SNIPPET: For your information - The 128-page "LIFE" special issue, "The American Immigrant," (September 2004) contains, on its very first page, a photo of lovely Irish immigrant Annie MOORE, shown in 1910 with her infant daughter Mary Catherine. Annie, as a girl of 15 in 1892, was the first person to pass through Ellis Island processing station. This issue, which I found at my local supermarket, contains marvelous drawings, paintings, photos and history of immigration from earliest times on. There are photos of Castle Garden and Ellis Island, ships, passengers in steerage, tenements, street life, child labor, the Irish Brigade, frontier towns, mining, notable people and their contributions, right up to the present day. You can also check ou the LIFE/Time, Inc. website for more information about their special issues. In the forward Frank McCOURT (author and former NYC school teacher for 30 years) tells us about what immigration means to him, and his love-affair with the American films he watched in Ireland as a youngster. "We knew who discovered America: St. Brendan, the Navigator: It's not something the Italians like to hear - not to mention the Vikings - but Irish history is Irish history and different from all other histories. We knew who built America: the Irish. It was all up there on the screen at the Lyric Cinema in Limerick, Ireland. It's not something other ethnic groups like to hear about but there was no getting around the names that built railroads and canals and ran the great political machines in the big cities. Irish. There was little to be proud of at home - eight hundred years of subjugation and lamentation - but, boy, did we make up for it when we arrived in America! If I know anything about American history I learned it by going through that Irish door. I had read textbooks on American history and taken courses but they were dull, dull, dull. Not a bit like Irish history, where something was always happening, always a fight or a promise of a fight and would you l! ike to step outside? When I taught at various high schools around New York I heard the students complain about their American history classes and I didn't understand. The movies at the Lyric Cinema opened up to us an American past that was glorious, colorful and sweeping, and with music playing no matter what happened. One of my earliest memories is of a movie with Deborah Kerr in which she plays the wife of William Penn, how he came to America with a vision of peace and love. There were the westerns, classic in form and subject: the lone gunman; noble Indian chiefs, forts attacked, scalps taken; gun-fighter showdowns on Main Street; whiskey knocked back by the bottleful; chaste blond heroines and dark-haired temptresses; the heroes in white, the bad guy in black. Then there were the gangster movies with our Cuchulain, James Cagney, up to all kinds of devilment, and Father Pat O'Brien praying over him. And how about Hopalong Cassidy? .... It was the Irish who nobly ! went toe to toe with everyone, killed the Indians, fought on both sides of the Civil War, joined the cops, fought the Mafia, earned the most medals of honor of any ethnic group -- or so we were told. American history sneaks up on you. It can come in shapes of huddled masses, barrows in streets, cries of hawkers, whores in Victorian doorways, lines of doomed infantryment moving toward one another at Gettysburg, Roosevelt soothing our Great Depression fears or telling the Daughters of the American Revolution we are all immigrants. The Lower East Side of Manhattan is a great multilayered museum of American immigration. Walk the streets. Look at the old tenements with fire escapes where families slept during sizzling summers. Sigh over bricked-up synagogues. Imagine the people moving through these streets between the Civil War and WWII: the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians. Closer to our time came the Chinese and Puerto Ricans. The walls tell stories. The streets sing of romances on stoops, stickball, men going to war, returning as heroes, maimed, nor not at all. ... Take the ferry to Ellis Island and prepare to weep. This is the Golden Door, and yet a tragic place! . You'll see the Great Hall a mound of bags, trunks, boxes. In other rooms are glass cases filled with the artifacts of exile: books, clothes, rosary beads, babies' shoes, diaries ... These are your people - it does not matter where they come from.... How did they survive it, the ones who were turned away? To have traveled across Europe and Atlantic, betrayed at the Door by eyes or lungs or an uncomprehending mind? To be escorted along Manhattan piers and put aboard another ship while their families wailed on the docks? Is there a single story or novel or play about the terrible tragedy of the rejects? .... But the East Coast is only part of it. We know the Chinese struggle, how they worked on the Central Pacific RR, how they brought supplies to the wild men in the '49 Gold Rush, how they did the laundry and cooked and prospered in SF till a mad Irishman, Denis Kearney ranted and waved signs that said, Chinese Must Go. They were excluded for a time but they hung o! n, and you can't imagine SF or NY .... without them. Every ethnic group has a story. They get into this country one way or another. They dig in, work like ants, beavers .... They wear themselves out but they insist on education for their children .... In the old westerns I watched at the Lyric Cinema, I squirmed with pleasure when the wagon master called 'Move out,' and whips cracked and men urged on horse and oxen and women and children gazed out of the wagons and music soared from a heavenly orchestra and you knew that out there lay .... locusts, outlaws, drought, Apaches, impassable mountains, no never impassable, not if they had to lift the damn wagons over the peaks and if they kept on, they'd come to lush land where they could claim hundreds of acres ... all that land and sky and greatness of heart and vision, those tremendous people in their Conestoga wagons, good-humored, unblinking, ready for anything. Native or foreign-born, they rode from horizon to horizon and that, for me, is the American story."