Eamon Kelly

by Eamon Kelly

  There was a park in front of the building with a planetarium in the middle where we sometimes went to view the stars. During President Kennedy’s time a scheme was brought in to cater for preschool children. As Brian was only five he qualified for this and went to the nearest public infant school, where he made friends with kids of every colour in the human spectrum. For his birthday he invited a bevy of them to the apartment and had the time of his life.

  Eoin, seven, had been going to school in Dublin and I found a place for him a few blocks away where a one-time Irish parish had flourished, with church and schools all built with the cents and dimes of the emigrants. The neighbourhood was now deepening from white to brown and black, while the stained glass windows in the church still carried an appeal for prayers for the soul of a John O’Brien or an Elizabeth Reidy. Many years later I went to Mass there and the notice on the door said Misa en Español. The Irish had gone.

  New York streets were very unsafe in the 1960s and children were never left out on their own. I accompanied Eoin and Brian to school every morning and collected them again in the afternoon. Maura did the later chore when I had a Wednesday matinée. Because Eoin would be back in Dublin again to resume his studies, I was anxious that he didn’t lose touch with the subjects taught at home. I spoke Irish to him on our way to and from school. After a month or so when he had become accustomed to his surroundings he said to me one morning, ‘Dad, I think we shouldn’t talk Irish any more.’ ‘Why so, Eoin?’ I asked. ‘Because,’ he answered, ‘people might think we are Puerto Ricans!’

  The children enjoyed the strange city although they were too young for any abiding memory of it to stay with them. Because of their skin colouring as against the pallor of American white children, they caught the eye everywhere they went. Women stopped Maura in the street, curious to know what country they came from, and admiring Sinéad’s rosy cheeks they exclaimed, ‘Isn’t she a doll!’ Eoin became very patriotic in the States and hated having to stand in front of the star-spangled banner before class every morning as they all sang ‘America the Beautiful’. He told the teacher that it wasn’t his flag. I had to traipse around the Irish shops of the city until I found a tricolour for himself and Brian. I have a photograph of the two of them with the Irish flag firmly planted in the ground. With toy guns they defend it against all comers on a small knoll in Central Park.

  If Maura and the children enjoyed New York it was a new lease of life for me. In my first days I liked to sit in Schraft’s café near Broadway and watch the passing crowds while I partook of a dish of ice cream with scalding hot butterscotch poured on top of it. In these cafés at mid-morning groups of older men with their hats on sat at tables and talked. One day I heard them mention our play and discuss the part I was taking in it. At that time I wasn’t hooked on the pint and didn’t go to pubs much except to Eddie Downey’s of 8th Avenue where showpeople went after the theatre. Eddie had a corner where he displayed pictures of the greats of Broadway and we of Philadelphia, Here I Come! figured prominently there.

  I rode the subway down to the theatre every night, but when money was plentiful I hailed a cab and asked to be driven through Central Park. The fare was eighty cents and you left the driver the dollar. On the east coast of America spring follows swiftly on the heels of winter. Today the trees are bare; tomorrow there’s greenery showing everywhere. I’d spread myself on the back seat of the cab drinking in the beauty of the blossoming shrubbery and, regretting the twelve years I had spent hidden behind a microphone in Radio Éireann’s attic on top of the GPO, I’d sing:

  Bless ’em all! Bless Séamus Breathnach

  Who railed us one day,

  ‘Will ye stop the bloody acting

  And get on with the play.’

  New York cabbies are great talkers and they talk so fast and range over a wealth of topics even on a short journey. One man broached with me the difficulties he was having in his sex life. Mercifully the journey ended before he got to the intimate details.

