Irish strongest lead Hurricane Sandy efforts - NYC’s Sanitation Department on the front line

This Irish flag was recovered by the Sanitation Department in Belle Harbor.
Pictured are supervisor Matt Ryan, sanitation worker Ed Shevlin and supervisor Joe O'Keefe.

Frank O’Keefe has seen a lot in his 20-plus years as a member of New York City’s Sanitation Department -- massive blizzards, hurricanes, even 9/11.

Nothing prepared him for what he saw when he reported for work in the Rockaways after Hurricane Sandy.

“Any pictures you’ve seen do not do it justice,” said O’Keefe, whose parents were born in Kerry.
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

O’Keefe, a Sanitation Department superintendent, was dispatched to the Rockaways after the storm. He, along with countless other members of the department, immediately began cleaning up ravaged, heavily-Irish communities such as the Rockaways, Breezy Point and Broad Channel.

The Sanitation Department, known as “New York’s Strongest,” has transformed Jacob Riis Park into a massive trash storage facility. Many of the workers and supervisors cleaning up Queens have not had a day off since the storm hit.

Not long after the clean up got underway, O’Keefe noticed something.  Many key leaders of the department’s Queens clean-up effort are Irish Americans, active in the department’s Emerald Society and Pipe and Drums Band.

The top supervisor on the operation, for example, is Deputy Chief Jim McGovern.  Deputy chiefs Danny O’Leary (an Emerald Society vice president) Roger Leahy (a pipe major) and Keith Woods, as well as Assistant Chief Joe Hickey (a piper with the band) are also key players. 

Sanitation workers on the streets in the Rockaways include Jimmy McGoorty as well as Ed Shevlin, who is well known in Irish circles for his fluency with the Irish language. 

Shevlin has studied Irish in Galway, after wining a grant from the Fulbright Commission, and is working toward a bachelor’s degree in Irish studies. He has said he plans to earn a master’s degree and eventually teach college.

Read more on Hurricane Sandy and the clean up efforts here

Does having all of these Irish Americans help the clean up operation?

“Absolutely,” says O’Keefe. “You have everybody’s cell phone numbers.  It’s easy to get in touch with people.  You know where everybody is.  And maybe there’s even a bit more camaraderie.”

Other key Irish Americans on the clean-up effort include superintendents Timothy Fox, an Emerald Society vice president, and Dennis Cleary, an Emerald Society member, as well as supervisor Joey O’Keefe, a pipe sergeant in the band.

Given all the pain and suffering caused by Sandy, it’s been easy to forget the tremendous job done by all of New York’s Sanitation workers, and what they’ve done to help bring some kind of sense of normalcy back to New York. 

Sandy, in short, gave New Yorkers a chance to sing the praises of New York’s unsung heroes.  (Full disclosure -- my own father retired from “The Strongest” back in the late 1980s.)

Among those working to clean up the Rockaways were many sanitation workers who themselves suffered property damage, lost homes or had family members displaced.

“Coming to work was almost therapeutic for them,” said O’Keefe.  “It took the focus temporarily off of their personal issues.”

Whatever their background, sanitation workers tasked with cleaning up what Sandy left behind faced unprecedented challenges.

“Never ever in the history of the department have we had a clean up like this,” noted O’Keefe, who grew up in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx.

“People had to get together and use their experience and the knowledge they acquired over the years.”

O’Keefe added, “There’s still a lot of work to do, but given what it looked like two weeks ago it’s almost a miracle.”

And while residents have been hit hard by power outages, homelessness and looting, O’Keefe has been blown away by the strength of Queens residents.

“The people here are incredibly resilient.  They have loved us and they’ve really responded to our contribution here,” he said.

The Irish American sanitation workers and residents have actually started looking ahead to the first Saturday in March.  That is the traditional date of the Rockaways annual St. Patrick’s Day parade.

“They want to have it,” O’Keefe said of local Irish residents.  “I think that’s going to be their big comeback.”

And will the Sanitation’s Pipe and Drums band be there?

“Absolutely,” O’Keefe vowed.  “We march in it every year.”

