A CHICAGO COP WITH A SONG IN HIS HEART
Chief Francis O’Neill’s labor of love was preserving Ireland’s folk music
If Chicago police weren’t wrestling with a sensational murder case, the abrupt way Chief Francis O’Neill hung up the phone and summoned the driver of his carriage might have gone unnoticed. He sent word to Sgt. James O’Neill to meet him at his destination and hurried out the door of his City Hall office.
Reporters assumed the police superintendent must have received a tip on the murder, which was generating banner headlines and had editors screaming for more copy. Upon his return, members of the press mobbed Chief O’Neill. He had received a tip — but it wasn’t what they thought.
The mysterious call was from a cop who knew of his boss’s lifelong devotion to Irish music. When O’Neill was growing up in Ireland, only a thin partition separated his bed from his village’s impromptu dance hall. “Half asleep and awake the music hummed in my ears for hours, and the memory of the tunes is still vivid after the lapse of fifty years,” he wrote in his book “Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby.”
His hobby, as O’Neill modestly called it, would enable subsequent generations to savor the music of their Irish forebears.
The cop who called the chief that day told him about a 93-yearold woman who “had a tune” she’d gotten from her grandmother. Sgt. O’Neill (no relation, incidentally) was dispatched to meet with the chief and woman because he had the rare ability to set down in notation a song as it was sung or played.
And with that, the chief set before the reporters the score of “The Little Red Hen,” which in all his years of collecting he hadn’t heard before.
The Tribune recalled the episode in 1923, when Chief O’Neill was retired and going blind, 13 years before he died.
He was born in 1848 in Tralibane, County Cork, a district in Ireland that depended on the cultivation of potatoes. But crop failures led to the Great Famine, during which myriads perished and myriad others fled Ireland.
The country’s music was also a casualty of the dire times. It was already under attack by priests who preached the sinfulness of dancing. When O’Neill left Ireland in 1865, fiddlers’ and pipers’ tunes were heading for extinction until he later rescued them.
It wasn’t poverty but wanderlust that drew him abroad. At 16, he passed the examination for
teaching but knew it was unlikely that a school would hire someone so young.
“I decided to challenge the Fates in a wider field of human endeavor,” he recalled in the memoir “Sketchy Recollections of an Eventful Life in Chicago.”
He became a cabin boy on oceangoing vessels, and on one voyage was shipwrecked on an island in the middle of the Pacific. The ship that came to the rescue was crewed by South Sea Islanders, one of whom had a wooden flute.
“Being something of a performer on that instrument, I picked it up one evening and rattled off ‘The Soldier’s Joy,’ ‘Yankee Doodle,’ and ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me,’ ” O’Neill wrote in his memoir. “Whatever may have been thought of my performance by others, I won the Kanaka fluter’s friendship, for thereafter he shared his daily ration of poi and salmon with me and I gladly let him have my allowance of salt meat.”
After four years of adventures at sea, O’Neill taught school stateside in Missouri and came to Chicago with his wife. Joining the police force in 1873, he rose rapidly through the ranks while amassing a formidable collection of Irish folk tunes.
“Walking his beat in Bridgeport or traveling on the streetcars, O’Neill would hear familiar tunes whistled by immigrant newcomers, and he spent a lifetime — and a small fortune — publishing those melodies,” observed Ellen Skerrett, one of the editors of his memoir, which was published in 2008.
O’Neill put together several volumes of sheet music and wrote studies of notable players and tunes. He willed his research materials and a library of Irish history and folklore to Notre Dame University.
“It is hard to say whether Francis O’Neill … is a bard who became a policeman, or whether he is a policeman who became a bard,” the Tribune wrote in 1901 in a series of profiles on local celebrities.
John Brosnan, a contemporary Irish musician, recalled that in his village there was a fiddler who would introduce a tune by solemnly announcing: “This one is from O’Neill’s collection.” It was a certificate of authenticity.
O’Neill’s years as a police officer were perennially noteworthy. A month on the job, he encountered a Loop watchman who was pursuing an armed burglar. O’Neill was shot but drew his nightstick and knocked the gun from the offender’s hand before he could fire again, the Tribune reported.
“The next day I was a hero and a cripple and promoted for conspicuous bravery by the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners from probationer to regular patrolman,” recalled O’Neill, who recovered, though the bullet couldn’t be removed because of its closeness to his spinal cord.
Upon becoming police chief in 1901, O’Neill embarked on departmental reforms — an idea that hadn’t occurred to his predecessors. Their tenures were brief, each mayor replacing the incumbent with a chief of his choice. Police officers, as political appointees, were effectively independent of the district commanders and the chief, but vulnerable to the pressure of politicians.
“From the moment an arrest is made the policeman’s trouble begins; everybody whom he arrests is the son of someone, a brother-in-law or relative of someone else whose friendship is valuable, or possibly a member of an organization which it will be found desirable to aid or placate,” O’Neill told a convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
The kind of cop who sadly flourishes amid such pressures was described in a Tribune story of 1906, a year after O’Neill retired.
“‘Bob’ Toosley, the landlord, cigar manufacturer, and general contractor, who has been drawing pay as a patrolman in the stockyards district for fifteen years without ever donning the uniform, took a furlough yesterday for six months rather than obey Chief (John) Collins’ order to get into the ‘harness’ of the police department.”
O’Neill admitted underestimating the difficulty of fighting entrenched corruption. “Every man knows how to manage a woman until he gets married,” he said. “I had some of those ideas myself until I got to be chief, and then, like the man who gets married, I found out.”
Some schemes were so petty it was hard to believe someone would stoop so low. A night watchman was selling dogs brought into the city’s dog pound. Accusations and counteraccusations blurred the line between the good guys and the bad guys.
When an inspector investigating police corruption came under investigation before a city election, Chief O’Neill protested that “the arraignment of the inspector, at this time, by the ‘reform element’ savors of ‘politics,’’’ according to the Tribune.
When O’Neill changed the game, some Chicagoans could hardly believe it. Especially along 22nd Street, as the Tribune reported:
“This district has so long been regarded as belonging exclusively to the ‘divekeepers’ with little or no interference, that the idea of stopping music and driving the women from their profitable winerooms and whiskey and music halls appears startling.”
In retirement he made a visit to Ireland, where he connected with some fine musicians. But a popular revival of the country’s traditional music he hoped to sire hadn’t occurred. Yet come it did, and in recognition of his contriba ution, life-size statue of O’Neill playing the flute was dedicated near his childhood home in 2000.
There’s no similar formal marker in Chicago. (Informally, you can raise a pint to his portrait at Chief O’Neill’s Pub on the Northwest Side.) A marker here needn’t be monumental. Maybe just a sign adjoining his mausoleMount um at Olivet Cemetery on the city’s Southwest Side, informvisitors: ing
“Here rests an Irishman with two great loves: the music of his homeland, and the police departof ment his adopted city.”