Flanagan Family Oral Histories: Edward "Danny" Flanagan

Danny Flanagan, one of the eldest Flanagan grandchildren, provided a helpful perspective as part of the history. He had asked some of the same questions as I had, such as "Why do family conversations always go back to Mary Cushing Flanagan while John H. Flanagan doesn't get mentioned much?" Danny talked with family and acquaintances and reflected on his own upbringing to reach some answers. What struck me as we talked is that although we came from different generations, when Danny talked about guilt in religion and family loyalty, I understood. Not that I uncovered everything. I didn't know Danny's first name wasn't Danny. It's Edward. I found that while visiting him while he was hospitalized and listed under Edward Daniel Flanagan. Everyone called him Danny, so I didn't stop to ask his full given name in the interview, which was held in Rockland, Maine on January 5, 1991.

Dan Flanagan at the 2006 Flanagan family golf tournament at the Rockland Municipal Golf Course in Rockland, August 2006


I met a guy down at Campbell's Market down at the South End one time and he said to me, "Aren't you Jim Flanagan's son?"

And I said yes.

"Jesus, I grew up with Jim on Willow Street," he said. "What a crazy bastard!"

I asked, "What do you mean?"

"In the middle of winter," he said. "He used to put on his shorts and t-shirt on with no shoes and run up and down Willow Street when it was 30 below zero just to prove he was more macho than the rest of the guys."

I said, "Well, I guess he was probably trying to outdo his brothers because they were all competing against each other."

"Well that was a helluva way to do it!" he said.

I forget the guy's name.

I could just picture Dad doing that. As I recall, when we were kids we would always tell him we could outrun him and he'd take us right on Willow Street and we'd run dashes all the way up to Broadway and back. And he always won. He was faster than Hell. And he must have been in his forties then and we thought we could outrun him.

All I ever heard growing up was all these glowing stories about my grandmother and what a charitable lady she was and how much she contributed to the community. I just could never figure out how she could do that with 14 kids.

I talked a lot to my father's friends and they'd go over to 41 (Willow) and in they came. She had this big table in the kitchen with benches around it. She'd not only sit the Flanagans there, but everybody else who was visiting. And everybody got fed. Dick French was telling me about this.

That's where my father must have got that from. During the winter, he was the director of the Rockland Rec Center. He always liked the underdog, the poor kids who didn't have anything.

I can recall there was one family in Rockland that was very, very poor and alcoholism was rampant in the family and the kids were like street urchins. He'd haul them into the Rec Center, let them play ball for a while, and then he'd make sure they all got a shower. He'd go in there and pick out the nits out of their hair with a comb. I remember him getting the nits out of their hair and then give them shampoos to kill the lice.

They had t-shirts which were stuck to their bodies because they had been on so long. So he'd take them down to Economy's clothing Store on Main Street and buy them new t-shirts. This guy could have $10 in his pocket and spend $9 on street urchins as long as he had a dollar for a beer when he got home. He was very kind and he never sold anything.

He wasn't the type of guy who would sell anything to anybody. He gave things away. I still talk to people today, old-timers who still play golf and who say, "Gee, I can remember your father giving me my first bunch of golf clubs."

I said, "He gave them to you, right?"

"Oh yeah."

He would never take anything from them. I must have heard this from a hundred different people about how he gave them golf clubs to start out playing golf. It was always given away. I don't remember the man selling anything in his life. He never sold anything. He always gave things away. He was a very charitable person.

I kind of think when I look back on some of that, most people with alcoholic personalities are great givers and are very poor receivers. That seems to be a trend in my own family. You can always pick the kids who come out of alcoholic homes because they not only give material things but of themselves.

I found that true in A.A. Most of the people I met while I was going to A.A. who were recovering alcoholics were very generous. They were very poor receivers. They didn't know how to accept charity or gifts or positive strokes.

I think that has a lot to do with self-esteem. That's why he would do things like run up and down Willow Street half bare-assed in the winter when it was 30 below zero because he wanted to prove he was just as good as the other people in the family.

I think that had to do with being a poor student in school. That maybe he had something to do with him staying back a year. I noticed all through his lifetime he was a very slow writer and always watched how he wrote. In fact, in the whole four years I was in the service, I only received one letter from him because he didn't like to write. He always felt a little bit inferior because he never felt as educated as the next person. That's a trademark I remember well.

