Michael Dwyer recalls growing up in Tralee, one of Ireland's great sporting towns, where his passions however remained cinema and music
I came within a few hours of being born in a cinema, although that omen went entirely unnoticed at the time. There were, after all, more pressing considerations: I was the first child in the family and I was late in making my arrival on Planet Earth - three weeks late.
On that fateful night, the doctor assured my mother that it could be a while longer before I put in an appearance and he recommended that my parents relax and take in a movie.
So it was that my mother and father were ensconced in the Picturedrome cinema on Castle Street in Tralee - watching Burt Lancaster in Mister 880, as I later gleaned from the cinema ads in the newspaper files at Kerry County Library - when the labour pains started. Rather than stay in the cinema and give me a story on which I could dine out for decades, my parents rushed towards St Anne's nursing home on Strand Road, where I made my debut a few hours later.
We lived just a couple of streets away and, as the family grew with the births of my sisters, Anne and Maria, we moved house twice, always staying close to the heart of the town. My sisters, both now with families of their own, live close to my mother, Mary, in St John's Park, a few minutes walk from the town centre.
When I was growing up, Tralee had a wonderful sense of community. Everyone seemed to know everyone and I have abiding memories of the warmth and bonhomie that permeated the town in those days. It was much smaller then, with a population in the region of 16,000.
As it stretched out in all directions and that population doubled, many of its most sociable features have been sacrificed for anonymity, I suspect. In common with so many other urban areas, it has to deal with problems of crime and drugs that would have been unthinkable when I left there for Dublin more than 20 years ago.
In my childhood, Tralee had three large cinemas, of which the Picturedrome was the grandest with its staircases dominated by imposing gilt-edged mirrors leading up to the balcony and the best seats. It is now a bookstore, while the vast Ashe Memorial Hall is now the Kerry County Museum and the tacky third cinema, the Theatre Royal, has become a bowling alley.
Tralee now has one four-screen Omniplex. Had that been the case when I was a schoolboy, it would have saved my father no end of grief. From an early age, I engaged in an obsessive ritual whereby I felt impelled to tour around each of the three cinemas every day after school, to peruse the posters and stills and to keep informed of coming attractions.
On wet days, my father Nicholas would interrupt his working routine as a fruit and vegetable wholesaler to drive me home from school - and regularly had to waste valuable time driving from cinema to cinema to track me down.
My parents were avid cinemagoers and from when I was four years old, they took me with them to the 7 p.m. shows two or three nights a week. I was further fuelling my addiction on weekends, taking in double bill matinees on Saturdays and Sundays with my school friends, except in summer - and I distinctly remember extended warm, sunny summers in my youth - when the family went to one of the lovely nearby beaches in Banna or Ballyheigue.
Once, in my teens and sunbathing on Banna Strand, I fell asleep and suffered from mild sunstroke, which caused me to faint in the Picturedrome that night.
I also inherited my parents' love of popular music and they indulged this in my childhood, every Sunday night turning up the volume on Radio Luxembourg's Top 20 show, so that I could hear it in my bedroom.
As I drifted towards my teens, Hurley's store on Castle Street became the essential stop on my daily rounds of the town. There I had all my favourite weekly and monthly magazines on order: New Musical Express, Disc & Music Echo, Record Mirror, Photoplay and later, the risqué Films and Filming.
Hurley's was also my record shop and I pestered Patricia Scannell, the owner, almost daily, checking if my magazines and the new singles and albums I had ordered, had come in.
I grew up in one of Ireland's great sporting towns and my school friends included such footballing greats as John O'Keeffe, but while I followed and admired their achievements, my obsessions as a schoolboy remained movies and music.
When I was 14, I started attending record hops, as they were known in that pre-disco universe, often illicitly on nights my parents were out, always staying until the latest possible minute and then furiously cycling home just before they got back.
The deejay was a larger-than-life personality, Michael Donovan, whom I last saw in Tralee General Hospital a few days before he died last October. He enterprisingly brought some of the best early Irish rock bands to town, often losing money in the process.
I felt ashamed of Tralee on the night when he booked Taste, the Cork trio featuring the unique talent of Rory Gallagher, and fewer than two dozen turned up, while the ballroom of the Brandon Hotel a few blocks away was thronged for the dreadful Big Tom and the Mainliners.
Rooted in our urban milieu, my friends and I sneered at Big Tom and all the other showbands who passed for Irish country-and-western. Instead, we avidly sought out every gig by the more cosmopolitan and adventurous bands: The Freshmen, The Plattermen, The Chessmen and Chips and groups such as the exhilaratingly innovative Horslips, who played the ballroom circuit at the time.
On my 18th birthday, a month before I did my Leaving Certificate, my father amazed me with the gift of a car - a year-old red Vauxhall Viva numbered NIN 775 - which he came across as a bargain. Now I could follow my favourite bands all over the county, thinking nothing of driving 20 or 30 miles to a gig in Killarney, Ballybunion or Dingle.
