A Long Way From Tipperary: A Journey of Morrisseys, Ryans, Heffernons, and Agnews to Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota

By Mike Morrissey

Combining memoir with family history, A Long Way From Tipperary is the narrative of an Irish immigrant family that managed to survive the Great Hunger and then make the perilous journey to America in the 1850s. It is also the story of a young person’s coming of age in the 1950s and wishing to put his own life into the context of ancestors who blazed the trail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Morrissey
• Release date: Oct 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310897337

Mike Morrissey

Mike Morrissey is a retired public school superintendent who enjoyed teaching young people, mentoring student teachers, teaching university graduate course work, and engaging school board members on matters of policy and administration. He has morphed into a scribbler who enjoys writing short stories and matters of family history, as well as listening to the exploits of his five young grandchildren.

Book preview

A Sense Not Understood

What possible inner homing device can cause a person to be drawn to a former residence that predates one's ability to compile and catalog data? Why do geese, or wild turkeys, or monarch butterflies for that matter have the capability of traveling thousands of miles to former reproductive grounds? Perhaps humans had some of those same innate capacities, but no longer engage them as a result of the continuing evolution of the human brain.

If you are reading this you must be a relative. Or, you broke into our home and found your way to my study. Why you might pick up this manuscript and begin reading is beyond the best efforts of my imagination. I have rendered this tale to paper only to satisfy my own needs. Perhaps, to take stock of my life in some way. Or, possibly, so my children, and maybe theirs, could have some sense of the journey traveled by their ancestors. Anyway, whatever compels people to write a bit of their family history now compels me. I hold it back no longer.

My earliest recollection is of being in the yard behind the back of a house. It is a white house, square rather than rectangular, with a dark gray wood shingled roof. There are no rain gutters. At the back there is a garage with a basketball hoop on a nearby pole. I can visualize myself up near the hoop but unable to grasp or touch it. I am on my father's shoulders. The season is early spring or late fall; it is cold and I am wearing a fleece-like powder blue jacket and a matching cap with flaps. I think it is fun to be up in the air! The breeze slips in between the flaps and my ears. I think they are hot, confusing cold momentarily with heat. The year is 1942, and I am two years old give or take a few months. It would be more than a half-century before I would stand in that driveway again.

*****

In the summer of 1997 I had taken a quick trip to Dickinson, ND, where Mother's sole remaining North Dakota sibling, Robert Agnew, was living. News from Mother told he was failing, and since he had been a very special person to me when I was growing up, I wanted to make sure I had one last chance to see him before the final card was tossed on the table. He was the uncle first in line buying gifts for me following my birth. A pair of cowboy boots when I was a year old, which I would grow into at age four; a Marx electric train for my second Christmas which has weathered all the travail a child could thrust upon it and still circle the tree at Christmas three quarters of a century later; and a .22 rifle for my third birthday, which my father would finally allow me to carry on the railroad right-of-way at age fourteen, solo, following intense training by his side.

The passage of time had shrunk Robert's youthful five-foot-eight stature to something considerably less. For the previous several years his life seemed more and more to be a steady stream of doctor's orders: "Do this! Don't do that!" Why does it all boil down to this? The freedom that had been so much a part of his existence was stolen away a molecule at a time.

In the early years he had roamed the North Dakota prairies in his Ford pickup at seventy miles an hour, a modern era cowboy; instead of rounding up cattle, he rounded up nickels.

When little more than a teenager he went to work for the owners of the St. Charles Hotel in Dickinson, ND, and it became readily apparent that he had a talent for money, gathering it that is. He started out as a bellhop and quickly advanced to bookkeeper. When the owners of the hotel discovered his financial acumen, they soon realized that he was a young man in whom they could invest. The two men with the money, one having married it and the other having inherited it, were eager to stake Robert to a third share in the new venture. The venture was all about nickels and the fact that when emptied into five-gallon pails they amounted to more than a person might think, particularly while the rest of the country emerged from the Great Depression. Pinball machines and jukeboxes were the stock in trade.

Young Robert ambled the dusty prairies almost daily, hitting the small towns west of the Missouri River in North Dakota from forty miles north of old US Highway 10 (now I-94), to Bowman near the southern border, and over to Wibaux, just into Montana. Into the old ramshackle taverns on the main street of each of these western cow towns, one virtually indistinguishable from another, strode Robert. With a heavy case in each hand, one containing the tools and solvents necessary to clean the pinball mechanisms, the other the hand-cranked coin-counting machine, he set about his work. The smoky, stale beery smell of the interiors reeked, so thick it could be sliced like Velveeta cheese, even at nine-thirty in the morning.

The business once established, Bob had jingle in his pocket. He was generous to a fault. Before he experienced the joy of a daughter on whom to spend some of his newly acquired income, he made chest-bursting proud his nieces and nephews, stuffing their pockets with fifty-cent pieces, silver dollars, and on special occasions such as birthdays, some serious folding money. To say he was generous is to understate; he often gave away things he could well have used himself. Some of the nephews were fortunate to ride shotgun during summer vacation; along with the spare change he dispensed liberally as they burned up the red scoria roads from Killdeer to Beulah was a good bit of philosophy, most of it focused on making the most of life with the gifts that you have. And there was the mantra, Don't ever smoke, Mickey. Do as I say and not as I do!

On frequent occasions when in Dickinson at noon, he wheeled into the cafe at the St. Charles Hotel greeted by Heys and Hi, Bobs all around. As he sat at the lunch counter over a hamburger, a bowl of soup, and coffee jabbering with the locals, the counter checks of those within the immediate area gravitated by magic to his plate's edge. By the time he finished eating he had accumulated eight or ten dollars' worth of lunches, that in an era when a hamburger cost a quarter.

His wife Ruth, his one true love, contracted multiple sclerosis when she was in her early twenties. She fought the disease with courage generally ascribed to the acts of heroic fighting men. Bobby was her man and she fought the battle for him. And he returned the adulation by his constant attention to her needs. In later years when she was confined to a nursing home he was her daily visitor. After taking his lunch he left for the nursing home and would spend the afternoon sitting by her side. On good days he would take her out in the sunshine for the fresh air she loved so much, her face a broad smile as she radiated in his attention.

In the 1920s Bob learned to play golf while caddying for the old duffers out at the country club. He became an outstanding golfer, his intuition for the game exceeded only by his desire to take a few quarters from some of his golfing buddies. Little could he peer into the future, but the golf course was to become his final place of residence. In the early nineteen sixties the pinball and jukebox business was sold. Robert was offered the job of managing the growing country club; his understanding of the game coupled with his knowledge of what it took to keep the greens and fairways in good shape made a perfect match for a guy who would rather have been on the golf course than in the old pickup anyway.

When he finally retired, the golfing community gave Bob and Ruth the old pro shop as a home in which to live out their final years. Sitting in front of his living room window, he could alternately watch the young people chasing white pellets down the fairway, and then glance over to the TV, constantly attuned to the Golf Channel. It was in this setting and place that we would have our final conversation, alternately laughing and then, Look at that chip would you...he had the slope of that green figured out, didn't he, Mickey...his third bird this round.

As his health began to decline, a number of hospitalizations, surgeries, and pneumonias began to take their toll. Following discharge he returned to the cigarettes as if the brief cessation while in the hospital was a well-designed interlude to increase his capacity for abuse. Besides, Those damn doctors don't know anything anyway, the grin on his face intended to take your mind off the seriousness of his condition. Toward the end he stopped his daily visits to see his beloved Ruth. She had begun the long, slow spiral into the mixture of darkness and half-light that characterizes brain disease. It was excruciating for him to watch her decline, and physically he just wasn't up to it. But Little Robert, now approaching more than ever in stature the moniker his golfing buddies had given him years ago, didn't have the last word in that regard. A heart attack would put him in the nursing home with his Ruth. They were, at the end, under the same roof, and companions once again.