  Reading the name card on another cabman’s dashboard I saw Florence O’Donoghue – a Glenflesk name if there was ever one. He turned out to have been the servant boy at Dineen’s, a neighbouring farm, when I was a child. I often saw him with a rifle during the Troubles and, because he took the anti-Treaty side in 1922, he lost out and had to flee to America. We were early at the theatre and we sat in the cab and talked about Glenflesk and Killarney until it was time for me to sign on before half-hour. He was saddened by the number of old people I told him had passed on, and agreeably surprised at the many changes for the better in the district. The ride was free. As he said, ‘I couldn’t take money from a neighbour’s child!’ Many of the cabmen go to the theatre. One of them asked me, ‘Are you the guy who plays the part of the storekeeper in that Philadelphia show?’

  The Kerrymen’s Patriotic and Benevolent Association of New York got wind of the word that I was in a Broadway show and I was invited to their premises to receive an award. Paddy Murphy went with me. At the door for a joke I indicated that Paddy was my bodyguard. To my surprise this was taken seriously and I was asked if he was one of New York’s finest. The term, meaning one of the city’s policemen, was lost on me, and winking at Paddy I said, ‘Only the finest would do.’ Word got around quickly that the tall guy with me was my bodyguard, and I went up in everybody’s estimation. We were treated like royalty. When I stood by the podium to hear the citation read, a chair was provided for Paddy in a position where he could cover all entrances and exits. The joke, which Paddy thoroughly enjoyed, had to be played out now, and it wasn’t the only absurdity; the one award they had to give was to make me a Kerryman (honorary). And they did just that!

  SNOWBOUND IN WILMINGTON AND CHICAGO

  The run of Philadelphia, Here I Come! came to an end on Broadway and in December we set out on a tour of the States. Our first stop was in Washington where we played in the National Theatre. Our household had a nice apartment there just for one week. I remember the location well because a little distance away on the Y-junction of Pennsylvania Avenue there was a monument by the Kerry-American sculptor, Jerome Connor. It was in memory of the women who nursed the wounded in the civil war. I think they were called the Daughters of the Republic. Down the street from it in the grounds of the Irish Embassy was Connor’s statue of Robert Emmet, a replica of which stands in Stephen’s Green.

  Eoin, Brian and I set out one morning to find a launderette to do our washing. We kept enquiring for one until we were finally directed to a place a distance away in an entirely black neighbourhood. We three were the only white people in the launderette. When I put the clothes in the washing machine I found I hadn’t enough coins for the slot. I gave a five dollar bill to a black man and asked him if he would be kind enough to go out and get some change for me. He looked at the note in his hand and said, ‘What if I don’t come back?’ ‘You will,’ I said, ‘your washing is here.’ He did come back and we went ahead with the work. As we sat on a bench waiting for the machine to finish, the room filled up. Not all the boys and girls had washing to do – it seemed a kind of trysting place.

  I put the damp clothes in the dryer, and after some time an argument started between two people about whose turn it was for the one dryer that was left. Then a strange thing happened. As I was the only white adult there, they assumed I was the owner. I was approached to settle the disagreement. I didn’t feel as assured as Aesop’s monkey adjudicating between the two cats over the piece of cheese. As they argued their case our dryer gave its last twirl and the swishing clothes came to a halt. I emptied them out and gave one of them the dryer and so peace was restored. I had never before been the odd man out in a crowded room of black people, and because I was new to the States I felt a little uneasy. The children, who saw the world through different eyes, and who had mixed with coloured children at school, were not one bit perturbed.

  After our short stay in Washington we were to play for a week in Wilmington, Delaware, and then on to Chicago for two months. T
hrough friends of ours in that city we had already found an apartment, and instead of coming to Wilmington with me, Maura and the children went on to Chicago to await my arrival there on Christmas Day. In Wilmington we played in a theatre in the Dupont complex, and you couldn’t ask for nicer weather as we drove there for our last show on Christmas Eve. Back in Dublin all theatres were closed on that day, and in Holy Week the stages were as dark as the words of the Passion on Good Friday. That year Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday and we had two performances, one at five and one at eight. For these back-to-back shows, as they were called, a meal was brought into the theatre, and in the short time before the next curtain-up we didn’t have to get out of our costumes or make-up.

