More Irish and American Stories

By William Oliver O'Neill

THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SEQUEL TO THE INTERNATIONAL SELLING BOOK

Monsignor O'Neill is quite a storyteller. After years of encouragement to collect his tales into a book, he published Stories from Ireland and America, a collection of 124 stories spanning 70 plus years from his childhood in the 1940

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Oliver O'Neill
• Release date: May 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781732836273

William Oliver O'Neill

Born in 1942 in County Tipperary, Ireland and educated at Irish schools and seminary, William Oliver O'Neill accepted the call to "mission" work in the American rural south. He left home and family at the age of 25 and crossed the ocean to a world of new family, new friends, and very different ideas of life. Many Europeans who immigrated to America never returned to their native land but O'Neill was determined that he would remain Irish at heart and has returned home at least once a year for the last 53 years. He served parishes in New Orleans, Augusta. GA, and Columbus, GA before ending up in Savannah where he spent the last 32 years of his pastoral career serving in two of the city's larger parishes. He attended the North American College in Rome on two occasions to extend his education and has traveled to many countries outside of his native Ireland and adopted America. He is known for his amazing memory and the stories he can pull up for any occasion.

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Part I

More Irish Stories

1

My Childhood Home

My childhood home was a typical two-story rural Irish farmhouse. The walls were stone and mortar. The builders were the Doyle brothers from Toem who were renowned stonemasons. It was built on the site of an earlier thatched house, which was demolished. Demolition of the old house began on August 16, 1910. The house had a very large kitchen, five bedrooms, and a parlor. There was no bedroom over the large kitchen, so the ceiling was very high. The upstairs bedrooms at each end of the house were connected by a balcony leading to the stairs going down to the kitchen.

The large kitchen was the center of activity. Before getting electricity in 1949, all cooking, baking bread, and boiling food for the farm animals was done over a large open fire. The fire was fanned by a blower. This contraption was a large wheel with a belt going to a small wheel which had an internal fan. Turning the large wheel at normal speed made the small wheel rotate very fast. The draft from the fan was conveyed underground to an ash-hole underneath the fire. When a pot was hanging over the fire for boiling, fanning the flame with the blower was usually done by one of the children. The fireplace was very large with an open chimney overhead. The chimney was so wide that we could look up to the top of it and see the sky. There were iron hooks secured to the interior wall of the chimney. Those hooks were for hanging home-cured bacon to be smoked. When we were innocent children, we were told that those crooks were to help Santa Claus climb down the chimney on Christmas Eve! The chimney was cleaned on a regular basis with a long-handle hoe. It was always cleaned on Christmas Eve in preparation for the arrival of Santa Claus! He would not be happy if soot got on his red clothes and white beard. Pots and kettles were suspended from a crane, which could be lowered and raised to swing in and out.

The belt on the blower was also used to discipline children! I got many a spanking from my father! Whenever my mother tried to spank us, we pretended to be hurt and laugh at her! One time, I took the belt from her and pretended that I was going to spank her! She usually left that to my father. Whenever a spanking was to be administered, it was wise to get it over with there and then. Otherwise, my father would wait until the little brat went to bed. Then he went to the bedroom with the belt!

During the winter months, the house was very cold. The only fire was the one in the kitchen. The fire in the parlor was used only when visitors were entertained. We took hot water bottles to bed. Getting up on cold mornings when there was frost on the windows was very difficult. One got his clothes on fast and dashed to the kitchen fire to get warm.

The parlor was used only for special visitors. It was off limits to the children. We loved to go in there to look at all the family treasures, which were kept in a glass-case. It had a lovely ornate fireplace with a very ornate mantelpiece. Over the mantelpiece was a very large mirror. On the mantelpiece was a mounted yellow canary bird in a glass dome. The bird was my father’s pet bird when he was a child. When the bird died, my father was so upset that his mother had the bird mounted or stuffed. On the walls of the parlor were large framed pictures of family members from previous generations who were long dead. The only recent picture was my father’s and mother’s wedding picture. The furniture in the parlor was a very fancy black-stained table with matching chairs. There were also a few black-stained sideboards. On one sideboard there were glasses for serving drinks. On the other sideboards were ornaments and figurines, which delighted the eyes of any child who had the opportunity to admire them.

