Rogue’s March a celebration of St. Patrick’s Day after S.F. parade
Saturday’s San Francisco St. Patrick’s Day parade was just a five-hour warm-up for Kerry Egan. He saved his shamrock sport coat and shamrock shirt for the longer commitment required of St. Patrick’s Day itself at the Lark Bar on Market Street.
“Feeling every bit of it today,” Egan said as he stood outside the Irish pub shortly after noon, steadied by his wife, Jamie, and their 7-year-old freckle-faced son, Jameson. “You’re going to get the ‘hair of the dog’ crowd.”
On Saturday there had been 10,000 people lining Market Street as the 173rd rendition of the San Francisco St. Patrick’s Day Parade and Celebration came right by the Lark and its outdoor patio next to the Palace Hotel. On Sunday, Market Street was empty except for the Lark hungover regulars who came to partake in their own parade, the Rogue’s March. Behind a band of bagpipes, 50 or so marched across Market Street and up Geary Street to Union Square, then down Post Street to the Lark’s sister bar on Kearny Street, Rickhouse, which had been renamed Mickhouse for the holiday.
By the time they hit Mickhouse, they had reached maybe 100 marchers packed into a bar so dark there is only firelight for illumination.
“Today is the important day,” said Ivan Harrow, an immigrant from Limerick, who also saved his best shirt for it, an Irish national team rugby jersey. “Yesterday was fun with the parade, but today is the actual day.”
The Rogue’s March is an import that Lark owner Brian Sheehy partook of while a student at the University of Galway. The name comes from a musical composition performed as failed soldiers were being drummed out of a regiment, usually for desertion, in the British Army.
The Rogue’s March has lyrics, but nobody bothered with them, having probably been written by an Englishman. Plus it would be too complicated to march and sing, while many of the paradegoers were already trying to march and drink.
To reduce spillage, Sheehy had withstood an international bureaucratic ordeal to become the first American Guinness purveyor to offer it in a half-pint glass that bears the Guinness shape and logo. In Ireland this is known as a “lady pint,” but to keep up with the times, Sheehy renamed his offering a “baby pint.”
It was poured for the first time in America at the stroke of noon Saturday, during the parade. The ceremonial first drink was taken by Orla Niland after she was hoisted onto the bar by Egan.
“I have the glass at home,” Niland said. “I was given permission to take it.”
Many others took the baby pint glass out of the bar Saturday when the Rogue’s March had its inaugural run, right after the parade went by.
“Yesterday when we did the Rogue’s March, I had a baby pint in my hand,” Harrow said.
Sunday’s march, on a longer route, was slow in forming because the Irish Pipers Band of San Francisco got waylaid during a previous engagement at the Irish Cultural Center. During the wait at the Lark, the North Beach Brass Band did its best to keep the energy going.
After one tune, Egan raised his Irish coffee in a toast. “Who is struggling?” he asked. The consensus was that everybody was struggling. “I’m a little shattered, but I’m getting through,” said Kathy Prunty.
She had been at the Lark on Saturday as had Niland, an immigrant from Galway. She normally works Sundays at Gino and Carlo in North Beach but had taken the day off “to celebrate my Irish heritage,” she said. “I’m back at the scene of the crime. Where else would I be?”
In a story that ran in the Chronicle over the weekend, bar owner Sheehy was among those complaining that San Francisco does not have as many Irish immigrants as it once did, due largely to strict government policies. His company, Future Bars Group, owns 13 taverns and employs 220 people, just one of whom is Irish — Sheehy.
“We’re running out of Irish people,” he said, “but the ones we have are here right now.”