Reunions a sober side of Savannah St. Patrick's party

SAVANNAH, Ga. -- Frank Rossiter has a zest for St. Patrick's Day that has little to do with green beer -- though he does have a fondness for Guinness and Harp.

It's a passion for his family, starting with his great-grandfather who came to coastal Georgia 153 years ago from Ireland.

Three generations of Rossiters -- more than 40 from across the country -- will spend Monday in Savannah. First, they'll go to morning Mass. Then they'll march in the nation's second-largest St. Patrick's Day parade, chanting "R-O-double-S-I-T-E-R spells Rossiter! Proud of all the Irish blood that's in me!"

The day is an ironclad ritual of reunions. Missed gatherings at Thanksgiving or Christmas may be tolerated -- but not on St. Pat's.

"St. Patrick's Day IS family," said Rossiter, a pediatrician. "You relive your own childhood, you establish traditions for your children and your children's children. And it goes on and on."

But for hundreds of thousands of others, many of them not even remotely Irish, St. Patrick's Day in Savannah is nothing more than the biggest post-Mardi Gras party.

The parade was started 179 years ago by Irish immigrants who came to Savannah seeking work at its ports and rail yards. The roster of parade organizers is still full of names such as Connolly and Doyle, Fahey and Finnegan, Kenneally and Kilpatrick, Mahany and O'Leary.

"I like to describe it as sort of a true celebration of Irish heritage," said David Gleeson, a history professor at the College of Charleston who's both an Irish native and former Savannah resident.

"It is social and there is food and drink involved," Gleeson said. "But there's very much emphasis on the things that helped the Irish survive over here -- family, church, community and societies."

Still, Savannah has the image on St. Patrick's Day of an anything-goes booze fest. The 300,000 visitors make every March 17 the biggest tourist day of the year for a city where tourism is the second-largest industry.

"The celebration has been overshadowed by the revelry," said Patrick Rossiter, Frank Rossiter's younger brother. "The bottom line is so many people don't have a clue about the actual celebration."

For those who grew up Ireland, where sprigs of shamrock were pinned to lapels and families went to church, the party atmosphere provides a bit of culture shock.

"When I first came to the United States, I was absolutely surprised with it," said Bishop J. Kevin Boland of the Catholic Diocese of Savannah, who grew up in County Cork, Ireland, and came to Georgia in 1959.

"I saw green hair, green beer, green grits. It was absolutely foreign to me. I couldn't identify with it."

Still, traditionalists who eschew the day's drunken excesses have been known to make a toast themselves.

There's Rossiter, with his fondness for Guinness and Harp and his cabinet full of cocktail glasses from Irish-toasting Hibernian Society.

And Gene Hahne, a Savannah native now living in Houston, who tips a glass every year to his late uncle, James Patrick Cavanaugh Jr. The men marched in the parade for a half-century, before Cavanaugh died six years ago.

"When he passed away, it was two weeks before St. Paddy's and we buried him in his green coat and derby," Hahne said. "So before every parade we have a toast to him."