Mike Whalen Interview Narrator: Mike Whalen Interviewer: Dáithí Sproule Date: 5 April, 2018 DS: Dáithí Sproule MW: Mike Whalen [BEGIN MIKE WHALEN PART 01—filename: A1011a_EML_mmtc] DS: Here we are, and I’m with Mike Whalen, and we’re at the Celtic Junction. And is it the 5th of April? I think it is – you’ve got the newspaper there. I was just saying to Mike that the pattern I’ve had with everybody else is just to start it off even with your parents – what’s the background of your parents? MW: Well, I consider myself 100% Irish. My parents were both from small towns in Minnesota, and they were Irish towns. DS: What were the towns? MW: My mom came from Franklin, Minnesota, in western Minnesota. The town was Scandinavian, but the townlands – what do you call those? – there’s not a town in it, but it’s a political division. Birch Cooley and Bandon were all Irish, and Bandon was named by one of my great-great-grandparents from the town that he came from in Cork. And my dad was from Rosemount, which was a real strong Irish town. He moved into the Cities in the 30s because his dad died, and they couldn’t keep the farm. My mom moved to Eden Valley, which is on the Meeker-Stearns County border. She was fourteen or fifteen. That was an interesting town, because it was seven hundred people and they had two Catholic churches. They had an Irish church, and it had a Dutch church, but it was “Deutsch”, you know. The Irish church just closed about ten years ago, and now my mom says that a lot of those people drive fifteen miles to Manannah, to another Irish parish rather than go the six blocks to the German church. DS: What was her surname? 1 MW: Her last name was Hanlon. Her mother’s name was Larry. My dad’s mother’s name was Kelly. Just in December I did a DNA thing. I did one of those swabs. I didn’t understand this, but somebody I know from doing Irish genealogy said that this is the best one for some reason. It wasn’t one I’d heard of. When I got back from Mexico, I saw the stuff, and I was 98% British Isles. They don’t differentiate between Irish, Scottish, Welsh, but I know there’s no British in me --I’m sure it’s all 98% Irish and 2% central Asia. DS: Yea, you see, that’s the thing – who knows? MW: The Celts came from central Asia. So it’s kind of an interesting trip. So even though I’m Irish American, there wasn’t a whole lot of Irish activity or Irish identity in my family. Everybody knew they were Irish, and Saint Patrick’s Day was a big deal, stuff like that, but nobody talked about going to Ireland. Irish music for them would have been ballads, you know, Carmel Quinn, stuff like that. You’d say you’re Irish, you’re Irish American, is the way you identified, which was the same as most of the people in my neighborhood. DS: So you were raised in an Irish American neighborhood? MW: Yea, but it was kind of interesting. There’s a real interesting book about Saint Paul by woman named Lethert Wingerd – she’s related to Nick Lethert. So she wrote a book on Saint Paul that dealt with labor, nationality and politics, She said when the new parishes, the suburban parishes – Saint Luke’s, Saint Mark’s, Nativity – were being formed, they were middle class, and the old Irish parishes, like Saint Vincent’s, Saint Mary’s, Saint Patrick’s, were older ones. She said that the new ones were middle class, so in the First World War they had preparedness committees, before the war, you know, getting ready for war, where the old Irish parishes were anti-war because the Brits were involved – they didn’t want anything to do with the Brits. It was a real kind of an interesting thing. This book is really, really interesting on Ireland. DS: The words are used slightly differently in Ireland and England, you know, middle class and so on. Are you saying that the old Irish were what class? MW: Working class. The old neighborhoods were the old Irish parishes, the national parishes – the same thing with the German and Italian – they were much closer to 2 downtown. The houses were smaller, and the people who lived in those houses were workers. As the communities developed, the houses got a little bit bigger, but not that much bigger because the families were still huge. I’m still shocked when I think -- my brother and I shared a room, a bunk bed, we didn’t have a closet, because we rented out a room to a boarder. So there was four bedrooms, and my mom and dad had one, we had one, and then my sister had one, and then the boarder. So the houses weren’t that big, but not like the bigger mansions out in the suburbs now, so it was kind of interesting. There was no real class consciousness. You really didn’t understand that. Everybody wanted to be middle class. DS: One of my themes, we have personal themes as we listen or I listen, and I’m interested in things that are never mentioned. Say, one of the things that wasn’t mentioned by most people was the Vietnam War – astonishingly. MW: Right. DS: Or some people don’t mention politics at all. Isn’t that astounding? I comment with one of the people: I say, I know people here for the last thirty, thirty-five years who have never mentioned politics to me, which astounds me. Then the other thing that I don’t think was really mentioned was class. It’s not surprising that you should mention it, by the way. But it’s an important issue obviously. MW: It’s interesting because my parents, their families were all farmers, but they were small farmers. My mom’s mom and dad had a ninety acre farm, so that would have been small, not small like in Ireland, but when they moved off the farm, when I was up to five or six years old, we’d go to visit them, because they lived in the same town that they had had the farm – they didn’t have an indoor toilet – this was 1953 or 4, 1955. They would have had an outhouse and they had a pump in the kitchen and stuff. It was kind of an interesting trip, but it wasn’t probably till I was a teenager that they had an indoor bathroom in the houses that they rented then because they didn’t own a house. Everybody in my family worked. All my aunts and uncles worked, nobody made a lot of money. DS: What did your father do for a living? MW: My father was a salesman, but before that he worked in a gas station. My uncle worked in Quigley’s, he pumped gas all his life, that’s all he did. 3 DS: With some of the interviewees the music is a factor in their lives, even if it’s just in the background. Let’s say, before the age of twelve, eleven, or whatever, when you were really young, was music or dance or Irishness a factor at all in your life, apart from Saint Patrick’s Day? MW: Well, no, it wasn’t. There were certain things, like when I went to Ireland first in 1972, I heard people lilting, and I didn’t know what lilting was, but my mom and my grandma always did it. (lilts) DS: They did? Great. MW: So the thing is, there were certain things – I think sometimes the terms that people used when I was in Ireland, because the families were all fairly large, say, my mom’s name is Mary, there was probably fifteen Marys in our family. People would talk, they’d say, “Our Mary, Phil’s Mary, Jim’s Mary,” things like that, and I hadn’t heard that except at my family until I went to Ireland, and then I heard it in Derry a lot. So I was kind of an interesting trip. So some things that I didn’t necessarily understand about being…that would maybe have come from Ireland, I didn’t understand it until I went there and saw it. So no, I just knew I was Irish, I was interested in Ireland. When I got out of high school, I was the bus boy at Diamond Jim’s, Carmel Quinn would sing there. It was a big restaurant, not a concert hall, you sat at tables, I would see her, she’d be there for a week, two weeks, and I asked her to sing a rebel song – it had nothing to do about rebel songs, which she didn’t do, but she said, “Oh, oh, that might be…” DS: What year roughly would that have been? MW: This would have been 1967. DS: And how did…you talked to her? Nick also…she came over to Nick’s house one time for some reason, was brought over for breakfast or something, and he talked about her. MW: She would have been relatively famous. She would have been on Arthur Godfrey’s show in the 50s, and then I think the Irish American Cultural Institute brought her in for concerts – a lot of people who would have gone to events for the Cultural Institute were that age, they would have been in their fifties and sixties, and so that would have been Irish for them.