On the long dark winter evenings, we gathered around the large fire in the kitchen. Neighbors frequently dropped in to join us. News from the locality was shared; farming matters were discussed; stories were told. Before the coming of electricity, there was nothing as lovely as to sit by a glowing fire in a dimly lighted kitchen with a flickering oil-lamp. When we were very young children, we were sent off to bed at a fixed time so that the adults could talk about things, which children did not need to hear. This is where the balcony in our kitchen served a great purpose. We could sit there quietly and listen to the adult conversation below. Once in a while, one of us might break wind, or cough, and my father would shout up, If you don’t go to bed, I will be up with the belt from the blower.

Another item of interest in our kitchen were rings in a wall. The rings were used to tie the very young children to them. This prevented them from going near the large open fire in the kitchen and pots of boiling water. The safety of the children was a concern. By putting a harness on them and tying them to the rings in the wall, they were safe. My father and his brothers and sisters were also tied to those very same rings when they were children. There was a gate at the bottom of the stairs to keep the children from climbing. Not only were children tied to the rings in the wall, they were also tied outside to milk churns during milking time. It only took a minute for a child to get hurt when busy adults were not able to watch. Tying the children to the rings in the wall or to milk churns during milking time ensured their safety. This method of child-minding might not be approved today, but it worked and it was safe!

The kitchen floor was concrete with no floor covering because the kitchen was the center of activity. Once a week, the concrete floor was scrubbed. After the scrubbing, the cement was glittering. Occasionally, we had house dances in the kitchen. Farmers generally wore hobnail boots. During the dancing, the sound of hobnail boots was heard pounding the concrete floor.

As time went by, my father had a little house built in the farmyard for a large boiler for boiling animal feed. This was a very large pot. There was a firebox underneath it. The fuel used for the fire was coal, or timber, or peat. This removed all of the boiling of animal feed out of the kitchen. The large boiling pot was also used to boil water for washing clothes. With the coming of the rural electrification in 1949, most of the household cooking and the baking of bread was done on electric stoves and ovens. The first electric stove and oven we had was very small. It was called a Baby Belling. Later it was replaced by a larger one called a Revo. The electric kettle replaced the kettles boiling over the fire.

Every rural Irish farmhouse kitchen had a picture of the Sacred Heart with a red votive light underneath it. Before electricity came, the votive light was a little oil lamp with a red globe. When electricity came, it was a red electric bulb with a little cross inside of it. Every Irish rural farmhouse kitchen also had a picture of John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII. The Sacred Heart picture was large in size, and no matter where one went in the kitchen, the eyes followed. Adults got their children to behave by telling them that Holy God was watching them! The family Rosary was recited each evening kneeling down before the picture of the Sacred Heart.

The days of the open fireplaces and cement floors in rural Irish farmhouses are long gone. They have been replaced by modern fuel-burning stoves and carpets on the floor. Television has taken the place of chatting around the fire. We always had a holy water font at door exits. When leaving a house, we were reminded to get the holy water. Now if there is a holy water font at a door, it is probably empty! They were good times and happy times in spite of the lack of the modern conveniences we have today. May God bless our homes!

2

My Mother

My mother was Bridget Kelly. She was born on August 1, 1914, at Shandangan near the village of Donohill in County Tipperary. It is only about two miles from my home. In other words, she was a local girl. She had two brothers and two sisters. One of her brothers and one of her sisters died as infants. From my childhood, I remember her as having one brother and one sister. She got to know my father, John O’Neill, from going to dances at the local parish hall in Donohill. My father and mother were married at the parish church in Donohill on February 18, 1942.

My mother was a quiet and gentle person. After primary school, she received her secondary school education at St. Mary’s College in Arklow in County Wicklow. This was a boarding school for girls. She also spent some time in school at the Presentation Sisters School of Domestic Science at Dundrum in County Tipperary. I actually have one of her class notebooks from the School of Domestic Science.

