Lizzie and Maureen

I was talking with my niece Lizzie recently and she described an interesting situation she experienced at the hospital where she works as an operating room technician. She was working with a group of people for the first time and one of the nurses, an older woman, saw her name tag and mentioned to her that she knew an Emery family when she was growing up in Germantown.

Lizzie texted me in real time while she was talking to this woman whose name growing up was Maureen Barry. It turned out this woman was the younger sister of one of my long time friends from the neighborhood John Barry. I was also friends with his younger brother Kevin. I also remembered their sister Maureen who was a friend of my younger sister Cathy. She remembered playing in our backyard on Greene Street and I commented that there were lots of little girls running around in our yard a lot.

The Barry's lived around the corner from us on Logan Street next to the schoolyard. and across from Royal St. I had been in their house a few times. John was in my class at St. Francis of Assisi School from 1st grade right up to 8th grade. He went to a different high school. I think LaSalle. I didn't see him much after that and especially after we moved from the neighborhood in late 1968.

We had another connection and we were related by marriage. Maureen knew about it and told Lizzie. I later explained the connection. Our grandmother married a man from the neighborhood late in her life. Her husband, my grandfather, died very early when my mother was a couple of years old. She raised my mother in the house on Seymour Street where her parents lived and her two sisters. Eventually she married Martin Casey who was a widower and was a friend of my grandmother for many years. He was originally married to the Barry's grandmother's sister. He was their great uncle and saw their family regularly.

The last time I saw John Barry was at my grandmother's funeral. Over the years she would often accompany Mart to family activities at the Barry's.

I had run into John in the late 70's and he came by our house on Seymour Street which was originally my grandmother's family home and where my mother was raised. I told him about my experiences in the Navy and he told me about him going to Afghanistan with the Peace Corp. Afterward he was involved in a carpet business in Iran. He had some interesting and scary stories about living in Iran just before the Islamic revolution and hostage crises.