for the record . . . a reprise

09 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by Editor in Antrim, Belfast, Belfast Peace Lines, bombing, British Army, Bruce Springsteen, Castledawson, Good Vibrations, IRA, Joe Strummer, La Mon House Hotel Bombing, Memoir, Mix tapes, Movies, Music, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Regrets, Sectarianism, Sherman Alexie, Terri Hooley, The Clash, The Miami Showband, The Troubles, The Undertones, Themes of childhood, UVF, Vinyl Records

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!970s Northern Ireland, Belfast, Europa Hotel, Good Vibrations, La Mon Bombing, Miami Showband Massacre, Mix tapes, Phoenix, Punk Rock, Record Shops, Sherman Alexie, Terri Hooley, The Troubles, vinyl

When Terri Hooley decided – again – to close down the Good Vibrations record shop in the summer of 2015, I wrote this for him. Again.

I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but that changed one November night on the plane from Chicago to Dublin. Perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused, I’m supposing, with Woodbine cigarettes:

“Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .“

Terri Hooley.

Where do I begin, and what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? In 1977, he opened his own record shop, “Good Vibrations” on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. The next year, under his own record label of the same name, he released “Teenage Kicks” by a relatively unheard-of Derry band, “The Undertones.” I bought the single and played it relentlessly. It was 1978. It was Northern Ireland, where, when our kitchen windows rattled, we stopped what we were doing to wonder aloud if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and from where we wanted to escape, to a different neighborhood and for “teenage kicks all through the night.”

This may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie except Terri Hooley reopened “Good Vibes” on Great Victoria Street, the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after what came to be known as “the day the music died” in Northern Ireland. Watching Richard Dormer’s brilliant portrayal of him in Good Vibrations, I was a teenager again, fingering through the sleeves of vinyl records in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop in Antrim, my hometown, knowing that Ronnie would always know what I would like, and if I asked, he would play it on the record player behind the counter for everyone in the shop to hear. As soon as the needle hit the groove, no one would have guessed that our little country was in the grip of The Troubles.

There were moments on that flight back home when I wanted to jump out of my aisle seat and cheer for Terri Hooley, for Punk Rock, for everyone who ever bought a record from a smoke-filled shop just down the street from The Europa, the most bombed hotel in Europe, and for every musician who ever played in Northern Ireland. I understood again – and more clearly – what Joe Strummer of The Clash was talking about when he said:

When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to live for one glorious burning moment.

But when the movie ended and my remembering began, I cried for all that my Northern Ireland had lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night. Every single night.

Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.

Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends still refuse to visit Belfast while vacationing in Ireland. They don’t think it’s safe. “But it’s a great city!” I tell them. “The best in the world! And the Antrim Coast is stunningly beautiful.” I urge them to take the train from Belfast to Dublin, to enjoy the full Irish breakfast on the journey. In my enthusiasm, I somehow forget all those times my brother had to get off the Belfast-to-Dublin train and take the bus because of the threat of a bomb on the line. I wonder now what must it have been like for Terri Hooley trying to convince bands to play in Northern Ireland in the 1970s when musicians were afraid to come because of the terrible thing that had happened in the summer of my twelfth year.

In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband, one of the most popular bands in the country, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us, I’m sure they were only mildly annoyed by it, until they were ordered to get out of their vehicle and stand by the roadside while the soldiers checked the back of the van.

I don’t know if, while standing on the side of the road, The Miami Showband realized that this was not an army checkpoint and that they were instead the victims of a vicious ambush carried out by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). As they waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of the band’s van. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing both, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.

There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy in spite of his pleas. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.

Sitting here at my computer, forty five years later, the shock and revulsion returns, the fear we felt as details of the massacre unfolded in our newspapers and on the radio later that morning. I remember my mother shaking her head in utter disbelief. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?

Perhaps we had been in a kind of denial that musicians were somehow immune, perhaps because we saw in the Miami Showband what could be, its members and its audiences crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. But what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else.

Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers defined his band as “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” I imagine Terri Hooley had been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were afraid. Some people thought Northern Ireland’s musical life was over. Performers from the UK mainland were too scared to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, performing in Northern Ireland became wildly expensive, the cost of insurance premiums soaring given the real threat of hi-jackings and bombings.

Northern Ireland was a “no go” area.

Just three years after the slaughter of those young musicians on what became known as “the day the music died,” in Northern Ireland, I was shaken to my core – again – by the inhumanity of some people in my country. It was February 18, 1978, and what happened in the restaurant of the La Mon House Hotel in Gransha, outside Belfast, will forever stay with me.

La Mon House was packed that evening with over 400 people, some there for the annual Irish Collie Club dinner dance. By the end of the night, 12 of those people – including children – were dead, and numerous others seriously injured. The next day, the Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the attack and for their inadequate nine-minute warning. With cold-blooded premeditation, the IRA had used a meat-hook to attach the deadly bomb to one of the restaurant’s window sills, and the bomb was connected to four canisters of petrol, each filled with home made napalm, a mixture of sugar and petrol, intended to stick to whatever or whomever its flames touched. I remember watching the TV coverage and listening as a reporter described what happened after the blast – the enormous fireball, some 60 by 40 feet, unrelenting in its ferocity, roared through the Peacock restaurant, engulfing the people in its path in flames and burning many of them beyond recognition.

Almost forty years later and on the other side of the world, I am haunted by a widely disseminated image of the charred remains of someone who died in that horrific explosion.

imgres-2

How could anyone look at that image and look away, unchanged?

I looked at that image – time and again – and still I was not brave enough to stay and do the hard work. To abide.

Unlike me, Terri Hooley didn’t leave Northern Ireland:

A lot of my friends passed away. I thought I was going to be the only one left; it was a horrible time, but the idea of leaving Belfast made me feel like a traitor.

Punk Rock was perfect for Terri. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owning a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in standing on either side of the sectarian divide. For the young people who came to Good Vibes, he wanted another option, another kind of country where a kid would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. He was fearless in the pursuit of such a place.

Naturally, Terri Hooley loved “The Undertones.” So did I. They were from Derry, and they knew about “The Troubles,” living and breathing it every day of their lives. They chose not to sing about it. Why would they? If anyone needed an escape, they did. So instead, they sang about the everyday things that mattered to them – and to me – in 1978. They sang about “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a darker road.

Glam rock, punk rock, reggae, blues, pop, classical – my musical education encompassed all of these and more. There were piano lessons, violin lessons, orchestra, choir, but the music lessons that stayed with me I learned in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop, in vinyl.

I spent hours in the Pop-In, flipping through LP after LP, and walking up to the counter with three or four, knowing I would have to whittle my selection down to one. My school dinner money could only buy so much. I loved the ritual behind buying a new record. It began with carefully opening the album to see if the song lyrics were inside, or a booklet of photographs, or liner notes that would fold out into a full-size poster that would end up on my bedroom wall. I handled my records with care – as did Ronnie. And he would always add a clear plastic cover to protect the album art.

In those days, we had three TV channels from which to choose, no Internet, and no smart phone, so I spent a lot of time in my room, reading and listening to music. Still, I remember watching the Mork and Mindy show, and noticing that hanging on Mindy’s apartment wall was the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album.

cover

Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too.

There was nothing better than opening an album to find a paper sleeve inside that folded out into a full-size poster, like that of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” That made it on to my wall as well.

bruce-springsteen-born-to-run_1028114617005

And then there was the ritual of playing the record – and some records, like “Born to Run” or Steely Dan’s “Aja” or Little Feat’s “Waiting for Columbus,” should only be listened to on vinyl.

It requires some effort. First, you have to actually get up, look through your stack of LPs to find the one you want, remove it carefully from the paper cover, place it on the turntable, drop the stylus right in the right groove, sit down again, listen. Then you have to get up again and turn over the LP to hear Side Two. It’s a major investment of time. There’s waiting involved. Shuffling music on an iTunes playlist requires no real commitment at all.

