Patrick S. Gilmore - About Mike Cummings

Dedicated to the memory of Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore
"Father of the American Band"

Michael Cummings:
Boston’s Irishman for All Seasons

by Michael P. Quinlin

(BOSTON) – Since arriving in Boston in 1947 from Ballygar, County Galway, Michael Cummings has amassed a sterling record in Irish athletics, community activism and scholarship while gaining wide-spread respect as a devoted family man and an astute advisor on immigration reform and cultural heritage.

His first public acclaim in Boston was as a football star. He led the Boston Galway team to five consecutive championships, and was elected the youngest GAA president in New England history.

During the 1950s he brought national attention to Boston’s Irish community by helping to organize a feature segment on NBC’s popular television series, Wide Wide World, which showcased Irish set dancing, sports and imported products from Ireland.

He remained active in Irish cultural circles throughout the sixties and seventies, a period when it looked like the Boston Irish community might become marginalized. Irish immigration had been curtailed by the 1965 Immigration Act, and many of the Irish who had arrived in the 1950s were moving out to the suburbs and towns surrounding Boston.

Cummings and a small core of activists kept the GAA going while supporting cultural groups like the Eire Society and the city’s numerous county clubs.

In the 1980s, when illegal immigration had reached a crisis point in Boston and other American cities, Cummings emerged again, along with Bill McGowan, Michael Joyce, Tom Flatley and others, as the force behind the Donnelly Visa Bill, sponsored by Congressman Brian Donnelly.

Cummings became a point man in the Irish community, helping to organize meetings and to craft a position on immigration that eventually worked its way to Washington.

In the 1990s Mike was a key member of the Boston Irish Famine Memorial committee, which raised $1 million to build a Famine Memorial Park in downtown Boston to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine. The park opened on June 28, 1998.

Creating A Ballygar Legacy

For the past couple of years, Cummings has been homebound with Lou Gherig’s Disease, which has halted his ability to physically move around but not his ability to remain active in mind and spirit. Most of his energy these days is devoted to his wife Noreen, his children and grandchildren, and friends and neighbors who drop by to see him regularly.

He also has the chance now to follow-through on what has become one of the abiding tasks of his life, researching the achievements of another extraordinary Ballygar man, Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore.

In 1968, Cummings founded the Patrick S. Gilmore Society, a group dedicated to restoring the bandleader’s legacy. As president and chief historian of the group, Cummings helped to schedule an annual Gilmore concert outdoors each summer at Boston City Hall and later on the Boston Esplanade.

Today Cummings continues to answer inquiries from music scholars around the world, and recently heard from a Dublin researcher interested in finding out whether Gilmore’s grave in New York had a tombstone.

Cummings was able to answer yes unequivocally, since he himself, along with Rusty Hammer and others, helped to add the tombstone there after discovering it was missing from the great musician’s grave.

In addition to preserving the Gilmore name, Cummings has also done considerable research on Lawrence Logan, another Ballygar man who lived in Boston and was an acclaimed military leader, commanding the 26th Yankee Division during World War I. Boston’s Logan International Airport is named after Logan’s son Edward.