Celebrating Irish contributions to our way of life

We've sometimes lamented the stripping of the "German" label from McCook's annual Heritage Days celebration, feeling that it would be better to focus on our community's predominant ancestry, German, would be better than conducting some sort of generic activity.

According to the Census Bureau, about 3,400 of us, 44.6 percent, claim German ancestry, although none of us have to declare forbearers of any particular country.

It doesn't seem unreasonable, therefore, to dedicate one day a year, today in fact, to the Irish, who comprise more than a thousand McCook residents, about 14 percent.

Throw in the Scotch-Irish (who may or may not welcome the association), another 1.5 percent, and there's even more reason to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

While many of McCook's early German settlers came here from Russia, we don't know the particulars for the Irish, although they may have accompanied the railroad or immigrated from eastern cities as the rest of the population expanded west.

St. Patrick's Church and School are the two most prominent representations of the Irish culture in McCook, but other contributions are all around us.

We all drive mass-produced automobiles, and if they happen to be Fords, we owe much to the son of an Irish immigrant, Henry Ford, whose low-priced automobile created our modern way of life with its suburbs, interstate highways and ease of mobility.

Submarine warfare played an important part in both World Wars, and continues to be key to our national defense -- a technology we owe to John Philip Holland from Clare, Ireland.

Modern agriculture could never exist without tractors, including one of the earliest, invented by Harry Ferguson of Northern Ireland, who cut his teeth on bicycle repair and invented the first four-wheel drive Formula One racing car as well as the Ferguson tractor.

When Winston Churchill put out a call for a machine capable of withstanding rifle fire, flattening barbed wire fences and rolling over no-man's land, Irishman Walter Gordon Wilson responded by inventing the modern tank.

Color photography is standard with the simplest cellular phone, but John Joly from County Down was among the first to create a color photograph, back in 1894, although it didn't catch on for many years.

Disneyland popularized the monorail, but Louis Brennan from Mayo, Ireland, invented it back in 1903, using a locomotive kept upright by a gyrostat.

Speaking of cell phones, Irish Chemist Dr. James J. Drumm invented the nickel zinc battery that powers them today. He installed early nickel zinc batteries in four two-car railway sets between 1932 and 1948 for use on the Dublin-Bray railway line.

Nearly unlimited energy resulted from the work of Irish physicist Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton, who won the Nobel Prize for his work with John Cockcroft as the first to artificially split the atom.

Sir Hans Sloane discovered cocoa when he visited Jamaica, watching the locals drink it mixed with water. He brought it back to England, mixed it with milk and by the 19th century, Cadburys was selling tins of Soane's drinking chocolate.

Of course, say St. Patrick's Day and many of us will think of another Irish contribution to modern culture: Guinness.

Enough said.