Tuffy-An Irish Legend

Some people stand out. We notice when they walk into a room. We stop whatever we are doing and listen to them when they speak. We seek them out because they appear to be just a little bit more than life sized. And, when we are with them, our own lives seem more exciting.

My dad is one of those people. In fact, my father, Joseph “Tuffy” Farrell, is a legend.

Oscar Wilde once wrote that: “Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.” That adage certainly applies to my dad. None of us can be truly understood by looking at only one moment of our life. Each person’s life is a series of stories. Some of those stories are joyous. Some are funny. Other stories will break your heart.

Both my mother and my father were born at the beginning of the Great Depression in Heckscherville, a tiny town in the anthracite coal mining region of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.

Years ago, Heckscherville was a company town. And, by “company town,” I mean that a coal company owned just about everything in the town.

In a typical company town, a coal company owned the mine where all of the men worked. It also owned a company store where they spent whatever small amount of money they received. The coal company also owned all the houses in which people lived.

It is my understanding that, during the Irish Potato Famine, agents of the coal companies actually went to the docks in New York City and anywhere else that a boat full of desperate Irish immigrants might land. They would recruit the newly arrived Irish-Americans with promises of jobs, houses and beautiful mountain vistas.

At one time, Schuylkill County certainly was a beautiful, bucolic place with crystal clear streams and rugged mountains covered with green trees. However, at some point around the beginning of the industrial revolution, a group of wealthy dullards in heavily starched white shirts discovered that there was an enormous amount of coal beneath those streams and mountains. And from that point on, Schuylkill County’s destiny was determined, in one way or another, by coal. To be honest, the discovery of anthracite beneath those beautiful mountains and streams pretty much ruined the place. In my opinion, the only good thing that coal ever brought to Schuylkill County was the huge number of Irishmen who moved there to mine it.

When the Irish poured into Schuylkill County during the 1800’s, they were tailor made for the back breaking drudgery of mining coal. You see, those of us who are fortunate enough to claim an Irish pedigree have a unique outlook on life. We seem to be born with an innate understanding that we will face hardship. Consequently, we are naturally contented with difficulty in the same way that one becomes accustomed to the constant barking of a neighbor’s dog. Overwhelming circumstance which might break another man will inspire an Irishman to smirk with optimistic defiance. In fact, the Irish look upon times of both triumph and tragedy with the exact same mix of: belligerence, resignation and a sense of humor.

The Irish who settled in the tiny town of Heckscherville quickly developed a reputation for strong wills. In 1862, during the Civil War, a group of men headquartered in Heckscherville began their own separate insurrection when they refused to be dragooned to fight in the war. The Union Army had suffered great losses in the bloody opening months of the war and they were looking to draft fresh replacements. Many of the men in Heckscherville and the surrounding anthracite coal region wished to decline that invitation.

As a result, in the fall of 1862, there were several anti-conscription riots all around the coal region of Schuylkill County that shut down the coal mines and directly challenged the authority of both the Pennsylvania and federal governments.

Pennsylvania Governor Curtin petulantly demanded more than 1,000 federal troops from President Lincoln to help him put down the Heckscherville led riots. However, the United States military was already stretched extremely thin fighting a war. So, Governor Curtin did not receive anywhere near the large number of troops that he requested. And most of the troops that were sent to end the riots never left their lodgings in Pottsville, the Schuylkill County seat.

In the end, it was not federal troops that quelled the Heckscherville led riots. It was the arrival and intercession of Bishop James Wood, the Catholic bishop of Philadelphia, who came to Schuylkill County personally in late October and convinced the large Catholic community in the region to stand down and abandon their rebellion.

