Patrick: the Irish Immigrant

By Brenna O’Shea Cagiano

Patrick: The Irish Immigrant is the story of a determined Irish lad who dreamed of a better life of opportunities in America. By the age of seventeen, Patrick J. O'Shea had saved enough money to buy passage to the United States. Upon his arrival in New York City, Patrick used his ambition and determination, mixed with a dash of Irish malarkey, to set himself up with a job and a new life. This recipe served him well throughout his adventures that led him from New York City to the Territory of Hawaii and throughout the world.

Along the way, Patrick married the love of his life, Arabell. Together they raised their family against the backdrop of World War II and other life-changing historical events.

Patrick's life story is the universal story of many immigrants to the United States of America. He came, he prospered, and he proudly became a U.S. citizen. Patrick wanted his story told to encourage others to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks, to do one's best at any task, and to always conduct oneself with honor and dignity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 14, 2007
• ISBN: 9781462094936

Brenna O’Shea Cagiano

Brenna O?Shea Cagiano lovingly recorded her father?s life story and transformed it into this book in his memory. She resides in Polk County, Florida, with her husband and her son and his family. Brenna retired from teaching after 39 years and is active in her church and community. Like her parents, she has traveled extensively and she enjoys sharing these experiences of other cultures with people.

Book preview

Patrick:

The Irish Immigrant

As recollected by

Patrick J. O’Shea

Written by

Brenna O’Shea Cagiano

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

Patrick: The Irish Immigrant

Copyright © 2007 by Brenna K. Cagiano

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any

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ISBN: 978-0-595-42517-4 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-68274-4 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-9493-6 (eBook)

In memory of my father, Patrick,

and dedicated to my mother, Arabell,

and to my sisters, Marcia and Heather.

Your love and support have gone beyond the boundaries.

Over the hills of the Wicklow Mountains

Came a man of far adventures

All yesterday he sailed the oceans both Atlantic and Pacific

The Erin in his blood and the twinkle in his eye

He captivated his friends and family

Of the tales of yesteryear

—Brenna O’Shea Cagiano

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Epilogue

Appendix:

The O’Shea Family Tree

About the Author

Acknowledgments

My husband, Gary, has encouraged me throughout this adventure. My son, Garrett, has constantly encouraged me to complete this book and to publish the results. My sister, Marcia, has painstakingly helped me to go through this story and has offered many suggestions.

I am blessed to have a wonderful family.

Chapter 1

Amongst the Wicklow Mountains and hills of Ireland thick with mist, lay the country town of Rathdrum in County Wicklow. The Irish countryside was covered with beautiful shades of green; the landscape, divided by stone hedges, looked like a quilted patchwork from afar. Nestled in a valley was a quaint Irish home with lovely flowers; within this idyllic setting lived the O’Shea family.

Conaire II, King of Ireland, was the O’Sheas’ family ancestor at the beginning of the Christian Era. Over time, the family was reduced to a good, hard-working fighting stock, the result of the successive invasions, lasting over a thousand years, by Vikings and Anglo-Saxons who confiscated the O’Sheas’ property.

April 2, 1912, was a very special day as Elizabeth Carey O’Shea gave birth to her third child, Patrick Joseph Benedict Carey O’Shea. The midwife told Elizabeth’s husband, James, of their new arrival. He was very proud to have another son to add to the family, as Patrick joined his brothers, James and Robert.

Elizabeth, being a good Catholic woman, fulfilled her duty by having a large family. She had another son, Dominic, and two girls, Carmel and Nina, all healthy children. However, there were sad times when her daughter Elizabeth and another son died at birth. Her son Edward died at the age of four during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Her daughter Maureen, whose nickname was Molley, later died of pneumonia at the age of twenty-one.

When the O’Shea family got together they would sing the haunting Irish songs and recite poetry. Everyone loved to hear the famous Irish tenor, John McCormack, sing their favorite Irish songs such as Macushla, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, and in later years, Mother Machree, Kathleen Mavourneen, and The Rose of Tralee.

