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Irish heritage runs deep
Local folks keep family memories of the old country alive
Friday, March 12, 2010
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by EMILY BARNES
Nora Favier, who grew up in Ireland, stands in front of a framed mural of her father's railroad career, on display at Casey Jones, the pub she started 30 years ago in La Plata after she emigrated to the United States.
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In March, the thoughts of many Americans turn to Guiness stout, corned beef and cabbage and other Irish favorites, but to those of Irish heritage, the culture is strong — beyond the green of St. Patrick's Day.
Sarah Brenzo, president of the Celtic Society of Southern Maryland, knows her own ancestry in detail and continues exploring it further. Like other Americans, she is aware of her heritage and she lives it.
"I don't remember not being aware of it," she said in a recent interview in her Hollywood-area home. "We were always taught that we were both Irish and Scottish, with a little bit of French-Canadian."
Brenzo's maiden surname, Lepper, comes from the Scottish "Leiper," and her Irish lineage traces back to her father's mother, Mary Rose Haughey, a name pronounced "Hoy" that comes from the northern counties of Donegal and Armagh. Brenzo recently ordered a kilted skirt and fly plaid in the tartan of County Donegal, with its muted colors of greens and blues. Her interest in her lineage also has found that her purported Scottish bloodline might include an effort at one time to conceal even deeper Irish roots.
"We thought it all came from my father's mother," she said.
Her grandfather was Scottish, as his own grandfather had emigrated from its seaport of Aberdeen to Canada, before entering the United States. Brenzo noted that the Scottish tradition was very "paternal" in absorbing new members married "into the clan," and encouraging them to leave their past lives behind and adapt to the ways of their new family.
Brenzo's ancestors came into the United States during a time when the Irish people were not readily accepted. Merchants routinely posted job advertisements stating "Irish need not apply," according to Brenzo, while Scottish immigrants met with less of that type of prejudice. That encouraged other immigrants to portray themselves as Scottish to gain more acceptance in their new home communities.
"We never learned as much about our Irish ancestry, because [the grandparents] claimed to be" Scottish, Brenzo said. "It was more acceptable, I guess. Not everyone was very welcoming of the Irish."
As a result, Brenzo, 48, and her relatives discovered only recently that some of their ancestors who they previously believed to be Scottish actually were Irish. She said her brother traced back the history of their mother's great-grandmother and found that two of her older sisters had toiled at one of Ireland's tough jobs assigned to young children.
"They worked at a soap factory in Ireland," Brenzo said. "It makes you take a step back and think ‘what a terrible way to live.'"
Both sides of Brenzo's family likely come from the northern area of Ireland, where inhabitants were known as Ulster Scots. Her Celtic roots also include the bit of French-Canadian ancestry accumulated during her ancestors' travels through Canada into New England.
The term Celtic encompasses the people and culture of the seven Celtic nations — Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Galicia and the Isle of Man. The music is the chief draw for Brenzo's interest in Celtic culture.
"A lot of the music that we have today [in the United States] has roots in the mix of Celtic and Appalachian music. It's filtered through the Appalachian music," she said. "They brought the music [from Europe] with them. It began to thrive and take on a whole new life in the United States. It still is today. All these music-makers are still giving a nod to traditional music, but breathing new life into it."
Brenzo's mother was a music teacher, so she and her siblings grew up playing music.
She took violin lessons in high school and took the instrument out of a closet a dozen years ago, initially delving into a community orchestra before she discovered her interests lay elsewhere.
"I realized that's not really what I wanted to play," she said. "The whole time, I wanted to play fiddle music."
She joined the band Pond Scum that had started up in the 1990s, launched by Danny Flynn after his job as a U.S. Navy civilian employee was moved from Pennsylvania to Patuxent River Naval Air Station. He now lives in Calvert County, near Broomes Island.
All four of Flynn's grandparents emigrated from Ireland to the United States in the early 20th century, and he said his consciousness of his heritage goes back to "day one" of his childhood in Philadelphia.
"Somebody plays," he said, "and somebody else dances."
Flynn, 48, has been playing the accordion since he was 5. His mother played the fiddle, and his father would sing.
"You have to do something to pass the time away," Flynn said. "The Irish music, it's for personal entertainment. It's all in the home. You go over to somebody else's house, who teaches you a tune. These days, you [also] learn it off of YouTube."
Flynn said that when they moved to in Southern Maryland, he and his wife attended a contra dance, where he heard familiar tunes composed by a friend in New Hampshire.
That experience led him to join other local musicians at monthly jam sessions in St. Mary's County's 7th District. Flynn and other workers at Pax River started playing music during their breaks, gathering on the base by a pond coated with pollen, which gave their band its name.
"The group was never meant to be professional," he said, and the reward is in the playing. "It keeps you in tune with the Irish roots," he said. "For me it does."
Flynn said he has cousins who sustain their ancestral Celtic awareness by playing golf — invented in Scotland — and that no matter how it's expressed, Irish heritage is nurtured in cities and rural areas throughout the United States, from one end to the other.
"There's a hotbed in San Diego," he said.
Music remains a core element of that heritage.
"If you have people interested in the dancing and the music, those things survive," Flynn said. "Irish music is living music. It's changing."
Flynn said he and the other writers of contemporary Irish music pursue their craft while riding in trains or watching hurricanes, and draw on those experiences.
"I write tunes that remind me of things and events in my life," he said.
Memories of a childhood in Ireland played a role in directing Nora Favier where to start a pub 30 years ago in Charles County.
Casey Jones in La Plata takes its name from a legendary railroad engineer in America; that's her acknowledgement of the history of the country where she arrived in 1956. But the rest of the story comes from her native land.
Favier grew up in southern Ireland, where her father ran country railroad stations, and before his death, he purchased a farm near one of the stationhouses.
"I always had the idea that I would like to run a restaurant. I worked in that field when I was younger," Favier said.
The opportunity to do it, and tie it into her childhood memories, presented itself when she moved in 1977 from Prince George's County to Port Tobacco. She started checking out potential sites in La Plata.
"I was attracted to another spot in the town, and that fell through," she said, before she discovered the ideal locale.
"I came across that place while it was a tiny little bar," she said. "It was next to the railroad track. I always had an affinity for that."
She added, "I opened it as a bar, and then it grew into a restaurant," operated with help from family members including a son, Paul Bales.
Paul Bales and Lisa Bales offer a menu beyond Irish fare, including standard American meals, but they'll emphasize its Irish influences next week on Wednesday, St. Patrick's Day.
Lisa Bales said the day's offerings will include corned beef and cabbage, Irish stew and fish and chips.
"We do a special Reuben pizza," she said. "It's a big deal here."
Bales said Favier still visits the business. "She pops her head in now and then to make sure we're doing everything right," Bales said.
Brenzo enjoys her culture's artwork, textiles, history, legends and myths, and she has been the president of the Celtic Society of Southern Maryland for the past three years. It's an identity that's cherished from within, if not universally.
"It seems like there's some animosity across the cultures sometimes," Brenzo said, even between the Irish and Scottish.
"There's a genetic spirit of fighting," she said. "We're just wired that way. I like to debate."
To get your shamrock on
To learn more about the Celtic Society of Southern Maryland and the events that it presents, go to www.cssm.org.
