choir goes to ireland

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, December 2, 2009

By Kathy Chaffin
Salisbury Post
This is the story of two men from different continents whose lives paralleled each other. What started out as an e-mail correspondence soon developed into a deep friendship. The men became like brothers, and in time, their wives, families, churches and towns came together as well.
CLEVELAND ó Three years ago, Dr. John I. Steele Jr. went on the Internet looking for a German pen pal.
He had started learning the language while stationed in Germany in the Air Force and thought having a pen pal would help improve his skills.
No one responded.
Two months later, over in Killyleagh, northern Ireland, John Huddleston was surfing the Net looking for a pen pal when Steele’s name came up.
“I thought, ‘He’s ex-military, I’m ex-military …’ ” Huddleston recalls, so he wrote to Steele asking if he was interested in corresponding.
It didn’t take long for the two Johns to realize they had even more in common. John and Joy Steele shared the same Dec. 26 wedding anniversary as John and Louise Huddleston.
They were also both Presbyterians. The Steeles attend Third Creek Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, and the Huddlestons attend Second Presbyterian in Killyleagh.
“Things just clicked,” Steele says. “John and I got a little nervous about how similar our lives were. Both of us being Presbyterians, we said it was predestined that we become friends.”
In October 2005, Huddleston flew from Ireland to visit the Steeles at their home in Cleveland, his first trip to the United States.
When applying for a travel visa, Huddleston forgot Steele’s address but remembered the name of Third Creek Presbyterian Church.
“The lady said, ‘Fine, we’ll put Third Creek Church,’ ” Steele recalls. “We automatically said John’s American address is Third Creek Church.”
While in Cleveland, Huddleston tried grits and barbecue at local restaurants along with Joy Steele’s cornbread. “He sat on the front porch,” John Steele says, “drank iced tea and overcame his Irish-British propensity not to like it.”
He also spoke to Steele’s social work class at North Carolina A&T about the British social services system in northern Ireland and met with the Cleveland Board of Commissioners, on which Steele serves, and proposed that the western Rowan town twin with Killyleagh.
Huddleston accompanied the Steeles to Third Creek Presbyterian, delivering greetings from Second Presbyterian Church in Killyleagh. Huddleston was so impressed with the choir that he invited members to perform in northern Ireland.
The friendship between Steele and Huddleston continued to grow via e-mail, and in September 2006, the Steeles flew to Ireland for a 10-day visit with the Huddlestons.
“The trip was the experience of a lifetime,” John Steele wrote to Huddleston afterward. “We saw a beautiful countryside. We had the opportunity of making new friends in a country and town to which we are historically related ó emotionally, spiritually and socially.
“We were able to learn about and from our Irish cousins and come back to our own country with a deeper appreciation of what this ancestral association has meant to us in our own cultural development.”
Killyleagh is a rural community on the shore of Strangford Lough with 2,300 to 2,800 residents, many of whom used to work in the shipyards of Belfast, where the Titanic was built.
Steele’s ancestors immigrated from County Down in northern Ireland to America 262 years ago, settling in western Rowan. Many others in Cleveland also descended from Irish immigrants.
Steele enjoyed looking through the Killyleagh phone book and seeing so many west Rowan names, including Steele, Cowan, Young, Graham, Fleming, Knox and Foster.
“We saw our people,” he says. “It was just wild.”
Among the sites they visited was the Hamilton-Rowan Castle, the oldest continuously inhabited castle in northern Ireland.
The Steeles also accompanied the Huddlestons to Second Presbyterian Church, where John related greetings from Third Creek Presbyterian. He also met town and county officials and gave them T-shirts from Cleveland’s annual Spring Fest.
Killyleagh officials extended a formal invitation to Cleveland to become twin towns and gave Steele T-shirts from the 2005 Viking Festival, reenacting the Viking invasion, to take to the town commissioners here.
While in Ireland, the Steeles learned to enjoy hot tea and tried such Irish food as kippers, fish and chips and corn beef. “And I loved scones,” John Steele says. “I was not shy about asking Louise to make them.”
The black pudding, made from pig blood, was the real test, he says, “but I passed it, and it was pretty good.”
“My favorite dish was trifle,” he says. “It’s layers of pudding with layers of fruit. Louise made it just for me.”
John and Joy Steele took some grits for Louise to try. “And Joy told them how to fix them,” he says.
John and Joy returned to Killyleagh last May for the 2007 festival, during which he served as an honorary member of the town’s police force and helped lead the Vikings into the festival. “Again, their hospitality was lovely,” he says, “and we met even more Irish people.”
Huddleston returned to Cleveland last October with Louise and her sister, Sarah Watson. They loved seeing the fall leaves, and the ladies enjoyed shopping with Joy.
The prices were great, Louise says, without the 17 percent sales tax in Ireland.
What the Huddlestons weren’t expecting was 80-degree temperatures in October. “It would be a heat wave to us,” Louise says.
Later this month, on the 29th, more than two years after John Huddleston’s invitation, the Steeles and 13 other members of the Third Creek Presbyterian Church Choir will leave for northern Ireland along with seven additional members of the community.
Steele says everyone in the group will be staying with families in Killyleagh.
The choir is scheduled to give a concert at Down Patrick Cathedral in County Down, where St. Patrick was buried.
Third Creek choir members will also perform at the Stormont parliament building in Belfast.
“It’s an honor because not just anybody can go in there,” Huddleston says. “This will be the first American church choir ever to sing in Stormont.”
Huddleston arranged for Margaret Ritchie, the social development minister for Northern Ireland, to sponsor the group. Minister Ritchie will attend the concert along with a representative of the American consulate.
“We’re trying to get the BBC religious stations to give publicity to it,” Huddleston says. Proceeds from the Stormont concert will go to the Alzheimer’s Society in Northern Ireland.
Both concerts will feature traditional hymns as well as spirituals and gospel songs, contemporary Christian music and American secular songs.
Third Creek choir members will lead the March 2 service at Second Presbyterian Church in Killyleagh and present the special music that Sunday.
Also as part of the trip, Steele and fellow Cleveland Town Commissioner Mary Frank ‘Frankie’ Fleming-Adkins will participate in a twinning ceremony with Killyleagh town officials.
Huddleston says he hopes to plan an October 2009 trip to Cleveland for members of the Killyleagh Social Partnership.
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Contact Kathy Chaffin at 704-797-4249 or kchaffin@salisburypost.com.