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Patrick’s mother, Elizabeth                   Patrick’s father, James

The women in those days wore long ankle-length skirts, long-sleeved shirts, black stockings, and black shoes with thick, two-inch pumps. People drove Model-T Fords or used flatboard wagons drawn by a couple horses. A good horse, a bicycle, or just a good stretch of the legs were popular modes of transportation.

The biggest news at the time of Patrick’s birth was that of the White Star Liner RMS Titanic, built in Belfast. The world had never seen a ship such as this. It was considered a floating palace with beautiful art works displayed on the walls, fine furniture in every room, stained-glass windows and elegant woodwork. It was at that time the fastest and largest vessel ever to have been built.

On April 14, 1912, just twelve days after Patrick was born, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg on its way from England to America; the ship surrendered to the freezing ocean, taking with it fifteen hundred people from the twenty-three hundred passengers and crew aboard.

During that same year, the United States welcomed Arizona as its forty-eighth state. Cherry trees were sent to Washington, D.C., by Japan as a gift of good will, and viewing the cherry blossoms would become an annual springtime tourist attraction for visitors to the nation’s capital.

The Democrats selected New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson to represent their party in the presidential election. William Taft ran on the Republican ticket, while Teddy Roosevelt formed a new political organization, the Progressive Party, and secured its nomination. The Socialists selected Eugene V. Debs, a labor leader. The presidential election of 1912 was an exciting one with Woodrow Wilson becoming the twenty-eighth president.

The automatic pilot for airplanes was invented along with the mercury vapor lamp and a telephone amplifier. Jim Thorpe won both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the Stockholm Olympics. Those two events were considered the greatest test of an athlete’s all-around strength, agility and speed.

In 1913, when Patrick was one year old, the Irish Volunteers, the Ulster Volunteer Force, and the Irish Citizen Army were formed to help reestablish what was left of Ireland as a result of British control.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress. The Federal Reserve reformed the banking system by creating a central bank to monitor the nation’s money supply and control interest rates. At the same time, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line to the world. No one had ever seen such efficient and time-saving work.

In 1914, when Patrick was two years old, the British Parliament passed the Home Rule Bill. Home Rule meant that Ireland would remain part of Britain but would have its own parliament for domestic affairs. However, the bill was prevented from taking effect because of the outbreak of World War I.

The U.S. Congress established the Federal Trade Commission. Its purpose was to promote export trade and issue a Cease and Desist Order to prevent unfair methods of competition. Also at this time the Panama Canal was completed, a truly magnificent achievement, which opened a passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Patrick’s father, James O’Shea, took care of two-and-one-half thousand acres of forest land in the Wicklow area for Lord Fitzwilliams. James never left the house without a gun as the forest was loaded with game. Any game his father shot the family ate, and sometimes he would shoot one or two deer and they would have venison dinners for two weeks to a couple months.

Lord Fitzwilliams’ estate raised fifty to sixty thousand pheasants for the hunting season and Fitzwilliams invited his friends to the estate to participate in the annual hunt. James was the Lord’s gun loader and would remain at the estate until the pheasant hunt was over.

When Patrick was young, his father often invited ladies and gentlemen to gather at his home to participate in a fox or deer hunt. The hound master would arrive with his pack of hounds to spearhead the hunt. The hounds bayed with anticipation, creating an air of excitement. The ladies and gentlemen wore colorful riding habits and, as tradition dictated, the ladies rode side-saddle.

One day a young woman arrived wearing boots and britches. She carried a crop for her horse and wore her wristwatch on her ankle over her riding boot. That was the first time anyone had ever seen such attire on a woman. It was a big

shock to everyone—the audacity of a lady to dress like a man!

