I grew up in a small town with a volunteer fire department. I remember hearing the fire horn blast through out the town, in various patterns, and checking the piece of cardboard that hung in the hallway which explained the sequence of blasts used to describe where the fire was. I loved going to firemen’s musters, and even today, I live in a town with a volunteer fire department.

I grew up in an Irish family. As best as I can tell, my great great grandfather, John Hynes, showed up in Boston around the time of the great potato famine. He married a girl from an old New England family, and by the time I came around, there weren’t many Irish traditions being passed on.

I think of this as I remember the father of a good friend from college, T. Francis Stanton, who passed away this week. He was a retired Cleveland firefighter and an Irishman through and through. He had the gift of gab that went beyond anything you could get from kissing the Blarney stone and was always up for a practical joke. My friend Marty would often recount stories of some of his antics.

For example, there is the story of when some Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door. T.Francis went to the door, talked to them for a few minutes and excused himself saying he had something to attend to and that they should come back in half an hour. Sure enough, half an hour later, the Jehovah’s Witnesses returned, eager to make a convert, and T. Francis welcomed them. When they made a comment about having come back, T. Francis appeared confused. He played that up for a little bit, and finally said, “Oh, you must have been speaking with my identical twin brother”. They were amazed at how much T. Francis looked like his twin brother and he regaled them with stories about times when the two of them had been confused and then sent them on their way. Of course, T. Francis didn’t have an identical twin brother and the family watched from another room and snickered.

As with any good Irish story, it’s probably changed a bit from what happened as my friend Marty told it to me and then through me recounting it here, but that’s part of what makes good Irish stories good.

Marty and I were roommates in New York City soon after college, and with Marty, I went to visit T. Francis’ brother who had become a monk at the Trappist Monastery in Kentucky. T. Francis’ other brother Jim, a successful businessman, would come to New York sometimes and Marty and I would meet him at some fancy restaurant. Thinking about the three of them, it almost sounds like a set up for another T. Francis story, Three Irishmen walk into a bar, a firefighter, a monk, and a business man. It makes me think of one of my favorite Irish jokes that I learned from Marty, Three Irishmen walk out of a bar….

My Irish great great grandfather married a woman of proper New England upbringing, and from that proper New England mindset, it feels perhaps a little bit inappropriate to be telling jokes about drinking as part of remembering a great man who has passed. However, I still have enough of my Irish ancestry, revitalized through my friendship with Marty to believe that instead of being all prim and proper, the best way to remember his dad is to jovially tell some stories, and when Marty and I see each other again, to hoist a pint in the memory of a great Irishman.