It's St. Patrick's day and I am thinking about Gaga, or Gagie, as we called her. When one of her grandchildren learned to speak he said GAGA instead of Granma and the name stuck. She really was named Catherine Flood, born in Lietrem Ireland in the 1880s. She was the only grandparent I knew, the others were gone by the time I was born.
My dad tells me that in the 1920's she belonged to a society of Irish women that had moved to America and they would ship clothes and supplies back to the old country. Once my grandma shipped a box of clothes with a revolver, I guess so they could use it against the Brits.
My cousins had a tape recorder in 1960 and recorded Gagie with it-I have those old scratchy recordings of here singing a song called "Mr. Frog" and talking about JFK. "It'll take a BIG man to defeat the russians" she was saying about Jack Kennedy.
This Sunday on my radio show I think I will play some of those tapes.
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