European powers signed a complicated network of treaties in 1914. Two of these were the Triple Entente (Great Britain, France, and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy). The Euporean nations claimed that these alliances maintained a balance of power; if a member of one alliance was threatened, the other member pledged to support it. These alliances would soon be joined by other nations, with Italy changing sides, and emerge as the Allied Powers and the Central Powers.

In the summer of 1914, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated. In August, Germany invaded Belgium. This led to Russia entering the war against Germany. By September, the German armies were within thirty miles of Paris. This triggered World War I, with France and Great Britain joining Russia against Germany. In the Battle of the Marne, French and British troops drove the German army away from Paris.

During World War I, the majority of the bloody battles were fought in Belgium and France, better known as the Western Front. The war was fought between the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) and the Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Japan). Later the United States entered the war aligned with the Allied Powers. The opposing armies dug trenches to protect themselves from bullets and artillery shells and they put up mazes of barbed wire in front of their positions. These lines ran across northern France, from the sea to Switzerland.

On April 2, 1915, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany after German submarines attacked British commercial ships and a passenger ship, the RMS Lusitania, carrying American citizens. The world must be made safe for democracy, declared Wilson. The United States used Ireland as a base for delivering anti-submarine destroyers for Britain. The American soldiers were commanded by General John Pershing, and the French were under the command of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander of the Allied armies.

Patrick was four years old in 1916, when the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Citizen Army had an Easter Rising Revolt in Dublin against the British Army. The rebellion was squashed after a week, and the leaders were executed. But the Irish certainly didn’t give up. Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera were kept busy throughout the years between treaty talks and the Civil War itself.

When Ireland was cold it would chill you to the bone, as it did to Patrick on a bitter cold, winter day when he was about four-and-a-half years old. He arrived home from school and saw that his mother had laid out plates and bowls with real hot soup for everyone in the family. Patrick was famished and he ran to the table, picked up a bowl and took a full gulp of the hot soup. He burned his tongue and spit out the boiling hot soup, which ran down his chin and chest.

He was wearing a white starched collar. Patrick dug his hand under the collar and tore it open; along with the collar, he tore all of his skin off the front of his throat. The next thing he remembered was being wheeled around the back of the house in a perambulator by a nurse. Patrick would wear this burn mark for the rest of his life.

Patrick was quite adventurous at a young age. One day he was coming back from the River Avonmore that flowed by his family’s home. When he reached the top of the hill, a hundred yards away from his home, he climbed through a barbed-wire fence. The upper barbed wire cut his head and tore his scalp, another scar he would wear forever. Patrick bled profusely and by the time he got home he was covered with blood and screaming in pain. His mother and father were alarmed as they didn’t know what had happened to him. At first his parents thought that Patrick had been thrown by a horse. After they cleaned his wound they realized what had happened and were relieved somewhat.

On another occasion, Patrick locked himself in the sitting room after finding the key. Elizabeth and some of the children had gone to Sunday Mass. Patrick’s father was home and started to look for Patrick and called out his name. Patrick didn’t respond and James became very worried, so he went to his neighbor and asked him to find Elizabeth at church while he continued to look for Patrick.

When Elizabeth arrived home she asked James if he had searched the sitting room. He hadn’t, of course. She opened the room and there was Patrick, busy as a bee and happy as a lark. What a relief his parents felt at that moment; Patrick

had not added to his growing collection of bodily scars!

Between the years 1916—18, there were two thousand soldiers stationed at one time or another on the O’Sheas’ homestead. They were mostly shell-shocked troops who were put there to cut the trees for timber. The trees were then cut into eight-foot lengths and shipped to line the front trenches for the Great War.

The troops lived down by the river close to the O’Sheas’ house. Railroad tracks leading from the forest came nearly to the front of the house. The lumber was transferred by steam trucks, rather than gasoline trucks, and was taken to the railroad station where trains would transport the lumber to the boats; finally, the timber was shipped to France.

