The Pecan Park Eagle

“HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY”
From
LARRY AND KATHLEEN MIGGINS
2017

What better way to celebrate St. Patty’s Day than to feature it coming from the greatest, most beloved legend and leprechaun of the Houston Irish and baseball communities!

Was the movie “The Quiet Man” really important to Larry and Kathleen back in their younger days? After all, it was only the story of J0hn Wayne as a 6’4″ Irish-American male athlete who meets up with Maureen O’Hara, the love of his life character, on a trip back to to the old country. Wayne’s character is quickly and duly smitten by this dazzling young redheaded Irish beauty of great mind and character.

Important. you ask? – It was their first date movie and social time together in Chicago! – and Larry was already well into the role of being another 6’4″ Irish-American athlete in baseball – and Kathleen was this beautiful young “not-long-off-the boat” girl from Ireland – with a name close to the “Mary Kate” that played opposite John Wayne! The only difference here between fiction and reality was that Larry didn’t have to win the greatest movie fight in history with lovable, but the tough-minded heroine’s brother, Victor McLaughlin, as John Wayne had to do in the movie.

Interesting to note too that Larry and Kathleen later met John Wayne in the lates 1960s, when he came to Houston to make the movie, “Hellfighters,” the one one about local oil-fire fighter Red Adair.

“Yes, that was interesting to actually meet John Wayne,” Larry once told me. “I noticed too,” he added, “even though we both are listed at 6’4″, that I was the taller man by a smidgen.”

Happy St. Patrick’s Day Evening now, folks! I’d like to leave you with the little Irish Blessing pennant that’s been hanging in our kitchen for decades:

“May your roof never fall in and those beneath it never fall out.”

____________________

Bill McCurdy

Publisher, Editor, Writer

The Pecan Park Eagle

Houston, Texas