Tralee was - and I hope, still is - marked by a remarkable "can do" spirit, reflected in the success of ventures such as the Rose of Tralee festival founded in 1957 and still drawing huge TV ratings, the confidence-boosting extended string of victories by indomitable Kerry football teams and more recently, the remarkable business achievements of the Kerry Group.
I have one unforgettable memory of the Rose festival, when I served as a Rose escort in a year I will not divulge in order to protect the identity of the contestant I was escorting.
There was an article in the Kerryman, bemoaning that escorts were easier to find outside rather than inside Kerry and, when I echoed that criticism to friends in a bar, I was dared into picking up the phone and volunteering.
I was the subject of unmerciful slagging from my friends, as I wandered around in a tuxedo from about 5 o'clock every evening - in blazing sunshine. I was allocated to the tallest Rose because of my height and sadly, we had nothing else in common.
She loved Coronation Street, knitting and crochet, none of which even vaguely interested me, and small talk rarely was smaller, while her lack of Terpsichorean skills left my toes crunched.
My first full-time job was with Kerry County Library, where I developed the orderly skills now routinely applied to my collection of videos, DVDs and CDs.
Outside of working hours, my friends and I created our own entertainment. Two of us joined the local dramatic society, the Group Theatre, where a gifted director, the late Maurice Curtin, guided us through a stimulating range of productions.
I made my debut as the sympathetic defence counsel in On Trial, the English-language version of Mairéad Ní Ghráda's socially challenging drama, An Triail, and later acted in Uaigneas an Ghleanna, the Irish-language version of Synge's The Shadow of the Glen.
We toured several plays on the drama festival circuit, driving back from festivals in Clare and Limerick in the early hours of the morning and going to work after a couple of hours sleep. We loved every minute of it.
I also had the dubious distinction of being the first person to use a four-letter word on stage in Tralee, when I played a Welsh soldier under pressure in Brian Friel's The Freedom of the City.
I was briefly typecast, going on to play another British soldier, this time a callous cad who gives the heroine a hard time in The Rose of Tralee, John Caball's entertaining play based on the legend, which played to packed houses night after night.
I had played the on-stage narrator in an earlier shorter working treatment of that play, in which I was assigned to wear a gold lamé jacket. I turned heads when I turned up wearing it at a Horslips gig at the Brandon after the show had closed.
I saw myself as a budding Brian Epstein when I came on board as manager of a new local rock band, Clutch, a four-piece led by Francie Conway, who went on to enjoy success in his own right across Europe.
As the band went through intensive rehearsals, it was clear from their astute mix of striking original material and imaginative reworkings of rock classics that they were very special indeed and this fuelled the messianic zeal with which I bombarded Kerry's Eye and the Kerryman with promotional material week after week before their triumphant debut on the stage of the Ashe Memorial Hall, my favourite cinema in earlier years.
Around the same time, a few diehard enthusiasts had been running Tralee Film Society for over a decade and were looking for successors. I immersed myself in it with all the boundless energy and ambition of youth.
With the sterling help of a small dedicated committee, I rapidly expanded it from seven screenings a year to weekly screenings every Monday night from October to March, filling all 620 seats in the Ashe Hall, where, in the absence of a screen, we white-washed the back wall of the stage.
Audiences came from over a 20-mile radius to savour our programme of new international cinema, US productions bypassed by the local cinemas, classics and some movies banned in those significantly less liberal times.
When I returned to Tralee last Tuesday, a few people were still shaking their heads on recalling our screenings of such then notorious movies as WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Paul Verhoeven's Dutch picture, Turkish Delight.
Every time I return to Tralee, I see changes. The green expanses on the outskirts are now dotted for miles with houses. The old cattle market and flour mills are being turned into apartments, hundreds of them. An ethnic food store, a welcome addition, has squeezed in among the legal and medical practices that line Ashe Street.
Tralee for decades had a staunch Labour Party tradition, epitomised by my uncle, Michael O'Regan, a dedicated urban councillor whose resolve remained unshaken for years after he lost his sight, and by Dick Spring, one of the finest politicians Ireland ever produced, I believe. I was covering the Cannes Film Festival during the general election of last year and I was dismayed on returning to my hotel and reading the results on ireland.com to learn that he had lost his seat in Kerry North.
The sprawling Town Park, known locally and aptly as The Green, remains an oasis of tranquillity and natural delights and it has changed, too. It is more beautiful than ever, with its manicured lawns, blazes of floral colour and its striking new Garden of the Senses.
Last Tuesday afternoon, after a walkabout of Tralee suffused with nostalgia and reflection, I sat on a bench in the park and I felt sure that I couldn't have been happier to spend my formative years, steeped in popular culture, anywhere else.