Patrick was only four or five years old when he had his first taste of being an entrepreneur. He sold apples from the family’s orchard to the soldiers for six pence apiece. The young merchant even had regular customers. For a time, Patrick’s parents didn’t know that he was in business; when they found out he was delivering apples they forbade him to continue. But Patrick had his regular customers and he didn’t want to offend them by not having the apples to sell. Not wanting to disappoint either his parents or his customers, Patrick got paper bags and went to the stables, where he packed horse apples (manure) in the bags and sold them to the soldiers. Needless to say, the soldiers were very angry and if they had caught Patrick they would have beat him. And so ended his first business venture. But Patrick continued to use his ingenuity to sell things to the soldiers in order to earn a few shillings.

The British military had a lot of horses. The family’s horse stable was built out of large rocks found all over Ireland. As the soldiers rode by on their horses, they would salute Patrick as a gesture. Patrick had already learned how to salute like the British, taught by a colonel who gave Patrick two shillings when he clicked his heels and gave the British salute.

The family had a gray pony that Patrick rode bareback through the woods. He would crawl under the pony to examine its legs or whatever without any fear. Sometimes he enjoyed dressing like a cowboy. As Elizabeth said, Sure he was a wild thing, always wanting to be a cowboy.

There was a British lieutenant, a holy terror, that the soldiers hated. They never could do anything right and the lieutenant was always on their backs. Patrick’s family didn’t care for the bloke, either. Patrick and his brothers hid in the woods and timed when the soldier went to the latrine; fifteen or twenty minutes after dinner was his habit.

The latrine was a trench, dug three to four feet deep, with a couple sticks crisscrossing over the top and the soldiers would sit on these sticks. Patrick and his brothers searched the woods high and low for a rotten piece of wood that looked exactly like the ones the soldiers were using. The boys watched as the other officers went to the latrine. Before the lieutenant arrived, the boys ran out of the woods and replaced the piece of wood. When the lieutenant sat down, he immediately broke the stick in half and was dumped in the most ridiculous fashion into the trench! This was not a pretty sight as the soldiers wore shining riding boots and pinkish britches with sandy-brown belts. Patrick and his brothers, watching from their hiding place in the woods, rolled on the ground with laughter when their feat was accomplished.

The lieutenant was so mad that he restricted all the troops to camp for two weeks. No one knew who had pulled the prank and Patrick and his brothers certainly didn’t tell anyone. That was one of the best-held secrets of World War I!

Patrick was very impressed when he met a pilot from the Royal Flying Corps, dressed in his sky-blue uniform. The next day the pilot flew over the house in his double-decked winged plane. This was the first airplane that Patrick had ever seen. He was hoping the pilot would land, but he never did. That encounter, as it turned out, was to direct Patrick’s aspirations in future years.

In the wintertime, the river often overflowed and threatened the encampments of the British troops. They moved into the town of Rathdrum, where they stayed in a big warehouse that served as their barracks. Finally the war came to an end and the troops left, taking out all the railroad tracks. They also took their horses and now Patrick missed making his shillings by giving the troops the British salute as they rode by.

In the spring of 1918, Germany pushed into France. But in the summer, fresh reinforcements from America launched their counterattack with the Allies against Germany. By November 11th of that year, the Great War was over and an armistice was signed.

Although the Great War had been fought throughout Europe, Ireland had remained neutral. The Irish people’s experiences were limited to what they had heard on the radio unless a family member had been involved as a soldier in the war.

One day Patrick went to town, which was only a mile away from the family home. He saw a British soldier who had returned from the war. He was drunk and kept repeating, I like goodies. (Goodies was toasted bread with milk poured over it.) Patrick thought that was very odd, but the soldier was probably hungry and in a daze.

The Great War was over and Ireland had its revolution. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) gained control of Sinn Fein and met in Dublin instead of London. Irish nationalists staged the Easter Uprising on April 24, 1916. The country was in a rebellion and the police were as heavily armed as the troops. Shootings and killings took place all over the country, especially in Dublin. The next Irish uprisings were in 1920, 1921, and 1922.

