April 16th is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the indomitable, quiet but fierce, gentle and good Grandpa John William Sheehan, of the Large Hands, Boom Boom's Dad.
He died an American, and brought one of our ancestral lines here. I have written this story before, but added a bit to it for John's Birthday, so please bear with me.
John J. Whalen (Whalen Patriarch)
As the Chicago Irish would say, John G. Shedd was a "rich millionaire" living in the mansions of the meat-packing, steel-mill owning, retail princes and robber barons of post-Civil War Chicago. His great contribution to posterity is the magnificent Shedd Aquarium on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. It has a whale in it.
Shedd was so rich he couldn't spend his money fast enough. Then there was the other John.
John William Sheehan was born in 1870, in Carrigaholt, in County Clare, on the western edge of Ireland, right where the Shannon enters the sea. Just on the north side of the Shannon estuary is the Loop Head peninsula, called Corca Baiscinn, maybe meaning Kingdom of the Basques, maybe Kingdom of the basin, for the topography. It is ancient, full of ghosts, banshees, legends, and wild beauty. It is said to hold the most beautiful women on the seafront. That's where Big John lived. He was very big for the time, 6 feet 2, but skinny, with hands large as shovels. He was very quiet, and so shy that he could not speak to girls.
He was connected in a random way to John G. Shedd, and that is a part of our story.
About 5 clicks north of John in County Clare lived Katherine Honore Maloney, daughter of James Maloney, a farmer, and his wife, Mary Fitzgerald. Mary was descended from the Fitzgerald's who were known as the Geraldines, or the Gerailta, and who had come over from Norman England, sent by Henry II in 1169, to put down a rising in the east. The Norman knights (Fitzgerald, FitzSimmons, Fitz
Maurice, Butler, Ormond, Roche, De Lacey, De Clare, and a few others), had originally sprung of course from Normandy in the northwest of France, conquered England, and then were sent over to take Ireland, but fell in love with Ireland and became "more Irish than the Irish themselves," and later provided the leadership of the great rebellions against the English.
The Fitzgerald blood is now spread out all among the people of Clare, on the north side of the Shannon, and Limerick, on the south.
Katherine, known as Kate, was very small, petite, known for her delicacy, manners, politeness. She was also stunningly beautiful, and John Sheehan had had his eye on her for years. He watched her at the big parish dance at St. Sennen's parish in Kilkee every Sunday night from the sidelines. He could never bring himself to approach her, for he was tongue-tied and red as a beet. He once said he felt as if he were sticking out of his clothes. His hands were overly large, and he was a bit too strong for his weight, so he was a little awkward.
One day, the news swept the peninsula that Kate Maloney was going to America. This was in the 1890's. The people had an "American Wake," a party to say goodbye to Kate, and then she took ship, never to return. John missed his chance to speak, and was miserable. He was a trained engineer, a hydraulics expert, and decided to go to America too.
Was John stalking Kate? We don't know. But she wound up in Chicago, in the Irish neighborhood "Back of the Yards," on Union Avenue, and John wound up in Chicago, "Back of the Yards," in a boarding house right down the block.
In those days, the neighbors sat on the stoops, especially in summer, and talked and sang and danced and shared their food and company. When I was little, I caught the tail-end of those things in the South Side Irish neighborhoods. It was great fun.
Kate got a job as the downstairs maid, because of her elegance and appearance, her diction and precision, in the house of John G. Shedd, the “rich millionaire”. There was a large staff, run by a gigantic English butler.
One Sunday night in summer, the Shedd's had a brisket of beef, and a nice portion of it was left over, to be thrown out. Kate salvaged it, tied it in a package, wrapped it in brown paper and placed it next to the back door. She would bring it home and share the delicious meat with her neighbors. Everybody would have a tasty little nibble. Also, coming from Famine Ireland, where only a generation before her relatives had been dropping dead in the fields from starvation (hard to imagine, but oh, so true), she could not bear the thought of throwing away such life-giving food.
