HUGHIE: PREFACE

Jerry Harkins

Hughie is a work of fiction in process. However, some parts of the story are true and some others are sort of true. There really was a Father Ed McGlynn and he really was a radical social reformer. There also really was an Archbishop Corrigan who really was something of a prig—all you have to do is look at his picture in Wikipedia. He did get McGlynn excommunicated for a time, he was a notorious sycophant, and he never did get a red hat. He did, however, secure a spot in the crypt under the main altar at Saint Paddy’s.

The title character, Big Hugh, is based roughly on my paternal grandfather, Hugh Jerome Harkins, who almost certainly did not assassinate a holy priest or anyone else but, like many Irish immigrants of his generation, liked people to think that he’d been forced to leave the old country one step ahead of the hangman. I suspect they thought that more heroic than admitting that they were dispossessed by simple economics.

The Irish love their stories which never lose anything in the retelling. Still, my grandfather was a legend. Eighteen years after his death, I had a summer job as a “runner” for an oil company headquartered in Rockefeller Center. One afternoon, I delivered a small package to the Farrell Lines docks in Brooklyn. The old man at the Receiving Desk noticed my name on the papers and wondered if perhaps I was related to Hugh Jerome. Learning the truth, he gathered some of the men and we adjourned to a local bar where they regaled me with stories about some of his exploits. A few of these may have found their way into this manuscript but I make no case for their historical authenticity.

I had considered writing an alternative history about what Brooklyn would have become had it not been “consolidated” with New York on January 1, 1898. Consolidation was a goo-goo idea and it is certainly true that New York—city and state—were in need of a dose of that uncorrupted goo-goo fresh air. They still are. As has often been the case, however, the reformers’ perch on the moral high ground led to a long series of unintended consequences the net result of which is depressing.

All of this is by way of keeping the lawyers happy by claiming fictional status for the work that follows.  I justify that claim by admitting reliance on family stories which are invariably less reliable that even eyewitness testimony.  No matter.  What is important in history is not objective truth but what people believe is true.