During 1920-21, after the Irish Civil War had progressed, English soldiers were stationed very close to the O’Sheas’ home. Some nights, Patrick’s Uncle Pat left Dublin on his bike and stopped at the O’Sheas’ house for a visit on his way home, which was in the mountains of Drumham. They would talk into the wee hours of the morning. Patrick’s family thought Uncle Pat was involved in the IRA because he was often gone for three months or more at a time. No one really knew who was involved in the IRA.

The O’Sheas’ house had large shutters on the windows that were made of heavy wood and hung on pegs in the wall. Two-by-fours would be placed across the windows on the inside of the house so no one could get in. One night, about one in the morning, a loud knock on the door woke up the household. They all thought it was Uncle Pat.

Who’s there? asked Patrick’s father.

Police on duty. Open up!

James thought it was Uncle Pat playing a joke so he opened the door. To his surprise there were four or five men, all with a weapon in each hand. They pushed their way into the house and demanded all the family’s guns and ammunition.

James owned only two shotguns. He received twenty-five to thirty rounds of ammunition per week from the military for hunting. Coincidentally, there recently had been a big deer hunt with British officers and gentries, twenty-five hunters in all. The hunters started a scrimmage line with the gentries walking through the woods, while the British officers started at the other side of the woods, making noise and beating the bushes until deer ran out into the opening between the two groups. After the hunt, many of the hunters left their rifles at the O’Sheas’ house; therefore, a pile of guns was stashed in the corner of the bedroom.

The family had a couple maids working for them and Patrick’s father recognized two of the gunmen as brothers of one of their maids. These men knew exactly where James kept the ammunition in the kitchen cupboard. They also knew where he kept his guns in the corner of the kitchen. They went directly to the kitchen, but all they found was a shotgun and two rounds of shotgun shells. The men wanted to know if James had any more guns or ammunition. He told them, No!

Patrick’s mother, Elizabeth, told the men, You can search the house if you want to, but don’t wake the children. Upon hearing this, the children jumped out of bed as fast as they could, grabbed the guns and stuffed them under the mattresses. Then they jumped back in bed and pretended they were sleeping. For some odd reason the men didn’t bother going into the bedrooms.

They finally left and Patrick’s father breathed a sigh of relief because he had all of his money in a box in one of the kitchen cupboards. He had taken the family’s money out of the bank and converted it to gold and silver during the war.

The next day, thirty to forty British soldiers came to guard the O’Sheas’ home. They had come to investigate the robbery, but James wouldn’t inform on anyone. After that day, Patrick couldn’t recall ever seeing his father using or owning a gun again.

The family’s maid was going with a British soldier, and she would give him any information she had about her brothers or anyone else. The British soldiers would then capture the perpetrators. The maid’s boyfriend received one stripe and then two stripes as he was promoted for this information. The O’Sheas knew where the information came from, as did the members of the IRA.

One morning as the sun rose, a guard at the front gate of Charles Stuart Parnell’s property, which was used as the British barracks, saw a person tied to a large tree across the way. It was a woman who had been egged, tarred, and feathered. She was the O’Sheas’ maid, the informer. No one ever knew who had done this to her, but the locals had their suspicions.

Chapter 2

In August of 1920, the 19th Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution allowing women the right to vote. This probably made other women around the world think about their rights in their respective countries. This also was the period when prohibition began in the United States.

In the British Isles, British Parliament divided Ireland into two states: one consisting of the six northern counties of Ulster; and the other, the twenty-three southern counties. Again, Southern Ireland began fighting for complete independence. The IRA attacked British buildings and installations. In retaliation, the British brought in the tough and often brutal police called Black and Tans, so named because of their uniforms. The Irish people didn’t like them because they were extremely cruel and ruthless. They were highly paid and were nothing more than uniformed murderers as far as the citizens were concerned. Daily life was hazardous with troops staging ambushes all over the towns.

