By Stephen McKinley
When she left County Kerry behind, and arrived in the United States, she had no idea that she would end up working at a place with such an odd-sounding name.
The Dingle peninsula was a world away from the daily grind of a waitress in Schrafft’s. You had to work hard. The pay was OK, and after all, it was America, and your first job was always a steppingstone to something better.
Today, Schrafft’s, the New York restaurant chain that employed many an Irish immigrant, is gone and those days, the 1950s, are only memories.
But there is one real, physical memento of the hours she put in at the restaurant. For some reason she kept some of her pay stubs stuffed in an envelope, lying in the back of a drawer. Easy for such things to get thrown away over the years — after all, it was the money that was important, not the stubs.
Now, however, the pay stubs have acquired a new value. They are a tiny but vital record of the Irish experience in the U.S. — they tell the story of the wages that an Irish immigrant could expect to earn in the 1950s — and they will soon join a growing collection of other material in the new Archives of Irish America at New York University’s Bobst Library on Washington Square South in Manhattan.
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The immigration experience
The archives are unique in the United States, and will salvage items in danger of disappearing forever, as well as documents and images that will reveal the Irish immigration experience and the distillation of Irish-American identity. A net has been cast, and a people’s history is now being preserved.
"Every day, it’s been disappearing," said Robert Scally, professor of Irish American history at NYU, "disappearing into garbage cans, people die, houses are emptied."
Not everything is of value, Scally said, but much of it tells a story. Letters to and from Ireland, books, newspapers, postcards and photographs, menus from restaurants, wedding invitations, receipts, bills, passports, even those lowly pay stubs — they all speak to us today, from a past that is perpetually receding from our grasp. As author Pete Hamill puts it, "We have a tale that has a beginning, and a difficult second act, and then a third act, which we’re living. That’s of value to everybody as an example."
Telling the tale of the Irish in America, says Scally, is of vital importance, and not just for its human-interest value. The research that will come out of the archives will correct misunderstandings and bring dignity to the long, arduous immigrant journey experienced by millions of Irish and the subsequent success story of their Irish-American descendants.
"Many of the myths and memories that we’ve carried over might be shown to be shallow, misleading, driven by cliches and stereotypes," Scally said. "Once you begin to understand in the voice and hand and artifacts of that population, the stereotypes evaporate, the cliches melt away, and you can see people as they are and as human beings."
One of the more remarkable items in the archive is a typewritten receipt for $1,000. It is dated Jan. 21, 1920, and at the bottom it has been signed by one Eamon De Valera.
This receipt was for a bond, an investment in the Irish Republic. It bears the words: "Said Bond to bear interest at five per cent per annum from the first day of the seventh month after the freeing of the territory of the Republic of Ireland from Britain’s military control."
The receipt was issued to the Gaelic Society of New York, where, across the Atlantic, in America, the Society had held ceilis, charging 25 cents per person as admission, in order to invest in the fledgling Republic. Stuck between the pages of the Society’s minutes book, it is a striking reminder of the time when the Irish in America realized that there was finally freedom and independence in the home they had all left behind. After the $1,000 bond (the first to have been issued) had been purchased, the minutes writer has carefully noted that there remained in the bank $213.
The writer’s meticulousness is not lost on Marion Casey, who was the inspiration behind the archives and has been responsible for it since its inception. She has had to catalogue and index the collection, which grows as more items are added every week. To her, however, it is a passion. "This is a long-term project," she said. "We’re only at the beginning."
The daughter of immigrants from Kerry and Carlow, Casey is a professor of Irish American studies at New York University. She studied first at University College, Dublin, and then trained as an archivist at NYU before finishing her Ph.D. there. But she came to start the archives in a roundabout way. Nor was archiving always the primary focus in her professional life.
"It was the early ’90s," she said, "jobs weren’t plentiful, and I did it to have a skill in my back pocket." The training has paid off — archives of this nature enhance research into Irish-America immeasurably. But when Casey started collecting material, she first went looking for contemporary documents and images. And the inspiration for that came almost by chance.