Do not let that one historical anecdote give you the wrong impression however. The newly arrived Irish coal miners of Heckscherville were not ones to shy away from a fight. To the contrary, they always welcomed a good fight (and a stiff drink). But, don’t just take my word for it. On April 26, 1863, the New York Times published an article describing a coal miners’ strike in Schuylkill County. The author of that article singled out the town of Heckscherville, writing that: “the difficulty with the [Heckscherville] mines is that, unlike all the other mines, they are occupied almost exclusively by Irishmen, and the worst class of Irishmen at that. The ‘Molly Maguires’ as the [Heckscherville] miners are called, are a lawless, whiskey drinking set of outlaws that even the priest has lost all control over.” New York Times, April 26, 1863. The author clearly meant that as an insult. However, I am personally quite flattered by that account of my forebears.

The “Molly Maguires” are folk heroes to many people in Schuylkill County. During the early days of coal mining in Pennsylvania, they were a secret band of Irish coal miners led by a man named John “Blackjack” Kehoe who stood up to the powerful coal companies and fought against the oppressive working conditions of the coal mines. It is true, as the New York Times reported, that their tactics occasionally drifted beyond the strict limits of the law. However, you must understand that, as a rule, the Irish cannot stand to be bullied. So, from the Mollies’ perspective, when they stood up to the tyrannical coal mine owners, they only did what they believed they had to do to in order to take care of their own.

The people in Heckscherville eventually gained their independence from the oppression of living in a company town. Today, they are able to drive to a supermarket to shop for groceries or to a mall to shop for clothes. They are not limited to a “company store.”

They are also allowed to purchase their own houses now. However, the coal company still owns the land upon which every house in town sits. And, more importantly, the coal company owns the mineral rights to anything beneath those houses as well.

My dad is the youngest of seven children. His mother, my grandmother, died while my dad was still in grade school. He never spoke to me much about her.

His father Thomas on the other hand, was the subject of many of Dad’s stories. My dad idolized his father. He would frequently tell me how strong and noble my grandfather was.

“Your grandfather never drank” Dad would announce with great pride. It was no small irony that he would normally make this announcement after having finished one or two adult beverages himself.

Dad was a natural story teller. He would always take a breath, creating a dramatic pause at this point in the tale. Then, he would continue: “he went to the bar with the rest of the men after work to be social. But, he never took even one drink.”

“Whenever a man bought a round of drinks for the house, your grandfather would ask for a Hershey chocolate bar instead. He would bring a pocket full of small Hershey bars home with him at the end of the night and hide them in the small table at his bedside. But, when I was a boy, I knew that the bedside table was where he hid his chocolates. So, I would sneak in the next morning before school and take them.” Dad always had a mischievous smile as he finished telling this tale. I used to imagine that it was the same smile he had as a boy while he was eating those Hershey bars.

When my dad was growing up, his father and most of the other men in Heckscherville worked in the coal mines. Each day, these men woke up before sunrise. They washed themselves in the ice cold mountain water that flowed from every tap in town. They walked a steeply sloped path to whatever colliery or shaft of a coal mine was active that day. They crammed themselves into a cart and they descended into a dank shaft under the ground.

They spent each day in a claustrophobically small space hacking away at the rock walls of the mine. There was no natural light or fresh air to speak of. And the roof above their heads often had questionable structural integrity. Every moment that they worked, they were breathing in the black dust which would eventually turn many of their lungs thick and dark with disease. All of this just to dig hard rock coal out of a mountain. It was dangerous, back breaking, soul crushing work.

There were no urban sky scrapers or free catered lunches like there are at the law firm where I work. They didn’t have urns of fresh coffee and comfortable chairs. There were no freshly pressed suits or lunchtime walks in the sunshine. Those guys had it rough.

My family left Ireland sometime around 1840, during the first wave of the Irish Potato Famine. They left a world of abject poverty, deprivation and limited economic prospects in order to become coal miners in rural Pennsylvania. Kind of a lateral move as it turned out.

I remember going to visit Heckschersville as a boy. By the time my parents were married and I was born, my grandfather Thomas had passed away. However, my mom grew up just a few hundred yards away from my father. Her father, my “Popop,” was a very respected and educated man. He was a teacher and later the superintendent of Cass Township’s Schools. He still lived in Heckscherville. So, we would stay with him.

