AMERICA AT LARGE:IT TOOK me 65 years to figure this out, but this week I discovered the safest place to spend St Patrick's Day is on an airplane bound for London. A strand of bright green beads draped around the neck of one of the stewards was the only visible acknowledgement of the occasion, and all things considered it was a reasonable means of escaping the embarrassment of what has, in its American incarnation, turned into an annual puke-fest traditionally celebrated by amateur drunks.
Thus it wasn’t until I arrived at my hotel Tuesday night that I saw the news clips of Barack Obama, sporting a green tie, communing with his cousin Brian from Offaly. The same dispatch revealed that the occasion had been otherwise commemorated by dying the water in a White House garden, a stroke reportedly undertaken at the behest of Mrs. Obama, who, having spent her formative years in Illinois, where the Chicago River turns green each March 17th, probably thought it would make the Taoiseach feel right at home.
For a quarter century, more often than not I found myself in Florida, covering spring training games on St Patrick’s Day. The Boston Red Sox used to celebrate the occasion by wearing green chapeaux in place of their traditional blue, and sometimes they’d play a road game in a venue where the bases themselves were green for the day. In more recent years, with an eye toward the collectibles market, the Sox have even been known to don green jerseys on March 17th. When they played the Twins in Fort Myers this past Tuesday, I see that they wore brand new white ones, with green letters and numbers and a shamrock affixed to the sleeve. Those should start showing up on e-Bay by the weekend.
But the otherwise uneventful crossing did give one pause to reflect on other St Patrick’s Days past, including the occasion, 45 years ago when I didn’t know any better, I showed up in South Boston on the day of the parade there.
The busing crisis was still a decade off, but Southie was already well-established as a no-go area for African Americans. The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) had defiantly entered a float in that year’s parade, and I remember standing in the doorway of a West Broadway saloon on a freezing afternoon. Most of the clientele had rushed outside at the first sign of its approach. Many of them hurled racial invectives as the NAACP float passed by. The rest of them hurled rocks, beer cans and whatever else they could forage from a nearby rubbish barrel.
A few years later I was in New York. My brother was passing through town on St Patrick’s Day, and seizing upon that convenient excuse, a colleague and I begged off work for the afternoon and gone off to “watch the parade”. Since it had begun to snow by the time we made our escape from the office, we slightly revised that battle plan, and, having been joined by my then-wife, caught a downtown train and repaired to a lively pub on Sixth Avenue in the Village.
The Paddy’s Day celebration was in full swing. The place was not, thankfully, serving green beer, but there must have been a couple hundred customers, many of whom seemed to be notably large, beefy men kitted out in matching bright green plastic Derby hats. Lest anyone miss the point, many of them also wore large buttons proclaiming, “Kiss Me, I’m Irish.” “McNamara’s Band” issued forth from the juke box several times an hour.
I’ve passed that barroom hundreds of times since, but, for reasons which will shortly become apparent, never gone back in.
An hour of two into the festivities my bride returned, sobbing, to our booth, reporting that on her way out of the ladies room she had been trapped against a wall and fondled by one of the celebrants – “a guy in a green hat,” a description which matched at least half the men in the room.
In her defence I should point out the first Mrs Kimball was at the time barely of drinking age, then 18 in New York, and thus had youth as an excuse, but it has also occurred to me more than once over the intervening four decades she might also have had a touch of the provocateur about her, since this was plainly only going to end one way – particularly after, some time later, she excitedly elbowed me, pointed toward the biggest guy in the bar, and said “Him. That’s the one!”
We quietly gathered up our coats. I instructed my brother to get everyone outside and wait by the door. I then approached the green-domed masher and engaged him in conversation. He not only acknowledged his transgression, but seemed rather proud of it. Drawing himself up to his full height he asked me just what I proposed to do about it.
“Aw, nothing,” I said with the most disarming smile I could muster. “It’s St Patrick’s Day, remember?”
I turned my back on him and took one step toward the door. Then I wheeled in a 180-degree spin and landed the best right hand I ever threw in my life. The surprise of the sucker-punch was no doubt augmented by centrifugal force, and it caught him flush on the jaw. I knew before he hit the floor he’d copped his last feel for that St Patrick’s Day.
I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be getting back up, but there remained the matter of all his friends at the bar. My brother held the door open as I made my escape and then slammed it behind him.
We had no more than a few seconds’ jump on the posse, but providence smiled on us that day. In the few hours we’d been in pub at least a foot and a half of snow had accumulated on the streets and sidewalks of Greenwich Village to cover our retreat. When the first of our pursuers managed to get the door open and tried to race after us, he slipped on the sidewalk and fell down with his first step. Hard on his heels, the next guy barreled through the door and tripped right over him, creating a human log-jam that effectively impeded the progress of the angry mob right behind them. As we piled into the taxi that waited to evacuate us, the last thing we saw was a tangle of arms, legs, and green plastic hats, thrashing about on the snow-covered sidewalk.
