but that on-board ship she fell ill and died and her body was buried at sea. Today we have no documentation to verify this, we only have the story.</p>
<p align="left"><font color="#000000"><font face="Arial, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman"> </font></font></font></font></p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703676?profile=original" target="_self"><font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman"><font size="3"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84703676?profile=original" width="200" class="align-center"/></font></font></font></a></p>
<p></p>
<p>Letters like these tell a piece of our family's story. And they tell it in a way much better than the oral stories that are passed down from one generation to another. The oral stories often lose something of the original or some embellishment creeps in that distorts what really happened.</p>
<p>Maybe you have letters, writings or newspaper clippings etc. that tell a piece of your story. Or maybe you have other things, keepsakes that you treasure, that in some way tell a piece of your family story. Share them here if you will, and let others treasure your story as well.</p>
<p align="left"></p>Daniel Florence O'Learytag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-01-07:6442157:BlogPost:645922014-01-07T00:00:00.000ZJim Gouldinghttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/JamesGoulding
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84702760?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-left" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84702760?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300"></img></a> <strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;">T</span>here is a statue commemorating his bravery</strong> in Fitzgerald Park in Cork City where he was born, but many Cork residents today have no idea who he was. Yet history students in Venezuela know him as one of the most trusted aides of Simon Bolivar, the liberator of what is today…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84702760?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84702760?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300" class="align-left"/></a><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;">T</span>here is a statue commemorating his bravery</strong> in Fitzgerald Park in Cork City where he was born, but many Cork residents today have no idea who he was. Yet history students in Venezuela know him as one of the most trusted aides of Simon Bolivar, the liberator of what is today Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia.</p>
<p>Daniel Florence (Florencio) O'Leary was born in 1801, the son of Jeremiah O'Leary and Catherine Burke. That the family's roots sprung from West Cork is certain. Unclear is precisely from what town. Some say they came from Inchigeela and others from Dunmanway. Once his great grandfather moved the family into Cork City, they became successful butter merchants utilizing their West Cork contacts to supply them with the products to sell in the city. The business was passed down to Daniel's grandfather and then to his father. But in the early 1800's after the Napoleonic War ended, the business declined substantially and young Daniel, by then in his mid teens, had to look for other opportunities.</p>
<p>Between 1817-1819 a recruitment campaign was underway which enlisted some 6000 English, Scottish and Irish volunteers for military service in Simon Bolivar's army to liberate South American territory from Spain. Daniel enlisted but by the time his group arrived on the shores of present day Venezuela, he became disillusioned by the poor quality of many of his fellow recruits who were veterans of Napoleonic era European armies seeking action as mercenaries. Daniel took the first opportunity to transfer to another regiment where he was soon spotted by Bolivar for his leadership and language abilities. He was quickly promoted up the ranks and gained the confidence of Bolivar. He was slightly wounded at <i>Pantano de Vargas</i> in July 1819, but recuperated sufficiently to participate in the battle of <i>Boyaca</i> in early August, which was a turning point in the liberation of <i>Nueva Granada</i> from the Spaniards. By this time he had become Bolivar's <i>edecán</i> or top assistant.</p>
<p>As Bolivar's trusted aide, O'Leary saw action in the more important battles at <i>Carabobo</i> in which Venezuela was liberated, and at <i>Pinchincha</i> bringing liberation to Ecuador. Bolivar's dream was to unite all the liberated territories into one large entity which he called <i>Gran Colombia</i>. But once liberation had been accomplished, the various parties began their own disagreements and little wars among themselves. Bolivar sent O'Leary as conciliator to try to resolve some of these differences but after Bolivar's death in 1830, one by one the individual territories each declared their own independence to become the countries of northern South America as we know them today.</p>
<p>In 1828 O'Leary married Soledad Soublette, the sister of Carlos Soublette, one of Bolivar's generals who later became president of Venezuela. After Bolivar's death in 1830, and because of the toxic atmosphere that had developed as a result of the disintegration of <i>Gran Colombia</i>, O'Leary and his wife moved to the island of Jamaica. Here he tried to set himself up as a merchant without much success. In Jamaica his wife gave birth to their first child. By 1833, his brother-in-law summoned them back to Venezuela.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84702743?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84702743?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="287" class="align-right" height="411"/></a></p>