  Like the first house that afternoon, the second one was a packer. I couldn’t help wondering, remembering what Christmas Eve was like in my young days in Ireland, if the people had any homes to go to, or any decorations to put up for the festive season. As the play progressed I found it hard to keep my thoughts from wandering back across the sea to Christmases long ago. There is a scene at the opening of the third act where the family kneel down to say the rosary on young Gar’s last night at home before leaving for America. As the Our Fathers, the Hail Marys and the responses swelled and died the thoughts of Gar Public, articulated by Gar Private, always soared westwards across the Atlantic as he visualised what his new life would be like in Philadelphia. But on that night in Wilmington, as the young would-be emigrant’s thoughts soared westward from Ireland, my thoughts were soaring in the opposite direction, to my own home in Carrigeen, Glenflesk.

  How clear it all became to me, every detail of the kitchen, the picture of the Holy Family, the berry holly, laurel and ivy decorating the walls. The mottoes on the chimney breast, the roaring fire and the Christmas candles in the windows bringing what was to us then a glorious blaze of light. Images of Christmas crowded the mind. Driving to early Mass in the dark in the pony and trap. The sound of hooves on frosty roads, the loud salutations at the chapel gate as neighbours exchanged Christmas greetings, echoed and re-echoed in my head. ‘Your decade!’ from the housekeeper, Madge, brought young Gar back from his dreams and me back to reality. The reality that was S. B. O’Donnell’s stage kitchen in Wilmington, Delaware.

  When we came out of the theatre that night the city was blanketed in snow and strangely quiet, as whatever traffic there was seemed to glide soundlessly over the white streets. We had some trouble in getting a taxi. Those at the centre were lazy about venturing to the outskirts in case they couldn’t come back. The snow was coming down again and slanting in the rising wind. Eventually we got an empty cab going in our direction. When we got out the last man was lucky. He stepped into the footprints made by the others in the deep snow which was being tossed and swirled in the wind and driven against the walls of the motel. I had to brush it away to find the door handle, and when I opened the door inwards there was a wall of snow almost three feet high between me and the room.

  By scooping it outwards with my bare hands, a bit like a rabbit setting about making a burrow, I managed to get in without bringing too much snow with me. I’ll never forget the feeling of loneliness that came over me as I shut the door that Christmas Eve and looked around the bare motel room. Granted, the bed was comfortable. There was a dressing table, a wardrobe, a john and a shower; but one picture would have brightened the place. Just one picture with a sprig of berry holly behind it. I got into bed but I couldn’t sleep because of the noise the blow-in hot air apparatus was making. I switched it off but then it got so cold I had to switch it on again.

  The phone rang. A fellow player, Éamon Morrissey, who couldn’t sleep any more than myself, had rounded up some American and Irish actors from the cast. Would I come down to the lobby? We made ourselves comfortable in a large room and, despite the lateness of the hour, those of us with wives and families called them to send festive greetings. Parcels of good cheer for dear friends in Chicago were raided, and as Christmas Eve merged into Christmas Day, toasts were drunk, songs were sung and on Éamon’s insistence I told of Christmases long ago when the world was young and we were all happy by our own fireside.

  Next morning at an early hour we were on the road. The snowploughs had cleared our way to Philadelphia airport, where we were to get the plane to Chicago. Flame-throwers were used to clear the snow from the runway. I got a window seat in an aircraft packed with people, parcels and hand luggage, bursting at the seams like the bus from Killarney to Barraduv on Christmas Eve. It was nightfall when I reached the apartment in Chicago and was united with my family. We exchanged presents and had a quiet drink but it was Christmas Day and I hadn’t been to Mass. Maura was anxious that I should talk to God before we sat down to our festive dinner. I went down to reception and was directed to a church in Clarke Street, the scene of the infamous St Valentine’s Day Massacre in the time of Prohibition.

