February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Malden is 97 and has been married 71 years, which may be a Hollywood record. The real-life inspiration for Fr. Barry died 25 years ago today – July 1, 1984. However, the Rev. John M. “Pete” Corridan, a Jesuit, wasn’t simply the model for the priest who befriended Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy; he was the movie’s instigator.
That’s the view put forcefully by Fordham professor of theology James T. Fisher in his “On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York,” which is due out in September.
Fisher, when I interviewed him in January, cast the war against corrupt businessmen and mobbed up unions on New York and New Jersey’s docks as a family fight within the New York Irish community.
“On the one hand you had the status quo, archdiocesan figures, including many of the pastors on the West Side who had customarily supported the way life was there,” he said.
On the other, you had social reformers like the crusading Corridan.
The Jesuit, who was born in Manhattan in 1911 to County Kerry-born parents, made alliances “outside” his own group, enlisting, for example, Southern Protestant journalist Malcolm Johnson and Jewish novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg for the cause.
Oscar winner Schulberg, at 93, was one of those who gathered on a bright cold day at Manhattan’s Pier 40 in November 2006 to christen the “Rev. John M. Corridan,” the first ever police launch of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor.
“Fr. Pete [as he’d been known since his seminary days] single-handedly turned the union into a powerful force for good,” he said to the crowd that day.
The Rev. John O’Brien, recalling family vacations on Rockaway, told me: “He would go 200 yards beyond the last rope. He was a great swimmer.”
O’Brien and 90-year-old Patricia Garry, another cousin who shared their memories that day, have sadly since died.
The latter’s son, the Rev. Peter Garry, a parish priest in Northport, L.I., said of his famous relative: “He was fearless. He was a prophet.”
The remarkable story — which also features Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague, union boss Joe Ryan and Bill McCormack, the shadowy businessman who controlled Ryan – is being told properly for the first time. We’ll be hearing a lot more about it in coming months.
Very imPrezed
President Barack Obama wasn’t the only 40-something lawyer with a compelling multicultural life story to make it big in 2008. There was also the previously obscure Cork-born writer whose third novel was named one of the year’s “Top 10 Books” in the New York Times and lavished with critical praise just about everywhere else.
He’s half-Turkish via his mother, was raised in Holland, studied law at Cambridge, practiced at the bar in London for 10 years and now lives in the Chelsea Hotel in New York with his wife and children.
Obama gave a ringing endorsement to that other guy recently when he was asked what he was reading. Said the president: “I’m reading this book called ‘Netherland’ by Joseph O’Neill…It’s about after 9/11, a guy – his family leaves him and he takes up cricket in New York. And it’s fascinating. It’s a wonderful book, although I know nothing about cricket.”