<p>O'Leary's fame as a conciliator developed into his being named diplomat by the Venezuelan government. By the mid-1830's he was appointed emissary seeking diplomatic recognition for Venezuela in the major capitals of Europe. His efforts took him on a five-year sojourn returning to South America in 1839. In the 1840's he was designated as the British government representative in Caracas and Bogotá.</p>
<p>In 1852, by now in declining health, O'Leary made another trip to Europe seeking medical care. His trip took him to London, Paris and Rome. On his way back, he visited his native Cork. Shortly after his return home to Bogotá, on February 24, 1854 he died. He was initially buried there but later his body was transferred to the National Pantheon in Caracas, where he was laid to rest close to the body of Simon Bolivar, the great Liberator.</p>
<p> Perhaps the most long lasting piece of Daniel O'Leary's legacy was the voluminous work he wrote recounting his military campaign years. He used his own diaries and many of Bolivar's own letters and writings, to put together in 32 volumes what has been recognized as the most comprehensive history of Bolivar's life and times. Today there is a copy of the <i>Memorias del General O'Leary</i> in the University College Cork library.</p>
<div><div><p><em><span class="font-size-1">This selection appears on my webpage: <a href="http://irishamericanfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/03/daniel-florence-oleary.html" target="_blank">Footnotes to Irish History in the Americas</a></span></em></p>
<p></p>
</div>
</div>Remembering JFK's Funeral Fifty-Four Years Ontag:thewildgeese.irish,2013-11-20:6442157:BlogPost:620132013-11-20T18:00:00.000ZJim Gouldinghttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/JamesGoulding
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><strong><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84701675?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84701675?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"></img></a></strong></span></p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-1"><em><strong><font>John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35<sup>th</sup> President of the United States</font></strong></em></span></p>
<p>It was early Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963. I was a student at the Catholic University of America in northeast Washington,…</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><strong><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84701675?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84701675?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750" class="align-full"/></a></strong></span></p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-1"><em><strong><font>John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35<sup>th</sup> President of the United States</font></strong></em></span></p>
<p>It was early Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963. I was a student at the Catholic University of America in northeast Washington, DC. My classes for the day had just finished and I was going to the library to look for a book that I needed for a term paper. I noticed some conversation buzzing in the study carrels, a place usually reserved for quiet. But there was more buzzing than usual. “President Kennedy was shot in Dallas” they said. “He has been taken to the hospital.” It was stunning, surreal for a moment, and then only minutes later “he is dead.” I couldn't believe it -- I didn't want to believe it. My world came crashing down. This president who was our daily inspiration, whose smiling face and positive spirit uplifted millions of Americans and others around the world, was dead.</p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-3"><font size="3"><b>My Irish-American Catholic hero president, John F. Kennedy, was dead.</b></font></span></p>
<p>The bells from the National Shrine basilica on the other side of the campus started to toll. The bells seemed to confirm that it was really true. The president was dead. From all across the campus students converged on the National Shrine where prayers were being said. I walked over and went inside and stayed a while – not sure how long, and then went home to the house where I lived in northwest Washington, DC.</p>
<p>For the next several days all commercial television programming ceased, only non-stop news was broadcast. The classic newsreel clip of Walter Cronkite on CBS, with uncharacteristic emotion in his voice announcing that President Kennedy was dead while removing his glasses, was replayed numerous times and viewed by millions. Most stores on Connecticut Avenue closed and many exchanged their usual window displays for a solemn photo of the president in a black frame or crepe. Friday night the president's body was flown back to Washington, DC and taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital where an autopsy was performed.</p>
<p>The next day Saturday, once the president's body was moved to the East Room of the White House, Kennedy family members, relatives and family friends came to pay their respects as well as a day-long procession of dignitaries, politicians and other government officials. The public would have their chance the next day at the Capitol.</p>
