Spokane’s Irish Earn Their Place On A Pedestal
This is the day I want to be Irish in Spokane.
Today, St Patrick’s Day, the Irish own this city. It has taken this Danish Methodist years to understand about the Irish in Spokane. I’m finally getting the picture.
Italians, Germans, American Indians and the Jewish community all have stirred a spoon in the melting pot of this place.
Still, the shamrock casts the largest shadow over Spokane.
Phillip O’Rourke was one of the two miners who discovered the Bunker Hill deposits in Idaho.
Many of the succeeding silver fortunes made during the 1880s and 1890s were blasted and picked out by Irish immigrants. They first landed in New York, took the train to Butte, then came over the hill to the Silver Valley and on to Spokane.
Irish who hit it big, like Patsy Clark, built mansions in Spokane.
Irish who wanted their children educated founded Gonzaga University.
Irish who believed that their heritage was worth saving moved into Hillyard and north Spokane and built strong, ethnic neighborhoods that survived for decades.
The Irish weren’t often part of Spokane’s wealthy classes in the early days, but they often owned local politics.
In some ways they still do.
“My grandfather was the city of Spokane’s corporate council from 1916 until 1932,” recalled Spokane’s current Irish mayor, Jack Geraghty. “My grandfather was part of that whole Irish contingent that lived over there near Gonzaga, right across from Bing Crosby.”
When Mayor Geraghty first entered politics in 1964, he believes, his Irish connections helped him be elected county commissioner.
“I don’t think it has ever hurt in Spokane to run for politics with an Irish name,” he said, ticking off the names of Irish City Councilman Jeff Colliton, former Councilman Rob Higgins, former County Commissioner John McBride, former Congressman Tom Foley, and sitting Judge Jim Murphy .
Politics isn’t the only place where Spokane’s Irish have shaped the city.
The network of Irish connections knit together through Gonzaga, Marycliff and Holy Names schools and supported by the city’s Catholic parishes continues to actively influence many aspects of community life and commerce.
Tim Welch, grand marshal of this year’s St. Patrick Day’s Parade, grew up a stone’s throw from St. Aloysius Church. He attended Gonzaga High School, then sent his own children to Gonzaga Prep.
He went into business with his Gonzaga school buddy, Ginge Etter.
Their company built the new Spokane Arena, which is one reason Welch was the grand marshal of Saturday’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.
“From a business standpoint there are still a bunch of guys I do business with because they are Irish, or in spite of it,” Welch laughed.
Watching Tim Welch lead the St. Patrick’s Day parade were hundreds of other Spokane Irish educators, attorneys, business people and their families that no go back generations.
Bob Sweeney planned to watch the parade.
The retired assistant U.S. attorney came to Spokane in the 1930s with his father, who was born in Ireland.
The Sweeneys were part of that immigration that by 1940 had made one in four Spokane households Irish.
Bob went to Gonzaga High School, Gonzaga University, Gonzaga Law School, and worked for a U.S. attorney who had followed the same path. “Being Irish in Spokane can be a very unifying thing,” Sweeney reflected.
Being Irish from Spokane still unifies families. Sweeney’s son and his daughter, Julia, of “Saturday Night Live” fame, flew in this weekend just for St. Patrick’s Day.
If they have a spare moment, the Sweeneys, along with dozens of other Spokane Irish, will stop in at Jack and Dan’s Tavern near Gonzaga University over the weekend.
Jack Stockton, father of NBA basketball star John Stockton, will be serving.
When Kerry Lynch arrives, Jack will ask her to do an Irish jig, as he has done in many years past.
Kerry Lynch, head of one of Spokane’s leading public relations agencies, is the Irish Woman of the Year. She also helped found the Spokane Limerick Sister City Society.
Why?
“There is just a real network of Irish here,” she said. “We get together all the time for social and business occasions. We’re just very supportive of one another.”
That gets back to why I want to be Irish for the day.
It’s not the green beer or the chance to be on the cement truck float in the parade.
Non-Irish can partake in these activities.
No, it’s because the Irish in Spokane know about community. The know about sticking together, remembering where you come from, and having a good time as life goes by.
The Irish have been the luck o’ Spokane.
, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the Editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday.