Born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1943 to an Irish mother and German American father, Patrick Max was the only one among his six siblings to receive a full dose of the Irish chromosome. Pat spent a lifetime recreating the best parts of Irish culture wherever he lived–immersing himself in Irish writers and poets from Beckett and Behan to Wilde and Yeats. It was traditional Irish music, though, that magically connected him to his purpose in life, the old sod and other terrain closer to home.
Irish history and music are inseparable, especially its rebel tunes. Pat’s grandfather, John Giffen, was a leader in the Belfast division of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was active in the Irish independence rebellion that was sparked by the 1916 Easter Rising. While most of the leaders of the Rising were found and executed, John Giffen stowed away on a ship bound for Portland, Maine in 1922. The rest of his family emigrated through Ellis Island in 1922 aboard the SS Columbia.
Pat began playing and performing Irish music in the ’70s and ’80s in South Bend, Indiana, first the acoustic guitar, then the bodhrán and finally the tin whistle, cussing all the way (squeek-Shit!). Later, after moving to Killington, he founded his long-time band Extra Stout with talented local musicians Mary Barron, Sandy Duling, Helen Mango and Marcos Levy, who still play as a group in the area.
Among many stories still uncorroborated is a tale of the night that a reputed boss of the Boston’s Irish mob sat one table away from Extra Stout’s stage performance at McGrath’s Pub and sang along before departing and slipping the grip of the FBI, again.
For Pat, life was a story to be lived and told—with each retelling an opportunity to improve upon the prior.
Pat’s story began in Detroit in March 1943, the son of Emma T. Giffen and Joseph A. Max. Early on, he became a paperboy and worked his way up to station captain, a job from which 64% of his life stories came. He ran track and played football at Detroit Catholic Central where he graduated in 1961, before going on to earn undergraduate degree from the University of Detroit in 1965. From there, he earned a Master of Arts in English and a Master of Science in Library Science from Wayne State University.
In 1965, he married Alice Shugdins, with whom he had four children, Rosemary, Brendan, Kevin and Brian. The family moved to South Bend, Indiana in 1976, where Pat became part of the University of Notre Dame faculty and a director at the Hesburgh Library, whose southern face is the famed “Touchdown Jesus.” A Notre Dame football fan to the end, Pat never dared look past the next game, knowing that his Irish superstition could end an otherwise promising season.
In South Bend in the late 1970s, Pat and friends were founding members of the area’s first youth soccer organization, the Michiana Soccer Association (MSA). Pat coached his kids’ soccer and hockey teams until they would no longer listen to him.
Pat moved to Vermont in 1988, where he taught Irish film at Castleton State College, and where he was also library director and president of faculty. He married Patricia Bick in 1995.
For three decades, Pat and Extra Stout traveled to play to audiences in Bend, Oregon, Mackinac Island, Fargo, North Dakota and Key West among others. But home for him and the band was always McGrath’s Pub, where they played songs of love, whiskey and fighting to local and visiting Hibernophiles.
Patrick Max was a husband, father, grandfather, an athlete, a coach, teacher, scholar, musician, an Irish film critic and, to the end, an arse kicker.
He leaves behind sisters, Kathleen Sees and Ann DiMezza; a daughter, Rosemary (Mamadou), sons Brendan (Stephanie), Kevin (Kimberly) and Brian (Stephanie); grandchildren Evan and Julia, Fiona and Isabel, Alice, Emma and Joseph; stepdaughters Molly Sullivan, her children Quinn and Geroge; and Jessica Janicki, her children, Silas and Lillith. He is preceded in death by his parents Emma and Joseph, his brothers Matthew and Joseph, his sister Mary and his wife, Patricia.
Sláinte, Patrick Max. We will celebrate your life in scratched book notes, musical notes and across the pond, where your rebel soul never left!
An outdoor celebration of Pat’s life will be held at Riverside Cemetery, River Road in Killington, Vermont at noon on Sunday, Sept. 15.
Arrangement are being made by Aldous Funeral Home, Rutland.
