The Sullivan story
A Tale of Two Irishmen
Michael Sullivan hailed from the more typical or traditional Irish immigrant background. His father, John, an impoverished farmer fortunate to have escaped the famine, arrived by austere passage to the port of Boston in 1848. In the Bowery of Boston, he married Jane Flynn, a young Irish lass, more than likely having landed on board the same ship from Ireland. They had a couple of children, then escaped the slums of Boston for a better life in the West, moving to Jacksonville, Illinois, where John toiled to eke out a living farming.
It was in Jacksonville that Michael was born in February of 1855. On January 11, 1861, Michael witnessed the death of his father, –John, from a brutal knife attack by an intruder who was seeking winter warmth and shelter. In 1880, Michael moved from Mt. Sterling, Illinois, to Kansas City, where he met diminutive and Irish-born Nora Murphy. They were married on October 24th, 1882, at the Kansas City Cathedral by Father Richard M. Ryan. From 1884 up until the time of his death from pneumonia in 1903, Michael made a secure but scarce living working first as a porter and later as a clerk for Kansas City Bag Manufacturing Company located at 100 W. 3rd Street. On March 26, 1889, they had a son - my grandfather - Edward Thomas Sullivan.
Non-typical for an Irish immigrant is the story of James Flanagan, the son of Cormac and Margaret Gilmarten Flanagan, who was born in County Cavan, Ireland, in 1862. He immigrated to Kansas City in 1880, also via Boston, on what is believed to have been first-class passage, with some coin in his pocket. His departure was not an escape but rather to fulfill his dreams and make his fortune. At that time, there was a small congregation of Flanagans who had already settled in the KC area. On Thursday, May 17th, 1888, in what the Kansas City Star dubbed “An Aristocratic Marriage,” James married Mary Christopher of Armourdale at the Church of the Annunciation, 14th & Wyoming. Presiding over the wedding was Reverend William J. Dalton.
On March 1, 1899, James and Mary had a daughter – Marie Flanagan – my grandmother.
(A look through the crystal ball – On September 14, 1954, Robert John Sullivan married Kathleen Rose Dalton. So when Sully, Jr. was born on July 5, 1956, Reverend William Dalton, who had presided over the wedding of his great-grandfather and great-grandmother, became his great-granduncle.)
It was reported in the Kansas City Star, November 26, 1947, in the It Happened in Kansas City column:
“James Flanagan, 2-fisted Irishman, once owned the “longest bar,” Ninth and Stateline, had a fortune of half a million in real estate when he died. A rough and ready, dependable man, handsome and of stalwart character, was Flanagan. If it was a matter of giving some friend a lift, he had T. J. Pendergast’s ear.”
True to the Irish, as Nora Murphy Sullivan was widowed, Edward T. Sullivan inherited the responsibility of the man of the house. Early on he worked as a pressman with the Kansas City Star, drove the first motorized grocery delivery truck for Muehlebach Grocery, and spent twenty years with the Interurban Railway. He refused to leave his widowed mother at home alone and was said to have passed up an opportunity to play baseball for the Washington Senators do to his pre-destined Irish-guilt. Edward was 36 when Nora passed away, and a year later, in November of 1926, he married Marie Flanagan.
Edward founded Sullivan Beverage in 1948. But the Sullivan family history of supporting all things Irish in Kansas City with beer, and through the beer industry, traces back to James Flanagan’s Saloon on the corner of 9th & Stateline, in the 1880’s and 90’s, and later through the Kansas City Breweries Company, the city’s largest pre-prohibition brewery through 1919, which James was a partner and served on the Board of Directors. Support for our city’s Irish resumed in 1937, when Edward became the Sales Manager for City Beverage, the city’s first Budweiser distributorship, owned by Tom Pendergast, and later through Sullivan Beverage, a Falstaff distributor and the first Guinness distributor in the U.S. Midwest. And, finally, from 1989 through the present, Kansas City’s Irish Community has had continued support from the Midwest’s and Missouri’s largest American-owned brewery, Kansas City’s own Boulevard Brewing Company, of which Bob, Jr. returned to his heritage and KC beer roots, commencing employment in 1994.