With vinyl, it was also important to have the right hi-fi system. The first significant and most important purchase of my life was the system I bought in 1983. Feeling flush with my university grant check, I remember enlisting the assistance of an engineering student who lived across the road from me, a few doors down from the Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street. He didn’t go out much, but he loved music. A purist who would never have watched Top of the Pops but would never have missed the Old Grey Whistle Test, he conducted his research the way we did pre-Internet and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable with a little red strobe light, and some fairly impressive speakers.

What he knew then – and I knew it too – is what the 21^st century late-adopters of vinyl are discovering – there is no better way to listen to music than on a record than with all the pops and crackles, the anticipation before dropping the needle in the groove, and the audible drawing of breath, the hiss before the first syllable is sung. Yes. I was experienced.

When I came home to Antrim on the weekends, I’d make a point of visiting Ronnie Millar’s shop. By that time the Pop In had moved from its original location by Pogue’s Entry and into the shopping center. And by that time, Ronnie Millar knew what I liked which meant he knew what else I would like. One of the things I remember about him is that he paid attention to his customers and quickly figured out the music they liked– even if he passed judgment on their taste, like the day he asked “Why do you want to buy that rubbish?” when Dennis Ceary from the Dublin Road picked up “Never Mind the Bollocks” by the Sex Pistols.

It hadn’t taken him too long to figure out what I liked. I’d spent hours in there during which he would play something he knew I didn’t know (because, let’s face it, he knew the contents of my entire LP collection and probably everyone else’s in Antrim). And, he knew I’d buy it – a perfect profit cycle. Every once in a while, I’d stump him by asking if he could get a record he hadn’t heard of – but not very often. Even though I could have probably have found it during the week in ‘Caroline Records’ or Terri Hooley’s ‘Good Vibrations’ in Belfast, it wasn’t the same as going home to Antrim to ask Ronnie to get it for me.

I don’t know when I found out that Ronnie’s brother was Ray Millar,the drummer in The Miami Showband, but I have often wondered about the impact of that horrible night on a man who loved and sold music for a living.

All those years when I was collecting vinyl, it didn’t matter when I didn’t have a boyfriend or had nowhere to go on a Friday night. Even when I had convinced myself I would be “left on the shelf,” it didn’t seem that bad given the company I was keeping – Lowell George, Linda Rondstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. Meanwhile, my parents were listening to Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Hank Lochlin – and although I resisted the steady diet of country and western, it someshow moved in and took up permanent residence in my heart as well. The music made everything better, and one of my fondest memories is of sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night with our dog almost hypnotized watching Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection” spin around on the turntable.

By the late 1980s, I began making cassettes – mix tapes – hundreds of them. A labor of love, there was none of this easy downloading, dragging and dropping of music into an iTunes library. No. A mixed tape required hours and hours of opening albums, choosing just the right song, making sure the needle was clean, then dropping it in the groove, and making sure to press record and pause at exactly the right time. And then you’d give it to some boy or girl, hoping the tunes said what you could not. (Or maybe that was just me.) Then you’d wait for feedback.Those were the days of delayed gratification, and I miss them.

If you don’t know Native American poet and author, Sherman Alexie, you really should. He knew a thing or two about the mix tape, as he writes in this “Ode“

Ode to a Mix Tape

These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes.
CD burners, iPods, and iTunes
Have taken the place
Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon
Enough, clever introverts will create
Quicker point-and-click ways to declare
One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor.
But I miss the labor
Of making old school mix tapes— the mid air

Acrobatics of recording one song
At a time. It sometimes took days
To play, choose, pause,
Ponder, record, replay, erase,
And replace. But there was no magic wand.
It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape
Was sculpture designed to seduce
And let the hounds loose.
A great mix tape was a three-chord parade

Led by the first song, something bold and brave,
A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,”
Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye.
The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,”
or something by Hank. But O, the last track
Was the vessel that contained
The most devotion and pain
And made promises that you couldn’t take back.

~ a labor of love.

