John T. Brown Tells of Early Minooka - 1925

The Scranton Times, Saturday, August 8, 1925

John. T. Brown Tells of Early Minooka

Journalist Rambles Back Over Memory’s Lane on Eve of Minooka’s Great Celebration, Planned to Commemorate Opening of Once “Main Street”

Goes Into the Days When “Father John” was the Good Shepherd of His Flock and Advocated Reform, Not by Legislature or By Force But By Truth and Reason.

Tells of the Time When a Solid Mass of Humanity Was Dropped In a Hall As Judge Connolly Was Speaking and of the Heroic Efforts of Men At That Time To Prevent Greater Calamity.

Philadelphia, Aug. 8 – Come all ye readers of the Scranton Times – may your tribe increase, for it is a great newspaper – and listen unto me while I ramble back over Memory Lane and try to describe Minooka and its fighting race of bygone days. Next week the old town will have a formal celebration. Of the opening of its new thoroughfare, now called Birney Avenue, but in my boyhood, and long afterward known as Main street or the “Old Turnpike.”

Fifty years ago the population of that section between the city line and the present terminus of the trolley car route was probably one thousand. Most of the heads of families were born in County Mayo or County Galway, Ireland, and their everyday language was the ancient Gaelic. Very few could speak English, and fewer still read or write at all.

They Were Misunderstood

People of other towns, I came to find out when I got into newspaper work had a most erroneous set of conclusions regarding Minooka and its inhabitants. They look upon us as cavemen. Never was there a more cruel misconception, for with all their faults never was there a more God fearing true hearted community. They drank lots of hard liquor, had many’s the paynight fight, but used only their fists, never got contaminated with the hideous vices of race, suicide or divorce, and no man ever sank low enough to lose veneration for his priest.

Rev. John Loughran was the first pastor of St. Joseph’s parish, organized within a year or so after 1870. Everybody called him “Father John.” He was born in Ireland not far from where St. Patrick lived, educated in Maynooth College, a scholar of wide culture, giant in stature and in face and figure, proportioned like a Greek god. It was my happy lot to spend many evenings in Father’s study where he tried to teach Latin, and I can testify to his humility and piety.

Father John Was a Real Shepherd

Father John was a real shepherd of his flock. The parish then took what are now Lackawanna Township, Taylor and Old Forge boroughs, Moosic borough almost to the Avoca line, and South Scranton beyond the residence of the late John Gibbons. The people in this expansive area attended St. Joseph’s church and thought nothing of trudging through mud, snow or rain to mass. Later on a mission church was built in Old Forge.

St. Joseph’s church was situated where it now stands, and the rectory conjoined it. Living amongst us in Minooka, Father John was thrown into contact more intimately with the people of Main street than those of the rest of his parish, and undertook to correct with a stern hand some of the habits that needed correction.

In those days the sole industry was usual. When a boy reached the age of eight or ten, he quit school to go picking slate in the breaker. A few years later he shifted to the mines and worked his way on up to follow his father as a miner. Coal companies paid on the Saturday nearest the 20th of the month, and that night was usually the occasion for generous indulgence in wassail bowl.

Priest Was Police Force

There was no police force to stop bashes of fisticuffs except Father John and none other was needed. They can see him yet walking along Main street a pay night cracking his whalebone whip. He was a great horseman, and had one of the best trotters in Lackawanna county to whirl him along in a concord buggy, and could crack his whip like a circus ringmaster.

If he every applied it to anybody’s thighs, I never found out. By some sort of magic the word spread that “Father John was coming,” saw such a scampering for shelter as you never saw. We were trained to jump fences. Innkeepers soon learned that their license was in jeopardy, if they sold liquor to a man near saturation. This nevertheless, was a remedy that Father John often told me was of doubtful expediency.

“You can not reform a man by legislation or force,” he used to say, and how true were his words can be gathered from the present lamentable enforcement farce of prohibition and the Volstead act. In Philadelphia, at present, police stations overflow with Saturday night drunks, despite our vaunted boasts.

Organizes Temperance Society

Father John’s principle weapon against rum was moral suasion. Under his guidance the leading men organized the Father Mathew or Total Abstinence Society, and it gained in flourishing membership.

The cadet society included practically every boy in the town. Father John understood human nature and saw to it that we were outfitted with red-flared uniforms like Dunmore volunteer fireman on parade day. The 10th of October was the one great event we looked forward to, when we could step out behind a band in honor of the birthday of Father Mathew, the great Irish apostle of temperance.

On that dread evening of October 10 1888 while we were returning from Hazleton where the annual parade was held and two trains crashed at Mud Run by far the largest number of dead and injured from any one locality were residents of St. Joseph’s parish and the adjoining one of St. Mary’s in Avoca.

Another factor in turning the people away from their grosser natures was education. Father John made it a point often in his sermons to urge parents to make a sacrifice to keep the boys and girls at school as long as possible.

When The Hall Went Down

In addition to sermons on temperance, Father John fostered fall and winter entertainment of the Father Mathew society in the Temperance hall. No admission fee was charged. The program was generally worthwhile. Father John would secure services of a prominent main speaker – a man who made good in his chosen line, and to whom the youth could look up to as a model of success.

These speakers were not always total abstinents, and some might better be able to tell twenty then be one of the twenty and follow their own teaching. Nevertheless, in principle they could consistently tell their hearers that success demands sacrifice, and overall indulgence always demonstrates that you can get even too much of a good thing.

How well I recall the night the hall went down. It was in the early eighties. I had achieved a knack of speaking pieces on Friday afternoons at school, and was honored beyond expression with an invitation to speak a piece at this entertainment.

Judge Connolly Was Orator

Judge Connolly was the orator, and if I am not mistaken Mrs. Joseph O’Brien sang “Kathleen Mavourneen” and “Come Back to Erin,” which she could interpret in her rich lyrical voice so as to bring tears down our cheeks. I feel quite sure she sang these two melodies that night, and our “Paddy Dear, and Did You Hear?” for an encore, but left before the excitement.

Richard J. Beamish, of the editorial staff of the Philadelphia Enquirer, was then a rising young law student, and recited a gem from the “Treasury of Irish Eloquence.” Another entertainer was the inimitable Tommy Walsh, who earned a sobriquet for a song he jazzed so well that the chorus became community property afterward. The title of the ditty was, “The Hodcarriers’s Dream,” and the chorus:

Shop the clock or I’ll see a quarter;

Don’t lie shnorin on your back;

If I aint there to mix the mortar,

Pon me sow! I’ll get the sack.

Some of the other classics he popularized were “How Paddy Cut the Rope,” “Fill Them Up Again,” and “I’ll Take the Same as Father.”

Michael Judge, familiarly known as “Judgey,” sang “The Kitchen Furniture” and “Tipperary Christenin’,” and they wouldn’t let him be until he recited “The Face on the Barroom Floor.” He could do better justice to that recitation in other places, as, for instance, when he came under the inspiration of Shaun Kane’s hospitality. Them was the happy days.

Keep Time With Their Feet

Prof. Thomas Davis of Taylor, started the affair with a medley of Irish airs on the piano, the kind that set everybody keeping time with their feet. “Tommy” we used to call him. To digress for a moment, here is a point that shows the broad charity of Father John. Tommy Davis was a Welshman, a Baptist, and a natural and cultural musician. For years he was organist and trainer at St. Joseph’s church, but Father John, I often heard Tommy say, never tried to “prostalatise” him. He wanted the best man he could get for his organ and Tommy gave value received.

Professor Joyce selected the piece I was to speak, and drilled and drilled me until I could whistle it backwards. Two fingers up, I haven’t looked at the book since, but as I write, the lines are familiar as that night. The piece was “The Two Glasses.” Here goes the first stanza:

On a rich man’s table, rim to rim.

There sat two glasses, filled to the brim.

One was ruddy and red as blood,

And the other clear as the crystal flood.

Said the glass of wine to the paler brother,

“Let us tell the tales of life to each other.”

I got off with the declamatory effect of a boy who has the untrammeled conceit that he is a second Daniel O’Connell. Mr. Beamish came next, and then Judge Connolly.

Just Before the Crash

The judge was just about warmed up to his subject, and sailing along vehemently against saloon keepers, who give boys their first drink, or speed a woman toward the gutter. “Such a dealer,” He thundered, “will go down, down i-n-t-o-h-e-l-l!”

The judge could curl his upper lip and hiss a blast was that equal to the blast like the best melodramatic actor. There had been a heavy snow a few days previously, and the wind drifted huge banks of it against the basement walls of the long building, which stood ten feet or more above the ground at the front door, and twice that in the rear, because the lot took a sharp dip from the road.

Kerosene lamps in wall brackets furnished illumination and a ponderous cast iron stove the heat. The stove was near the front door, but faced the stage. I could see the red hot coal through its open door. The hall was jammed with men, women and children on crosswise benches.

Everyone was anxious to get as far from the stove as possible, and a solid mass of humanity had edged against the wall. Judge Connolly was consigning certain saloonkeepers to perdition when, like the crack of a doom, the floor gave way about 20 feet from the stove, and scores were precipitated into the cellar. The crash put out the lights, and raised a cloud of dust that made it almost impossible to breathe. Four or five crashes in rapid succession brought down the sections of the floor, and half the 1,000 or more in the audience were in the cellar.

Priest is the Last One Out.