From junk mail to gems
In 1991, Casey had seen a TV story about a Connecticut man who made a hobby of collecting junk mail. Casey decided to collect some of the flyers and advertisements for recent, not old, Irish events.
Poetry readings, ceilis, meetings, lectures, parades; so much of it arrived in her mailbox or came across her desk, that after a year, she was astonished at the amount she had accumulated. From that initial experience sprang the grander notion of archives that would embrace the whole Irish-American story. The plan finally got under way in 1997, when Casey was still a doctoral student, with an initial grant from the Irish Institute. Although her main job is teaching at NYU, the Archives of Irish America project quickly became her responsibility as well.
As a child growing up in the ’60s, Irish culture was an important underlying dimension of her life, so her understanding of the Irish-American story has been both personal and professional. Robert Scally has no doubts about her abilities: "The main qualities that she has brought to the Irish American Archives are detailed knowledge of documentary sources, good judgement in separating the wheat in them from the chaff, a fine sense of historical context and, maybe most of all, incredible stamina." Casey herself stresses personal experiences.
"Many of my generation were able to go home, because it was the era of air travel," Casey said. "We had a foot in both worlds, even by the age of 10."
She sees the experience of new Irish Americans as a kind of limbo. "You can be intensely part of both cultures, Ireland and America, but you can so easily be rejected by both." The archives will capture that quintessential state of being. In particular, letters or journals that relate personal experiences will, she hopes, reveal the loneliness or homesickness that many immigrants had to deal with, as well as undreamed of new experiences — for example, how Carlow immigrant Kathleen Mulvey ended up kissing Robert F. Kennedy.
That story is one of Casey’s favorites in the archives. She has a photograph that shows a beaming Sen. Robert F. Kennedy shaking hands with Kathleen from Carlow. It could be any old event — a fund-raiser, a political meeting — but before she died, Mulvey told the story behind it to Casey.
"Kathleen Mulvey only passed away last year," Casey said. "She and a friend used to do catering for parties that RFK held in his house. And they were going to the annual Irish Institute dinner, so they said to him, ‘If you’re free that evening, drop in.’ And then they were floored when he did. Kathleen said that if the shutter had clicked a second earlier, she was giving him a huge kiss on the cheek."
This aspect of archiving, knowing the story behind an item, is almost as important as the item itself, and it makes Casey’s job all the richer. "It’s nice when you are collecting this stuff, that you hear the stories that come with it," she said. But it is no easy task. "We’re not on top of it at the moment," she said. "I have a full-time assistant starting in the summer." A part-time assistant has already helped set the archive into some order, including working through an odd collection of FBI files from the 1930s through the ’50s.
The files were released under the Freedom of Information Act, and show that federal agents tracked Irish people who were politically active — involved in labor movements or perhaps engaged in Irish politics. The files show that agents attended meetings and made detailed notes about what various persons said in speeches in bars and clubs.
"A pointless exercise," Casey said. "Anything of importance that might have been said would certainly not have been spoken in public or to a crowd of people. But the National Association for Irish Freedom was under observation, and so was the Irish Republican Club. My assistant, who put them in order, reckons they’re all harmless stuff."
The only blacked-out, censored parts of the file today are the lines that might identify an informer — and as time goes by, less and less will be censored as the files become less sensitive.
When faced with items such as the FBI files, Casey has to make decisions as to how and where they are entered in the Archives.
Material culture
"It’s a lot of work," Casey said. "We are also collecting contemporary stuff, of course, and it accumulates pretty fast." Already there are 200 linear feet of shelf space in NYU’s Bobst Library. Most of the material is relatively easy to catalogue and store, such as photographs, documents, newspapers — paper products — but there is the Material Culture section for occasional oddities, such as the football.