My plan in November 2013 was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by a very cool record shop I had discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring back to my Phoenix home, my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland. My plan was to resurrect the turntable that was part of the stereo system my husband bought for me the year we met.

Back then, I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, and he surprised me with it. It had the tape deck, CD player, and, the trusty turntable – although by that time, nobody was buying vinyl. Still, I must have believed it would make a comeback, because I held onto it. It’s in a cupboard along with other things of sentimental value. He kept asking me why I just didn’t get rid of it, but he knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And, I cannot. In fact, it moved to a prominent place in my living room in Phoenix.

Ken would have loved to see me break out that turntable to play his favorite Lou Reed album. But life barged in, the way it always does, when I was busy making other plans for us, and he never got to see me resurrect the turntable. How I would have liked just one more spin. For the good times.

Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a spot of time in our lives. This isn’t just nostalgia for my youth, it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that good things were and still are worth waiting for. Like peace – in Northern Ireland.

FOOTNOTE:

How Long Must we Sing This Song? For the Miami Showband . . .

30 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by Editor in Antrim, Belfast, bombing, British Army, Castledawson, Claudy, IRA, La Mon House Hotel Bombing, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Sectarianism, The Miami Showband, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, UVF

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!970s Northern Ireland, Belfast, Claudy, James Simmons, La Mon Bombing, Miami Showband Massacre, Phoenix, The Troubles, vinyl

Any atrocity reported in isolation can be used to beat the other “side,” but together with stories from both communities, it is clear that no “side” has a monopoly on suffering or loss.

~Stephen Travers, July 30, 2018

On July 30, 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday, the final details were being planned for what would happen the next day in Claudy, a sleepy little village in County Derry. Three car bombs would be strategically placed in a town center bustling with Monday morning shoppers. Carefully choreographed, the plan would include telephone warnings and code words to alert authorities before the bombs detonated.

The warnings never came. In nearby Feeney, the public telephone box was out of order; in Dungiven, the telephones were out of order following an earlier bomb attack on the local telephone exchange; and, by the time shop clerks were asked to tell the police in Dungiven that three bombs were about to explode in Claudy, it was too late. The first bomb had already detonated at 10.15am, outside McElhinney’s shop and bar on the village main street, killing instantly Joseph McCloskey, Elizabeth McElhinney, and Kathryn Eakin.

The other two followed in rapid succession, injuring thirty people and killing nine – five Catholics and four Protestants. Three of those killed in the assault were children, memorialized by poet, James Simmons:

An explosion too loud for your eardrums to bear,
Young children squealing like pigs in the square
All faces chalk-white or streaked with bright red
And the glass, and the dust, and the terrible dead.

Kathryn, a little girl on a step-ladder cleaning her mother’s grocery shop window, was the youngest victim, just eight years old, a year younger than me. Innocent, hopeful, unguarded.

Gone.

In my mind’s eye, I see her tiny body on the ground, the devastation around her. And, all these years later, haunted and helpless, I still see on our tiny black and white TV screen, the platform boot among the wreckage on the side of the road at Buskill, County Down.

It wasn’t until I read a book about Northern Ireland that I realized I was probably a Child of The Troubles, even though I was always, by nothing other than luck, in the right place at the right time. It would be from a safe distance, that I would learn to recognize the dull thunder-clap of a bomb, the tremble of our kitchen window in its wake, and the stench of days-old smoke from rubble that used to be a hotel, a supermarket, a restaurant, a favorite pub.

Physically untouched and far away in America, I cannot escape a calendar marked with anniversaries of atrocities in the country that shaped me and scared me – Bloody Sunday, the bombings of Omagh and Enniskillen, La Mon, Kingsmill, The Wayside Halt, Loughinisland, Greysteel, Warrenpoint – and too many more. Rewinding my mental tapes, I also recall black and white news reports from the place across the water that some of us referred to as “the mainland” – of Aldershot, of cars packed tightly with explosives that blew up outside The Old Bailey and in Whitehall; The M62; bars in Guildford, then Birmingham; and, Warrington, Canary Wharf, and Brighton. And, I remember, following one of these atrocities, hearing a man on the radio remark that it “would give the Brits a taste of The Troubles.” He really said that.

