It's a great day for a parade!!!!!!

IF you are here looking for my ODD SHOT MONDAY, please scroll down as it is at the end of this post.


Happy St. Patrick's Day!

We celebrated the IRISH with a parade on Friday.

The following article was in yesterdays' paper:


"Hough Relative Leads Parade"

Did you know?

Hough enthusiasts are known to lecture outsiders on how to pronounce Hough. But Paddy Hough’s distant relatives pronounce their family name “hock,” not “howk.”

Liam Horan, , the great-grandnephew of Paddy Hough, was the grand marshal for the Paddy’s Day Parade on Friday. Horan, his brother John and their wives traveled from Ireland to learn more about Hough, one of their more mysterious relatives.

Saturday, March 15, 2008
By ISOLDE RAFTERY, Columbian Staff Writer

Every year, Hough Elementary pays tribute to a slight, one-armed Irishman named Paddy Hough. Hough was an educator and champion of the poor, an immigrant who left his homeland in 1872, possibly after the Franco-Prussian War.

A school, a neighborhood and a parade have been named in his honor, but until this week, details about his life were sparse. On both sides of the Atlantic.

On Wednesday, two of Hough’s great-grandnephews arrived in Vancouver, searching for clues about their uncle.

“I suppose the usual thing is for Americans to come to the old country to see their roots,” nephew John Horan said. “And while we’re not coming to see our roots, we’ve come to see a little branch that moved over. It’s nice to know what your people have done.”

Horan lives in County Clare, in the west of Ireland. His brother — the grand marshal of Friday’s Paddy’s Day Parade — still lives near Hough’s old haunt.

“I was born and reared literally across the road from where Paddy Hough was born himself,” Liam Horan said. The land continues to be used as a dairy farm by another Horan brother.

The Horans believe that Hough moved to British Columbia with a group of Christian Brothers. They believe he left Ireland after the Franco-Prussian War, though they don’t know why a one-armed Irishman would have fought in that war. That — and the story behind his missing arm — remain unclear.

“We were led to believe he lost his arm as an infant in a fire, but we’re still researching that,” Liam Horan said.

From Vancouver, B.C., Hough moved to the more southerly Vancouver, Liam Horan said.

After leaving Ireland, Hough wrote to his sister and later his niece. He never returned to Ireland.

On Friday, Hough Elementary’s reader board welcomed “Liam Horan and Family.”

Liam Horan wore a beige sash and a bright green bowler hat his daughter had given him before he left Ireland. Liam, John and their wives led the parade in a tan-colored Cadillac Escalade.

Later in the afternoon, at a gathering at the home of Hough neighborhood native Ceci Ryan-Smith, John Horan contemplated their journey to scope out their family history.

“They say nostalgia starts at the age of 50,” John Horan said. “It started for us around then. We started to do family trees and he was probably the most intriguing because we knew so little about him.”

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This little parade circles around the area where I live in uptown Vancouver, WA. The school is just 5 blocks from my apartment. This is the first year I had a chance to see it since I wasn't working and live in the area.

Besides the great grand nephew of Paddy Hough leading the parade as the Grand Marshal, it included a band from one of the Junior High Schools, politicians, the C-Tran patriotic bus, several antique vehicles and one from the American Legion that looked like a train/bus.

I chose only a few of my photos I took that day to show you. They related to St. Patrick's Day or Hough School entries. The kids were great since it was an elementary school and they had about 3 miles to cover. They will enlarge the size of your computer screen if you choose to click on them. Especially . . . the bagpipe/drummers to see how in step they were!










I also went for a walk earlier last week and took these photos -- they show a resting place with benches and retaining walls to help cut down on a main street noise. It is near the entrance to HOuGH neighborhood and proudly celebrate the Irish heritage. These two retaining walls are made of tiles with art work all in green! Of course, the green HOUGH sign to welcome people to the neighborhood entrance proudly "wears green" also!




OSS SHOT MONDAY