My Popop’s house seemed small and dark. It was the first house in a row of four similar dwellings. They actually called it a “row house.” That was also a name that people in Philadelphia gave to the ubiquitous, often historic, three and four story, sturdy brick structures that I had seen on school field trips downtown. But, my Popop’s house was not made of brick and mortar. It appeared to me to be constructed primarily out of asbestos shingles and a good bit of luck. I used to imagine that my Popop’s house and the houses adjacent to it were each exhausted and sort of leaning up against one another for support.

Since my maternal grandmother also passed away shortly after I was born, by the time I really became aware of it, my Popop’s the house lacked any sort of feminine touch. I am absolutely certain that my Popop never intentionally decorated the house.

Instead, his house had a utilitarian functionality to it that suited an older man who lived alone. There was a well-cushioned chair in the front parlor where he spent most of his time. From that chair, he could look to his right and see the window leading to the front porch and any approaching visitors. He could look to his left and see the tall, dark, wooden cuckoo clock that hung on the wall so that he could always know the time. Or, he could look straight ahead and see the very old, very large, wooden cabinet of his ancient television.

I hated that antique television. It never got good reception when my brothers and I tried to watch cartoons on it on Saturday mornings.

No matter how we twisted the knobs or adjusted the dials on that television, everything in the picture always seemed to be in some sort of snow storm. My Popop knew this. Still, he never purchased a large antenna for his roof or got his television repaired because, according to him, there was: “never anything good on it anyway.”

I remember sitting in the kitchen of that house around a large, white, rectangular table listening to my parents talking with my Popop and occasionally a few of the neighbors who had stopped by.

Everything my Popop’s kitchen seemed old and out of date. The old fashioned refrigerator was white and it had a rounded shape to it. It was not like the bright yellow, perfectly rectangular, relic of the 1970’s that we had in our kitchen at home at the time. I also remember that my Popop’s refrigerator always had a big box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes on top of it. Though, I never noticed anyone eating that cereal. My brothers and I never touched it. But, we wouldn’t have even considered eating any brand of cereal that was not “frosted” with at least a metric ton of sugar.

Behind my Popop’s usual seat at the kitchen table was an old fashioned stove. Well, it looked like a stove. I always assumed that it was his stove. But, honestly, I don’t believe that my grandfather ever used that stove to cook anything.

From what I could tell, he only used it as a pastry cabinet. Whenever we stayed with him, that stove would be filled with packages of cakes and pies that my Popop had purchased at a bakery in Pottsville in anticipation of our visit.

Whenever we went to see my Popop, the first thing I would do when we arrived was to run up the hill and knock on the back door of a woman named Lucy Horn. I was told that she was a relative, a distant cousin on my mother’s side I believe.

Her last name wasn’t actually “Horn” though. It was “Horan.” However, the Pennsylvania-Irish brogue with which everyone in the valley spoke could not countenance the effort required to actually annunciate both of those syllables. So, her last name was unceremoniously shortened to “Horn.”

Lucy always greeted me with a huge smile and then she would ask: “Is that my Michael?” She always said it that way. I was her Michael. That was just how the Irish people up home spoke. When they talked about my mom or my brothers they wouldn’t say: “Mary” or “Jim” or “Shawn.” They would say “our Mary” and “our Jimmy” and “our Shawn.” Once you belonged to them, you were a part of the community. You were theirs forever.

I absolutely loved talking with Lucy on her rickety, screened in back porch. Unlike most adults, she seemed to like talking to me directly rather than asking my parents questions about me while I was sitting right there in the same room. She listened to me. And I loved the fact that she always seemed to be genuinely impressed with whatever I said to her.

Lucy used to give me a small bottle of soda when I would come and visit with her. It was not a plastic bottle, nor was it filled with diet soda. It was a bottle made of glass as a proper bottle should be. And it was infused with enough pure cane sugar to scare off anyone who might have even a remote history of diabetes in their family.

