While at Jean and George's this weekend, Joy Bennett informed me of the passing of the Mother of Dan Milner aka Liam's Brother here on the Mudcat. To those of you new to this place, Dan has been free to share his knowledge and love for the music with us here for many years. Seamus Kennedy, Jed Marum, and I have all recorded songs that Dan has rescued from obscurity. Dan co authored a must have songbook called "A Bonny Bunch of Roses", and has several CD's with Bob Conroy on Folk Legacy. If you are serious student of the music, you would do well to look up the posts of Liam's Brother.

I didn't know Nora. But I count her son as a close friend. I can tell much about her by the way Dan is. She must have been a remarkable person. Here is how Dan described her in an email to his friends informing them of her passing;

Dear friends,

Many of you have met my mother either in her own home or at places as far apart as Dublin, San Francisco, Reykjavik and New York. More of you have just heard me talk about her so often that you may feel that you knew her well. In either case, I must tell you that she died last Thursday night.

My mother grew up as Nora Mary Cremin in the townland of Laughalla, Brosna, Co. Kerry. Her father and mother were from Kishkeam and Blueford, Co. Cork. She loved music deeply but was absolutely crazy about dancing. Her face would glow with mischievous delight as she told us about sneaking out of her bed at night, bicycling to a dance at Newmarket and then returning home by daybreak.   

A priest from Brosna brought my mother to England when she was 16 to work at his parish in Wolverhampton. She met my father 10 years later. We moved to Ballybunion, Co. Kerry in the late 1940s but my parents later decided to emigrate to Canada. Within a couple of years of that, we were in New York. Six of her 11 brothers and sisters had already emigrated to the United States.

Nora had many jobs in her life. In England, she was a conductress on a double decker bus and made munitions during World War II. In New York, she was a checkout girl in a supermarket and a bookkeeper.            

My mother lived in the same house for the last 45 years. As the neighborhood changed, it ceased being Irish and German, and became multicultural. As an older resident and someone who could be seen daily patching concrete, pruning bushes or shoveling snow, quite a few of the newer arrivals sought her advice on a host of practical questions from waltzing with the city bureaucracy to replacing gutters. Many of her neighbors, people from China, Greece, Ecuador and Italy, called her "Mommy" or "Aunt Nora." Tip O'Neill once said "all politics is local." If such an office had ever existed, my mother would easily have been elected president of her block.   

Dan Milner

I attended the wake for Nora tonight in the Jamaica neighborhood she lived in. The faces looked like the neighborhood she lived in. One family, a Mother, Father and child, just sat there. You could tell they loved her very much. Bonnie Milner and Joy Bennett of The Johnson Girls did a stunning rendition of a song in Irish. The tricolor was draped over the casket, and Nora's son did a wonderful job of telling of this marvelous woman. She was a force, and her voice will be found in those she touched for years.

Here's to you, Nora Mary Milner. God be good to you. Dan and Bonnie, we love you here and are with you in this time.

All the best,

Mick