Those who were not, jumped from the window into snow drifts. Father John was the last one out like a captain sticking to the ship until the band plays “Annie Laurie.”

I was lifted to the window by father John, but before I saw an act that never faded from my memory. Although the lamps went out with the first crash, the glare from the open stove sent a headlight of lurid beams toward the stage. I could see the stove was but a few feet from the edge of the broken floor. If it ever fell there would have been a world-shocking holocaust. God was good to us, for an instant two or three big men with bare hands caught hold of that heated monster and never let go until they tossed it out the front door.

Some one who kept his wits about him opened the two side doors in the cellar, and through them the people scrambled out. Not a man woman or child was injured to the extent of a broken bone. A week later a similar accident in a small town in Tennessee killed fifty.

Michael Walsh, “Big Mike” or “Rory” he was called sometimes to differentiate him from other men of the same name, was one of the three who lugged the stove out. Several of his sons distinguished themselves in the American navy during the world war. He has since joined the innumerable caravan and, as Mary Dougherty, a quaint character of the town used to say, “May God give him a bed in the lights of heaven.”

Town Had Many Heroes

Speaking of heroes, the files of the old Scranton Tribune would witness the truth of what I say. In 1898, as a reporter on that paper, I wrote about the number of Minooka boys who were enlisted in the army or navy for the duration of the Spanish-American war. I had a complete list of all their names, official figures of the population of the town, taken from the last federal census, and the proportion showed that Minooka led the country in pro rata representation of defenders.

None of these boys had flat feet or a yellow stripe down their back. I well remember in the article I wrote that I said if they fought half as well at the front as they did at home, it would be a good night nurse for Spain.

Michael J. Coyne and Patrick Carey, who enlisted before the war, had the distinction of being gunner’s mates on Admiral Dewey’s flagship, the Olympia, when the American fleet on the morning of May 1, 1898, sank the Spanish fleet in Manila bay. The Olympia is now tied up in the back channel at the Philadelphia navy yard with a lot of other obsolete war craft marked for the scrap heap. Sic transit glorium mundi!

An equally credible record was made by the youth of Minooka in the world war, and many of them made the supreme sacrifice.

Some Diamond Stars

On the professional baseball field, the town has not been surpassed on the number of its stars by any town of its size in the United States. We can rightly claim Hugh Jennings, for although he uttered the first “E-yah” in Pittston, his folks moved to our parish before he developed his first set of freckles.

John J. Coyne and yours truly had a lot to do with starting John O’Neill on his career as a catcher. After him into the big leagues went his brother Mike, Steve and Jimmy. Mike McNally, Charlie Shorten and others, whose names now escape reflection.

Coyne was a great catcher himself and undoubtedly would be a star if he followed up the game. He was a backstop for the Barkeepers in the days when masks and shin guards and big mitts were unknown. Martin P. Judge, afterward recorder of deeds, and Thomas Shea were his alternating pitchers, and their shoots were usually mastery to opposing batters.

People are Charitable

Life or death found the people of Minooka in a bond of charity that knew no bounds. If a man was killed in the mines, willing hands took up a collection that kept the wolf from the door of his widow and children, after paying funeral expenses.

If anybody was sick, neighboring women spell each other off assisting with the nursing. Weddings, christenings, wakes, or funerals were never invitation affairs. Everybody flocks to one or the other.

Wakes were never without pipes, tobacco and grog. The remains were laid out in the parlor, beside a table or stand with a crucifix, a picture or statute of our Redeemer and His blessed mother, and lighted candelabra. On entering, the neighbors all approached the coffin, knelt and said a Hail Mary, stood up and gazed with a tear at the calm face of the departed, his or her cold hands entwining a rosary. The men returned to the kitchen and the women sat quietly around the parlor and front room talking in whispers.

           

Vied At Telling Lies

You would find the same three or four old stagers grouped together in the kitchen puffing pipes and loudly comparing with one another to see who could tell the biggest lie. Their favorite topics were ghosts, haunted houses, leprechauns, fairies, or the ponderous size of shnakes (sic) which St. Patrick banished from Ireland.

Pipes were passed at frequent intervals, and occasionally one exploded from a small dab of powder out of a mine squib secreted from the tobacco. Those from the old town who read this will say: “Hm, well he knows.”

Let the goody-good sneer all they have a mind to about passing the liquor, but I never saw over-indulgence to speak of at wakes.

In my time I have reported the doing of some of our best people self-styled 100 per cent. Americans who were not born of poor but Irish parents and the drinking at wakes couldn’t hold a candle to what I’ve seen them do. But, that’s the different. The king can do no wrong.

