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Unprovenanced Chinwaggery

by Peter Hanagan

253 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #07-2555; ISBN 1-4251-5691-6; US$26.00, C$26.00, EUR18.00, £13.00

Peter Hanagan... a longtime lawyer, lobbyist, teacher and oap offers a smorgasbord of humorous narratives and memorabilia from his droll life in America, Mexico and Ireland. He currently lives in Limerick.

About the Book

The book is a memoir collection of some fifty short stories and anecdotes based on amusing episodes and escapades from the author's life. The book is totally unlike the popular best seller genre of "misery memoirs". Nary a page of misery.

An attractive feature is the fifteen pages of geezerisms, a massaged collection of witty and lighthearted adages as seen through the eyes of old men.

Reviews

Pete Hanagan in his Santa Fe lawyering days thought it would be fun to get a prestige New Mexico license plate for his dark blue Cadillac Brougham. He chose three simple letters that had been abandoned when another motorist left the state. "GOV," said the new license plate.

Now, Gov. Bruce King also had a Cadillac Brougham, light blue, with a less conspicuous, numerical tag. Hanagan's account of the ensuing adventures leading to his surrender of the prestige plate is like a Mark Twain story. It's in Hanagan's comic memoir, "Unprovenanced Chinwaggery," and I won't give it away here. I will also not attempt to define Hanagan's title except to say he described himself as a "word nerd." Excuse me if I speak of this white-bearded jolly old oil lobbyist in the past tense. But I have before me his lengthy obituary, which would be pretty convincing evidence that he is history except that he wrote it himself last year in Ireland, where he lived (and at last report still does) with his Dublin-born teenage son. Explaining why he undertook to write of his own departure, he wrote, "The standard, run of the mill obituary almost never does justice to the special and frequently interesting life and times of the dearly departed."

His life and times in Roswell where he was born and reared; in Washington, D.C., where he was educated and worked in law and weekly newspaper publishing; and in Santa Fe, where he was director of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, were interesting enough. But to make things more interesting, he retired early after 15 years with the association and sought new adventures in Mexico and Ireland from a home base in Santa Fe, where he kept ties with the White, Koch law firm. He was a natural to play Santa Claus for the Chamber of Commerce. He adopted a traffic median to landscape. He enjoyed the Pink Adobe restaurant, whose owner Rosalea Murphy was a good friend. And he enjoyed life as a trickster (with prestige plate) and story teller.

In 1992, divorced and with his three children grown, Hanagan moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he lived four years and taught business law. But Irish eyes were smiling, and in 1996 Hanagan married Susan Fitzgerald, whom he had met while teaching at the University of Limerick, where she was the president's secretary. After a brief time in Ruidoso, they moved to Ireland and set up a household near Limerick – Pete, Sue and her young son Darragh from a previous marriage.

Five years later, Sue suddenly took ill and died of liver and pancreas complications, and Pete in his 70s became the single parent of an 8-year-old boy. To facilitate Darragh's education, he bought a house in Ennis, on the Atlantic coast in County Clare.

Father and son have now achieved dual citizenship (U.S.-Irish), adding a New Age footnote to the saga of Irish immigration. In 1873, a 17-year old Irish boy named Hugh O'Reilly arrived in the United States to seek his fortune, but instead of settling with other immigrants in Boston or New York, O'Reilly went west to Texas, where he homesteaded near Wichita Falls. He married a Tennessee girl, but she died five years later in childbirth. The child was Hanagan's mother. O'Reilly worked hard and raised his children himself, living alone for 43 years. In 1911, oil was discovered on his land. When he died at age 84, his fortune included a 5,000-acre ranch in New Mexico's Guadalupe County. Pete's mother married an independent oil producer of Irish stock, and the family settled in Roswell, where Pete was the eighth of 11 children living in a nice two-story brick home. His recycling back to Ireland by way of Santa Fe represents a merger of two cultures that have a generally unrecognized affinity.

He notes, for instance, that both Mexico and Ireland honor the Saint Patrick Battalion (Batallon de San Patricio), whose core was some 200 Irishmen from Texas who joined the Mexican army in the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-48. He traces Spanish surnames back to their Irish roots. And he can't resist some cultural compare-andcontrast. In Mexico, for instance, a sign that says "Topes" will always be followed by some serious highway speed bumps that you ignore at your peril. In less bumpy Ireland, he says, "They refer to their bumps or topes as sleeping policemen or speed cushions or traffic calming devices." In Navajoland, he remarks, some officials learned that putting up "Bump" signs on a highway was effective without bothering to put in the bumps.

And this: "A Mexican was explaining the meaning of the word 'mañana' to an Irishman. 'It means,' he said, 'tomorrow, or not today, or maybe the day after tomorrow, or some other time. ¿Comprende? Is there a similar word in Irish?' 'No,' replied the Irishman, stroking his chin in feigned deep thought. 'The Irish don't have a word expressing such urgency.'"

Hanagan seasons his narrative with old-geezer jokes ("When a geezer gives up smoking, drinking and chasing women, he doesn't actually live longer, it just seems that way"), but he is one old geezer with surprising computer skills. His continued mass mailings at age 80 are good for a laugh or two, and many of the jokes and one-liners in his book began life in an e-mailed newsletter.

Not all are original stories (sign in an Irish restaurant: "If our food and service do not meet your standards, please lower your standards.") But, as Hanagan explained, "Someone has said stealing ideas from another person is called plagiarism, while stealing ideas from many other persons is called research."

A former Journal columnist, Calloway now lives in Crestone, Colo., and writes for www.larrycalloway.com.

Larry Calloway
Albuquerque Journal, 27 July 2008

About the Author

Peter Hanagan
a longtime lawyer, lobbyist and university teacher
offers a smorgasbord of
waggish narratives and rememoirabilia
from his droll life in America, Mexico and Ireland.

He currently lives in Limerick.