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tdeignan.blogspot.com or tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

The most tragic Irish American Joseph Patrick Kennedy - for better or worse a product of the immigrant experience

Joseph Patrick Kennedy

It is understandable why many people believe John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the most important Irish American.  He was the first Catholic president, a trailblazer who visited his family’s ancestral home in Ireland just months before he was fatally shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

But there would have been no JFK without JPK - his father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy of East Boston.
Esteemed historian David Nasaw has just released a 900-page biography of the old man entitled The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.

Yet another Kennedy book, you say?  More hazy malarkey about Camelot?

Or another rehashing of the extramarital affairs or the assassinations, proof of the existence of some “Kennedy curse”?

Such a reaction is understandable.  And yet the heft of this book is without question justified. 

Joseph Kennedy is not only the most important Irish American.  He is arguably the most important figure in American ethnic history, a symbol of the profound success which can be achieved through ambition and hard work, as well as the tragedy and damage which result from the blind drive to become “an insider.”

Not Eugene O’Neill, not Shakespeare, could have written a life story as complex and tragic as Joseph P. Kennedy’s.  Perhaps the Greeks came closest, particularly in the tale of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and fell to his death. 

Along the same lines, consider that no fewer than three members of the Kennedy clan - Joseph Jr., his sister Kathleen (known as “Kick”) and JFK Jr. -- fell from the sky, dying in airplanes.

Joseph Kennedy belonged to the first generation of Kennedys born in America who did not live in poverty.  Joe Kennedy’s father, P.J., lost a brother as well his own father, to cholera. 

P.J. left school at 14 to work and help support the family, and he managed to gain a foothold in Boston, running saloons and making friends in political circles.

P.J. was able to send his son, Joe, to Boston Latin School and then Harvard, and there is your first hallmark of immigrant life -- the strive to move up the economic ladder.

But Joe Kennedy’s ladder never seemed to end.  He climbed and climbed - in part because he was maniacally ambitious, in part because American society viewed him and his kind with contempt.

Indeed, while it’s hard to view a Harvard graduate millionaire who was a close advisor to presidents as any kind of victim, the fact is that Joseph P. Kennedy endured subtle, imagined and blatant bigotry throughout his entire career.  Here is another hallmark of the immigrant experience -- disdain from the powers that be.

And this leads us to the most difficult part of all, when that ambition mixes with resentment and produces an emotional volatility that manifests itself in some of the most deplorable behavior in the
American psyche -- paranoia, rage, anti-Semitism. 

The dark side of the American ethnic experience, rarely discussed because it runs counter to our belief that we are a benevolent beacon of hope for immigrants, is that nativist hostility and the drive to succeed take a massive toll on first and second generation Americans. 

Crime, alcoholism, family dysfunction.  These and more scarred Irish American and other ethnic families from New York to San Francisco. 

Kennedy dabbled in all of these - mingling with gangsters, possibly bootlegging, cheating on his wife relentlessly, believing Jews to be the cause of so many phantom problems - as he paved a path to the White House. 

Kennedy himself was going to run for president in 1940, even though he doubted Americans would vote for a Catholic.  FDR’s decision to seek a third term made this a moot point. 

Then it was going to be Joseph Jr., but he was killed in World War II.  And so it was JFK. 

And the old man was able to witness it, even though his powers were diminished by strokes.

This meant he also had to stand by powerlessly as Jack and Bobby were killed.

In the end, Joseph P. Kennedy was admirable and loathsome.  But he most definitely was - for better or worse - a product of the American immigrant experience.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tdeignan@blogspot.com or tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

No love lost among Irish immigrants for honest Abraham Lincoln - VIDEO

Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln

Bill the Butcher is now Honest Abe?

Daniel Day-Lewis has made several trips to the Academy Awards playing Irish characters in films such as In the Name of the Father and The Boxer.  In 2002 he even nabbed an Oscar nomination for playing the notorious anti-Irish bigot  Bill “The Butcher” Poole in Gangs of New York.

Once again Hollywood is abuzz with Oscar talk for Day-Lewis, who is earning  raves playing the 16th president in Steven Spielberg’s latest historical epic Lincoln. 

