Nation’s Irish Honor St. Patrick; lst Woman Leads N.Y. Parade

Dorothy Hayden Cudahy, the first woman grand marshal in the 228-year history of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, said she was “walking on air” ahead of 150,000 marchers Friday on New York’s 5th Avenue.

Across the country, bars were jammed with patrons drinking beer and Irish whiskey and eating corned beef and cabbage. The festivities even embraced the nation’s space program when engineers tracking the shuttle Discovery changed their giant map from blue to green.

The Chicago River and fountains in Savannah, Ga., ran green, and celebrants sipped green tea at the San Francisco Zoo.

In Providence, R.I., state Rep. Patrick Kennedy was the featured speaker at a traditional St. Patrick’s Day dinner where his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and his great-grandfather, Boston Mayor John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, once spoke.

Sponsors of the New York parade, the nation’s largest and oldest St. Patrick’s Day march, estimated that nearly 2 million people gathered along the route with temperatures in the 60s.

Interspersed among the Irish county associations, fraternal and civic organizations and 186 marching bands, with their skirling bagpipes and fifes and drums, were marchers carrying “England Get Out of Ireland” banners.

The happiest marcher of all was Cudahy, 66, known as the First Lady of Irish Radio because of a local radio program she has been host of for more than 40 years.

An estimated 400,000 people lined the downtown Chicago parade route in a light rain. Forty thousand marchers and more than 200 floats and marching units moved down Dearborn Street.

In Savannah, reporters estimated that 250,000 people watched 300 units in the nation’s second-largest St. Patrick’s parade. The city’s 165th parade also honors Irish immigrants who entered the United States through the East Coast port.

The San Francisco Zoo held a St. Patrick’s Day Tea Tour, serving green tea and scones.

Hundreds of thousands of Irish-Americans also marched Friday in Kansas City and Atlanta.