Jack and Anna

Well, this is the story my father told me. Jack Halloran was a streetcar conductor in Boston. His father, Patrick, had come over from Ennis, in County Claire, in 1882. In the summer of 1914, Jack went out to Milwaukee to visit a cousin, and he went to a dance at the German hall. That's where he met Anna Weber. Her father, Heinrich, was a brewer, and he did not think much of an Irish streetcar man from Boston.

Jack wrote to Anna every single week for a year. Heinrich read every letter before she did, and by the end he said Jack had better handwriting than half the brewery. They were married in Milwaukee in June of 1915, and Anna came back to Boston with him. Her brother Fritz never forgave Jack for taking her so far away. Or so he said, every Christmas, for forty years.