Death came to him in his sleep on October 20, 1997, and his family and friends gathered a few days later to celebrate his life and commit his remains back to the earth. As those gathered engaged in the aimless milling that goes on at funerals, they saw in each other's faces a smile they recognized as his, and once again their pockets, as well as their hearts, seemed to be filled with jingle.

Following my visit, which lasted about three hours, at times funny, at times perplexing, but also filled with anguish, the die was clearly cast. I was seeing this dear man in his home for the last time.

I headed back to the motel where I would spend the night, an early morning departure planned for the trip back to the eastern part of the state. Upon getting sorted out in the room, and selecting from a flyer on the bureau a Chinese restaurant in which to have dinner, I began to contemplate what to do with the rest of the evening—something which would release me from the internal turmoil I felt, a consequence of what I knew was a final visit. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was only a half hour's drive from the small town to which I had been born and where I lived for the first two and a half years of my life, Killdeer, North Dakota. I would visit it that evening.

A plan established, I devoured my Chinese. The restaurant was a poor choice. Why would I think good Chinese food could be found in the middle of North Dakota's ranching and oil country? The last ethnic Chinese in Dickinson probably worked in a cook car on the Northern Pacific Railroad when it forged westward in the late 1880's.

The drive north on Route 22 was interesting: the earth dry, the rangeland a sage-like color of greens, browns and dusty yellows. This land is perfect for cattle, but with the limited annual rainfall growing any sort of grain is risky business. I drove with the window of my aged Dodge Ram rolled down, the breeze refreshing after a witheringly hot afternoon, the aroma of timothy grass in the cab with me. When I rounded the gentle easterly-to-north curve that takes one into Killdeer from the south, I suddenly considered that the folder of my extemporaneous adventure had failure writ large on its cover. Lacking a clear picture of my objective in mind, I proceeded in halting fashion. I drove first to the main street of the town of some 700 ranchers, shopkeepers, and agribusiness-related merchants. Life was peaceful in Killdeer. It would be several years later that oil discovery in the Bakken would turn the town into a Medusa's coiffure of roughnecks milling between the town's several saloons. A nursing home off on a side street reminded me there was also the business of caring for the elderly.

Driving the length of Main gave a quick sense of the town, the streets laid out in the customary grid-work of the Ordinance of 1787. I was drawn to the northwest quadrant by nothing more than an inner compass. It comprised no more than six or eight square blocks. I stared at the fronts of the small homes built in the 1920's and 30's as I drove slowly by. Where did I live, I asked myself. I could remember my father and mother giving names to the houses they lived in following their marriage. Ozzer was one name, Fischer the other. It seemed clear I could not relate to the appearances of the fronts of the houses, so I drove down the alley of one of the blocks that had a sense of familiarity about it. There, near the alley, was a small garage built in the time of the Model A Ford. I stopped to look at the surroundings. I had an eerie feeling about the place, but no way to confirm my suspicions. Then a thought came. I could call Mom in St. Paul. Surely she would be able to tell me something.

I drove back to the main street wondering where I might make a phone call. There was a saloon open, and it looked like it might be at the head of the class as far as Killdeer saloons went, so I parked and ventured in. I pulled up a stool and ordered a beer. The Native American barmaid engaged my efforts in conversation only as far as one-word answers would permit. I thought I would try explaining that I was partly raised (well, at least two years' worth) in Killdeer and was looking for my roots. I indicated I wanted to seek my mother's assistance since I had nowhere else to turn for information, and wondered from where I might make a credit card call. With one word—Here!—she tossed a cordless phone from beneath the bar onto its top. Sliding through spilt beer, it stopped just inches from my half-emptied glass.

A brief conversation with Mom confirmed I had indeed been in back of the house into which my parents had moved from their home in the Killdeer Hotel several months following my birth, the basketball hoop re-emerging out of the ether. Whee… it's fun to be on Dad's shoulders.

