By Tony Boylan
The lone exception was Tom Woolley, the hotel restaurant manager who had conceived the stunt, which was described in the Savannah Morning News as “a new milestone in Irish shenanigans.” From the superfluous helicopter, where he sat with Miss Georgia and Miss Savannah, Woolley saw the dye form a sort of zebra pattern in the water before being washed away in the tide.
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Woolley had come up with the idea only two weeks before Saint Patrick’s Day. No stranger to promotional gimmicks, he recalls pitching it to the city’s most prominent Irishmen: “No one knows the heritage of the Irish in Savannah. They always think of New York and Boston. You have a big day, but nobody knows about it but you guys.”
After serving as honorary chairman of Savannah’s parade that year, Woolley parlayed his experience into a consulting expertise in dyeing things green. The next year he was hired to make the greens even greener at Augusta National for the Masters golf tournament. Later he discussed his experiences as a guest on the game show I’ve Got a Secret. And according to Woolley, Savannah’s 1961 embarrassment was reborn as a Chicago trademark every bit as recognizable as the Sears Tower or a Cubs losing streak in August.
Loftus contends the local media must not have picked up on the tradition until its fifth year, in 1962. Yet in the early 60s both papers included minutiae about the parades, including the observation that the center line down State Street had been painted green.
Current Chicago parade coordinator Jim Sullivan isn’t sure how the tradition started. That’s why he’d like to put together a written history of the parade, not only to settle disputes such as this one but to provide a record of events for future Chicagoans. His goal takes on a special urgency considering the advanced age of anyone associated with the parade in the 1950s and ’60s.
