My father was born into a small farming community in County Down in the north of Ireland in 1900.
He grew up with the century.

As a teenage "Sinn Feinner", in 1918, at the end of World War I, he fought the dregs of the British army, dredged up from the gutters of  London and Manchester and Liverpool after the big war (WWI) was over.  Based on the color of their uniform, they were known as  the "Black and Tans". My father helped the Irish Rebels fleeing from the "Tans" by sailing them across the Irish Sea to Liverpool in small mail-packet boats. He also served as a "provo" judge at informal hearings concerning decisions about the execution of informers and traitors to the "cause" (the freedom of Ireland from the British yoke).

When his own safety finally became untenable in the "Emerald Isle",  he sailed to America, where the streets were said to be "paved with gold".  He soon found out they were not.

Arriving just in time for the "roaring Twenties", he joined  the other young immigrant "green horns" working on construction jobs in and around New York City.  They were often referred to as " Irish donkeys" because of their strong backs and supposedly weak minds.  And he drank with the crowd, like a true Irishman.  All the young Irish immigrants hung together in those days. They worked together and played together at the many Irish social gatherings in the Gaelic Parks around New York, New Jersey, and Long Island. They weren't ready yet to melt into the new country's mythical "melting pot". They hadn't really cut the umbilical cords to the "old country".  Their minds and hearts were still tied to "the ploughand the stars", the symbols of the Irish Revolutionary Army (IRA) flag.  "Erin go Bragh" ( Gaelic for Ireland Forever) and "Puga ma hone" were the Irish toasts to the Brits.  And they sang "Oh Danny Boy" and " the Irish Soldier Boy" and cried in their beer, late at night, and all of this did little for Ireland.  They were here and Ireland was there.  Ireland's 32 (a favorite name for Irish bars inthe U.S.) is still only 26 counties in the south of Ireland.  The six nortern counties are still firmly controlled by the Protestant Anglo-Irish, and the fighting is still going on, 80 years after my dad left the "old sod ".

One thing the maudlin sentimental rebel reunions did accomplish was to help band the new immigrants together,  and  provide them with a solidarity front to combat job and social discrimination.  My father was the bebeficiary of Irishmen handing their jobs down to other Irishmen , especially if they were from the same county back in "the old country".  Civil rights wasn't even a dream in that day and age.  Survival was at stake.

At one of the Gaelic singing and dancing picnics my father met my mother to be, "Peryl", who was also one of the young Irish immigrant escapees from a probable future in one of the "Black and Tan" prisons, or worse.  In those days, in Ireland,  there were summary executions for Irish carrying guns, and my mother was a gun runner.

And so my dad settled  down and  took a job with "Con Ed", the big electric and gas utility company in New York City.  He stayed with Consolidated Edison for more than 40 years, eventually rising to "Foreman of the Holder" ( a big, steel girded, floatig gas container, used in the large northern cities prior to the building of the "big inch" and "little inch" natural gas pipelines up from Texas ) and later to Supervisor at Con Ed's electric power plant next to the U.N. headquarters in New York.

Along the way, around the time of "Lucky Lindy's" flight to Paris and just before Prohibition and the "Great Depression", I was born.  The first Irishman born outside of Ireland for both my mother's and my father's large families (14 children in each family).  I was quickly followed by four siblings.

Life continued on during Prohibition and the Great Depression with little or no noticeable effect on us.  We didn't know we were poor.  We had plenty to eat and a good roof over our heads.  And my father made beer and whiskey in the bath tub.  "Poteen" it was,  and it tasted good even when purloined by children.

Baptism, Holy Communion, Confirmation, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve and St. Patrick's Day were the big events. New births, weddings and a few funerals were also marked and celebrated ( yes, Irish celebrate funerals).

Pearl Harbor came.  No one knew what it was or where it was.  Which was odd, since we all knew about the "Rape of Nanking" and that Nanking was in China.  In the elementary schoolyards  10 year old kids were playing with cards that we got when we bought bubble-gum, showing the Japanese soldiers tossing Chinese babies back and forth on their bayonets.  But we had no cards showing the NAZI  gas ovens for the Jews.  In retrospect, it is clear where our propaganda priorities laid. Although we never did find out about the gas ovens 'till  after the war we soon found out about other events  of  WWII  as  some of our older cousins started fighting  the "Japs" in  Guadalcanal, and bombing the "Krauts" from B-17's flying over Dresden and Berlin, and dodging "Kamikazes" at Okinawa.

The war finally ended. We got a new car. I went to sea. My sisters got married. My little brother followed me to sea. I came home. I went back to school and after a short stint in the Air Force,  where I found out that I could never become Baron Von Krumtaugh  (our old family gaelic name),  I  became an engineer.  My fate was never to be a war hero.  I missed both Korea and Vietnam, for practical,  pedestrian reasons.   I was in Naval Reseve Officer Training (NROTC)  at King's Point during Korea,  and I was too old for Vietnam.  Ce la vie.

And so I got married (twice) and had a double ration of kids (4+4+1), and grand kids (15 & still counting).

In 1965 my father retired from "Con Ed" and went fishing and drinking  (  still a true Irishman )..  In 1978 at the age of 78, my father died of a stroke and complications from diabetes. He might have lived a bit longer if he agreed to let the doctor's cut off his leg.  But, being the stubborn old irishman that he was, he said, "No.  I came into the world with two legs and I'm going out with two"  And so he went, with two legs. He lived a full life.