Lucy and I would sit and talk together on her porch while my mom shepherded my brothers into my Popop’s house and my dad unloaded the luggage from the car.

Once the bags were put away and my parents had said hello to my Popop, they would also walk up the hill to Lucy’s house for a visit. I hated it when my mom and dad showed up. Because, when they did, it meant that my visit with Lucy was over. She would insist on going inside the house to speak with all of the adults.

Those adult discussions were awful. It seemed to me that they spent hours just droning on and on about who had died recently and who else had lost their job or contracted a horrible disease. Those conversations were so incredibly depressing that I felt as though I needed a prescription strength anti-depressant just to sit through them.

Whenever one of the adults spoke to me during those conversations, it was either to marvel at how much taller I had become since the last time they had seen me or to ask me whether or not I had washed behind my ears.

You read that right. They wanted to know if I had washed behind my ears. It was some sort of obsession with the Irish. Above all else, they had to know whether children were cleaning behind their ears.

Now, being an average young boy, I had picked up my share of frogs, slugs, snails and even the occasional dead bird. One would think that their biggest concern should have been whether I had washed my hands.

No sir, that entire room of adults was solely concerned with whether or not I had washed behind my ears. An uncle or an elder cousin of mine would beckon me over and make a big comedic show of inspecting behind my ears. And this show always followed the same script.

“Ahh, I see” the adult would proclaim as they bent my earlobe over, pretending to look for some evidence of cleanliness.

And then I would hear: “Jaaaysus Michael. You’ve got enough dirt back here to grow potatoes!” Then, all of the adults in the room would laugh as though that was the funniest thing that any of them had ever heard.

I would skulk off to a corner of the room and optimistically ponder the possibility that I had been adopted and that none of those people were actually related to me by blood.

At that time, I knew nothing about the latest scientific advancements in farming. But, if those people were dumb enough to actually believe that the conditions behind my ears merited serious consideration for the production of potatoes. . . . Well, let’s just say that I had a pretty good idea how that whole potato famine thing must have gotten started.

Straight up the hill from my Popop’s house is St. Kieran’s, the town’s Roman Catholic Church. It was fairly common in some towns in upstate Pennsylvania for there to be two or even three Catholic Churches within one or two block’s walk of one another. Usually, one church would be for the Irish. The others would serve the Italian, Polish, Ukrainian or whatever other congregations were nearby. And if the local municipal leaders were worth anything at all, there would also be a respectable bar or “tap room” in the vicinity as well.

But, sadly, that level of infrastructure was restricted to the larger, more cosmopolitan areas like Scranton or Pottsville. Heckscherville was small. It only had the one church.

Down the hill from my Popop’s house sits the Clover Club. The Clover Club is in a long, relatively narrow, two- story building that serves as the home for both a volunteer fire association and an AOH hall. AOH is an acronym which stands for “Ancient Order of Hibernians.” The A “”ho” H (as it is locally pronounced) is an Irish Catholic fraternal organization which was founded in 1836 in order to defend the Church and to assist Irish immigrants who faced widespread discrimination and dangerous working conditions, especially in the coal mines.

In the case of Heckscherville’s AOH and the Clover Club, it appeared to my younger self as though it was just a bar where the local coal miners went to spend more money than they should have on cards and drink. It was a place where the men could spend a few off hours away from their families.

And, of course, it was where they parked the local firetruck.

I remember that my two younger brothers and I tried to sneak into the Clover Club bar once when we were fairly young. The bar is on the second floor of the old building. So, we quietly climbed an outdoor stairwell on the side of the building to get to a second-floor exterior door. We all three took turns pulling on the handle to open it. But, the door would not budge.

While we were standing there trying to figure out how to get inside, the door swung open. The three of us suddenly found ourselves looking up at the ruddy, wrinkled scowl of a somewhat inebriated and very confused patron of the Clover Club. Apparently, three little blonde-haired boys, who did not reside in the area, seldom showed up at that particular door.

