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Still Kicking: Saint Patrick's Day in Butte, Montana
| Article
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10799 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
2,327 Words |
| Author
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Joe Bensen
Joe Bensen is a freelance photojournalist based in Montana. |
It's Saint Patrick's Day in Butte, and you can't get in the door at Maloney's bar, at least not without help and courage. Down at Charlie's New Deal bar, things are slightly quieter, though there isn't enough room to shoot pool. At the M&M, Butte's showcase of rough-edged rowdiness, it's wall-to-wall festivity; the space between the lunch counter and adjacent bar is a single, pulsating mass of humanity.
Over at the knights of Columbus hall, the crowd is not so densely packed. People dance to jukebox rock and roll and country swing, or sing along to Irish tunes. On the walls are membership rolls, with names like Boyle, Noonan, Sweeney, McGrath; there is an occasional Ossello or Badonovic but most are more like Monahan, Hanratty, and Shea. One bartender wears a shamrock-blazoned, Kelly green T-shirt that proclaims "Butte: City of Champions": the other wears a green derby.
Whoever wishes to may enter Butte's Saint Patrick's Day parade. Along with the expected array of floats, marching bands, vintage cars, and political figures, there is always a colorful (if somewhat ragtag) contingent of spray-painted, ribbon-festooned junker cars and pickups, generally packed with rowdy teens. Sunshine or storm, the parade winds its way through Butte's old uptown; they've held this parade in blizzards and with temperatures below zero.
Saint Patrick's Day in the old mining city is classic, traditional Butte wildness, eccentricity, and excess. But this is far more than just a Rocky Mountain Mardi Gras. Saint Pat's is a time of home coming for former residents, now moved on to another life beyond Silver Bow County. It's also an opportunity for Butte to roll up its sleeves and assert its vigor, to let the world know that in spite of the depression caused by the collapse of copper mining here, Butte will persevere.
To the rest of Montana, Butte has always been an anomaly, somehow different from "Big Sky." For ninety years Butte dominated the state in every arena from politics and economics to high school athletics. While the rest of Montana looked upon Butte with a combination of distrust, dislike, fear, and respect, Butte always held itself aloof, savoring the distinction. This was "Butte, America" a rugged, gritty, immigrant industrial city, a place where real men wore work boots and work caps, not cowboy boots and Stetsons, where the last Chinese tong wars in America took place, where all-out brawls between Irish miners and everybody else could break out in the midst of a Saint Patrick's Day parade, where cowboys got beaten up on
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