I could see that as a teenager that he had very low self-esteem. It may be why he was such a giving and charitable person. He probably picked that up from his mother and became a real people pleaser, which is not an unusual trait with people with alcoholic personalities. They don't please themselves as much as they want to please people around them. They don't want to be disliked by anybody. That's a protective mechanism.

I have that trait. I had to really take a look at it during my recovery. And that was hard for me to take compliments, etc.

I recall my father always preaching about the virtue of humility. We talked about when I'm hurting, or I'm sick, or I don't feel well, then offer it up for penance. So I grew up feeling that it's good to suffer because everybody needs to suffer, right.

Well, that's bullshit. Nobody needs to suffer, as far as I'm concerned. There's enough suffering in the world as it is. I don't think I really need to suffer to obtain grace from God. Perhaps I have done that enough emotionally during my lifetime so I've made up a lot of ground.

I see those traits in my family. You asked me a while ago about nobody really talking about my grandfather and I never could get an answer. Any time I tried to ask a question about him or started fishing, the subject always changed to something else. It always went back to my grandmother. I think what they were doing was taking the focus off him and his drinking problem, which was very, very real as I found out from Edna Melvin. So that's why the focus was put on her and not him. Apparently, he was quite an intelligent man.

Older people talked about him once in a while. He was a real nice gentleman, they'd say. He liked his whiskey, mind you, but he was a real nice gentleman.

There is a story about how he got so drunk at the post office one day that guys who worked there took him home in a wheelbarrow. They brought him up to the back door of the house and knocked on the door and my grandmother came out and said, "Thank you very much, gentlemen. Won't you come in for tea?

The Flanagans were very, very protective of the family reputation. So they always threw up that wall and nobody would ever penetrate that wall.

I was talking to my brother Bill and we got talking about the family. Everything led back when we were children and we were always taught by my own mother and father no matter what happened, you never speak about the family outside the house. No matter what the cost, you were always to protect the reputation of the family. That was an accepted way of growing up. As a result, everybody in town knew my mother had a drinking problem and my father had a drinking problem, which we always tried to cover up.

I can't speak for the rest of the family, but that was devastating to me. It wasn't a really healthy thing to do because we could never talk about it. We could never acknowledge it, therefore we could never get educated on the negative aspects of alcoholism because alcoholism was never a word in those days. People liked to drink and maybe sometimes drank too much, but they made light of that.

We're trying to work toward breaking that cycle. I can look back at my own family and see myself play the role of the responsible child. When things weren't right at home, I would take the day off from school to make sure they were right. I became domesticated very early. I learned how to iron, sew, cook, house clean. I did all those things to make sure when my brothers and sisters came home from school that there were meals on the table. The house was clean so if they brought company home from school that things looked normal.

Things weren't normal. That's a role I took at an early age. There were other roles my brothers and sisters took up.

Hopefully, by sitting down with my children and pointing out what their roles were ... they can educate their own children, should they have any, as to the problems with that sort of thing.

That protective wall still remains even in my own brothers and sisters. And my sisters-in-law and brother-in-laws all felt that very strongly. If you talk to any of them, they can tell you then just couldn't seem to penetrate the wall that existed. You know, I'd say they really don't mean to be that way. It's just the way it is. It was so drilled in us since the time we were old enough to walk. I don't think anyone who ever married into my family could ever penetrate that. As a result, there's been a lot of divorces.

I always wondered why Uncle Bill accepted the role of the responsible child in that family because he went to work for the telephone company right after he left high school. I can remember my father always telling me how he brought home his paycheck and gave it to my grandmother and she supported the family from this. And that time I'd say to myself, "Where's the other check from the father?"

But it seemed like it was always Uncle Bill who took care of everybody. He was sort of the guardian, the caretaker, the responsible child or whatever and it was always his finances that went to the mother I saw this trait all the way until Bill's death. He was always a very, very charitable person.

I recall when I was in the hospital and he'd come over on Sunday afternoon and drop off a big pork roast or something so the kids would have something to eat.

When he died. Fr. Leo Goudreau was telling me, "Nobody, Dan, will know how charitable this man was. He will be really sadly missed." Simply because he was so discreet. He'd pick up the "Courier" -- Fr. Goudreu was telling me this -- and read that a family had a fire and lost everything. And he said he'd (Bill) walk over to Fr. Goudreau with a sum of money, never to the family or to anybody who knew them, always a Catholic priest, give him the money and said, "Make sure the family gets this." And Father said, "I could write a book on this guy. This community is really going to miss this man."

