An Irishman's Diary

John “Yank” Harrington is back from his first ever recording session and, if he says so himself, it went pretty smoothly. At a small studio somewhere outside Bozeman, Montana, he laid down 20 tracks for his debut CD and never once called for a second take. His small button accordion billowed like a dream, he says - but then, why wouldn’t it? Yank, after all, has been rehearsing these past 80 years.

Sitting in his neat apartment in the beat-up old mining town of Butte, in lumber shirt in faded denims, he says he has known most of the tunes for longer than he can remember. The family would have been whistling those old melodies for ever and a day.

Copper miner

He was born in Utah in 1903, the son of a copper miner from Allihies in West Cork. He doesn't remember much from the Utah years and by the time he was eight years old the mines in the state were all but played out, so the Harringtons upped sticks and hit the high road to Butte.

The place sits squat on a scarred plateau, a boisterous boom town hazy in the ochre dust of the mining operation. Butte was bone-Irish, with teeming neighbourhoods such as Cork Town and Dublin Gulch, mines called the Minnie Healy and Hungry Hill. It was 6,000 feet high in the Rockies, the air was dry and thin and young John Harrington somehow had the feeling he was home.

While the Irish dominated, there were miners here from the earth's four corners and old Butte is remembered as a place of exotic aromas. Meaderville was the Italian quarter and in the evening you'd smell salami in the air and at a bar like Bertoglio's or Dex's the grappa would flow and somebody would get maudlin and sing O Sole Mio. If you were out of dollars, the best chance of light entertainment was to head for Finntown and watch the Finns fight.

There was Govina Street, the main drag of the red-light district, where the standard trick was index-linked to a third of a miner's daily wage. You could wander down to Chicken Flats and see what was shaking in the shebeens. Or in the catacombs of the Chinatown you could buy a bead of opium for $5 and heat it over a peanut oil lamp.

Antic and lively it may have been, but Butte wasn't to everybody's taste. An early environmentalist, Glenn Chesney Quiett, came travelling through and was sickened by the town. "This appalling Dantesque wasteland," he called it, "where no flower blossoms and no seed grows, the land burnt-out and ravaged, the grim and naked hills surrounded by gaunt mountains gnawed out by the iron tooth."

Drag of home

But the cities in the east were screaming for copper. America was being electrified and the iron tooth kept gnawing all day and right through the night.

By 1919, the Harringtons had had their fill of Butte, and succumbed to the magnet drag of home. At 16, John found himself living in a cottage outside Allihies on the windwhipped tip of the Beara Peninsula. With his western drawl he was instantly nicknamed "Yank" and the name stuck.

He remembers the walk into Castletownbere for "supplies" and then the walk back home again over the wearying terrain of Slieve Miskish, a round trip of maybe 25 miles. He was around for the War of Independence and remembers it well. When the Brits were coming out from Castletown, he says, families living along the mountains would light fires to warn of the troop movement.

You mean smoke signals, Yank?

"I guess."

Like the Indians?

"Just like the injuns," he says, and cracks up.

Although he had a feel for Cork, he never quite felt settled and at the age of 24 he climbed on a boat again. He landed in New York and stayed for a while.

What did you do in New York, Yank?

"I built the subway."

Shipyards

Then it was out west again. He drifted for a while before fetching up back in Montana. During the second World War he moved to California and worked in the shipyards but he found that game a little damp. "I couldn't handle the ocean air. I came over kinda rheumy."

He went home and threw down a root in the dusty dry air of Butte. He worked for many years as a porter at the Finlan Hotel and remembers the time John and Jackie Kennedy visit. He has hundreds of Butte stories but no, he has no recollection of the one about a local boy called Bobby Knieval getting thrown in the lock-up one night and hearing the sheriff say "You're evil, Knieval," and liking the sound of that.

Yank is 97 and due a nap but he takes out the button accordion and plays very beautifully a slow take of Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms. For a sentimental moment I believe that tears well up in his eyes.