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Promptly at nine o'clock in the morning on the 17th of March, dozens of bands and religious groups and service organizations lined up behind Grand Marshal John Granfield and platoons of metropolitan police commanded by Capt. Hugh MacGowan. From Fifth and Broadway, the parade moved across Fifth to Main Street, then south to 12th, and down 12th to Cherry, and then north on Cherry to old St. Patrick's, where Mass was held. After Mass, the parade reformed and proceeded, as traditionally, to St. Teresa's Academy.
By now, the academy girls were official judges of banners and crowned the winner. The event was highly competitive and marked by flowery speeches and formal responses. Not to be outdone, Kansas City's Ancient Order of Hibernians one year painted a banner so gigantic that its construction easel was a railroad trestle. It required eight men to carry it "when there was little or no wind!"
The parade then moved a block to the Cathedral, where Bishop Hogan read a poem in Gaelic. Following that, the parade resumed once again, returning now to Fifth and Broadway, where marchers this time turned west, tromping downhill to Union Avenue, past the depot, to Mulberry, and south on Mulberry to 14th Street. At that point, Wyandotte County contingents split off and headed for home.
"I never did such drilling in my life as I did in those old St. Patrick's Day parades - sure we marched from morning till night and then danced [at Long's Hall] till morning again and thought nothing of it," recalled the old policeman. He mused about the difficulties of keeping under a stovepipe hat the one year he was a division marshal.
Said he, "If you've never tried to ride a horse prancing with the music and manage a sword and a stovepipe hat at the same time on a windy day, which St. Patrick's generally was, you don't know nothin' about the job."
But the officer, as he approached retirement in 1921, pined for the old parades - the bands playing tunes from home, like "The Wearing of the Green" and "O'Donnell Aboo," and the memories stirring in us of the old sod that we'd left not so long before, and everybody so full of enthusiasm and good cheer and a little drop, maybe, that no one thought the worse of in those days.
"Sure," he told the paper, "the first thing we did on St. Patrick's Day morning was to 'drown the shamrock ... Did you never hear tell of 'drowning the shamrock'? 'Twas an old custom and gone for many a day, like all the good old customs. When you met a friend for the first time on St. Patrick's Day in the morning, you'd ask him, 'Have you drowned your shamrock yet?' Well, maybe he had, but to be genial he'd say no, anyway, and in we'd go to the most convenient fountain of potheen and each of us would take the sprig of shamrock from our coats and drown it in the drink while we gave the old Irish toast:
Here's to the land of the Shamrock, so green!
Here's to each lad and his darling colleen!
Here's to all those we love dearest and most!
And God save ould Ireland' that's an
Irishman's toast!
The old officer defended the practice of drowning shamrocks by saying: "And the divil a bit of harm was in it, if you didn't drown it too deep or too often ..."
CONTINUED
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