<p>On Saturday evening, television anchormen told the world that there would be a Mass at 10AM the next morning in the East Room for family and invited guests only, after which the president's casket would be moved to the Capitol rotunda for public viewing. Five friends and myself agreed to dress up in our Sunday best and go down to the 15th Street entrance of the White House around 9AM before the Mass would take place and ask if we could go into the East Room to see the casket and pay our respects. It wasn't likely that we would get in but we would give it a try. At the gate, there was a lone Marine guard in his telephone booth-like guardhouse. We asked him for permission to go in. He eyed us up and down and then picked up his telephone. He spoke to someone for a few moments and then stepped out to tell us that we should stay right where we were and that a Marine guard would come out shortly to escort us in.</p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-3"><font size="3"><b>Unbelievable!</b> <b>We're going into the White House!</b></font></span></p>
<p>Within a few minutes the guard appeared and instructed us to follow him inside. We entered the building and walked up a flight of stairs. At the landing we entered the East Room. There was a vinyl runner on the floor from the corner door down the length of the room. The closed wooden flag-draped casket lay there in the very center with two kneelers alongside. There were military guards at attention posted around the room. Our small group took turns kneeling at the casket. On the foot of the casket I noticed a small bronze plate with the name of its maker (which I forget now) and “Boston, Massachusetts” underneath. No one else was in the room – only the guard of honor and ourselves. In a few moments we were finished and our Marine guard escorted us back downstairs and out to the 15th Street gate. It was all like a dream, but it was real.</p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-3"><font size="3"><b>We had just experienced one of the most memorable moments of our lives!</b></font></span></p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-3"><font size="3"><b><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84701720?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84701720?profile=original" width="601" class="align-center" style="padding: 5px;" height="484"/></a></b></font></span></p>
<p align="center"><em><span class="font-size-1"><strong><font>JFK's casket lying in state in the Capitol rotunda</font></strong></span></em></p>
<p>That afternoon the casket was taken to the Capitol rotunda where it lay in state for public viewing. The line waiting to simply walk past the catafalque at a distance grew so long that it was said that some people waited on line all night to get in.</p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;" class="font-size-3"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84701771?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84701771?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="597" style="padding: 5px;" height="407"/></a></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-1"><em><strong><font>Bobby and Ted with Jacqueline Kennedy leading the funeral party down the White House driveway</font></strong></em></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: left;">On Monday, I stood on the southeast corner of Rhode Island and Connecticut Avenues. With the crush of the crowd, that was the closest I could get to the front of St. Matthew's Cathedral about 100 yards up the street to my right. A man standing next to me said that he drove all night from Indianapolis to be present. People came from all across the country and from around the world for the funeral of our beloved assassinated President Kennedy.</p>
<p>After waiting for a while on the corner that blustery day, the funeral cortege began to approach. It came up Connecticut and turned right onto Rhode Island. First came the flag-draped casket mounted on a horse-drawn caisson followed by the riderless horse. The funeral party followed behind walking from the White House. In the front row was Jacqueline Kennedy, all in black with a mantilla shrouding her face. At either side were JFK's brothers Bobby and Ted. Behind them came heads of state, leaders, diplomats and personages from half the countries of the world. The ones I could recognize from television were Charles De Gaulle in full military uniform, Willy Brant, the mayor of West Berlin, Prince Phillip and Harold Wilson from Great Britain, and of course Eamon de Valera, the President of Ireland. They were followed by the members of the US congress and scores of other important people. It was an unprecedented gathering of world leaders for one of the saddest times in the history of our country.</p>
<p>The funeral party filed into the cathedral and the doors were closed. I ran up Connecticut Avenue to the house where I was living north of Dupont Circle to watch the Mass on television. It was all so surreal. The president who had been so alive and personable on television almost everyday, all of a sudden was dead. How could this be? I was distraught.</p>
<p>After the Mass, I stayed at home and watched the funeral on television as it processed from St. Matthew's back down Connecticut Ave and out to Arlington National Cemetery. President Kennedy had been there two weeks earlier on Veterans Day and commented that the view of Washington from the front of the Lee Mansion on top of the hill was spectacular. Little did he know that only two weeks later he would be buried on the hillside just below this spot.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">The graveside prayers were conducted by Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston with the Kennedy family and dignitaries up front. An Irish honor guard of 26 Defense Forces cadets whom President Kennedy had seen at Arbour Hill Military Cemetery in Dublin the previous June on his trip to Ireland was commissioned to perform its drill at his graveside rites. To read about them, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57606089/" target="_blank">click here</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84701922?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84701922?profile=original" width="746" class="align-center" style="padding: 10px;"/></a></p>