Midnight was at hand as a rule, before liquor was passed. It was a breach of etiquette to refuse it. Those who did not drink, and there were no inconsiderable number, would say to the server: “I’ll take it out of your hand,” and pass the glass back as he gave it. The idea was to provide a stimulant, because most of the men remained at the wake until time to go to work in the morning, out of respect for the dead. Of course, there were some who had more than their share and were unfailing attendants at every “corpse-house.”

Takes Issues With Howley

M.T. Howley insists that the incident I am about to relate happened in the Sandy Banks, but I insist it was Minooka. However, as Miley McDonnell, the barber, the Lord be good to him, used to say, “It’s all the equal.”

The story is that two festive souls generously (partook) at a high-toned wake, and they had cigars and nothing but Casey’s best rock and rye. As they were homeward bound, arm in arm, in  the morning, and vociferously agreeing upon the good time they had, Pat concluded: Arrah, Shure, Molke, it’s only the likes of them that ought to have wakes.”

Howley, by the way, was one of the three or four young fellows from Scranton who contributed in large measure to the wellbeing of Minooka youth. One Sunday afternoon in 1893, shortly after the first of the year, they came to the Temperance hall and organized a branch of the Y.M.I.

M.J. McCrea, Minooka and Pittston representative of The Scranton Times, whose ready pen has recounted the virtues of many of the old-times in their obituaries, was the guiding spirit of the Y.M.I. for many years. The thing, to my mind, this organization did most for Minooka was to provide an attractive clubhouse and offset the temptation to a young man to spend his evening in the saloon.

In a very short time a number of boys blossomed out with ambition to be something, and many of them like Mac, succeeded. How are all the twins, Mac?

Large Families the Rule

The query about the numerous McCrea progeny recalls that what would be considered a large family now was a small one then, I don’t mean that for Minooka, for about two years ago, when I was up there, I met a friend I’d not seen for years, and after asking about himself and the missus, said:  “How many youngsters have you?” “Only eight,” he replied.

There isn’t a word of lie in that story either: a certain thrifty man waited to get married until he had enough money saved to buy a home and furnish it. A week or so before the wedding he took his bride-to-be to Scranton to select the furniture, and the next day the delivery wagon came though Minooka. Right on top of the load was a cradle.

Some of the Grand Old Men.

There was a galaxy of grand old men in Minooka, like Anthony Cusick, John Kelly, Michael McDonnell, Michael Joyce, James Egan, James Crane (I put the fathers of priests first), Martin McDonough, Owen Connolly and his son Phillip, F.A. Kane, for many years a distinguished schoolmaster like Prof. Joyce, and afterward the first postmaster and druggist: the two Peter Lowreys, John Wallace, the two Michael Cusicks, Thomas Joyce, Patrick Joyce, Patrick Brown, John and David Lowrey, three Patrick Coynes, several Michael Coynes, John Gallagher, father of Thomas Gallagher, first chief of the fire company, who died a martyr on duty; John McDonnell, John and Thomas Burke, Richard Walsh, several Michael Walshes, one of the heroes of the Temperance hall crash; Owen Kanavy, Thomas and Patrick Lydon, Martin and James Flannery, Michael Murray, John Joyce, Thomas Casey, James Morrison, Michael O’Neill, father of the baseball players; Patrick McNally and his brother Martin, John Fitzehenry, William Mangan, Patrick Ryan, Thomas McNamara, Thomas Sipple, Patrick Driscoll, John Cook, James Connolly, Patrick Langan, Phillip Mulderig and his brother Myles, John Mangan, Malachi Mangan, John Nee, and my own father, James Brown, whose good example I have not, mea culpa, always followed; also Peter Mullen, Martin H. Lavelle, John E. O’Malley, another distinguished schoolmaster; John McCrea, John Gannon, John O’Donnell, John Quinn, Felix O’Hara, Richard Powell, Patrick Powell, Patrick Carroll, John Nallin, Robert Campbell, Michael Jeffers, Anthony Hart, John Toole, Martin Toole and many others.

Mothers Were Models

The mothers in these households were shining examples of virtues that placed a diadem on their brows rarer than gold or precious stones and their happiest hours were when they folded their little acushla machrees to their breasts.

In my mind’s eye I have traveled back over dusty old Main street and gone into every house. Every one, without exception had a son or a daughter who gained some sort of commendable advancement in whatever avocation of life he or she undertook.

The fathers and mothers had many sorrows and heart-burnings in Ireland through the oppression of land-lordism, and came forth from the crucible of suffering filled with sympathy for others in distress and ready to share their lot with beggar or neighbor.

In the social scale, the only thing that counted was “dacency” (sic). The only heritage that nearly all of the fathers left to their children was a good name but “Kind hearts are  (?) more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman Blood.”

The post about the First School in Minooka was originally a part of Mr. Brown's recollection. That post is below.

Contributed by Maria Montoro Edwards