When the British military left Ireland in 1921, the Irish finally took over. The Anglo-Irish treaty was signed, giving Southern Ireland independence from Britain on certain conditions: Ireland would be an Irish Free State and not a Republic; they would have their own government; and they would pledge their allegiance to the British government. Some were happy with these arrangements, while others didn’t care for the allegiance.

In Italy, Benito Mussolini became head of the Italian Fascist Party. He would become well known at a later date. In the United States, Warren G. Harding was inaugurated as the twenty-ninth president.

In 1922, the new Irish Free State Army took over Dublin Castle and the British flag was lowered. However, not everyone was happy with this arrangement either.

When Patrick was young, he had an air gun to shoot birds and targets and he learned to shoot well. Later he got a .22-caliber rifle to shoot rabbits and other small game. One of the workers at his cousin’s house had a single-barrel shotgun and asked Patrick if he would like to try it. Of course, Patrick was excited to try this gun. He saw a rabbit running down along the stream and as it leaped across the stream he pulled the trigger and the rabbit fell on the spot. Patrick later developed the habit of getting up at six o’clock in the morning to go hunting in Arklow. He became quite the marksman with all of his hunting practices.

One day Patrick and his brothers, Robert and James, were out hunting with their dogs, when the dogs came across a badger in the rocks. The dogs kept the badger at bay while the boys procured two bags and brought the live badger home. They brought it into the kitchen and let the badger loose with the two dogs. Before they knew it the two dogs were up on the kitchen table with the badger sitting in the corner. All their urgings couldn’t dislodge the dogs from the tabletop. Meanwhile, the boys were bravely looking through the cracks of the doors. As a result of the standoff between the dogs and the badger, the boys were forced to shoot the badger in the kitchen. Elizabeth was not excited about that decision!

In 1923, Calvin Coolidge became the U.S. president upon the death of Warren G. Harding. The following year, Coolidge was elected president by a landslide. The Charleston became the dance craze of the nation.

In Ireland, the male children went to the national schools (most of the students were Catholics) while the girls went to the convents to be educated by the nuns. Education was a serious business and very strict. The children studied chemistry in the third grade. They were required to study advanced math, Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Gaelic, Irish history, and singing. At noontime the children played football or hurling, handball, rounders (similar to baseball), and a game called hare and hounds. The hare was the fastest runner, and the hounds tried to catch the hare, which was like cross-country running.

One of the teachers in Rathdrum was a sadist toward the students. On average he would break between eight to twelve canes a week by hitting the students across their hands. They would get these whippings for anything from not memorizing a poem to general misbehavior.

Some of the students would take straight pins and insert them in the end of the cane so that when the teacher used it, the pin would help split the cane. Sometimes the teacher would use the split cane on a student whom he believed had done the deed. The students would also put rosin on their hands in order to toughen them up so they wouldn’t bleed. At least that’s what they thought. Patrick carried those scars across his hands for many years. At one time Patrick’s father came to the school to confront the teacher about his inhumane treatment of his son and the other students.

There was one student in particular who was given quite a few of these beatings on a regular basis. One day the student had had enough. He proceeded to go outside and climbed to the top of the roof of the outhouse building, where he ripped off a two-foot long, one-and-a-half-foot wide, and one-quarter-inch thick piece of slate. He walked into the class with the slate behind his back and with all his might he flung it towards the teacher. The teacher ducked just in time, but it split the slate blackboard right in two. The boy was sent to reform school while the teacher was disciplined by the school’s superintendent.

Some of the students were very poor. They would come to school with slugs in their pockets. The classroom desks had ink wells for their pens and those boys would dip the slugs into the ink and eat them. It was a disgusting sight, as their teeth and lips turned a dark shade of blue from the ink. They probably thought the slugs were a lot more tolerable with the ink sauce!