For Fr. Goudreau to say this, he must have been a really charitable guy. And I don't remember him being anything else but. I think this probably comes from his mother's traits. I can see why now some of the old timers talk about the Flanagans in such a charitable manner because of the many charitable things they did for other people.

Auntie Alice and Uncle Jud were probably the two who were the most alike for the simple reason that in all my life knowing either one of them, I never heard them make a negative comment about any person personally. Never. And I spent a lot of time with Auntie Alice and Uncle Jud when I was a kid and if I can inherit anything from their side of the family, I would like to inherit that trait. I think it's a wonderful trait.

However, I think it was protective. But I think it's a helluva nice trait to always see the nice side of people. to never see the negative side.

I just never was in a conversation with them where they ... gossiped or said anything bad about anyone.

The Flanagans can go on defense real fast. And they can change the subject quicker than any people I ever saw in my life. They can take the focus off the question you asked and put it on something. I've seen it a lot.

I've been able to sit down with Aunt Agnes in the last few years and discuss my experience with alcohol addition with her and she's very attentive and listens with banjo eyes wondering how I would dare to talk about this. I'm sure since that was such a taboo subject along with my brothers and sisters and her brothers and sisters I think she really found that pretty interesting.

I think most people that I know, older people who grew up with the Flanagans and knew the Flanagans, never had many negative things to say about them. The Flanagans as a whole were always praising the good things people always said or did. People would say that about Auntie Rose, Auntie Agnes and Auntie Peg. It was a never-ending supply of people. They always had these rosy, glowing things to say about the Flanagans.

And I'd say, "Tell me a little bit about my grandfather."

And they would always change the subject. They'd say, "Oh  yeah,  a hard working man. A big family. A hard working man."

I can see some of the traits in my own father. I recall going to mass during Lent, which was extremely important to him. Also it was extremely important to him that his sons attend it with him. I recall him getting me up every morning and walking from Willow Street and walking to St. Bernard's on Park Street, colder than a son of a gun.

And I'd say, "Jeez, Dad, what are we doing? It's not Sunday. Why are we going to church?"

"Well, it's Lent. And you're supposed to go to church every day during Lent."

I'd say, "I've got friends who are Methodists and stuff like that and they don't go to church during Lent."

"Well, you don't want to go to Hell, do you?"

And I say, "No, I don't want to go to Hell, Dad."

I was in a religious atmosphere which taught fear of God. And I think times have changed and they're more about love (of) God than they are in fear of God.

I felt guilty about feeling guilty. Everything I did I felt guilty about. Jesus, it was awful.

Of course, we didn't have the privilege of Catholic school, but we had religious instruction classes which the Franciscan nuns taught. They also taught fear of God. This was in the 40s.

Everything was a sin. I don't recall anything which wasn't a sin. Everything I liked was either immoral or illegal.

As you get older, common sense has to dictate the way you feel about things and certainly my ideas which were formed very, very early changed.

But his was later on. I was very much a straight-laced Catholic throughout high school, my four years in the Air Force and in my first five years of marriage.

I still go to mass today and pretty much have my own comfortable relationship or whatever you want to call it with God, as I see Him. I don't disallow everything the church teaches, but I take a look at everything. There comes a time, like St. Paul says, put away the things of a child and take on the things of man. That has to happen. But a lot of teachings of fear were so deep-rooted that I had problems with that.

Guilt can cause real problems, real emotional problems. And drinking problems.

My best memories of the Flanagan brothers was Sunday morning after mass. They'd go up and play about 18 holes of golf and they'd get together at 41 (Willow) with lobsters, clams and several quarts of beer. This is where I observed how much fun there was with drinking as a child. They laughed, they told jokes, story after story, golf story after golf story, with Uncle Art, Uncle Jud, Dad, John Mazzeo, Tommy Mazzeo and Uncle Bill. The Mazzeos and the Flanagans were very close.

It seems like every Sunday afternoon they'd congregate right at the kitchen table at 41. They played around the den, consumed beer and ate copious amounts of food. And everyone was happy. I always used to associated drinking beer with being happy. These were some of the ideas I held when I was younger.

One thing I did notice. Whether they were there for two hours or eight hours. when they left, all the alcohol was gone. In my childlike mind, my idea of being a grown-up and having fun was to eat drink and be merry and make sure nothing was left over. I had no idea that a person could buy a fifth of liquor, have a drink and maybe next year at the same time have another one.

I thought if you came into the house with alcohol, you had to drink it all.

Dan Flanagan and his niece Doreen Flanagan, 2006, Rockland