If you were in the market for a shillelagh this weekend, Ed Leon had plenty of them to sell at the Naperville Irish Fest.
All handmade as part of Leon’s newly launched business, Blackthorn & Bramble, the event was the first in which the Naperville resident was selling them live instead of through his website, he said.
He started making shillelaghs, he said, after learning about the walking sticks — once used as weapons when swords were banned — and learning to make them from fallen wood he finds. Traditionally, they’re made of blackthorn or oak.
“I love sharing that history,” Leon said of shillelaghs, believed to have originated in Shillelagh in County Wicklow, Ireland, and now symbolizing Irish resilience.
His was just one bit of the culture shared as part of the annual gathering, held by the West Suburban Irish for the third consecutive year at Naperville’s Central Park.
“Before that we were at the Frontier Sports Complex,” co-chair Chris O’Hara said of the two-day event, which typically attracts about 2,500 people. This year, advance ticket sales were up 18%, she said.
There were few places on the fest grounds where something Irish wasn’t on full display, be it vendor wares, dance, music, sports, activities or food.
One of the longest lines was at Frank O’Dowd’s Food Truck, a Galena-based enterprise that, like Leon’s business, was making its Irish Fest debut Friday.
O’Dowd’s takes multicultural approach to its menu, which includes things like Irish-American Reuben sandwiches, Reuben egg rolls and Scotch eggs drizzled with black bean pico de gallo and curry aioli.
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Colleen Heffernan, of Woodstock, and Athena Zannis, of Roscoe, went with more traditional fare, opting for Guinness beer-battered cod and chips for dinner. It was their first visit to the Naperville Irish Fest, which they attended in part to support friends working at a booth for the Irish stick-and-ball sports hurling and camogie.
“This is a great festival, with outstanding music,” Heffernan said.
Taking the stage Friday were The Larkin and Moran Brothers, a South Side Chicago band, and, from Cleveland, Brigid’s Cross, featuring Paul Baker and his wife, Peggy Noonan Baker. The couple mixed Irish folk songs with pop/rock numbers from across the decades.
Fittingly, a light Irish-like mist began to fall just in time for their first number, a cover of Van Morrison’s “Days Like This.”
Between songs, the pair made wisecracks about being married for 28 years and recalling previous local performances at places like the long-closed JJ Finnegan’s and St. Catherine’s Irish Fest, both in West Dundee.
It wouldn’t be an Irish Fest without drinking songs, and the duo’s numbers included “Tim Finnegan’s Wake,” minus the drinking game they usually play with the audience during the comic ballad.
While they stayed in compliance with the event’s no-booze-on-stage rules, it didn’t water down the humor. As the mist turned into a light downpour, they fittingly broke into Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”
Mike Danahey is a freelance reporter for the Naperville Sun.