The English butler found the package, snatched it up and threw it away, demanding to know who had taken it. Kate spoke up and he said, "You Irish are not fit to eat the leavings of an English table. You are fired." Notice, no mention of American, only Irish and English.
Kate was heart-broken, violated, bullied, and she lost the food and her job.
She spoke on the stoop that night and the people commiserated with her. John Sheehan was hanging on the fringes of the crowd. He heard. He still had not spoken to Kate, though she had seen him more than once and recognized him from the Corca Baiscinn. She wondered about that, but never thought much about it. When Big John heard that his beloved had been wronged by the big bully, he hopped on his bike and traveled uptown to the mansions and walked into the front door of the Shedd palace. He strode through the house, to the kitchen, braced up the butler and knocked him colder than a mackerel with one thundering blow from his shovel-like Irish mitts. He looked down at the recumbent butler and announced to the shocked staff, "That strike was for Kate Maloney."
Then he strode out.
The police were out front, alerted by the next-door household when someone observed an obvious Irish laborer walk uninvited through the front door of the Shedd Mansion!
Of course, these cops were Irish, also from the West of Ireland, like most Chicago Irish, and they said to him, "Run like the wind, ya gobshite, so that we have trouble catchin' ya. Make it look good, lad, with yer one chance." So John escaped. The cops told everybody they knew, and all they knew.
And so the neighborhood found out about the hopeless risk, with nothing to be gained but a point of honor in defense of a young woman; with everything to risk in the days of "No Irish Need Apply," and a brave, futile gesture of love and unconditional support, by the big, strong, skinny, shy, awkward, tongue-tied, beet-red, shovel-handed Mick, head over heels in love with Kate Maloney.
Of course, 5 foot 2 Kate walked up to 6 foot 2 John the next day, looked up into his eyes and said, "Thank you, Big John." That was enough for him. He asked her to marry him right there, and they married and stuck until death, had two sons and one daughter, Mary Frances Sheehan.
And Mary Frances Sheehan, gone now for 23 years, is my grandmother.
My mother told me the more John, her grandfather, drank, the quieter he got. Now and then he would stand up and yell a bit, but Kate would say, "Sig shees, Sean." (Sit down, John), and he would meekly take a seat. He died at Boom Boom's house on December 23, 1947, and Kate followed him in 9 weeks, on February 24, 1948.
At the end of his life, he would walk down to the corner and wait for “the ship”--the Chicago city bus stopped there and in his confused and failing brain he mistook the idea of the bus stop for the boat from Ireland, docking. The cops would gather him and walk him home. They said he always told them he was waiting for his mother- Honore Corbett Sheehan, the famed midwife of the Corca Baiscinn Peninsula, who had been dead many years--to arrive on “the ship,” from Ireland. He had said goodbye to her at his “American wake” when he emigrated, holding the hope in his heart that the New World would afford him a way to bring her over, and like with so many of the Chicago Irish, this hope never came true, and the beloved were never, never seen again. His old heart never stopped yearning.
I suppose this is true of all our immigrants, but it seems to me now, as I get older and more reflective, that maybe this is part of the deep and almost undrainable pool of Irish sorrow and deep melancholy that lies under all our music and stories. There is an awful lot of each of us back there, and when you go back over, you see it. America has healed our hearts, though it took some generations.
And the valiant John William Sheehan is my great-grandfather. I think about all of this when times are tough and I realize nothing, nothing, nothing outlasts love.
Happy Birthday, Grandpa Sheehan, and thank you for your valor, for your love of the clan and for your too big, too strong, shovel-handed, awkward, heartfelt grace. Thank you for your bravery and your Dear Heart. Please watch over us, as you cherished and protected and fought for Kate.
You symbolize someone in each family of each person in this group of family and friends, who crossed the oceans, from both sides, with nothing, or not much, and took the big chance; and now, here we all are, thanks to these hero ancestors of ours, just like you.
God bless us and save us and keep us from harm.
Love, Seamus the Older
