The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Lyreacrompane native who became principal warden at Sing Sing
THIS is not a journey too many people have undertaken but that is what John Joe Sheehy did just over a hundred years ago and last week Joe Harrington and Kay O’Leary of the Lyreacrompane Heritage Group took the opportunity, while on a visit to New York, to retrace his steps.
John Joe Sheehy from Lyreacrompane joined the American Prison service and rose to be the Principal Keeper, from 1925 to 1941, of the notorious Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, thirty miles up the Hudson River from New York City. Amongst the 35,000 prisoners who passed through his hands were 300 he conveyed to the electric chair. These included Ruth Snyder who killed her husband and Francis ‘Two Gun’ Crowley, the cop killer, who was captured in the famous shoot-out known at the ‘Siege of 90th Street’ in the presence of a crowd of onlookers estimated to number over ten thousand New Yorkers.
John Sheehy attended the Glen School in Lyreacrompane in the 1890s and it is this, now protected structure, that the Lyreacrompane Heritage Group is working to renovate as a Heritage Centre for the area. One of about a dozen aspects of the heritage of the Stacks Mountains to be presented at the proposed Heritage House will be the connection with Sing Sing. The Lyre Heritage Group had already discovered that there was a group in Ossining working on a project – a Museum in Sing Sing prison with the theme ‘Unlock the Past...and Open Minds - A New Museum that questions how we treat each other’.
During the visit Kay and Joe met with the Mayor of Ossining, Victoria Gearity, and about a dozen staff and administrators including Lieutenant/Watch Commander, John P. McMorrow, Lieutenant/Administration, John P. Gilman, Ossining Town Supervisor, Dana Levenberg and Arthur M. Wolpinsky, Facility Historian.
“In what was a sort of a twinning of the Lyreacrompane and Sing Sing projects, presentations of mementos for the occasion were exchanged by both sides and we have invited them to send a deputation to the opening of the Stacks Mountains Heritage House, which, if our fundraising efforts continue to be successful, should be next year,” Kay O’Leary, Heritage Group Secretary, explained.