In Savannah, Ga., They Have St. Paddy’s on Their Mind

Between “The Parade” and “The Book,” this gracious, old Southern city, with its shady jasmine-scented squares, has become hotter than a pepper sprout.

“The Parade” is Savannah’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which dates back to 1813 and now ranks as the world’s second-largest.

A bash of Donnybrook Fair proportions, the celebration goes on for several days, draws a half-million spectators, generates $8 million in business and decimates pyramids of beer kegs along the cobblestoned riverfront. Motels for 60 miles around are booked solid at double their regular rates.

“People always seem surprised that Savannah has any Irish at all, much less a St. Patrick’s Day parade second only to New York’s,” said Jimmy Ray, a computer forms dealer and chairman of the nonsectarian parade committee that oversees assembling 40 bands from various parts of the country as well as three dozen floats and 5,000 marchers.

“They probably think we’re deep in the Bible Belt.”

“The Book,” as everyone in Savannah calls it, is “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” John Berendt’s deliciously gossipy account of a homosexual killing in one of the grandest mansions in Savannah’s historic district. On the best-seller list for nearly three years, it has been translated into 20 languages.

It’s also the focus of daily sightseeing tours around town and lately has director Clint Eastwood lurking under the live oak trees, peering through his fingers to frame shots for the upcoming movie.

But the big business of the moment is the parade.

The greening of Savannah for the four-hour-long parade borders on the manic. Green beer, green grits, green milkshakes, green fireworks and green newsprint. Revelers sport green hair, nails, lipstick, beards, mustaches.

In green sash and blazer, Floyd Adams Jr., Savannah’s first black mayor, officially proclaims the color code of the day by pouring green dye into the ornate marble fountain in Forsyth Park. Then, like magic, all the fountains in the downtown squares gush green.

One year, the wizards of this Emerald City for a day attempted to dye the Savannah River green, but strong Atlantic tides produced only the streaky murk of a low-grade oil spill.

More recently, police banned aerosol cans of green glob after Georgia Gov. Zell Miller got sprayed and several bands canceled with complaints of ruined uniforms.

Planned as a refuge for debtors, Savannah got off to a scenic start. James Oglethorpe sailed up the Savannah River in 1733 and on a high bluff laid out the town around open squares where farmers could bring their cattle in times of danger.

“Oglethorpe banned slavery, Catholics, lawyers and rum,” observed John Duncan, a professor of local history at Armstrong Atlantic State University and known as “Flunkin’ Duncan.” “He struck out on all four. But he must have foreseen this would become a partying town, because he allowed a brewery.”

The first St. Patrick’s Day parade stepped off on March 17, 1813, when the newly formed Hibernian Society marched to the Independent Presbyterian Church. Irish militia groups marched a few years later, and by 1826, the parade had become an annual event. It has been canceled only six times since, because of war or the holiday falling within Holy Week.

The trickle of Irish Catholics who came in the 1830s to build canals and the Central of Georgia Railroad reached flood tide a decade later as the Great Potato Famine ravaged Ireland.

Uneducated and speaking only Gaelic, they were fit mostly for farm work, which already was being done by slaves.

“The Irish were left with the dangerous jobs slaves were prohibited from,” Duncan said. “If a 500-pound cotton bale broke down on the docks, you didn’t want a slave worth $1,000 underneath it. You gave the Irish widow $5 and wished her luck.”

Many Irish Were Johnny Rebs

An estimated 170,000 Irish fought on the Union side in the Civil War; many signed up on arrival in New York at recruiting tents stocked with whiskey. Uncounted thousands served with the Confederacy, where Irish blacksmiths and wheelwrights were in demand because plantation owners refused to release skilled slaves. With the port of Savannah blockaded, unemployed Irish dockers joined the Montgomery Guards, the Jasper Greens, the Irish Volunteers and other Rebel units.

Savannah escaped destruction when Gen. William “Uncle Billy” Sherman cut his 60-mile-wide swath of burned plantations and slaughtered cattle from Atlanta to the sea. Mayor Richard Arnold and his aldermen rode out the Augusta road to surrender the city but walked most of the way after a passing Confederate cavalry unit relieved them of their horses.

Sherman camped out in the sumptuous, still-standing home of cotton broker Charles Green and on Dec. 22, 1864, telegraphed President Lincoln:

“I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”

The following March 17 saw two parades. Sherman’s troops marched along Bay Street behind green banners, wearing pine twigs in their blue caps. A few squares away the Irish societies, their ranks thinned by members off fighting in Confederate gray, filed in solemn procession to high Mass at St. Patrick’s Church.

Some children of the recently freed slaves raced across the park to catch the regimental band of the 20th Connecticut Volunteers blaring forth “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” but they were chased away by little white boys wielding sticks. They fought back with a hail of pebbles. Adults of both races decided against joining in when a company of black Union soldiers turned into the park.

This year’s parade, the 173rd, will feature a mounted troop of African Americans from Atlanta reenacting the Buffalo Soldiers, the famed black troops who served in the West after the Civil War. Their appearance is an interesting link with Savannah’s past. For two decades, beginning in 1897, the parade was led by Middleton’s Cornet Band, superb black musicians renowned for their repertoire of Irish airs.

“Diversity is one of Savannah’s great strengths,” Duncan said. “We have many threads in our tapestry.”