The film, set in the waning days of the U.S. Civil War, closely looks at the legislative battle Lincoln and his fellow Republicans waged as they tried to pass a series of Constitutional amendments designed to ensure full citizenship for freed slaves after the war.

Not surprisingly, most critics have noted that Spielberg’s film depicts Lincoln  as a near-God.  Even before the release of this movie, Lincoln was widely regarded as the greatest U.S. president in history and has been the focus of countless fawning biographies. 

The film further solidifies Lincoln’s standing as arguably the most noble American ever, who managed to maintain the union yet was unable to preside over its healing because of that Southern-sympathizing scoundrel John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln in Ford’s Theater on the evening on April 14, 1865.

Given Lincoln’s stature in American history, it’s easy to forget that not everybody loved Honest Abe.  Southerners, for one, believed he was responsible for tearing down their beloved way of life.

And then there was the Irish.  After Southerners, Irish immigrants in the U.S. may well have been the group that most despised Lincoln.

Why?  First, there was politics.  Lincoln ran for president as the nominee of a fairly new group called the Republican Party. 

The Irish, of course, were fierce Democrats.  In cities such as New York and Boston, Democratic machines such as Tammany Hall helped the Irish find food and shelter in the New World.  The machines were corrupt but also effective. 

Many Irish immigrants believed that anything which threatened the Democratic Party – such as Lincoln – was a threat  to their tenuous way of life.

In fact, New York City as a whole was so heavily Democratic and suspicious of Lincoln that there was talk of the city itself seceding from the union.

Then there was the war.  Yes, of course, many Irish immigrants fought nobly for  the Union cause in the Civil War, including the famous Irish Brigade.  And yet, many other immigrants new to America had no interest in going off to fight in a war they knew very little about. 

Consider the bitter lyrics of the ballad “Paddy’s Lament”: “When we got to Yankee land, they shoved a gun into our hands, saying Paddy, you must go and fight for Lincoln.”

The most infamous illustration of immigrant opposition to the war was the 1863 New York City Draft Riots which were depicted so vividly in Gangs of New York.

Anti-Irish bigotry in the Republican Party also fueled Irish disdain for Lincoln. The party during Lincoln’s time was a coalition of different interest groups, among them nativist and anti-Catholic ones such as the so-called Know Nothings. 

Lincoln himself may not have been anti immigrant or anti-Catholic, but many of his supporters were.  In fact, following Lincoln’s assassination and for many years after, conspiracy theories abound that the Vatican or other elements within the Catholic Church played a role in Lincoln’s murder.

Given all of this, you might say that Day-Lewis has portrayed two of the most vilified characters in Irish American history. 

Bill the Butcher was a street level bigot, the kind of guy who threw rocks at immigrants and made it hard for them to obtain work. 

Lincoln, meanwhile, was a great man of power, a symbol of an elite that wanted them in this country only if they were willing to feed the war machine.

Paddy had much to lament, after all.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tdeignan.blogspot.com or tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

Watch the trailer for Lincoln here:

Childhood Staten Island memories shattered by Hurricane Sandy -- Superstorm dubbed the Katrina of New York by locals

Homes and lives destroyed in Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy

When I was younger, if I had a Sunday morning baseball or soccer game, I attended Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes Church on Cedar Grove Avenue in the New Dorp Beach section of Staten Island.  The church was conveniently located right next to Miller Field, where thousands of kids and parents congregate on weekends for sports, picnics, sunbathing and more.

Right now, if you ascend the steps of Our Lady of Lourdes, a landscape of breathtaking devastation unfolds before you. 

Muddy water.  Wind-battered bus stop signs.  Waterlogged couches.  Discarded appliances.  Pulled-up rugs. Sand.  

And, of course, people.  

People like Lou Cummiskey.  I attended Our Lady Queen of Peace grammar school  with Lou’s son, Danny.  A 40 year-resident of New Dorp Beach, Cummiskey has  served as an Ancient Order of Hibernians treasurer as well as an organizer for  the Staten Island Irish fair. 

