by Pierre Ratte
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! A festive time in Healdsburg since 1995, with its noisy dawn parade. St. Patrick’s Day in the United States has many traditions: parades, green beer, corned beef and cabbage dinners, wearing green clothing, and celebrating Irish heritages. Everybody is honorifically Irish on St. Paddy’s Day, getting a chance to participate and enjoy the Luck of the Irish.
It’s not certain where the expression “Luck of the Irish” originated. Perhaps Celtic traditions. Perhaps notable successes of American Irish miners finding gold in the 1800s. Many immigrants worked digging and mining while moving west chasing rainbow dreams to proverbial pots of gold. Hard work? Right place, right time? Luck?
Fun facts: The chances of finding a four-leaf clover are reportedly about 1 in 5,000. Luck is involved. Clovers, or trefoils, can have more than three leaves. Five-leaf clovers are two times rarer than four-leaf, and the most leaves ever found on a clover was 63, discovered in Japan in 2023.
St. Patrick is not a canonized saint. He lived for 75 years, from 387 to 461 A.D., before canonization councils. Likely born in Britain or Scotland to Roman parents, at age 16 he was captured and taken by Irish pirates raiding his parents’ estate. He lived as a slave and shepherd for six years before escaping. He returned to Ireland, the land of his captivity, to preach the Gospel, and used the three-leaf clover to explain the Holy Trinity.
Irish people formed a large part of America’s immigrant population. Approximately 2 million new emigres came between 1840 and 1860, fleeing the Great Famine of the 1840s.
In 1847, approximately 40,000 Irish settlers arrived in Boston, whose population was 116,000. The Kennedy family was part of this migration, arriving in 1849. By 1949, Joseph Kennedy is said to have been worth $180 million; his means to wealth included shorting the stock market, investing in real estate, holding exclusive importing rights to Dewars scotch and Gordon’s gin, and consolidating small movie studios for efficiency gains.
Alfa Romeo uses a four-leaf clover as an emblem on its racing cars. SpaceX embroiders four-leaf clovers on flight patches. Perhaps the clover’s luck played a role returning astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams from 10 months in the International Space Station. Welcome home!
