I didn’t know this man but picked up the story from The Session discussion page. Those living in the American West especially in Montana might know him.
Online article plus picture of the gentleman here:
http://www.helenair.com/articles/2004/02/03/montana_top/a05030204_02.txt
Derek Pruitt The Montana Standard - John ‘The Yank’ Harrington plays his button box accordian during his 100th birthday celebration at The Garden reception hall in Butte in March of 2003.
A Butte legend passes away at 100
By Barbara LaBoe - The Montana Standard - 02/03/04
John ‘‘the Yank’’ Harrington, Butte’s famed button-box accordion player and historical treasure, died early Monday after nearly 101 years on earth.
Harrington, 100, died from shingles and pneumonia in the small Uptown Butte apartment he had called home for decades, said grandniece Gail Barrett, who along with her brother Paul Seccomb was with him. He would have been 101 in March.
Friends and family said Monday he’ll be remembered not only for his music, but also his big heart and near perfect recall of events others only read about in history books.
‘‘He was a piece of living history,’’ said friend Tom Powers of the Irish band called Dublin Gulch, with which Harrington played the past few years. ‘‘I’m proud to have been able to share a stage with him.’’
‘‘He was a man full of grace and he just lived his life that way,’’ Barrett said.
Harrington, the son of Irish immigrants, was christened John Patrick because he arrived just before St. Patrick’s Day on March 10, 1903, when the family lived in the mining town of Mercur City, Utah. Butte streets were paved with cobblestones when the family followed his father here in 1911. By 1918 Harrington and his four sisters were orphaned, his father dying in 1916 from miner’s consumption and his mother two years later from the flu epidemic of 1918. The girls were placed in an orphanage and Harrington moved with his aunt and uncle to Ireland.
It was in Ireland that he gained his life-long nickname and also where he spent his only time working in a mine; he never set foot in the Butte mines that claimed so many other Irishmen.
‘‘Everyone who went in there died,’’ Harrington said in 2001. ‘‘I didn’t want to work three years in the mines and die.’’
Harrington attributed his long life to clean living: he was never drunk and never smoked. Friends and relatives said it was also his kindness that contributed to his longevity.
‘‘What a gentle, generous soul,’’ added Cindy Powers, who was dumfounded at Harrington’s 98th birthday party when he handed her a $3,000 check for her Corktown Dancers. The money, the profit from his ‘‘A Celtic Century’’ CD, allows Powers to provide the traditional, but expensive, Irish dance hard shoes to her dancers.
Harrington was invaluable to historians and genealogists because he witnessed and could remember clearly just about ever major event of the past century, including the Frank Little funeral, the bombing of the Miners’ Union Hall and the Speculator mine disaster. He would often amaze his fellow Irish musicians by recalling events or people that they knew only from songs. He kept meticulous scrapbooks throughout his life.
‘‘He was unbelievable with names and dates and relationships,’’ said his nephew and first godson, the now 72-year-old Tom Mulcahy of San Diego, via e-mail on Monday.
And it wasn’t just Butte that prized Harrington’s stories. The Library of Congress houses the wax recordings of Harrington and his sisters singing traditional Irish songs and he’s listed on the Kennedy Center Irish music Web site. He was named a Montana Living Treasure in 2000. And his Irish fishing crew diaries are invaluable to Irish historians, said Ellen Crain of the Butte Public Archives.
A review of his CD here:
http://www.mustrad.org.uk/reviews/haringhtn.htm
It sounds like I would have like to have known him.
MarkB
It’s a pretty small community up here.