March on Broadway

By Bryce Haugen
Contributing Writer

While the sterile whites of winter turn into the ugly grays of our northern spring, a brilliant green will inundate Broadway this weekend, weeks before it reaches the lawns of valley denizens. North Dakota’s only St. Patrick’s Day parade – this Saturday at 3 p.m. – has, since 1996, been spreading the pride of the Emerald Isle in a region dominated by Norwegian and German influences.

“We’re Irish. We like to celebrate,” explained parade co-founder Brian Quigley, a jovial pureblood who runs an advertising firm named Shamrock Marketing. “It’s kind of a good transition into spring; a reason to celebrate at the end of winter.”

The six-block procession, starting at the Old Broadway, will feature bagpipers, children dancing traditional jigs, lots of candy and potentially rocker Jon Bon Jovi. Organizers asked the Irish-Italian American, who plays at the Fargodome Saturday evening, to be the Grand Marshal, but he has yet to accept or decline. Parade coordinator Paul Evans, VFW manager, gave the possibility even odds.

Though the parade is the anchor of the area’s holiday festivities, there will be reveling all day at venues throughout downtown. At noon, before the parade, the Fargo Theatre will show the acclaimed Irish musical film, “Once,” for free. Many bars are offering drink specials for an unaffiliated post-parade pub crawl. Evans, who Quigley called an “honorary Irish,” is temporarily renaming his joint, VFO’W. One block north, Dempsey’s Public House will serve a corned beef dinner before Poitin, a local Irish band, performs a couple of shows, mixing Celtic standards with original tunes.
“St. Patrick’s Day is a time to get together with a lot of friends and share a love of Ireland,” says Poitin singer and guitarist Don Rice, a Concordia College professor. “It’s such a rich tradition.” He and band mate Jim Haney—both of whom boast Irish blood – sometimes joke that they “were put here to teach the Norwegians to have a little fun.” U.S. Census Bureau data from 2007 shows 44 percent of Fargoans have German ancestry, 35 percent claim Norwegian, but less than 9 percent have any Irish in them.

That demographic reality made some people snicker when the idea for a parade first emerged, but that didn’t deter the organizers. “We figured there wasn’t much of a downside,” Quigley recalls. “We started with nothing, so what did we have to lose?”

It has grown incrementally since, funded entirely through local sponsors, from a few participants and small crowd in 1996 to dozens of floats and 5,000 spectators last year. Organizers predict a similar, if not larger, turnout this year (weather permitting, which it nearly always has). The outlook for Saturday is favorable, with The National Weather Service predicting clouds but no precipitation with a high in the 40’s.

Unlike in many larger cities, where parades are raucous affairs, Fargo-Moorhead’s event has remained family-friendly through the years – full of fun, frivolity and free from frenetic folly.

The post-parade festivities, on the other hand, might not be. After all, green beer and Jameson whiskey have become more integral to St. Paddy’s than paying tribute to the isle’s patron saint who converted the Celtic pagans to Christianity. Especially for Protestant American celebrants, who don’t give a hoot about the historical or religious overtones, let alone know them. Evans foresees the possibility that a few diehards might take the opportunity to party all the way through until the official holiday next Wednesday—perhaps breaking for work, perhaps not.

At the downtown Drunken Noodle, after a gig, local musician Andi Thoreson offered her take on the universal day of debauchery, before belatedly acknowledging her gross over-generalization. “As far as I know, it’s a celebration of a culture that loves fighting and loves getting drunk.”

“And who doesn’t love those things?,” piped John Giedosh, her friend with mixed Eastern European-Italian-Irish blood from across the table, with a hearty laugh and beer in hand.

Thoreson used one word to sum up her experience last year at Chicago’s famous St. Patrick’s Day events, where the river is dyed green and the lines to get into pubs stretch for blocks, “Wowsa!”

A very unscientific poll of a dozen or so downtown Fargo bar patrons – some with Irish ancestry, most without – yielded an unsurprising, nearly unanimous intention for this St. Paddy’s—imbibing, in many cases excessively.

Asked outside of Dempseys to explain the true meaning of the holiday, Concordia senior Kent Kolstad said he couldn’t. “I don’t know and I don’t really care.” But the Norwegian-blooded deejay says he’s a big fan of all things Irish, particularly the dark foods, music and attitude. “I can identify with the rebelliousness,” said Kolstad, who plans to catch a Poitin show. The band’s set includes several rebel songs from Ireland’s centuries-long feud with Britain.

There’s no question what Tom Conmy will be doing Wednesday. He’ll be tending bar at Duffy’s Tavern, as he has done for the previous 42 celebrations. “It’s a tradition,” says the retired Fargo lawyer, who’s “as close as it gets” to 100 percent Irish and plans to take his 8-year-old son to the parade Saturday.
When the two Irish-blooded owners, both now deceased, opened the place in 1968, “Duffy’s was the only bar in town that got into the act,” Conmy says. That is clearly no longer the case.

“They all know how to celebrate,” he says. “You don’t have to necessarily be Irish to know how to celebrate. But it helps.” After his morning bartending shift, he plans to “do a little celebrating” himself, though he’s “too darn old” to get into trouble like he’s been known to do in his youth.

Though the stereotype of hard-drinking brawlers exists to this day, Americans of Irish ancestry have come a long way since originally being reviled as uneducated, unskilled, largely Catholic immigrants escaping the Great Famine of the mid-1800s for better lives overseas. Many found jobs on the railroad, bringing them to far-flung places like North Dakota, while many others became teachers and police officers. Once the object of anti-immigrant vitriol (signs on businesses often stating “Irish need not apply”), some have come full circle, spewing similar rhetoric themselves (see Bill O’Reilly). President Obama claims some Irish linage, as do more than 36 million other Americans of all professions, according to 2008 Census data. That makes it the second largest self-reported ethnic group in the country, behind only the approximately 50 million German Americans.

“We’re pretty well assimilated,” Conmy says. “But we’re still very proud of our background … I suppose you could say that about all major immigrant groups.”

Conmy points out that the ancient bitter religious rivalries that still plague the isle are not visible in the largely secular Americanized celebration, though the Catholic jokes with some friends who come into Duffy’s that “If you ever come in with an orange jacket,” the color of Northern Ireland Protestants, “you’re going out feet first.”

Keeping a sense of humor while being seriously proud of their heritage is something Conmy and Quigley seem to have mastered.

“May the wind always be at our backs, and all that bullshit …,” he told Evans, referring to a classic Irish blessing, chuckling as he left the VFW last week.
Evans quipped that he looked forward to seeing Quigley paint his old-man nipples green.

“That’s after midnight,” Quigley quickly retorted. “My reputation is ruined.”

But before that tomfoolery, there’s the G-rated celebration. Quigley has high hopes for this year’s parade, and expects it to continue to improve each year.

Organizers added the Fargo Theatre partnership this year, and the idea of eventually creating a festival of cultural fusion with Norwegian Americans, who celebrate Syttende Mai exactly two months after St. Patrick’s Day, has been batted around. “Maybe that’s the next step,” he says, noting that April 17 would be a perfect day as it falls right in between both holidays.

Perhaps one of these years, Irish and Norwegian descendents will combine forces, feasting on green lefse and cabbage-laden lutefisk, in a room adorned with trolls and leprechauns. Two ethnic groups that have truly made it in America, offering hope to the newer waves of immigrants who are still derided as the Irish once were.

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If You Go

What: St. Patrick’s Day Parade
Where: Starts in front of Old Broadway
When: Sat, March 13, 3 pm
Info: 701.799.4134