In 2007, he helped a man from Derry return a Purple Heart medal to the family of an Irish immigrant New Yorker who believed the precious military memento had been lost forever. Cummiskey has also worked with the Irish Political Prisoner’s Children’s Holiday program which brings kids from Northern Ireland to America.

Now, Lou Cummiskey has no home.  

“They got a red tag,” Danny Cummiskey told me this week, referring to the seal left by city officials deeming his parents’ house unsafe.

“It’s been hard,” Danny added.  “This is Katrina in New York.” (To help the Cummiskey family visit this website). 

Danny says his  parents don’t “handle taking charity well.  They’re proud, Irish folk.” 

However, since Lou Cummiskey has spent his entire life helping others, Danny simply sees this as “karma.”

New Dorp Beach - a five minute drive from the home in which I grew up, and where my mother and sister still live – was decimated by Hurricane Sandy.  For days,  officials were looking for - and finding - dead residents after the superstorm hit.

In neighboring Oakwood Beach, one of my cousins was forced to evacuate after Sandy’s merciless tide flooded the home.

Last week, there were no picnics, no baseball games at Miller Field.  It was strewn with ocean debris and served as a staging area for volunteers and rescue workers who unloaded trucks full of food, clothes and other necessities for New Dorp Beach residents.

They had spent the bleak days after Sandy desperately, angrily demanding much-needed help. And now there’s cold weather, and another nasty storm to contend with.

The entire Northeast will be sorting through the debris left in Sandy’s wake for months.  But Staten Island will never be the same after Sandy. 

A small part of the world which had already been immeasurably scarred by 9/11 - a memorial with an angel and American flag was erected a few years back in New Dorp Beach - must now dig out from an unprecedented natural disaster. A landscape that I literally grew up with has been changed forever. 

My parents used to live down there.  I used to go fishing on a long, rocky jetty located in New Dorp Beach.  I played baseball at Miller Field and softball at the Bob Illig Memorial Field on Cedar Grove Avenue.

For three years, my wife lived in an apartment in nearby Oakwood Beach – this after being flooded out of another apartment on Father Capodanno Boulevard during a 1992 Nor’easter.

That boulevard, located just a stroll from New Dorp Beach, through Miller Field, will forever be linked to the most enduring tragedy of Hurricane Sandy -- a mother, Glenda Moore, whose car stalled on Father Capodanno Boulevard.  She attempted to carry her two and four year old sons to safety, but a massive wave knocked the boys out of her hands. 

They were discovered dead days later. Their father is a native of Co. Donegal.

Until last week, Father Capodanno Boulevard, running along Staten Island’s Midland and South beach areas, was a place of fond memories.  There were softball games with friends.  Trips to the adjacent playgrounds, boardwalk and beach with my own children.

Back in the eighties, thousands of teens would congregate along “Father Capodanno”  - as the locals call it - to do things the brave Vietnam vet priest for whom the  road is named might not approve. We did what teenagers do -- drink, fight, laugh, fall in and out of love and listen to music really loudly. 

There were no cell phones.  No Facebook. Somehow we managed.

Driving along Father Capodanno Boulevard this week brought only sadness.  Vast swaths of sand and mud still on the streets.  Traffic lights that still don’t work.  Piles of trash pulled from waterlogged homes.

And we haven’t even mentioned the place my parents took me - just as I now take my own kids - when we needed a break from Staten Island. Point Pleasant.  Seaside Heights.  The Jersey Shore.

Of course, people will recover from Sandy. Streets will be cleaned.  New homes will replace old ones. 

The Cummiskey family, like so many others in New Dorp Beach, is rallying around those in need.

The response from volunteers “has been phenomenal,” Danny Cummiskey says.  “The outpouring of support is a testament to humanity.”

But Staten Island’s waterfront communities will never be the same.  Fond  memories of the past will grow fonder, if only to help cope with the grim reality of the present. 

As for the future, it may be uncertain, but one thing is clear -- New Dorp Beach residents should not be forgotten.  

Go to www.gofundme.com/1gemg4 to help the Cummiskey family.  Otherwise, donate blankets, food and clothing, especially for young children.  

Help ensure that communities such as this are not lost forever.