Paddy (Patrick James) Nolan

Paddy has enjoyed life more than anyone known to man or beast. He is a raconteur extraordinaire and a lawyer. Paddy was born in 1862 and raised in county Limerick. He excelled in soccer, cricket and billiards -- he was a fine actor possessed of a beautiful singing voice. He studied law at Trinity College Dublin and Trinity awarded him it's gold medal in debate. He articled to a Dublin barrister and was admitted to the lawyers' bar in Ireland and practiced law for four years. He despised the English and after his hopes of Irish autonomy evaporated, he emigrated to Calgary in 1889. Paddy's relatives, the Costellos, had settled in Calgary before the CPR railway tracks. The Costellos and other Irishmen (one third of Calgary's population was Irish who called it Little Dublin) were influential in Calgary business, politics and the law - Calgary was exploding and Paddy couldn't have arrived at a better time.

Within four weeks of arrival here, Paddy had exploited his personality and his connections to place himself in a junior partnership with an Irish lawyer, Thomas Brown Lafferty. He won many medals in athletics and competitive debates. He sold out the house in amateur comedies and Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial by Jury. He helped organize the Calgary Board of Trade (he was the secretary). He was an editor of The Calgary Herald and an auditor of the City of Calgary, helped organize the Calgary Amateur Dramatic Club and the Calgary Literary and Debating Society. At age 27, he'd arrived in Calgary at just the right time.

An Irish raconteur extraordinaire, a number of American newspapers called him "on of the best orators of the age." His humour was, we are told, typically Irish. The best way to define Irish humour is to cite a few examples (with thanks to About.com):

• Brendan Behan: "If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks."
• An Irish proverb: "A turkey never voted for an early Christmas."
• James Boswell, a Scot: "The Irish are a very fair people, they never speak well of one another."
• An Irish Drinking toast: "Here's to our wives and girlfriends: May they never meet!"
• An Irish curse: "May the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind illegitimate children chase you so far over the hills of Damnation that the Lord himself can't find you with a telescope."
• Oscar Wilde: "I can resist everything except temptation."

Grant MacEwan was a professor of agriculture, an Alberta politician and Lieutenant Governor who wrote a number of "amateur" histories of Calgary and Alberta. In his biography of Paddy," He left them laughing when he said good-bye: The life and times of frontier lawyer Paddy Nolan", MacEwan calls Paddy Nolan "a giant in the profession of law" and "one of the most successful criminal defense lawyers in Canadian history". A professional historian, the University of Calgary's Louis A. Knafla, differs --- in a short biography he prepared for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. Paddy's biggest case was Her Majesty v. Ernest Cashel. Paddy didn't do much for Cashel who ended up being hung for murder --- the case was "big" because Cashel was a dramatic and daring escape artist. What Paddy did do for Cashel he did on the day of execution. While Paddy waited with Cashel in his cell he told Cashel so many funny Irish jokes that Cashel (a fellow Irishman) mounted the gallows roaring with laughter. Paddy acted mainly for petty criminals and two-bit horse thieves. He impressed his clients by his wit and eloquence in court and for verbally manhandling the police. In defense of Mitzi LePugh, the ping pong queen, he told the judge that her act was "not so much an exotic act, My Lord, as an athletic feat." --- she was convicted of Gross Indecency and went to jail for two years less a day. Roared one of Paddy's horse thieves at the end of his trial:"Boy my lawyer sure fixed them cops on that one..." as he was being hauled off for ten of the best in the Prince Albert Penitentiary.

For in fact, Paddy lacked common sense. What is common sense, you'll be asking. Here's what Dr. Hugh Mann had to say on the subject::

"Common sense means paying attention to the obvious. This is not as easy as it sounds. We all have vivid imaginations, and we tend to get lost in our fantasies. When fantasy replaces common sense, life becomes farcical and even tragic."

Rhetorical flourish, Irish blarney, the demon whiskey (in which Paddy over-indulged) and even good old Irish humour are bad for your common sense quotient. Speaking to the case of Dizzy Hunt, accused of a Calgary robbery, Paddy told Judge Jerimiah Travis: "My client has the perfect alibi, Your Honour ... he has established, well beyond a reasonable doubt ... that he was way over on the North Hill (a district of Calgary) at the time of the robbery." "But Mr. Nolan," responded Travis. "The robbery took place on the North Hill." He lost seven of the eleven criminal cases he defended in the Supreme Court of Alberta and most of his civil cases.

All this doesn't diminish his eloquence and humour and sense of enjoying life. Rumours of his death in 1913 are grossly exaggerated and he lives on eternally in and near the Long Bar in the Alberta Hotel.