Lawrence J. McCaffrey, a ‘giant’ in Irish and Irish American studies, has died at 94

Larry McCaffrey’s life epitomized why so many immigrants made the wrenching decision to leave their homelands and all that was familiar for America.

His father John was able to go to school only up to the sixth grade in the town of Blacklion in County Cavan, Ireland. Yet he was a stirring orator who’d quote Shakespeare and entire speeches by Irish patriots while shaving.

In 1912, young John’s mother engaged in some matchmaking on his behalf. But the young woman’s family — keenly aware seven of his nine siblings had died of tuberculosis — pressured him to sign over the family farm before the wedding.

“He jumped up and left and went to America,” his son, who became a world-renowned scholar of Irish and Irish American studies, once said. “My father was a peasant, and I’m a Ph.D.”

In 1960, Lawrence J. “Larry” McCaffrey co-founded what would become the American Conference for Irish Studies, which grew into a 600-member group of international scholars.

He chaired the history department at Loyola University Chicago, where he worked from 1970 to 1991, expanding course offerings on ancient history, the Middle Ages and Western civilization to include urban ethnic history.

He “brought in people who could come in and teach Latino, Polish” studies, said Theodore Karamanski, a Loyola history professor.

Mr. McCaffrey wrote several books that became classroom texts, including the “The Irish Diaspora in America.”

Reviewing the 1976 book in The New York Times, the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, a well-known Catholic priest and novelist who was a Chicago Sun-Times contributor, called it “the best short history of the Irish in America.”

Mr. McCaffrey later revised and republished it as “The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America.”

He lectured around the world and was a consultant for PBS and on the 2002 Tom Hanks-Paul Newman Irish mobster film “Road to Perdition.”

A memorial Mass is being planned for a yet-to-be-decided date for Mr. McCaffrey, who died in May of complications from age at his Evanston home. He was 94.

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“He was the last of the first generation of American Irish scholars, sons of immigrants who served in World War II, went to college on the GI bill. They really set up, in the United States, the field of Irish American studies,” said Maureen O. Murphy, an authority on Irish immigration and professor emeritus at Hofstra University in New York. “He was a wonderful teacher with a magisterial knowledge of Irish and Irish American history.”

“He was just a giant in the history of the Irish in America,” said Andrew Wilson, a Loyola history lecturer.

“Anyone who studies Irish history in the U.S. and Irish American history in the U.S. has read Larry McCaffrey or did meet him at some point,” said Timothy G. McMahon, an associate history professor at Marquette University.

Thanks to his work, “ACIS is the largest Irish academic organization in North America, probably the world,” said the group’s president Kate Costello-Sullivan, a professor of modern Irish literature at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

Mr. McCaffrey is credited with founding the ACIS with Emmet Larkin, a professor at the University of Chicago, and Gilbert Cahill of the State University of New York College at Cortland.

They “invented [the study of] Irish history in the U.S. and created the international organization of Irish studies that still exists today at the ACIS,” Karamanski said.

Young Larry grew up in Riverdale and Dolton. His father worked for the Illinois Central Railroad. His mother, the former Alma Kelly, was from upstate New York. He graduated from St. Mary of the Assumption Grade School near 138th and Leyden, where, even in the fifth grade, he was becoming a wily contrarian skilled at using Socratic-style questioning to draw teachers into long discussions — and leaving more mundane lessons untaught.

One day, he asked a nun whether dogs could get into heaven. He believed they could. The sister did not.

To his classmates’ delight, the debate stretched on and on as he looked for inconsistencies in her logic.

She “was certain that my dad’s ‘heathen’ arguments and ‘sinful’ ways were going to land him in the state penitentiary at Joliet,” according to Mr. McCaffrey’s son Kevin.

Dogs were important to him. He always had a terrier or two around. The McCaffreys bred and showed Irish terriers. Later in life, he could often be seen walking around Evanston with his “Westies” — West Highland white terriers. In 1956, he owned a Boston terrier named Clancy. When the dog died, he was succeeded in the McCaffrey home by another Boston terrier, also named Clancy. His family has taken Clancy II in.

Mr. McCaffrey graduated from Leo High School.

During World War II, he served in the Coast Guard on a patrol frigate based out of Brooklyn, an experience that made him a lifelong fan of the Dodgers, the baseball team that moved to Los Angeles in 1958.

Mr. McCaffrey got his bachelor’s degree at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, where he met his future wife Joan. They were married from 1949 until her death in 2018. He earned a master’s at Indiana University and a doctorate at the University of Iowa.

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Before joining Loyola, he taught at Michigan State University; St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota, the University of Iowa, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Marquette University and the University of Maine.

At Marquette, his classes were so popular, according to Karamanski, “He used to give his lectures in a theater” near campus.

On one magical night in 1962 — at the height of folk music’s popularity — the Clancy Brothers dropped by his home for a late-night music session after appearing at a show in Champaign, his son said. A student journalist named Roger Ebert, the future Sun-Times film critic, “crashed the party,” Kevin McCaffrey said.

Mr. McCaffrey experienced academic anti-Catholicism but didn’t allow it to circumscribe his career. During the Kennedy-Nixon debates, “I can remember at a cocktail party at the University of Illinois a professor turned and said, `We can’t let him be president of the United States, or else we’ll end up with n------ and k----,’ ” he told the Sun-Times in 1991.

Mr. McCaffrey said he was told in 1963 that his religion was the reason he wasn’t going to be hired at the University of California Santa Barbara and, “It’s not my fault; some of my best friends are Catholic.”

He was generous with time and advice for younger academics and students.

“He was also a warm, friendly guy who could chat about a range of subjects with anyone,” said Cian T. McMahon, an associate history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“I’m an Irish nationalist, but I have no hatred for England,” Mr. McCaffrey once told the Sun-Times. “They gave us a language — which we use better than they do.”

A witty raconteur, he’d sometimes pull together groups of professors and grad students from Loyola’s history, literature, film and media studies departments for a night out at Hamilton’s Bar and Grill, a Rogers Park institution.

Wilson said Mr. McCaffrey “completely changed my life.” In 1985, he’d completed a master’s degree in Irish politics at Queens University Belfast, but his job prospects in Northern Ireland were grim. The long political conflict known as The Troubles was flaring, and sectarian violence near his County Tyrone hometown of Dungannon made it one of the points of a notorious “murder triangle.” And “the ongoing political conflict was coming very close to me personally,” he said in an online tribute to his mentor.

Wilson had read some of Mr. McCaffrey’s work, so he sent him a note.

“He pulled out every stop that he possibly could and got me over to Loyola,” said Wilson, who now teaches Irish and Irish American history at Loyola.

Mr. McCaffrey helped direct his dissertation on Irish American involvement in Northern Ireland.

“My life took a completely different trajectory in Chicago,” Wilson wrote in his tribute to Mr. McCaffrey. “I have been blessed to meet a wonderful wife, have two amazing daughters and have a job that has been infinitely rewarding. None of this would have been possible without Larry.”

Mr. McCaffrey was a member of the Leo High School Hall of Fame. In 2017, he and Bill Murray were among those inducted into the Irish American Hall of Fame at the Irish American Heritage Center, 4626 N. Knox Ave. He received an honorary doctorate in literature from the National University of Ireland in 1987.

He loved the music of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme and Big Bands; Hollywood film noir, any movie with Humphrey Bogart and “The Quiet Man.”

In addition to his son Kevin, Mr. McCaffrey is survived by his daughters Sheila and Patricia, seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

During his graveside service at Evanston’s Calvary Cemetery, his family was delighted when a coyote loped by.

Provided