Richard Norris wasn’t part of the original planners of what would become the annual South Side Irish St. Patrick’s Day Parade, but he joined the fledgling parade committee just a few years after it became clear that the annual event was fast becoming a South Side – and a Chicago – phenomenon.

“I’ve walked in almost all the parades ever since,” says Kevin Norris, whose father joined the original parade committee and who was one of the 17 children who were part of the original parade way back on March 17, 1979.

Now he himself serves on the committee. “I kind of followed in his footsteps,” says Norris, a Chicago police officer. “It was always so much fun. As a teenager I started to work more for the parade. I took on more responsibility.

Thirty years on, the group of West Beverly children who circled the 10900 block of South Talman and Washtenaw avenues still participate in the tiny event that has become one of the world’s largest neighborhood parades.

Larger even that the city’s official parade, the South Side Irish St. Patrick’s Day Parade draws more than a quarter of a million people to the area each year on the Sunday preceding St. Patrick’s Day. And although it’s become world renown, the fundamentals – family, faith and friendship – have not changed.

The concept of a local celebration of Ireland’s patron saint was the work of the Coakley family, led by Marianne and her late husband, Pat, joined the Hendry family, led by George and Mary – all members of St. Cajetan parish.

Today professionally designed banners adorn the light posts of Western Avenue, and sponsors pay the media big bucks to show their support of the parade, but in the days leading up to that cold, rainy Saturday in 1979 a handful of flyers stuffed in mailboxes served as the only official parade notification.

Today Western Avenue is barricaded for more than two miles to keep the massive crowds (at times it’s approached 400,000) in check as 100 or more entries march proudly south … an unbelievably different scene from that Saturday three decades ago, when 17 children (no adults) were led by Tim Kelley, who was dressed as St. Patrick, and Pat Coakley, who was one of the Boy Scouts who carried the American flag. Even in its third year, in 1981, the parade was allowed just the southbound lanes on Western Avenue, and police protection was absent.
These days Coakley whose own family has grown to include two children, Lillian, 3, and Dan, 1, is one of the 26 committee members.
Norris, who grew up at 107th and Washtenaw and marched in that inaugural parade at the age of nine, recalls that “it was more like a game. I didn’t realize what was going on. I thought we were playing parade.”

Boy was he wrong.

It’s not surprising that the Irish strongholds of Mount Greenwood, Beverly and Morgan Park have carried on the tradition these past 30 years considering what the Coakleys and the Hendrys envisioned back in that winter of 1979, when George and Pat decided that they wanted to recreate the old St. Patrick’s Day parade (which moved downtown from 79th Street in 1960).

These days, as hundreds of neighborhood families host all-day celebrations, friends return to the area and local businesses are packed all weekend, it’s still the simple things – solid family bonds, a strong cultural and religious identity and unshakeable neighborhood pride – that continue to energize the original “Wee Folks of Washtenaw and Talman.”

“What’s surprised me most is the popularity and amount of people. They come from all around the world to what really is a neighborhood parade,” says Norris, who acknowledges that although the parade will experience challenging years (this year was particularly difficult for parade organizers to raise money), it’ll always be around. Like the Coakleys and Hendrys and his own father before him, he has a simple goal: “I want to keep it going for my kids.”