FOYNES, IRISH COFFEE, AND THE FLYING BOAT MUSEUM: WHAT?

If you want to know the truth, the promise of sampling some Irish Coffee in the place it was invented was a much bigger draw than visiting some obscure WWII aviation museum as we left Dingle Bay and continued our day’s journey into County Limerick.  That initial apathy changed, however, as soon as the petite and uniformed museum guide showed us the introductory video of an unwieldy aircraft coming in for a landing…splashing down right in the water of the bay! Gasp! So that was a Flying Boat! Who knew they even existed?  I remembered hearing about ‘seaplanes’ but they were smaller prop planes with skis on the bottom. This was different. These were big passenger airplanes, and we were to learn that their history was even bigger.

When we passed through a photo exhibition of early airplanes, including the Spirit of Saint Louis, Jennifer gave me a knowing look. “Your father, remember?” It took me a minute to get her reference. A professional sign painter and somewhat of a storyteller, my father had always insisted that as a young man, he had painted the famous name on Lindbergh’s monoplane. Obviously, he had impressed Jennifer, while I had always taken that claim with a very large grain of salt.  Still, her comment set me up for an unusual sense of psychic awareness that grew as the tour went on. 

As our guide led us back in time to an era of Pan American Airways and the early days of transatlantic aviation, that strange sense of connection increased. Pan Am was one of the airlines that flew into Lima in the late 60’s when I first went to live there. In my mind’s eye, a picture flashed of the elegant office on the ground floor of the Hotel Bolivar on the Plaza San Martin. Shaking my head to clear that incongruous vision, I wasn’t able shake a feeling that I was entering into force field that would pull me closer to someone I knew well. If not my father, then who?

As we boarded the only full-sized replica of the Boeing 314 Flying Boat next to the reconstructed original control tower, I knew. My father’s son, Jack M. Jones, was in the Air Force in WWII and taught me to talk about “aircraft”. My much older half-brother wore his khaki trousers and shirts for the rest of his long life, and it was his spirit I was channeling as I stepped up the ramp. 

Once inside, however, the novelty of the furnishings dispelled my otherworldly preoccupations, and we stepped back in time to when flying was for the rich and famous and passengers dressed for the occasion.  A flying boat came complete with beds, tables with elegant tablecloths, silverware, wide padded seats, a tiny galley, and even a honeymoon suite at the rear.

 

The navigation was so primitive that pilots flew under the weather, so low that if the weather changed, they returned to Foynes to wait out the storm. When that happened, the airfield already would be closed for the evening, the personnel gone home to bed. In that event, a certain farmer, called the Horse Crier, would saddle up his trusty steed and ride around town blowing his bugle, alerting the town that the flight had returned and passengers needed emergency food and a place to rest until the weather improved.

And that is where Irish Coffee comes into the picture. As with everything in Ireland, the weather played a key role. In 1943 a restaurant and coffee shop opened in the terminal, and on one stormy winter night that year, a Morse code message arrived alerting the staff that a flight was returning to Foynes and the passengers and crew needed food and drink to warm them. When the famous chef, whose name was Joe Sheridan,  (please remember his name) was asked to whip up something special for them, he decided to put some good Irish whiskey in their coffee. One of the passengers asked if that was Brazilian coffee, to which Joe reportedly responded, “No, that was Irish Coffee!” and a legendary drink was born.

                                                                    

Note the stemmed glasses – they are the original and 'proper' way to serve Irish Coffee.

Oh, did you remember the bartender's name? Another connection: Sheridan was my mother's maiden name.

We were given a lesson in the proper preparation of this libation, and then encouraged to drink up. See the video here when I figure out how to make it short enough to post.

In reading the historical book I bought about the airfield, it says that there was no place in the tiny town of Foynes to house the Pan Am passengers who were awaiting their continuing flights, so they were put up in the Dunraven Arms, in Adare, the very place we were staying!

Foynes was the last port of call on Ireland’s western shore for these planes during the war. It became one of the biggest civilian airports in Europe.