The Springfield Gaelic Football Team poses with Mike Carney, manager, at right.
I played some Gaelic football myself, but I was mostly an organiser. I was secretary-treasurer, manager and later president of the Southern New England Gaelic Football League for three years. Springfield did pretty well in that league. We won three New England championships in five years.
My brother Martin played Gaelic football too. He played his first game in America on the very first day he arrived in Springfield from Ireland. It was held on the old so-called ‘cowflop’ field off Nottingham Street in Hungry Hill. In fact, Martin met his future bride, Eleanor D’Anjou, at that very game. As they say, the rest is history.
Teaching Irish in Springfield
Of course, Irish was the only language spoken on the island. It is part of the West Kerry Gaeltacht. But there was no need for emigrants to speak Irish in America. Some of us would speak it just for the fun of it – just to keep the language alive.
I taught Irish at night at Springfield’s High School of Commerce, beginning in about 1955 or so. It was sponsored by the Adult Education Department of the Springfield Public Schools. They taught Irish, Spanish, French and Italian – the languages of all the nationalities that were living in Springfield at the time. I applied for the Irish teaching job and, to my delight, I got it. Finally, I was a teacher. I was not exactly the kind of teacher I had in mind when I was a kid growing up on the island, but I had finally made it. I didn’t have a college degree, but I was in my glory.
The students were mostly adults; quite a few were members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish fraternal organisation. I taught conversational Irish and some writing. We didn’t get into the grammar to any great extent because it is rather difficult with the unusual pronunciation, the silent consonant, the long vowel and so on. The main challenge was lack of practise. The students did not have the opportunity to hear people speaking Irish other than in class. Once in a while, I would run into my students at the John Boyle O’Reilly Club and we would speak in Irish with each other. I tried to teach my own children Irish, but they didn’t keep it up and they lost it over time. For them, Irish just didn’t have much value. They still know a couple of phrases, but not much.
There was no end to my efforts to preserve Irish. We had a small dog named Ginger, a Lhasa Apso. I used to tell her to sit down in Irish (‘suigh síos’) and, after a while, she did it. Then I’d give her a biscuit and then tell her in Irish to give me her paw (‘tabhair dom do lámh’) and, after a while, she would do it. She was a very smart dog.
I used to say that I had the only Irish-speaking dog in America. One time, I was interviewed by a reporter for The Irish Echo, an Irish-American newspaper. I told them about Ginger and they printed the story about ‘the Gaelic-speaking dog’ in Springfield, Massachusetts.
The new John Boyle O’Reilly Club on Progress Avenue in Springfield opened in March 1972.
The John Boyle O’Reilly Club
Together with my Gaelic football buddies, I applied for membership in Springfield’s John Boyle O’Reilly Club in 1960. The club was founded in 1880 and was named after the Irish patriot and writer who was exiled from Ireland to Australia because of his political activity. He later escaped to America and was eventually the editor of The Pilot, the Catholic newspaper in Boston.
When I came to America, I seemed to have more interest in our Irish heritage than some of the other come-overs. To each his own.
I wanted to keep my Irish heritage alive, particularly my connection with the island. The John Boyle O’Reilly Club seemed like just the place to do it. It was at 1653 Main Street in downtown, on the second floor. There were narrow stairs up from Main Street. A lot of guys fell down those stairs, but they never felt a thing … The club had fifty members when I joined. Many of the existing members were not very active and the place itself was in bad shape. After just a year, the Gaelic footballers proposed me for president. And, to my surprise, I was elected!
I told the members that we had to fix the place up, and do more business and make more profit. I used to read our financial reports and it would make me shiver. So we painted the place to make it more presentable. We instituted volunteer bartending where everybody took their turn. You could keep your tips. There was some complaining, but it saved the club some money and it worked out well. We brought in bands from New York and from all over Ireland. We organised a Ladies Auxiliary and lots of women got involved. The membership grew. People started to believe.