Chapter 2

Riding the Goose

My mother and father moved to Valley City in the summer of 1942 where Dad would be able to hold seniority on the Northern Pacific Railroad, specifically the branch line running northwest to McHenry and back on a daily basis. Dad ran on the Galloping Goose, as it was called, during the forties and fifties, eighteen years all told. He worked for the Railway Express Agency and handled baggage and mail. On any given day the baggage car might contain baby chickens and ducks, fish on ice stacked on the fish rack where melting ice drained out to the tracks below, and human remains headed for their final resting place somewhere along the branch line. Cream cans and farm machinery parts were de rigueur. When the Northern Pacific determined to close down the branch line, my parents resettled in St. Paul where Dad ran on the M&I to International Falls and then later on to the merged Northern Pacific-Burlington Northern mainline, St. Paul to Dickinson until he retired.

My memories of the Goose start early. From the age of three I was allowed the occasional day out with Dad. At that age a kid was still required to take some sort of afternoon nap. The carrot offered was that if I would lie down for a nap, I would be able to honk the horn while standing on the rear platform of the train when we re-entered Valley City in the afternoon. Winter rides were especially fun because the potbelly coal stove required occasional stoking, a young boy's delight.

One of the fringe benefits of Dad's job was cream... cream so thick you had to take it from a quart jar with a spoon or knife. Farm wives frequently took the milk and cream to the train station, sometimes in a pickup and sometimes in the trunk of the family car, destined for the creameries in Valley City. Because these cans were heavy, Dad would often jump off the train and throw the can up into the baggage car, carrying it from the nearby car park. These grateful women never ceased to show their gratitude...cream was the offering.

During the course of the workday Dad wore a sidearm. He had a railroad-provided, well-weathered leather holster containing a .32 caliber pistol. Regulations called for him to be wearing it at all times on the job, but he would put it on only when the baggage car door was going to be open (and he possibly visible to railroad supervisors) and then ditch it again as soon as the train pulled out of the station. Railway Express Agency employees took this precaution because payroll was onboard in a heavy steel safe to the right of Dad's knees just prior to paydays.

When I got a bit older I graduated from the caboose end of the Goose to the engine cab up front. The view of snow tunnels without tops in winter where rotary plows had cleared the rails was, in the words of today's youngsters, awesome. One could only see as far as the rails ran straight; the corners might have danger lurking around them!

The hoghead (engineer) on the Cooperstown Branch (it was seldom called the McHenry Branch, its terminus) during this period was Roy Iverson. Chewing gum (Yucatan, Blackjack, and Beeman's) filled Iverson's pockets, all to be thrown to youngsters waiting on the platform when the Goose pulled into each of the small towns. He was assisted by All aboard! Jack Tullius, conductor. Those were heady days for a young boy stretching toward adolescence.

Bill Morrissey, my father, hated his work. It held little or no challenge for a person with a good intellect, although I don't think he thought about it in those terms. Also, working for the railroad always held the prospect of being bumped from one's job by a person with more seniority. I think Dad found it difficult to live with that prospect hanging over his head from day to day when what he hoped for was stability and security for his young family.

My sister Maureen was born on 2 November 1942 prior to the family's move to Valley City. The redhead was beginning to crawl when we moved into our home at 515 9th Ave. NW. It was a big old two-story, built near the turn of the century, with a stairway to a third floor unfinished attic, the dwelling place of ghosts, witches, and serial killers of all denominations, depending solely upon my age and the type of comic book I had just read. The third of four houses we lived in as a family, it would be the place in which my sister Maureen and I, and some of the neighbor children, would explore our first anatomy coursework playing our early version of the TV drama ER. It would also be the first home of my younger sister Mary, born ten years my junior on 7 May 1950.

I recall isolated incidents of the preschool years; they are mostly visions of place. Dad planted two gardens in the back yard, one devoted to flowers and the other to vegetables. I remember getting down on my knees with him when he set the tomato plants and sticking my nose close to the action as he pressed a large steel spike parallel to, and touching, the main stem of the plant. Cutworms, I was told, could not get around both the stem and the spike, and thereby set the plant withering and dead overnight.

Also there is the recollection of asthma in the summer. While I was too young to understand the connection, I was not to romp in the flower garden. I remember lying on a rust colored studio couch when breathing became difficult, staring at the multicolored flowers on the well-worn linoleum in the dining room. The house was a friendly place with lots of room to run, and a basement with a cistern into which one might fall and drown should one step inside the circular concrete curb defining it in the cracking and broken concrete basement floor. Well, it was a mostly friendly place.

There was also the coal bin, a very good place for a burglar to hide if he wanted to wait until dark to execute his malevolent deeds. He could smear black coal dust all over his face and hands and be virtually invisible in the dark.

Part of the house was, from time to time, rented to other people. There were two rectangular rooms on the south side of the second story, and a sort of small galley kitchen on the east end. The inconvenient thing about renters was they shared with our family the only toilet in the house, located on the west end of the second floor. Sometimes the toilet was a long way from where you were in the house, particularly if one got a case of what Mom called the trots! A person might not get more than half way up the steps when all hell would break loose. Those were the times when I thought Mom was a saint. She would get a pail and rags to clean up the disaster I had just created and was no sooner finished when Maureen would duplicate the stomach flu-induced behavior. Vomiting and pooping spread from one of us to the other like bubonic plague. One only had to see the incident to create another. A bad number two was an invitation to hurl! The older of my two sisters could projectile vomit like a pro! It was out there a full three feet in front of her before it began to lose altitude, like a ball off the bat of Joe Mauer.

One of the conditions of renting the Nestoss house, called after the owners' name, was that my parents were expected to buy groceries at Nestoss' neighborhood store just down the alley a hundred or so steps from our vegetable garden in the back yard. Our parents charged the groceries and paid once a month, right after Dad got his paycheck. My sister Maureen and I became regular grocery circuit runners, traversing the alley in quest of whatever it was Mom ran out of. Sometimes we would pass each other at the midpoint, one going with the new list, the other returning with a quart of milk having forked over a dime.

On a rare occasion, Ed Nestoss would open the large, many-windowed Manchester Cookie cabinet and allow us to pick a cookie of our choice. Often, I would walk over to the cookie case and stand in front of it staring, just to see if I could mentally convince him to pony up a cookie. Mostly he didn't, but I knew my standing there made him uncomfortable.

Another memory of the preschool years is of the Watkins man driving down the alley and then backing the truck virtually to our back door. He would knock at the screen door and yell, Watkins Man. Mom would answer the call and sometimes go out to look at his stock. Sometimes he carried a basket to the door with him in which he placed things he thought housewives might want to buy, perhaps newly stocked items. I don't think Mom bought much off him, in the lexicon of the day. There was a certain premium price to be paid for having the truck back up to within six feet of your back door, and we couldn't afford much in the way of luxury. Mostly Mom just bought vanilla!

When I was at university and began to study English as a major, I had a professor of American Literature who often talked about how frightening and unhappy childhood had been for him. I had a difficult time relating to his experience, as for the most part, my recollections of childhood are happy ones. While I had my own set of minor demons, there was one exception to the happiness-filled days of my youth.

Chapter 3

An Expanding World

To the North of our Nestoss rental home was a gigantic house we came to know as the Luessen home. It was two stories with a huge attic on the third floor. It had four porches...one on each cardinal compass point. I remember we identified them as the North Porch, South Porch, etc. My introduction to the world of dragonflies came on the East Porch. One hot summer day, and they seemed a heck of a lot hotter in the nineteen forties—perhaps the lack of fans and air conditioning had much to do with it—Rick Luessen and I planned to do something on the East Porch but could not enter. The porch was filled with hundreds of dragonflies. Up to this point I had no recollection of them. They were of all sizes and colors, blues, greens, yellows, and they seemed to have every combination of wings possible. My instant reading was that bugs that could hover and dart could only have some sort of lethal ammunition on board! We tried to enter, but there was no cubic foot of porch volume that did not have dragonflies in flight. I told my younger companion we were sure to be severely stung, even fatally, if we messed with those helicopter bugs! We declared this mixture of flying beetle-bombers off limits.

