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Jack Brady.. the name and face have just flashed across my mind. He was a carpenter by trade, when there was any carpentry to do.
Valley Rangers of old perform!
That man could stand there on the roadway,
look at his audience and on the spot, make up stories about them that
were funnier than anything you would see in the pictures. When I see
what passes for comedy nowadays, many’s the time I say to myself, ‘If
only Jack Brady was alive now, he’d leave them for dead’.
There are few dancers now that could come up
to Joey Patterson of Number 46. He was also centre-forward with the
Valley rangers soccer team. His father was a blacksmith and his sister
May Liza was the prettiest girl in the street. Except for Lily and
Maureen McAleavey of Number 50. They were more my age.
Joey could tap-dance as well as Fred Astaire
– in his ordinary shoes; in his football boots, even! And him only an
ordinary working chap. But our street was full of talent.
Jamesie Brothers – who later went to America
– could perform such stunts on his Raleigh bicycle. He could stand on
one foot on the saddle and it moving, and steer with his other foot.
He could even stand on his head on the saddle while the bike was
moving. He could sit on the handlebars and pedal the bike in circles,
forwards or backwards.
The first person I ever heard playing the
zither was Tish Loughran, Peter’s wife. You could listen to her all
night. How they come back to me, all those warm, lovely people.
Mary McGuigan reminds me that her
father-in-law Gabriel once played drums with the Vincent Lowe Trio.
That chap could tap out a rhythm on the drums, cymbals and clog-box
that would galvanize a skeleton.
Self-taught too. By the way, Gabriel didn’t
live in Cecil Street. It was just most, not all of the town’s talent
that resided in Cecil Street! Do you remember Dermot McConville, the
fiddler and Kathleen Morgan the pianist? Aye the talent was here, when
I was a boy! |
Reminiscence 