During her early years of marriage, our home was very crowded. Living at home at this time along with my father and mother were my paternal grandparents, my father’s three brothers and his sister. My mother was not the queen of her own castle! This was not a good arrangement, but it was typical among farming families at that time. Sometimes, other family members remained in the family home until they got married. If they never married, they might never leave. They worked on the farm in exchange for room and board. They might have a small project on the side as a source of a modest income. From the time of my mother’s marriage until 1948 she had three children. They were myself and my younger brothers, Patrick Joseph, and Michael.

In 1948 she contracted TB. She spent a short time in the hospital in Tipperary town before she was transferred to Peamount Sanatorium near Dublin where she would spend the next two years. While she was in the hospital in Tipperary, my brother Owen Roe was born. During the two years my mother was in the sanatorium, I never saw her. This would have been when I was six and seven years of age. In other words, I did not see her from the age of five until the age of eight years. During this time, my Aunt Maggie took care of the family. When my mother returned home I did not recognize her because I had not seen her in two years. I had forgotten what she looked like. It was her distinctive striped overcoat, which she wore before going to hospital that I recognized. When she arrived home, she was wearing that overcoat!

However, because of her absence during those two very important years of my life, between age five to eight, I had bonded very much with my aunt Maggie and my grandmother. By the time my mother returned home, she was actually a stranger to me. It took quite an amount of time to bond with her again. What helped me to bond was the fact that I had very clear memories of being very close to her before she went away. She had never seen her son, my brother, Owen Roe, since the day he was born two years earlier. After he was born, he was whisked away to protect him from catching the TB.

While she was away in the sanatorium, she had one lung removed. She managed fairly well without it! She was able to do light work and take care of normal housework. It was not until 1953 when my grandmother died, that my Aunt Maggie and my uncles had moved out. Finally, she was the queen of her own castle! She died while I was on my way from Columbus, Georgia to Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1986, at the age of 71 years. May she rest in peace.

3

My Father

My father was John O’Neill. He was born on the evening of New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1903. He insisted on emphasizing that he was born in the evening. This placed the time of his birth close to Midnight. In this way he tried to claim that he was born in the early hours of January 1, 1904, which could make him one year younger! He had five brothers and two sisters. He had two other brothers who died as infants. As the eldest child, he inherited the family farm. This made him the fifth generation to work the land, which had been in the family since 1785. As written in another story, previous generations were tenant farmers. They were renting parcels of land on a very large estate from an English landlord. On May 10, 1889, my great-grandfather, John O’Neill, was evicted for failure to pay rent to the landlord. He eventually regained possession of the land. In 1898, parcels of the landlord’s estate were sold to the tenants. My great-grandfather purchased his parcel of land for £918.

As well as farming, my father was also a part-time agricultural contractor until the early 1950s when his brother, Willie O’Neill, who had been managing the farm in my father’s absence, purchased his own farm. While doing work as an agricultural contractor, all the machinery he was working with was drawn by horses. When tractors became more plentiful, that was another reason why my father took up farming full-time. During the years he worked as a part-time agricultural contractor, whenever I was not at school, he took me along with him. Two of my uncles, brothers of my father, were full-time agricultural contractors. Their machinery was tractor-drawn. As a child, I became very familiar with farm machinery, both horse-drawn and tractor-drawn. Always having a curious mind, I asked questions about the mechanical workings of the machinery. I have always been fascinated by machinery.

My father had a great love for farm workhorses. His horses were always pampered and well-cared for. Grooming horses and keeping the tackling glittering was a priority. The brass on the tackling was constantly polished. This was time-consuming because the horses were often working in fields, which were very muddy or very dusty. When the horses were not working, my father took care of trimming their tails and manes. He hated to see a horse with a tail or a mane cropped with a straight cut. He took care of the tail and mane by what he called squitching. This was done by taking a strand of hair and snapping the end from it. This gave the horse’s hair a flowing appearance instead of an ugly straight cut with a scissors. How did he manage to squitch the horse’s tail without getting kicked by the horse? There were two simple ways. One was to back the horse up against a low wall. If the horse wanted to kick, he kicked the wall! The other way was to get a piece of twine and fold it over to form a small choker, then insert the horse’s lower lip into it, then keep twisting it until it became very tight. Now the horse was focused on his hurting lip, and was not aware of what was happening to his tail! So my father could stand directly behind the horse’s back legs and snap away at the strands of hair on the horse’s tail. When finished, the horse had a lovely flowing look to the hair at the end of his tail.