The large man asked us, in a very menacing voice: “and who might you be?”

Since I am the oldest, my brothers physically shoved me forward to answer.

“We’re Joe Farrell’s kids” I said while I stumbled awkwardly toward the large man as a result of my brothers’ push.

“You’re Tuffy’s kids?” he asked with a new tone of genuine surprise.

Well, surprise quickly turned to excitement as a huge smile of recognition came over the enormous man’s face. He clapped his meaty hands together and invited us inside.

Within seconds, my brothers and I were perched atop three chrome-legged, black vinyl barstools with our elbows planted on the wood of the bar in front of us and our chins resting in our hands. We spent the rest of that afternoon listening with rapt attention to stories about my dad.

It seemed that every man at the Clover Club had a nickname. “Apple” Dugan, a large, barrel- chested man was so delighted to see us that he began the telling of the tall tales. “Your father,” Apple began, in his own rustic adaptation of the Pennsylvania Irish brogue, “could lift a full keg of beer straight up over his head!” Then he paused and he looked down at the three of us with a slack-jawed smile waiting to see some evidence of our astonishment.

Unfortunately, we were all under the age of ten and had never once even tried to move an entire keg of beer by ourselves. So, we did not truly appreciate the enormity of that achievement. We failed to give him much of a reaction.

“A full keg, straight up off of the ground, right up over his head,” he marveled again. This time he spoke more softly and basically to himself.

The next to speak was “Pudge” O’Brien. He got our attention away from Apple by slamming his hand loudly on the bar. “Boys,” he began, “your father was brilliant from a young age. He could always see three steps in front of any man. Yes, when it came to brains, the Good Lord spilled a bit extra into your dad’s glass.” Again, at that time my brothers and I were under the age of ten. So none of us challenged Pudge on his tortured mixed metaphors.

Pudge continued: “Years ago, he worked at a shoe store up in Minersville. He was paid on commission. And one day he noticed that he had an extra half dollar in his pay when they tallied up the receipts.”

“So, your dad asked the owner of the store why he had gotten the extra money. And the owner told Tuffy that he had sold a pair of shoes that day which were out of season. So, your dad got an extra four bits.”

“Well, your dad soon found out that there was a brown grease pencil mark on the outside of every box of shoes that was out of season. That was how the cashier knew when a salesman was owed the extra money. And, that gave your father an idea.”

“The very next evening, he stopped at the five and dime and bought himself his own brown grease pencil and he began marking every third or fourth box he sold.”

“He made a killing!” Pudge chortled, unable to contain his laughter.

This went on. Man after man tripping over each other’s sentences, unable to wait to begin the next story about my dad.

Eventually, my brother Jim asked: “why do you all call him ‘Tuffy?’”

Well, a pause descended upon the bar room. The men all looked at one another as though they were deciding who should be the one to speak.

Then, “Rip,” the big man who had initially let us in the door, inhaled solemnly and told us the tale.

“Right here, in this very bar, is where your father got the name ‘Tuffy’” he said.

Rip told us that, when my dad was only thirteen years old, he was already drinking fairly regularly in the Clover Club. One evening, Dad, and a couple of fully grown adult men, got into an argument. And, as sometimes happens when alcohol is around, the verbal argument became a physical fight.

Now, Rip did not tell us every detail of what happened in that fight. Perhaps we were too young at the time to hear the gory particulars. Or, as is more likely, after many years and many repetitions, Rip’s memory of the specific facts had faded a bit.

The precise details themselves were not central to the story. What mattered more was the ever growing legend itself.

I do know that my father acquitted himself well in that fight. Because, from that time on, he was known throughout the valley, almost exclusively, as “Tuffy.”

To this day, I cannot imagine what a thirteen year- old boy could have done in one fight to convince an entire valley of grizzled, Irish, hard rock coal crackers to refer to him as “Tuffy.” But, the nickname stuck. His legend was born.