But I felt that the current location was no place for us. We were paying rent and the building was in bad shape. So we started a building fund to accumulate the money to improve our facilities.
We found the shell of an unfinished new building on Progress Avenue in an industrial park in Springfield. It had no heat or electricity or plumbing. But I liked the site and name of the street – ‘Progress Avenue’. We eventually agreed on a price. The purchase was approved by the membership.
But we still needed a mortgage. We applied at about half a dozen banks and were turned down by every one of them. Banks were worried about loans to social clubs. When I was away from work at the banks, I told my second in command that if my boss called to tell him I was at a wake. Eventually, Community Savings Bank up in Holyoke agreed to give us a loan. We closed on the deal on the last day of 1970.
Now we had a building, but it was still only a shell. Then we got the members who were construction tradesmen to work on weekends on a volunteer basis for just over a year to fix the place up. The ‘new’ John Boyle O’Reilly Club opened in March 1972. It was mobbed. I came home at three o’clock in the morning. My lovely wife said, ‘You have an awful smell of booze on you.’ I told her that a lot of people wanted to buy me a drink. It was a great night of celebration.
A couple of years later, I proposed that the club sponsor charter trips to Ireland from Bradley Field in Connecticut on Trans World Airlines, or TWA. We added a charge of $25 per ticket that would go to the club. After six years, we had raised $68,000. Now we had money to pay for more improvements to the club, such as a kitchen, new counters, new furniture and so on.
Marshal Mike Carney leads Springfield’s delegation in the Holyoke St Patrick’s Parade in 1973.
The travellers would bring back all kinds of stuff from Ireland. Suitcases would be packed with potatoes, dillisk, black pudding, Cadbury chocolate bars and, of course, genuine Irish whiskey. None of this forbidden cargo was ever disclosed to the customs people, but nobody ever got caught.
When the club moved to Progress Avenue, I proposed that it sponsor its own radio programme on WMAS. It was a way to broadcast Irish news and music and to advertise special events at the club.
I approached my friend Jimmy Sullivan one Sunday morning after church and asked him if he would be the show’s host. He said he’d be quite pleased to do so and that his wife, my cousin Peggy, would help out too. A year later, the programme moved to WACE.
The radio programme has now been on the air for forty years. People all over the area listen. I still tune in every Saturday morning for a couple of hours.
One time we took an Irish band from the club on WWLP’s Western Massachusetts Highlights television show, on St Patrick’s Day. Everybody on Hungry Hill watched. There was a dinner afterward at the television station. We were shocked that they served Chinese food on St Patrick’s Day! We couldn’t believe it.
The club was a big supporter of the St Patrick’s Day Parade up in Holyoke. We always sent a big contingent to march down the parade route. I marched so many times, I can’t even remember. I was honoured to serve as the Springfield parade marshal in 1973.
The club is one of the few social clubs that is organised as a non-profit corporation. I had to go to a meeting at the Statehouse in Boston to explain our charitable purpose to qualify. We said that we awarded scholarships and sponsored Irish dancing festivals, feiseanna, and other cultural events.
The members asked, ‘How did you do it?’ I told the
m that I had spoken only in Irish; maybe they didn’t understand a word I said.
In 1985, we paid off the club’s mortgage early and celebrated with a mortgage-burning celebration.
Over the years, the club’s membership kept growing. Today, it is almost up to 1,000 members. It is one of the most active Irish social clubs in America. I retired from the leadership of the club in 1986 after serving twenty-four years in office, sixteen as president and another eight as a member of the Board of Directors. I had a great run. And the club is in great shape today.
The Carney Family in America
Around 1956, Maureen and I bought a two-family house at 550 Armory Street near Our Lady of Hope Church. We lived on the second floor and rented out the first floor. This gave us income to help with the mortgage payments.