  Brian and Eoin, full of curiosity about the trip, wanted to know if we brought the stage all the way from the east coast. I told them that in Wilmington on Saturday night coming near the end of the show we heard murmuring in the wings. The men of the theatre transport company were waiting and when the curtain came down they descended on the set like locusts and everything – flats, furniture, lighting-board, wardrobe and props – were quickly put in the vehicle reversed into the back of the stage. They were in the lorry in no time and driving through the night, and whatever time it took them to get to Chicago, that set would be in place and lit for us to walk through before we went on tomorrow night. Closing in Wilmington on Saturday and opening on Monday in Chicago, nearly a thousand miles away, was, they agreed, something of a record.

  Chicago is the Windy City and the coldest place on God’s earth in the winter. The icy breeze blowing across the frozen waters of Lake Michigan would be hard on a brass monkey. The nose, ears and the point of the jaw go numb and turn blue, and the tips of the fingers, even in mittens, tingle with pain. The Wilmington snow soon made its way westwards and we woke one morning to find the snow so deep in the streets that parked cars humped the white blanket like knees-up in a bed. The car antennas stuck out of the snow like the stalks of plants waiting for leaves to grow.

  One afternoon I had to make my way to WFMT, a Chicago radio station, to talk on a programme giving publicity to the show. I was well wrapped up for the trip and wearing overshoes which came above my ankles. They weren’t high enough and the snow went in over them, adding greatly to my discomfort. While waiting in the anteroom at the station, I took off my shoes and put my socks on the radiator. Unnoticed, I hope, I slipped my feet into my wet shoes when I was called. Once my legs were under the studio desk I discarded the wet shoes and I was interviewed barefoot by the legendary Studs Terkel, author of Division Street: America. His book was a collection of his most successful interviews, and one authority said of him, ‘Studs Terkel is a wonderfully skilled interviewer, with an instinctive ability to put the question that unlocks defences and coaxes self-revelation!’

  About this time Spoken Arts of New York had issued a record by the Radio Éireann Players of two plays by J. M. Synge, Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen. The actors’ names for some reason did not appear on the sleeve of the album. As I entered the studio an excerpt from In the Shadow of the Glen was on the monitor and going out over the air. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I heard my own voice, and Studs was equally surprised when I told him he was listening to me and my wife Maura on the disc. To put his hand on that particular record was a chance in a million and it gave us something to talk about at the opening of the interview.

  Studs himself spoke very little but he had the uncanny knack of drawing speech from his subject, and I talked about radio and theatre in Dublin, the play I was in, storytelling and the place where I grew up in Kerry. When it was over I slipped my feet into my shoes and when I came to the anteroom my socks were dry on the radiator.

  But we weren’t finished with the snow. After a two-month run in the Schubert
Theatre in Chicago the tour was to continue with one-week stands in nine other cities throughout the States. We thought the constant changing would be too much for Maura and the children, and after due consideration they decided to go back to Ireland. They had been almost twelve months away. It was a glorious morning when we set out for O’Hare airport. I wanted to see them off. I would be back in plenty of time for the night show. Our cab driver was Italian, newly arrived but with a fairish grasp of English. We weren’t long on the road when the skies darkened and it began to snow. In no time it was coming down thick and fast with fat snowflakes falling on the windscreen. The wipers worked for a while and then failed to function. We had to stop every now and then to clear the soft snow from the glass.

  When we got near the airport the snow was so deep that cars were being abandoned on the roadway. A little further on, the thoroughfare was completely blocked and the driver decided to turn around. He reversed into a ditch where the cab got stuck and we were marooned in the snow. This was before the time of telephones in cabs and he went looking for a kiosk to call his company. We were all in our light clothes and we soon began to freeze. The driver didn’t come back and I stood in the road to the city flagging down traffic in the hope of being taken back to Chicago. At last when I was nearly frozen to death a car stopped. It was a minister of religion. Little Sinéad was so cold that he opened his greatcoat and put her inside it while he shepherded us into his car.