"The ball was one of several used at the only All-Ireland final played outside of Ireland, in 1947," Casey explained. "It took place in northern Manhattan, and the ball came into the hands of Kathleen Mulvey," who had kissed RFK.
The ball has been painted, and you can still make out the signatures of some of the players from the famous Cavan vs. Kerry match, played in New York because of a heavy snowfall in Ireland. Artifacts such as this are interesting in and of themselves, because of their unique connection to an event. Casey hopes that as certain areas of documentation are filled up, the Archives of Irish America will become an unparalleled source for research students.
"We’re interested in items that can be used in research projects, because there’s a lot that we don’t know yet — things like constitutions and bylaws of organizations, such as the county societies," Casey said.
As a result, Casey hopes that the constant loss of Irish-American history, through documents and photographs being discarded will be halted. Once entered in the archives, however, the preservation process does not end. Some of the oldest items, such as an 1811 edition of The Shamrock, an early New York Irish newspaper, requires high-tech handling.
"It’s actually in better condition than some of the more recent newspapers, because the paper then was made of cotton," Casey said. "Newsprint made from wood pulp decays much faster." Special plastic folders that ensure a minimum of touching by human hands are provided for such items.
Technology also allows Casey to make copies. If people want to contribute to the archive, but don’t want to give up treasured photographs, Casey says that digitally scanning the images is perfectly acceptable for the archives, and the photographs can then be returned to the owner unharmed.
But technology isn’t always so beneficial. Casey wonders how best to archive something like an Irish website — there has been an explosion in such sites in recent years. Some have appeared and disappeared, leaving no trace of their presence. "It’s possible that just a print-out of the homepage would be enough," she said.
The Archives of Irish America has its own web site at http://www.nyu.edu/irelandhouse/archives. At the site, you can watch short interviews — oral evidence that complements the documents in the archives: what it was like to be a young, live-in domestic servant in Manhattan in 1930; the political style of Mayor William O’Dwyer and his brother, Paul; the publicity techniques used by the United Irish Counties Association to promote its annual feis; reaction to the 1950 visit of Northern Ireland Prime Minister Sir Basil Brooke; the largesse of writer Brendan Behan, and the men and women behind the Irish Institute of New York. Anyone interested in contributing something to the Archives can call Ireland House at NYU at (212) 998-3950, or e-mail: ireland.house@nyu.edu.
While the archives will not be open to the public, Casey hopes to run a small, occasional exhibit of material from the archives — currently, she has put some Irish record album sleeves on display at NYU’s Ireland House, which she has called "The Spin on Ireland."
The sleeves are a wealth of symbols and signifiers that portray changing images of Irishness over the years. There are the Clancy brothers on a 1956 cover, looking hale and hearty in their Aran sweaters in Greenwich Village. There is the prevalent color green and the shamrock, but there are other, less obvious cues on the covers that sends the message of "Irishness," such as the harp, the shillelagh and the potato. By the ’60s, some covers had images of soda bread and Irish coffee, perhaps suggesting the exportation of such products to an Irish-American market.
On March 2 this year, the immigrant from Dingle who toiled at Schrafft’s Restaurant marked a special anniversary: 50 years since she stepped off the S.S. Washington in 1951. For years, the pay stubs that she has kept were in an envelope at the back of a drawer, and could easily have been thrown out — people move house, say, and trivial items like that seem to lose their currency as a person’s life goes by.
But now that immigrant, Joan Dineen from Kerry, has passed the pay stubs on to her daughter, Professor Marion Casey at the Archives of Irish America, and they take their place there as a record of the minuti’ — the daily dollars and cents, the long hours spent on one’s feet standing and serving alongside fellow immigrants from Ireland. One pay stub shows earnings of just $101.70, for 47 1/2 hours worked one Christmas week in the 1950s.
"This kind of stuff so quickly becomes the only material connection we have to generations of immigrants," Casey said. A mere pay stub has now become priceless.