We also had a couple of rooms up in the attic. There wasn’t a second exit off the third floor, so it was illegal to rent it. Well, our tenants up there were only the come-overs from Ireland who stayed with us temporarily while they got settled. And they played Gaelic football with us too. So we tried our best to keep the illegal apartment quiet. Unfortunately, there was lots of noise and singing – Maureen thought that she’d go out of her mind with the singing and the dancing until all hours of the morning. One time, those guys took two six-packs of beer I had in my refrigerator. They drank all the beer and filled up the empty bottles with water, put the caps back on and put them back in my refrigerator. I blew my stack when I discovered their prank.
The footballers would pay Maureen to wash their football uniforms. In the autumn, when the weather turned colder, she would hang them outside to dry and they would be frozen solid with frost the next morning. One time, the neighbours wanted to know how many people were staying at the house. We told them nothing.
We moved to 174 Middle Street in Hungry Hill in 1965. It was a four-bedroom single-family home. It was time to get away from the ruckus.
Maureen and I had four children: Kathleen, Maureen, Noreen and Michael. We tried to keep up the Irish traditions in our house. They all went to Our Lady of Hope School. And, of course, we spent a lot of time at the John Boyle O’Reilly Club. The girls took up Irish dancing at the club, naturally. Maureen entered step-dancing competitions. She even made an appearance on television.
We had a lot of family fun. It was a lively house. We were involved in all kinds of activities in Hungry Hill. ‘Ma Carney’, as I called Maureen, kept it all together. It wasn’t easy for her. She always kept herself busy around the house and elsewhere and she earned the nickname ‘the Roscommon hare’. She was a very special woman.
One of our favourite times of year was our summer vacation at Point-o-Woods on the Connecticut shore of the Atlantic Ocean. The cottage we rented was always full of family and friends. I remember one night we had sixteen people staying with us, all Irish.
For thirty-seven years the Carney family made its home in this four-bedroomed house on Middle Street in Springfield.
The kids went to local high schools and then on to college and into good jobs. Kathleen works in insurance and real estate, Maureen in urban redevelopment, Noreen in facilities management and Mike is a Springfield police detective. I have five grandchildren.
The grandchildren are pursuing their college degrees and are already beginning their own careers.
I am very proud of them all. They have done a lot to better themselves. It is the Irish way. Each generation tries to do better than the one before. And in America, there no limits on what you can accomplish.
I often think about how different our lives and the lives of our children would have been if we still lived back on the island or in back in Ireland. Every time I do, I realise that my decision to emigrate to America was the right one for us. The opportunities in America made all the difference for me, Maureen and our family. I am very grateful for my new life in a new land.
The Carney Family in Ireland
After they left the island, my sister Cáit and her husband, Pádraig ‘Sheáisi’ or ’Paddy’ Ó Cearna, lived in Muiríoch, Ballydavid. Paddy was a great singer and loved to entertain. He worked in public works for the Kerry County Council and did some fishing too. They raised their own family of three boys and two girls. All their children got a good education. They stayed in the West Kerry area for the most part.
Seán is in the construction business. Paíd works at Louis Mulcahy Pottery. Anthony works for Ballyhea Fisheries. Maureen Moriarty and her husband John own Lord Baker’s, a fine restaurant in Dingle. And Eilín Ní Chearna works for Raidió na Gaeltachta.
I went back to Ireland to visit for the first time since my emigration in 1961 on a tour organised by the John Boyle O’Reilly Club. It was fourteen years after I came to America. It was a joyous but tearful reunion with my father and Cáit. We had lots of catching-up to do. I stayed with them in Cáit’s house in Muiríoch. It was almost like the old days back on the island.
My father, of course, wanted to know about the people and places he remembered from his time in Springfield. It was great to give him the news from America. He had a wonderful time reminiscing.
On one of my trips back, my father told me an old Springfield story about his brother Mike. There was a man from the island who had come over to Springfield. He was a fella who never took care of himself. He was always chewing tobacco and spitting it out. He’d like to take some drink and get rambunctious.
