She Had Luck of the Irish--and Patience of a Saint

The first woman named as grand marshal of New York’s famed St. Patrick’s Day parade credits her selection to the luck of the Irish. “I was lucky, just lucky. God was with me,” said an ecstatic Dorothy Hayden Cudahy, who won the post after being turned down for three straight years. Cudahy bears no ill will toward those who, for 226 years, allowed New York’s biggest parade to march down 5th Avenue without a colleen at the helm. But she is less forgiving about another event unfolding in New York, the arrival of Princess Diana for a three-day visit to promote British business. Cudahy vowed to be among those protesting British policy in Northern Ireland at a demonstration outside the Brooklyn Academy, where Princess Diana was to attend a concert. “We would like to inform the princess that not everybody is very happy with the royal family . . . maybe she will go over to the North and see why we want the soldiers out of Northern Ireland,” said Cudahy, 66, known in New York as the first lady of Irish radio for the “Irish Memories” program she has hosted on local stations for more than 45 years.

--Over at the Statehouse in Massachusetts, a beaming Gov. Michael S. Dukakis was handing out the cigars and accepting congratulations on the birth of his first grandchild. Alexandra Jane Dukakis was delivered safely after a difficult pregnancy that forced her mother, Lisa Dukakis, 33, to remain in bed for months and abandon the presidential campaign that occupied the rest of the family for most of 1988. The new father, John Dukakis, 30, Kitty Dukakis’ son from her first marriage, managed the Southern primaries for the Dukakis campaign.

--The New York City Corrections Department, learning that it had an electrical engineer in its midst with the incarceration of subway gunman Bernhard H. Goetz, has put his training to work repairing walkie-talkies and radios used by the department. Officials report that Goetz, serving a one-year sentence for carrying an unlicensed gun in the shooting of four teen-agers he said were planning to rob him, is doing an excellent job. His skills reportedly led the officials to draft Goetz for a job not normally turned over to an inmate. His wages? Fifty cents an hour.