Stephen Travers wouldn’t say that. He would say that “no community has a monopoly on suffering and loss.”

Were it not for the Netflix documentary, ReMastered – The Miami Showband Massacre – millions of people would not know about Stephen Travers and his support for all victims of the Troubles or of his unflagging quest for the truth about what was being planned for the last day of July, 44 years ago. They would not know that the final details of his execution were being planned for the next day at 2:30am. They would not know that the blame for this atrocity was to be placed squarely on the shoulders of his band members, Ireland’s most beloved showband, the “Irish Beatles” – The Miami. They would not know that the diabolical plan would go horribly wrong, that Stephen would survive and spend the next 44 years fighting every day for the truth about it, for justice for himself, his murdered friends, for victims and families on all sides, for Kathryn.

In the wee hours of July 31st 1975, Stephen and the other members of The Miami Showband, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to my hometown, Antrim, to stay with his family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us at the time, I imagine they were only mildly inconvenienced by it. They probably expected it, until they were ordered to get out of their van and stand by the roadside with their hands on their heads. Facing a ditch with their backs to the vehicle, The Miami Showband would wait while the men in uniform checked inside the van.

I don’t know when it was that The Miami Showband realized this was not a routine army checkpoint, that they were instead the unwitting victims of a vicious ambush. As they waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – were hiding a bomb under the driver’s seat, while the others rummaged in the back of the band’s van. The plan had been to send the innocent musicians on their way, with a bomb timed to explode ten minutes later, killing all of them and consigning them to history as terrorists transporting explosives. But, the bomb exploded prematurely, blowing both men to bits, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.

There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy as he begged for his life. Trumpet player, Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Lead guitarist, Tony Geraghty, was shot in the back – five times – and in the back of the head twice. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen was seriously wounded and survived only because he pretended to be dead. Face down in the grass and motionless, he would later recall that one of the gunmen kicked the body of his friend, Brian, just feet away, to ensure he was dead.

It was wash day, and I was at home and bored. My mother was ironing, and the quiet of our kitchen was interrupted only by occasional bursts of steam and the voice of the man on the radio. With an uncharacteristic solemnity, he was telling us about what had happened in the wee hours of the morning, that on their way home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, The Miami Showband, had been attacked in a vicious, premeditated ambush, that members of the band were dead including heartthrob lead singer, Fran O’Toole.

Our David Cassidy was dead.

Sitting here at a computer in my Arizona kitchen, the shock and revulsion returns, the sorrow and fear as details of the massacre unfolded. My mother kept ironing one of my father’s shirts, all the while shaking her head and muttering to God. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?

A favorite photo from Stephen: (Tony, Fran, Ray, Des, Brian & Stephen)

When I asked him how we should remember his friends on the anniversary of the massacre, Stephen had a simple request, that musicians of the world take a moment to remember their fellow music makers in The Miami Showband, to maybe mention their names at gigs or play a piece in solidarity, to sing a song.

How long must we sing this song, I wonder?

I think Stephen would tell me we must sing it until the testimony of every victim has been heard, until the truth is told, until peace has a chance.

We who have felt and continue to feel the consequences of violence are determined to use our experiences to build bridges by publicly illustrating that no side has a monopoly on suffering and loss. We earnestly believe that acknowledging this unassailable truth is an important step towards effective healing and lasting reconciliation. If stories of empty chairs, empty beds, empty cradles, and empty hearts serve no purpose other than to stay the hand of violence and give peace a chance, such testimonies are surely a precious gift to humanity.
Stephen Travers, 2016

Note: Stephen Travers co-founder and Chairman of Truth and Reconciliation Platform (TaRP) will be speaking in Phoenix Arizona on October 11, 2019. Click here to purchase tickets.