Somebody told my uncle Mike that this islander had got in some kind of trouble and was left handcuffed to a tree by a police officer who had to leave to answer another call. The police van was on its way to pick him up and take him off to the police station. So my father and my uncle ran over there right away and cut the handcuffs off. Then all three of them hightailed it out of there before the paddy wagon showed up. My father loved to tell that story.
On one of our trips back with the John Boyle O’Reilly Club, my wife Maureen and I visited the abandoned family home back on the island. Only the four outside walls were left. To my surprise, the old cast iron pot oven that my mother used to cook cakes and other dishes was sitting right there in what was left of the fireplace. I couldn’t resist. We took it back to Springfield as a memento of my boyhood home on the island.
The Carney clan in America gathered to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Mike and Maureen Carney (fourth and sixth from the left respectively).
Trips back to Ireland involved lots of adventure. One time, my son Mike went back to West Kerry with my brother Paddy and John ‘Diamond’ Shea. On their last night in Dingle, they had quite a time of it. Bright and early the next morning, they piled into their rental car and headed for Shannon Airport. My son was driving. Unfortunately, he swerved to avoid a dog, or at least that was his story. He rolled the car over on its roof and into a ditch. They were lucky that nobody was seriously hurt, but they had to take a taxi on a mad dash the rest of the way to the airport. Later, Mike said to Paddy on the plane, ‘I can’t believe we’re alive after that episode.’ Paddy just said it was the luck of the Irish.
My Father’s Death
My father died of old age in Dingle Hospital on 1 February, St Bridget’s Day, in 1968. He was almost eighty-six. Six of his children from America went back to Kerry for his funeral. We got a barrel of Guinness and some whiskey. We gave the poor man a fine send-off in high style.
Cáit Uí Chearna at her knitting.
His body was brought to the church in Dunquin where it stayed overnight. There was a Mass and he was buried the following day. Since the old cemetery next to the church was full by then, he could not be buried with my mother. Instead, he was buried in the new cemetery in Dunquin, overlooking the ocean and the island. We went to Kruger’s for a couple of drinks afterwards. It was a sombre affair.
Four of Cáit’s children gather with Mike Carney at the Blasket Centre in 2012. Standing (l–r) are Maureen Moriarty, Paíd Ó Cearna, Eilín Ní Chearna, and Seán Ó Cearna.
My father was quite a man and he had quite a life –a h
ard life. He was a man of steel, a real islander. He was my inspiration.
Cáit visited us in Springfield a couple of times after my father died, in 1973 and 1989. She would stay for a few days with each one of her siblings. But Cáit did not like America. She found the weather too hot and said that the food disagreed with her stomach. Cáit thought she couldn’t adapt to life in America and so was anxious to go back to Ireland. We had a big party for her one night at the John Boyle O’Reilly Club. The place was packed with family and friends.
Cáit’s husband Pádraig died in July 1986 at the age of seventy, leaving Cáit alone with their family. My brother Paddy decided to move back to Ireland after he retired from Baystate Gas Company in 1985. He moved in with Cáit in Muiríoch. But not for long. The damp weather aggravated Paddy’s arthritis, so he moved back to Springfield after only about nine months.
Mike Carney visits his father’s grave in Dunquin.
Cáit, the poor woman, had a tough life. She did a great job of raising her brothers and her sister under very difficult circumstances. She had a wonderful family of her own. And she took care of my father in his old age. She died, the poor woman, in 2005. I visited her in Muiríoch for the last time in 2001. She was obviously in decline. It was a sad reunion. I think we both knew that it was the last time we would see each other.
I will never forget Cáit for what she did for me and my brothers and sisters. I owe her more than I can ever tell.
Cáit Uí Chearna sits with her dog Spot, a retriever, at her home in Muiríoch in 2001.
Retirement
My wife Maureen retired as a nurse’s aide at Springfield’s Mercy Hospital in 1985 after twenty years of service. After that, she was a full-time babysitter for two of our grandchildren, Mike and Andrew Hayes, for a number of years. The grandchildren still call me ‘Pop-Pop’.
From the Great Blasket to America Page 15
