Howard Community College professor Jerrold Casway had an ethical dilemma.

Notified that he had been chosen by Irish America magazine among the "Top 100: Irish America's Finest" in the writers and media category, along with such lights as Jimmy Breslin and Phil Donahue, "I didn't know whether to accept or 'fess up," he says.

Because the truth is he hasn't a drop of Irish in him.

In the end he admitted to it, and was told that the award was a tribute to his work in early modern Irish history and the sporting culture of 19th century Irish America, including the books "Owen Roe O'Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland" and "Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball," some 50 articles and a like number of professional book reviews.

With a résumé like that, he's "Irish by osmosis," the magazine folks proclaimed.

And so, following a sumptuous reception and dinner at the New York Athletic Club, where the Top 100 were serenaded by flutist Sir James Galway and heard speakers including Gerry Adams, former president of Sinn Fein, he collected his Waterford Irish harp along with the likes of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Sen. John McCain, Daniel Day-Lewis, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley and singer KT Sullivan, who shared his table.

"How can we keep him grounded?" Casway says HCC colleagues worried after he returned home.

"Don't worry, you guys already do a great job at that," he responded.

A fixture there for 36 years now, "I came here the second year it was open, thinking I'd stay for a year or two. But that's how life is," he says, recalling how he had to cross a cow pasture to get from his car to the single-building campus.

"The college has been very, very good to me," he says, sounding appropriately -- considering his interest in baseball -- a little like "Saturday Night Live" sports correspondent Chico Escuela.

Casway, HCC's division chair of social sciences and teacher education division, professor of history and director of the Rouse Scholars program, has proven that "being at a community college is not a cul de sac. You can be academically productive.

"And the real growth in American education is at the community college level," he adds, citing a program recently begun for county police recruits to get associate degrees while in training. He's been able to concentrate on teaching (for which he has also won awards) without the pressure to publish-or-perish, although he is doing plenty of writing.

Currently in the works are a book-length study of culture and ethnicity in 19th-century baseball, as well as articles about the exiled Irish community in Europe in the 17th century. And although he has no idea exactly how he was selected for Top 100 honors, he's pleased that someone knows his body of work.

"Everyone who does writing or any kind of creative work likes to think someone is reading it," Casway says.

Interest in things Irish began in a very practical way for Casway when he was a young scholar. While working on his doctorate in early modern British history at the University of Maryland (Ph.D. '71), he learned that Irish history had been a very neglected field. Casway began reading in the area and found it fascinating, then delved into exploratory research that ultimately became his dissertation, the biography of native Irish general Owen Roe O'Neill, "last of the O'Neills" -- the leading native Catholic chieftains -- before Englishman Oliver Cromwell came in and subjugated the Irish people.

After some 15 trips to the Emerald Isle, including living there a year and escorting others on tour four times, he continues to go for lecturing and research. As for now, alas, no more of those two-week tours to places most tourists don't see.

But he's willing to share some favorites: the Lakes of Killarney, the still largely rural Donegal, the Aran Islands, and especially the Antrim coast of Northern Ireland, where "It's like the coast of Oregon in its isolation and ruggedness, and on a clear day you can see Scotland," some 20 miles away across the North Channel.

Another favorite, indeed the place where his heart remains, is a spot on the Irish Sea south of Dublin called Killiney, where a cliff face with houses terraced on it forms an arc, with the Dublin bullet train running along the bottom of the rim. From here, the whole vista of the Irish Sea opens out.

And it's where this historian had one of his own great moments in history. Doing research there in The Franciscan House of Studies, a library monastery, Casway found a lost original letter -- in fact, the only one known to exist, and up to then only in copies -- from Owen Roe O'Neill's wife, Rosa O Dogherty, about whom he had just written a biography.

Casway says that if he had it do over he might have concentrated on American urban social history. But then we'd be out one osmotic Irishman.

E-mail Lane Page at lpage@patuxent.com.

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