Getting Romantic About Baseball

25 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by Editor in American Dream, Baseball, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Field of Dreams, rounders, The Natural

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2018 World Series, baseball, Boston Red Sox, Field of Dreams, James Taylor, LA Dodgers, Northern Ireland, rounders, The Natural, The Troubles

I don’t know how it will turn out, but for tonight at least, the Boston Red Sox are ahead in the 2018 World Series, with a two game lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers. Finally meeting for the first time since 1916, this match-up is the stuff of dreams for baseball fans. Somehow, even though I grew up on the other side of the world from these storied franchises, it is for me as well. By the time I graduated from university in Belfast, I was head over heels with the idea of America’s national pastime, at least with the way it showed up in movies and music. Smitten with Don Henley’s boys of summer and the lone big baseball player in Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days and far away from John Fogerty’s Centerfield, I nonetheless understood, “Put me in coach, I’m ready to play.” I was, and I am.

On the big screen there was The Natural. With Robert Redford in the starring role as Roy Hobbs, a weary, aging baseball player with Wonderboy a bat no less magical than King Arthur’s Excalibur. Roy’s love of the game, his desire to break all its records, and be part of its legacy, is what drives him, because, as he tells his girlfriend, “Then when I walked down the street, people would’ve looked and they would’ve said there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was …”

Growing up on a housing estate in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the closest we came to baseball would have been the game of rounders. In primary school, everyone played it. Not a serious competitive sport by any means, it was just a game for us kids to play on the big field in front of our house on a long summer evening. A simple game, it involved throwing a ball and hitting it and then running frantically around a circle. We probably made up the rules as we went along. We would divide ourselves into two often uneven teams and flip a coin to determine who would hit first. All the children in our estate played – boys and girls, big and small, and – this part is important – religion didn’t matter in rounders. For bases, we used items of our clothing or tidy piles of cut grass, and the bat was whatever we could get our hands on – a tennis racquet, a cricket bat or a good stick. The ball, usually a tennis ball, was thrown underhand, and on the rare occasion that I made contact, I could barely contain my joy, running and laughing my way around those makeshift bases. From the houses across the road, some of our parents, young and hopeful, would watch until the game ended as a fat red sun set slowly into Lough Neagh behind us.

There was no magical language or ritual associated with rounders, no “fly ball” or “outfield,” no “swing and a miss,” or “stealing home.” There was no stirring rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” or peanuts and popcorn or Cracker Jacks. But there was, for an hour or two, a escape from The Troubles and the bitter divisions that were destroying our tiny country. It lifted us into a different realm. Maybe this offers a glimpse into the way baseball has provided an escape for America – from the Great Depression or a World War or the atrocity of 9-11 during the 2001 World Series. And just maybe, baseball brings with it a nostalgia for a simpler time, when the American Dream seemed more within our grasp, more accessible to anyone who desired it:

Born to an age where horror has become commonplace . . . we need to fence of a few places where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.

~ Thomas Boswell.

Although I do not understand the technicalities of the game and often have no idea where the strike zone is, I appreciate the unspoken drama that unfolds within these fenced places – the tension between between pitcher and batter, superstitions, and hand signals. What is the pitcher going to do? How will the batter respond? What about the runners on the corners? It reminds me of the psychology of penalty kicks in World Cup football. Will the kicker bluff the goalie? Which way will he dive? Will he do it in time? Or in a fifth set tie-break at Wimbledon – Borg and McEnroe – who will break first? It’s a duel – someone always loses.

I arrived in the United States the same year that Field of Dreams was released. Based on Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe, it tells the story of an Iowa farmer sho is compelled to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield after a mysterious voice whispers to him, “If you build it, he will come.” I saw it at the movie theater three times, until I knew the stories behind those ghosts of American baseball’s past – Shoeless Joe and the Chicago White Sox team, banned for throwing the 1919 World Series.To this day – and particularly during the post-season – I return again to James Earl Jones as his Terrence Mann waxes lyrical about the sport to Ray Kinsella and the rest of us, making believers of us all:

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again.