Later, when Patrick was in the higher grades, he attended Newborn School about three miles away from home. He would take his brother Dominic with him on the handlebar of his bike. He sometimes would ride the donkey cart along with the rest of his brothers.

The Newborn School was attended by both boys and girls. The students completed their education and were ready for college by fourteen to sixteen years of age. While he was attending school, Patrick also worked at a bar and grocery store in Rathdrum, for which he really didn’t care much.

During the Irish Civil War, the older students were becoming commandants and doing great deeds. Although when it came to the Air Force, England had the only cadet school available. Patrick did not want to be left behind. He passed his entrance exams to the Air Force, but his parents would not let him go. Since Patrick had been forbidden to join the English Air Force he decided to go to Australia or Canada, but then remembered that those countries also were under British rule. So Patrick decided that he would eventually go to America.

Meanwhile, the children in the O’Shea family were kept busy with various daily chores. They had to round up the cattle in the woods and bring them home to be milked every morning. The children also replenished the water from the wells, fed the pigs, cattle, horses, and sixty chickens every day. They cleaned the stalls for the two horses and five or six cattle. They also cared for honeybees. They sawed wood for the fireplace because they didn’t have turf to burn in that particular area, but trees were plentiful. Before going to bed they polished their shoes, and ironed their shirts and collars for the morning.

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Patrick and his father, James, in Rathdrum, County Wicklow, Ireland

On Saturdays and Sundays, the children did the same daily chores, as well as hunting and setting traps. Their mother Elizabeth and a couple of the children walked or hooked up the horses to the wagon and went to the store. Of course, on Sunday mornings they went to the local Catholic Church for worshiping.

One of the meals that Elizabeth often prepared was the famous Irish stew, made by layers of boiled potatoes, onions, and pieces of mutton in a covered pot. Another type of stew she made was boiled salt pork, cabbage, and potatoes. The children enjoyed hot soda bread each day. At Christmas time, Elizabeth made plum pudding, which was lit after pouring brandy over it. The hot meals were welcome since there was always cool weather and it usually rained year round.

During the summer the children had long vacations and went swimming while the teachers went to school to learn Gaelic. Patrick picked blueberries for a shilling per pound. He often picked as much as twenty to twenty-two pounds per day. A shilling was about the size of a quarter. Patrick had his own bank, which happened to be his parents’ big brass bedposts. He would unscrew the tops off the bedposts to reveal long pillars of shillings. He filled all four bedposts with shillings and nobody ever knew what he was doing.

In the spring, the children planted seeds for oats, turnips, cabbage, potatoes, onions, and radishes. In addition to gardening, they had fruit trees such as apples and peaches to pick along with gooseberries and strawberries. In the fall, they would pick hazelnuts, walnuts, or any other kind that was available. The family had one or two maids and a couple workmen who helped out with the heavy chores.

Even though Patrick was kept busy with jobs at home and at work, he did find time for a little fun. One evening Patrick walked a girl home and they decided to use a shortcut. They walked through a graveyard and noticed a big black dog following them. They closed the graveyard gate behind them and, at that moment, they both noticed the dog walked right through the gate. The dog did not appear

to be vicious and it didn’t go after them, but they were both scared and amazed!

In 1926 when Patrick was fourteen years old, Eamon de Valera resigned from Sinn Fein and started a new party called Fianna Fail, meaning Soldiers of Destiny.

Charles Lindbergh was the first aviator to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean. He took off on May 20, 1927, at 7:55 a.m. from a muddy, rain-drenched airfield near New York City in a one-engine plane, The Spirit of St. Louis. He traveled across the Atlantic some thirty-six hundred miles. He knew he was near land when he spotted a range of mountains in Ireland. It took more than thirtythree hours before he landed at Le Bourget Airfield on the outskirts of Paris, France. Lindbergh instantly became a hero. Everyone