Irish Will March to 4 Different Drummers

Los Angeles County, for many years one of the few major metropolitan areas without a St. Patrick’s Day parade, will have four Irish celebrations in the area this weekend, so many that a fifth parade planned for Sunday along Wilshire Boulevard was canceled at the last moment after months of bitter rivalry.

After weeks of name-calling between organizers of the competing parades on Wilshire Boulevard and Spring Street, the Wilshire parade directors voted Tuesday night to abandon the effort and join the Spring Street parade Saturday morning.

In addition, there is to be a lavish production in Beverly Hills on Sunday, and parades are planned in Pasadena and Redondo Beach.

Complaining that all the parades are too commercial and too little Irish, some Irish-American groups began a movement last month to organize yet another parade, this one in Hollywood. Their hopes died for lack of time, but they are already planning for next year.

Pasadena’s parade tradition began four years ago. But except for an experiment in 1962, there was none in Los Angeles until last year. A makeshift alliance of Irish-American groups, radio talk show hosts and Spring Street business interests staged a downtown parade that drew about 1,000 participants and 10,000 spectators.

But the organizers, divided by personality conflicts, splintered into rival groups that traded insults while they planned to stage competing parades this year, until the Wilshire group folded.

“There were just too many parades,” said Leonard Ashmore, the Wilshire parade’s chief organizer. “We just couldn’t get the sponsors we needed.”

Ashmore, who for weeks has accused the Spring Street organizers of putting together a commercial event with no Irish-American support just to make money for downtown businesses, charged that he was betrayed and pushed aside by others on the Wilshire parade committee “who were in with that Spring Street bunch all along.”

He said he would have nothing to do with the movement to join the other parade, led by Chris O’Shea, president of the Harp and Shamrock Club.

“We’re glad to see them come home again,” said Marshall Wright, coordinator of the Spring Street parade. “Sometimes you win the war by sitting back and doing nothing.”

The combined effort on Spring Street “is going to be a heck of a long parade,” he said, with about 3,000 participants in about 135 entries.

The parade will have two queens--Sheila Cleary of Burbank from the Wilshire group and soap opera actress Karen Kelly from the original Spring Street lineup, one of the few Hollywood Irish who did not join the Beverly Hills parade, which other organizers complained was drying up the pool of Celtic-named celebrities.

“The Beverly Hills crowd took nearly every damn actor and actress in town,” complained Ashmore, who folded his parade without ever finding a celebrity to serve as honorary grand marshal.

Beverly Hills parade organizers credited their grand marshal, Ed McMahon, straight man on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” with lining up a roster of more than 50 celebrities, including former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Sr., Pierce Brosnan, Joanna Cassidy, Gene Kelley, Fred MacMurray, Rory Calhoun, Meredith MacRae, Jennifer O’Neill, John Tunney and Jimmy Stewart.

The Beverly Hills parade, organized by Irish-born restaurant owner Jimmy Murphy, has 110 units, including a float from Giorgio’s boutique that will spray the route with perfume worth a claimed $200 an ounce. Rodeo Drive will be carpeted in green--”not just a painted green stripe like in New York, but covered in a custom-woven Kelly green carpet,” a spokeswoman said.

City Councilman Art Snyder, the great-grandson of an Irish Republican Army rebel hanged by the British who describes himself as “the city’s official Irishman,” said he and some others in the organized Irish-American community are boycotting all the parades. He called them “commercial endeavors with little concern for Irish roots.”

‘Almost Fell Apart’

The organization of the Spring Street parade “almost fell apart last year,” Snyder said, in disputes between Irish ethnics and Spring Street business leaders.

“A couple of those guys almost got punched in the nose after somebody suggested having a green pig in the parade,” Snyder said. In ethnic slurs, Irish-Americans are sometimes referred to as pigs.

Snyder said he will attend only the official City Hall celebration next Tuesday that he organized.

Ashmore, a Canoga Park photographer, and Wright, a retired hotel executive who lives in Acton, headed the Spring Street parade last year and quarrelled. During recent weeks, the feud degenerated into name-calling by Wright and Ashmore.

Ashmore distributed flyers to Irish-American groups charging that rival parade organizers were not of Irish descent. “Wright once told me he’s really Jewish,” said Ashmore, who conceded that he is half Lithuanian himself.

“This is ridiculous,” Wright replied. “I’m as Irish as any of them. What do I have to do, cut my arm and bleed green?”

‘Everybody Is Irish’

Ashmore said the Spring Street theme, “Everybody is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day,” is an attempt “to steal the Irish holiday from the Irish.” He pointed especially to statements such as Wright’s suggestion that the parade incorporate “a mariachi band from the Mexican community wearing green sombreros, or a green dragon from Chinatown.”

Leaders of some Irish-American groups said they favor a movement to organize a parade in Hollywood on the New York model, run by a nonprofit corporation with a council of directors from Irish ethnic groups, such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

An attempt to organize such a parade, which would have been the sixth this weekend, was made last month, at the suggestion of Snyder and led in part by Kelly O’Brien, president of the Irish-American Bar Assn. of California.

O’Brien said that although there was not enough time this year, “the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce said they’d be very glad to have us,” and “next year we hope to resolve this problem of the splinter groups” by organizing a new parade.

“This is all looking kind of childish by now, and we’re afraid it’s going to be a black mark on the Irish community,” said an officer in several Irish-American groups. He said he fears “the public will perceive this as one of those stereotypes of the Irish, that we’re always drunk and fighting and can’t get along together.”

THE PARADE ROUTES

Those who want to join in the wearing of the green have their choice of at least five parades and one official ceremony.

The Spring Street parade will step off at 10 a.m. Saturday and will cover about a mile from 9th Street in downtown Los Angeles to City Hall, where ceremonies will be held. It will be followed by an “international Irish stew cook-off” at Irwin’s Restaurant on Spring Street and an Irish fair at 5th and Spring streets.

The Beverly Hills parade will begin at noon Sunday at Wilshire Boulevard and Little Santa Monica Boulevard, moving eastward on Wilshire and winding around Dayton Way, Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica Boulevard to Crescent Drive.

The Pasadena parade--the oldest, at four years--will begin at noon Saturday on Green Street (“Yes, we chose it for the name,” said a spokeswoman for the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce), covering about seven blocks from Hill Avenue to Mentor Avenue.

The Redondo Beach parade will begin at 8 a.m. Saturday at Torrance Beach on the Esplanade and travel about two miles down the Esplanade to Veterans Park and will be followed by a daylong fair at Alta Vista Park.

The Los Angeles City Hall ceremony will begin at 10 a.m. Tuesday with the reading of a proclamation in the council chamber and will include “Irish of the Year” awards, bagpipers and dancers. At 11:30 a.m. there will be the presentation of the Irish flag, speeches and music on the 1st Street steps of City Hall.