The house was occupied by two eccentric elderly women, at least as viewed through the eyes of a child. Alma Luessen, a single woman, and her widowed mother lived in this giant house occupying the main floor. The second story, or part of it, was sometimes rented out to families, much like our own home. One summer the grass got out of hand on the vacant lot south of their house, and Alma, recognizing that a reel push-mower was useless in this instance, cut the entire lot sliding around on her butt with layers of undies showing, nipping handfuls as she went using a fabric scissors.

At one point in time there was a family name Phalen living as renters on the second floor. I have no recollection of the mother/father part of this family, but there was a girl named Patty who was the offspring of someone in residence. I have no image of her face; only of one of her deeds. She was two or three years older than my four at the time, and decided one hot summer afternoon to introduce me to the wide world of sexual arousal. For whatever reason, perhaps her own curiosity, she managed to get my manhood, such as it was, out of my shorts and began to tease it slowly with a short stick. It rose to the occasion as if under the effect of an Indian snake charmer! I don't remember a lot more about Patty other than when it came time to start school in the autumn after I had turned five, I was entrusted to her guardianship so as to get to the public school kindergarten safe from all harm which might befall a young school boy! After a few trips I was on my own. She obviously abandoned me for a more interesting or experienced man. I have often wondered what happened to Patty. She departed into the mists of time never to be heard from or seen again. I wonder if the web crawlers could find her....

Chapter 4

Primary School Reverie

I began kindergarten in the Valley City Public Schools in the autumn of 1945. The war was just over and soldiers were coming back home. Young families were building homes, and basement houses were beginning to spring up around town, a cinder block or poured basement extending about four feet above ground level upon which a greenish, black, or blue rolled roofing material was put in place as the final flat roof. Eventually that roof would become the first floor of the home when more housing dollars became available to finish the ground level.

My recollections of kindergarten are few but vivid. I remember bawling when my mother left me in a huge room with about thirty other squalling kids, a room furnished with a couple of large sandboxes and many small tables and chairs. One outstanding memory is of the teacher, Miss Evelyn Pung. She was, in today's terms, drop-dead gorgeous. With dark black hair pulled into something resembling a large soft piece of fruit, and netted in a way so there was nary a hair out of place, she became the first of several teachers who would affect my life in significant ways. She had a brilliant and welcoming smile accented by very white teeth. She was an older woman mind you, perhaps 20 or 21! Her kind, caring way caused me to believe school was a very nice place to be.

One of the most interesting things about kindergarten, although we attended for only half a day, was the issue of a small woven rag rug to be used for a short lie-down on the floor mid the four-hour school day. I recall that these sessions were meant to be quiet—they were anything but. Having placed the rug carefully on the floor, one positioned one's self so as to be able to make faces at the someone most likely to laugh out loud or, alternatively, cry. When these efforts were successful, a modest scolding would ensue.

Along with kindergarten came pride of ownership. Each student was issued a personal small white glass jar with a black metal screw cap into which Miss Pung helped us put a white, pungent, viscous substance called paste—one's first ever private stash of the stuff, an essential component in the business of making all sorts of colored paper constructions. We were dutifully warned not to eat it. Such an overt warning was all that was required! As a class we consumed about a gallon of it during the year. Miss Pung was amazed that we boys used so much of it. Also issued at the same time were scissors. They were unlike today's beginner scissors with blunted tips. They actually had fairly sharp points and were useful in stabbing things needing to be stabbed!

For Thanksgiving of the kindergarten year, we were all given a large red apple which was to become the main body of a turkey we were to make and take home as a gift to our parents. We dutifully cut out the legs, tail, neck and head and colored them appropriately. With the sharp scissors we made slots into the apple in appropriate places so as to insert the legs and other assorted body parts.

The project took the better part of a week, with us working on it for a few minutes each day. Of course all were excited about the prospect of having this wonderful gift for our moms and dads. We were dismissed for the Thanksgiving Holiday on Wednesday at noon, and we dutifully took our turkeys out the school door with us. I was not particularly proud of the way my turkey looked, often the case with any art project I was assigned, so I pulled out the paper parts on the way home and ate the apple. I gave the legs, neck, head and tail to Mom when I walked in the door. I told her I had made it for her in school. She probably went to Resurrection Cemetery in