From the Bottom Up : The Story of the Irish in Kansas City

For a lonesome immigrant, home was the country he or she left behind. For many of us Irish-Americans, our image of home involves a parish, a school and the house we grew up in. Having grown up as part of an extended Catholic family in a neighborhood that included lots of other Irish-American families, when I think of "home," I picture a front porch, a rusty glider, a postage-stamp yard with a patch or two of grass, and a church bell tower poking up over yonder trees. There are a modest number of children - usually no more than eight or 10 - living in that three-bedroom house with one full bath and a shower in the basement. A newborn baby's upstairs whaaing. A 2-year-old's yelling from the downstairs bathroom that she's gotta go but can't 'cause there's a dirty diaper "soaking" in the toilet. And a 4-year-old's stuck in the clothes chute. But it's okay, because some helpful neighborhood kids are pulling at his feet, and a couple of older brothers are at the second-floor hatch with a bottle of Wesson Oil. Mom's locked in the laundry room saying the Our Father. Home is where my brothers and I perfected living-room baseball, in which bouncing a ping-pong ball off the portrait of Pope Pius X was an automatic double. Home is where we cut out the middle of a holy card and put mom's picture in it. Home is where she still keeps that holy card, framed on the wall. Having someplace to call home is important. And Kansas City has been a good and true home for generations of Irish in America