<p align="center"><em><span class="font-size-1"><strong><font>Military guard removing the flag from JFK's coffin in Arlington </font></strong></span></em><em style="font-size: 13px;"><span class="font-size-1"><strong>(arrow points to de Valera)</strong></span></em></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">For weeks afterward the crowds were so large at Arlington visiting JFK's grave that I decided to wait a while before going out there. Finally I did go on Christmas morning, a month later, getting to the cemetery at 6 AM. Even at that early hour the line was so long that I stood waiting for more than 3 hours to get up to the grave.</span></p>
<p>To see some rare photos of the Kennedy funeral, including the first one in which Eamon de Valera appears, <a href="http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Rare-photographs-from-the-funeral-of-former-president-John-F-Kennedy--144415935.html" target="_blank">click here</a>.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Postscript:</strong> The man to de Valera's right is Fr. Donald O'Callaghan, a Carmelite priest who accompanied de Valera as his chaplain that day. Father O'Callaghan and de Valera were great friends for many years.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;" class="font-size-3"> </span></p>Eliza Lynch: The Paramour of Paraguaytag:thewildgeese.irish,2013-10-01:6442157:BlogPost:538212013-10-01T15:00:00.000ZJim Gouldinghttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/JamesGoulding
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84700872?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-left" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84700872?profile=RESIZE_480x480" style="padding: 10px;" width="400"></img></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">In the modern-day city of Asuncion, Paraguay, two main avenues, </span><i style="font-size: 13px;">Avenida Madame Eliza A. Lynch </i><span style="font-size: 13px;">and </span><i style="font-size: 13px;">Avenida Mariscal Lopez </i><span style="font-size: 13px;">intersect each other in…</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84700872?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="400" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84700872?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="400" style="padding: 10px;" class="align-left"/></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">In the modern-day city of Asuncion, Paraguay, two main avenues, </span><i style="font-size: 13px;">Avenida Madame Eliza A. Lynch </i><span style="font-size: 13px;">and </span><i style="font-size: 13px;">Avenida Mariscal Lopez </i><span style="font-size: 13px;">intersect each other in the Estanzuela neighborhood. The junction of these two avenues is symbolic of the interaction of the lives of the two individuals after whom these main streets are named. These two people, an Irish woman from Cork and a Paraguayan man, the son of a dictator, came together in the mid-1800's and impacted the history of Paraguay with long-lasting and devastating consequences.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"> <a href="http://irishamericanfootnotes.blogspot.com/2013/09/eliza-lynch-paramour-of-paraguay.html" target="_blank">Continue reading</a></span></p>Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Man from Kerrytag:thewildgeese.irish,2013-08-24:6442157:BlogPost:424462013-08-24T17:00:00.000ZJim Gouldinghttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/JamesGoulding
<p><span><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84700139?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-left" height="131" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84700139?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="91"></img></a></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-2">As we commemorate the 50</span><span class="font-size-2" style="font-size: 13px;"><sup id="yui_3_7_2_1_1377356925745_3919">th</sup> anniversary of perhaps the second most famous speech in American history on August 28, 1963 (Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is certainly the first), the man who gave the “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin…</span></p>
<p><span><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84700139?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="250" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84700139?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="91" class="align-left" height="131"/></a></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-2">As we commemorate the 50</span><span class="font-size-2" style="font-size: 13px;"><sup id="yui_3_7_2_1_1377356925745_3919">th</sup> anniversary of perhaps the second most famous speech in American history on August 28, 1963 (Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is certainly the first), the man who gave the “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. is being commemorated for his place in American history. One of the little known aspects of his life was his relationship with an Irishman, Michael J. Quill, the founder and president of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) in New York City.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://irishamericanfootnotes.blogspot.com/2013/08/martin-luther-king-jr-and-man-from-kerry.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FootnotesToIrishHistoryInTheAmericas+%28Footnotes+to+Irish+History+in+the+Americas%29" target="_blank" style="text-align: left;">Continue</a></p>