Savannah’s St. Patrick’s parade is probably the only one anywhere in which the Masonic order, once anathema to the Catholic hierarchy for oaths sworn against the pope, takes a prominent part. Shriners from Alee Temple belly-dance up the street, ride tiny motorcycles and, as Keystone Kops, load up a “Paddy Wagon” with red-wigged miscreants, which gets up the dander of some Irish participants.

“They might at least call it the Black Maria, which would be less offensive, but it’s all harmless tomfoolery,” conceded Msgr. Daniel J. Bourke, 87, grand marshal of this year’s parade. He arrived from Dublin in 1934 as a newly ordained priest and has never missed an opportunity to march in Savannah’s parade “because there’s nothing like this in all Ireland.”

Only in Savannah could a St. Patrick’s Day parade empty out at a British pub, the Six Pence. Proprietress Wendy Snowden hangs out a huge Irish flag, removes her Royal Doulton Toby jugs of Winnie, Monty and periwigged barristers from behind the bar, takes down the 300-year-old English coaching horns and harness from the walls and lifts out the bay window to serve restorative Irish coffees and pints of stout to the weary marchers.

“This is our biggest holiday,” Wendy allowed. “It’s magic, it’s special, it’s a nightmare. I drop down exhausted when it’s over, but I love it.”

“The Book” and “The Parade” almost merged two years ago. A gay group petitioned for a float featuring the author riding a giant replica of the book jacket from which rose a pillar enthroning the Lady Chablis, a black female impersonator who is one of the campier characters depicted.

The parade committee nimbly step-danced around the homosexual issue battled in the courts by the New York and Boston parade organizers by pleading a crunch of too many marchers. Several other applicants had been turned down, and indeed in recent years, the looping, three-mile-long parade route has been changed several times because the parade’s head was overrunning its tail.

“Wetting the shamrock” has been a local tradition and a persistent problem with observing the saint’s feast day. As far back as 1850, the organizers congratulated themselves on “the day passing harmoniously with no incident occurring to mar its enjoyment.”

‘Moral Standards’ Campaign Failed

For a decade or so after the Civil War, the St. Patrick’s Total Abstinence Society joined the line of march “to raise the moral standards,” but eventually gave up.

In recent years college kids on spring break, wearing T-shirts proclaiming “I Fear No Beer” and “Take Me Drunk, I’m Home,” have been blamed for turning the celebration into a “redneck Mardi Gras.”

River Street, where several bars brag of tapping 200 kegs of beer and distributors stockpile their wares in waiting refrigerated trucks, has been nominated for the Guinness Book of Records for “the most beer consumed in one block in a single day.”

Drunken rowdyism made Savannah’s green scene so notorious that bands declined invitations, and one year, the Catholic clergy yanked parochial schools from the parade. Alarmed, the parade committee banned drinking in the ranks and met with city leaders to bring about “sobering ordinances” that forbade beer coolers in the parade area, shut off outdoor beer sales after 1 a.m. and put a two-drink limit on take-out orders.

Arrests for disorderly conduct and urinating in public declined to about 60 from 200, and the addition of 249 portable toilets reduced damage to the squares by more than 75%--$2,500, down from more than $10,000.

Organizers offered alternatives to the mindless partying, scheduling a regatta, a golf tournament, a rugby competition that now draws 52 teams from around the country and a “feis,” a festival of Irish music, dancing and crafts.

An editorial in the Savannah Morning News praised last year’s celebration as “a study in controlled mayhem: tens of thousands of people whooping it up but with relatively few arrests.”

This leisurely paced city of 150,000 inhabitants is astonished to find itself a hot tourist town, drawing more than 5 million visitors a year. Hotels and restaurants are booming, real-estate values zooming.

The bonanza owes much to seven determined ladies who in the mid-1950s saved antebellum Davenport House less than 24 hours before it was to have been pulled down to make room for a funeral home parking lot. They formed the Historic Savannah Foundation, which has since helped restore 1,200 old mansions and carriage houses and brought to life 22 decaying squares.

“And whether you like ‘Midnight’ or not, the book has brought quality tourists to Savannah. You know: people who read,” said Duncan, who lives across Monterey Square from the Mercer House, where antiques dealer Jim Williams fatally shot street hustler Danny Hansford. “Now I suppose when the movie comes out, we’ll get a totally different influx.”

Hollwood Likes Savannah’s Style

Movie makers cotton to Savannah. More than 20 recent films were shot here, bringing such stars as Julia Roberts, Robert Duval, Demi Moore and Rosie O’Donnell to the family-style breakfast table in Mrs. Wilkes’ boarding house, a favorite with locals. “Forrest Gump” opens with Tom Hanks on a bench in oak-canopied Chippewa Square. Historic Williams House became a Boston townhouse in “Glory.”

Director Robert Altman has been in town scouting locations for “The Gingerbread Man,” which stars Kenneth Branagh in thriller-writer John Grisham’s first original screenplay. The city itself stars in that enduring soap “Savannah.”

Savannahians now regard answering a casting call for extras as nearly equal in snob appeal to joining the select Married Women’s Card Club or the exclusive Oglethorpe Club.

Parading or preening itself for pictures, “that gently mannered city by the sea,” as Margaret Mitchell called Savannah in “Gone With the Wind,” has outdone even dauntless Scarlett O’Hara by embracing yesterday as another day for salvaging tomorrow.