I cannot say with certainty why these words hold such allure for a working class girl from Northern Ireland. Maybe it has something to do with believing that regardless of social class or privilege, hard work and talent could place the American Dream in my hands the way it had done for Babe Ruth, the barkeeper’s son, Joe DiMaggio, the son of immigrant fisherman, or Jackie Robinson, the grandson of a slave and the son of a sharecropper. Maybe it has more to do with returning to a time when all things seemed possible. Maybe I’m getting romantic about baseball . . . which leads me to my love affair with the Boston Red sox.

A fan of European and World Cup football tournaments, I know well the disappointment and despair of a household praying for its national team to qualify. Long-suffering fans of Northern Ireland football have been desperate to see the team advance since its first World Cup appearance 33 years ago – so close last year, but then there was a disgraceful penalty decision in Belfast in 2017 that dashed their hopes again. Belfast will never forget it – just as many Bostonians know exactly where they were and what they were doing when Bucky Dent’s wall-scraping three run homer in 1978 ended their dream of a World Series trophy, on a day when schools closed early to let kids watch the game. Dent says that all these years later,

There’s not too many days that go by that I don’t run into somebody at the airport, the grocery store. The Red Sox fans say you ruined my life; Yankees fans say you made my life. As a kid, I loved the Yankees and Mickey Mantle, playing in the backyard, dreaming of hitting a big home run. That’s the kind of flashbacks that I got that day. All those dreams as a kid, they came true.

A bit like Northern Ireland football fans, Red Sox fans had – until 2004 – been bred to expect everything that could possibly go wrong. It would take two more titles in 2007 and 2014, and making it to the 2018 World Series again to erase the cloud of impending doom that hung over Fenway Park for decades. Afraid to tempt fate, it’s as if nobody wants to state that this Red Sox team might – as the record books show – be the best there ever was.

Home to the Red Sox is the lovely Fenway Park, a veritable cathedral for those who worship the game, described by John Updike in the New Yorker in 1960 as

. . . a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

Is this heaven?

Officially opened on April 20, 1912, Fenway Park was built by an Irish immigrant, Charles E. Logue, a Derry man who arrived in Boston at the age of 23, with ambition to spare and skills in carpentry. Following three straight rainouts, the hometown Red Sox defeated the New York Highlanders (later the Yankees) in extra innings before a massive crowd. It should have been a glorious celebration in the sunshine, but the city was reeling in the aftermath of what had occurred at sea a week earlier, when just four days after leaving Southampton, England on her maiden voyage to New York, the S.S. Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank, claiming the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. The Fenway faithful would have us believe the curse of the Bambino was responsible for the team’s 86-year drought from 1918 to 2004. I’m not so sure. Fenway Park and the S.S. Titanic are forever intertwined, alluring sources of conjecture.

Over the years, when the Sox weren’t playing, the ballpark offered a central hub for the Irish community, hosting in 1919 Eamon de Valera’s Freedom Rally which drew almost 60,000 people. The GAA played at Fenway too, with the All-Ireland Football Champions from County Mayo defeated the Massachusetts team, 17 to 8, in 1937. In 1954, the All-Ireland hurling champions County Cork beat an American team, 37 to 28.

The first time I visited was with my best friend in the summer of 2008. A cheeky Dubliner was our guide for a behind the scenes tour of this fabled ballpark, famous for its natural grass, quirky symmetry, and that 37-foot-tall wall that keeps score, the Green Monster. Manually operated, it houses a place to sit for the operator and somewhere to store the big white letters and numbers. Sitting up there on top of the iconic Green Monster, the day before a game against the Yankees, it occurred to me that Fenway is for everyone whether they can afford the good seats or the bleachers. In the end, everyone shares in the joy and the heartbreak.

Tomorrow night, my beloved Red Sox are far away from Fenway Park to take their two game lead to Los Angeles, where they will face the Dodgers in a modern ballpark near downtown. I don’t know who will be performing the Star Spangled Banner before the game, but I know that whoever it is will be hard pressed to match the performance of Massachusett’s own James Taylor who opened the World Series as only he could, turning the Start Spangled Banner into a song that would have belonged on the Sweet Baby James album. Alluding to the current occupant of the White House, Jame Taylor told an audience in London earlier this year, “Ladies and gentlemen, there is an America different than the one represented by that guy.’’ In his understated performance at Fenway the other night, I think he captured that America, the America that drew me to her back when I was still playing rounders. I miss that America.

