A Ribbon of Green

The First Word

Mike McGuire talked about growing up in a small town in northwest Ohio where his family owned a small grocery store. “Everything I needed to know about life I learned there,” he said.  He recalled his father quietly slipping a man money to buy groceries for Thanksgiving, and said observing his parents in their day-to-day dealing with customers, some of whom had fallen on hard times, taught him compassion.

“You have to go, and you have to do well.” How many young Irish boys and girls left lreland to those words?
Their own survival and often-times the survival of their family back home depended on it.

Like Molly, they kept on keeping on when the going got tough and that’s the stuff that America is built on. And that’s the stuff, the “can-do attitude” that spurred Liam Casey (see our cover story) to international success and our Business 100 to embrace leadership roles.

When Katherine Irwin Thomas, a fiddler from Tennessee whose family emigrated from County Armagh in the early 1700s, took the stage to play a soulful Irish tune, it was easy to imagine a window onto the past opening and  Molly and the other ancestors entering the room.  Amidst the sailing voice of Thomas’ fiddle, one could almost hear them whisper, “You did good.”

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