More Top Picks Why Do My Eyes Hurt After A Day At The Screen
player ready...When I was young and Aunt Helen would come to stay with us, my parents would roll out the cot and she would sleep in my room.
Before going to sleep, though, she would share her stories. She was born in 1899, and by then — the late 1970s — she’d acquired quite a few of them.
The one that stands out the most was about a kid who got hit by a train, probably in the first couple decades of the 20th century, and the gruesome steps a doctor had to take before publicly amputating his leg.
But she’d also tell of working in a South Side steel mill during World War II and other adventures in a life well spent. She’d also often mention that she was ready for the Lord to take her whenever he was ready, though we’d always tell her we weren’t ready for that. Luckily, that didn’t happen for many years, and she lived to age 98.
I’m adopted, and my last name is decidedly not Irish, but I was raised in a household with a strong Irish tradition, and Helen Coughlan had been my living link to the Old Country. She was actually my adoptive mom’s aunt and was born in Whiting, Indiana, but her father was from Limerick, Ireland, according to genealogical information.
Technically, I’m not Irish, but my extended family is, and many of my cousins hold to their heritage tightly. Though the bloodlines aren’t the same, it’s something I feel like I share with them.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day week, a time when everybody’s Irish, at least those who want to take part in the revelry surrounding the feast day.
In the late 1970s, a group of actual Irish people got together to make a place for themselves to celebrate their culture year-round, and eventually Gaelic Park was born in Oak Forest. The banquet hall, restaurant and sports facility was completed in 1985 and has been a regional hub for everything Irish ever since.
Among those people who made it happen were the parents of Sean Crean, who now is a Gaelic Park board member. As a teenager in the years leading up to its establishment, he got to tag along to fundraisers, meetings and even the Oak Forest construction site.
“Both of my parents are from Ireland, so they came out here and came to this strange city where they had little to no family, so the Irish community became their extended family,” Crean said. “These were the people who helped you in tough times. If you needed help, those were the people you turned to.”
Together, they made Gaelic Park happen on 147th Street in Oak Forest, a little west of Cicero Avenue. But it almost ended up in Oak Lawn, at 103rd Street and Cicero near the modern Stoney Creek Golf Course.
That fell through, though, and Gaelic Park ended up in Oak Forest, and “the rest is history,” Crean said.
Some of that is personal history. It was where he met his future wife, and most of his really close friends, he said, which led him to volunteer as a board member, and it’s what led to lots of people to give their time to the facility.
“You do it for the people,” he said. “It’s the friendships you have established, it’s the camaraderie, it’s the community that the building and the land afford you to have, it’s just immeasurable.”
Like all places where people gather, the yearlong pandemic has made things tough.
“We thrive on community and community means multiple people getting together, whether for sports theater, dance or a pint of Guinness in the pub,” Crean said. “That’s what we excel at, and unfortunately what we excel at was taken away.”
And beyond that, the timing of the pandemic was particularly unfortunate, as it became serious just before St. Patrick’s Day, a seriously busy time at Gaelic Park. Usually activities surrounding the feast day take up the better part of two weeks, but last year, they were canceled halfway through.
“Typically, we’ll have something called Ireland on Parade, where there are different dancing schools and performances every night, bands and singers on weekends, a corned beef luncheon on St. Patrick’s Day, and after a week we closed down” Crean said.
The event would draw 200 to 400 people to Gaelic Park on any given night.
“We were worried about our community and about us being a super spreader and what might happen with that many people gathering together,” he said. “We weren’t told to shut down, but we felt it was prudent.”
A year later, with hope on the horizon and vaccines gradually making their way to people, they’ve been having a much smaller St. Patrick’s day celebration with a few days of food and Irish entertainment, including on Wednesday, with reservations required to ensure social distancing.
“We wish we could have the whole community there, but we are still celebrating St. Patrick’s Day,” Crean said.
They’re also not planning to hold Gaelic Park’s other big annual event, the Irish Fest that can draw upward of 20,000 people to the grounds on Memorial Day weekend, because such a large event takes months of advance work.
But they are preliminarily planning on resuming sporting events. Gaelic Park is the home field for all the city’s Gaelic football clubs, with matches typically taking up Sunday afternoons and sometimes Wednesday evenings. The fields often host rugby and soccer clubs, as well as a South Side youth athletic club.
And eventually, they’ll be back to filling their banquet rooms with the weddings, baptisms, showers and anniversary parties that bring hundreds of people to Gaelic Park on any given weekend.
Like my Aunt Helen in the 1970s, the Lord isn’t going to take them anytime soon.
More Top Picks Sample 504 Accommodations List For Adhd And Dyslexia
“We’re healthy and vibrant,” Crean said, “just waiting on the thumbs-up to fully open back up.”
And when they get it, they’ll be ready to celebrate two St. Patrick’s Days.
“We don’t have anything circled on the calendar, but we’re definitely talking about it and itching to do it,” Crean said.
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].