Before I knew about baseball, I knew about James Taylor. I knew about the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston and the songs that we sing when we take to the highway, a song that we sing when we take to the sea, the songs that carry us home. Home safe. Long may we sing them.

Go Sox.

july 31 – just another day in northern ireland

31 Tuesday Jul 2018

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!970s Northern Ireland, Belfast, Claudy, James Simmons, La Mon Bombing, Miami Showband Massacre, Phoenix, The Troubles, vinyl

Any atrocity reported in isolation can be used to beat the other “side,” but together with stories from both communities, it is clear that no “side” has a monopoly on suffering or loss.

~Stephen Travers, July 30, 2018

I remember reading a book about Northern Ireland and realizing I was probably a Child of The Troubles, even though I was always, by nothing other than luck, in the right place at the right time. It was from a safe distance, that I learned to recognize the dull thunder-clap of a bomb, the tremble of our kitchen window in its wake, and the stench of days-old smoke from rubble that once was a hotel, a supermarket, a restaurant.

Physically untouched yet forever changed, I cannot escape a calendar marked with anniversaries of atrocities in the country that shaped me and scared me – Bloody Sunday, the bombings of Omagh and Enniskillen, La Mon, Kingsmill, The Wayside Halt, Loughinisland, Greysteel, Warrenpoint – and so many, too many more. Rewinding my mental tapes, I also recall black and white news reports from the mainland – of Aldershot, of cars packed tightly with explosives that blew up outside The Old Bailey and in Whitehall; The M62; bars in Guildford, then Birmingham; and, Warrington, Canary Wharf, and Brighton. And, I remember, following one of these atrocities, hearing someone on the radio remarking that it “would give the Brits a taste of The Troubles.” Someone really said that.

As Stephen Travers reminds us today, “no community has a monopoly on suffering and loss.”

On this day in 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday, three car bombs exploded without warning in Claudy, a sleepy little village in County Derry. With the chilling choreography that was unacceptably commonplace, the first bomb exploded at 10.15am. The other two followed in rapid succession, injuring thirty people and killing nine – five Roman Catholics and four Protestants, the assault memorialized by poet, James Simmons:

An explosion too loud for your eardrums to bear,
Young children squealing like pigs in the square
All faces chalk-white or streaked with bright red
And the glass, and the dust, and the terrible dead.

One of the dead was Kathryn, a little girl on a step-ladder cleaning her mother’s shop window. She was just eight years old – a year younger than me. Innocent, hopeful, unguarded. Gone.

I am thinking of Kathryn today. In my mind’s eye, I see her tiny body on the ground, the devastation around her. And, all these years later, haunted and helpless, I also see the platform boot among the wreckage on the side of the road at Buskill, County Down.

On this day, 43 years ago, five members of The Miami Showband, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us at the time, I imagine they were only mildly inconvenienced by it. They probably expected it, until they were ordered to get out of their van and stand by the roadside with their hands on their heads. Facing a ditch with their backs to the vehicle, The Miami Showband waited while the men in uniform checked inside the van.

There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy as he begged for his life. Trumpet player, Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Lead guitarist, Tony Geraghty, was shot in the back – five times – and in the back of the head twice. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen was seriously wounded and survived only because he pretended to be dead. Face down in the grass and motionless, he would later recall that one of the gunmen kicked the body of his friend, Brian, just feet away, to ensure he was dead.

Sitting here at my computer, over forty years later, the shock and revulsion returns, the sorrow and fear we felt as details of the massacre unfolded in our newspapers and on the radio later that morning. I remember my mother, standing at the ironing board, shaking her head and muttering in utter disbelief. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?

May we never forget them and their families on the path to truth, reconciliation, and peace.