My father was very meticulous about his work. There were two ways to do things, a right way and a wrong way. God help you if you did it the wrong way! He was very punctual. Sometimes, when we were going to church on a Sunday morning, my mother who was never in a hurry, might be still in the house when my father was pressing on the accelerator and blowing the horn. I have often seen her get into the car while it was moving away, putting on her hat, and managing to get seated while one leg was still outside the car and the door still open. Then there would be a lecture all the way to church about how he cannot deal with people who cannot be on time.

When my father was twelve years old, his father sent him to live with his uncle who had a pub and boarding house in Tipperary town. In other words, my grandfather’s uncle was my father’s grand-uncle. His name was William O’Neill. He was very old and very contrary. He grew a beard, and was known as Old William with the whiskers. He was generally referred to as Whiskers. Whiskers had my father working in the bar and serving drinks. Americans will be shocked with this! In Ireland there is no minimum age for children being in pubs! We train them to drink early! On market days in the town, there were plenty of customers. On the night before a market day, Whiskers rehearsed my father on how to serve drinks, and how to calculate the amount of money due for the drinks, and how to calculate the exact amount of change to give back. There were no calculators in those days! Whiskers would use examples of a certain amount of drinks ordered, the price of each drink, and the amount tendered by the customer. Then my father had to calculate the total, and the amount of change to be returned. If my father miscalculated, Whiskers shouted at him and tapped his head with his knuckles. While living with his grand-uncle, he went to the local school in the town. After a few months of this stressful living with his grand-uncle, he ran away and returned home and took up farming.

He often told a story about something very bad that happened to him when he was about fifteen years of age. At that time Ireland was under British rule. The Black and Tans were patrolling Ireland. Curfew was imposed at night for a period of time. One night he was walking home with an elderly man during curfew hours. On the way, they were stopped by a few Black and Tans. They asked the elderly man to explain why he was out during curfew. When they did not get a satisfactory answer from him, they started to beat him and arrest him. My father tried to protect the elderly man by grabbing one of the Black and Tans. That Black and Tan punched him and hit him in the face with the butt of his gun. As a result of this, his right eye got hurt. From that point onward for the rest of his life, he had very bad sight in that eye.

At the end of my annual vacation in Ireland, my father got very lonely. He used to say that he will never again see me because he would be dead by the following year when I returned home from America. This went on every year, and made it very difficult for me to bid him farewell. During my visit home in 1981, it was the time when the American air traffic controllers went on strike. Flight schedules from Shannon to New York were subject to change at short notice. Passengers were advised to be at the airport several hours ahead of time. The morning when I was leaving home to return to America, I had to leave several hours ahead of my scheduled departure flight from Shannon just in case the departure time was brought forward. I had a rented car. As I was about to leave, as usual, my father was crying, and telling me that he would be dead the next time I came back to Ireland. He said a year is a long time. Just to cheer him up, I told him that I could come back anytime and did not have to wait a year. After leaving home, I was gone about a mile when I decided to turn around and go back and surprise him. When I got into the house, he was sitting by the fire and crying. He was surprised by my sudden return. I reminded him that I told him that I could return at any time. I stayed a few minutes, and as I was leaving, I told him it might be a little longer before I came back again, and that it might be less than a year. Little did I know then that I would be back home after one week!

I was Pastor at Holy Family Church in Columbus, Georgia, at that time. On Tuesday evening, September 8, 1981, the day after Labor Day, just one week after I returned, I got a phone call from my brother, Michael, telling me that our father had died suddenly just after going to bed. I remember exactly where I was standing, and the exact time it was when I got that phone call. It was 6:50 pm in Columbus. That was 11:50 pm in Ireland. I was in shock when I got the call, and I was completely alone.

I told my brother that since