Heading to the McMenamins Olympic Club History Pub last week, I looked forward to learning more about the legendary “smiling bandit” and “last American train robber” who was captured in Centralia 105 years earlier — on June 16, 1921.
But my thoughts kept returning to Sarah (Ciranny) Zopolos, who shared with me her familial connection to the Centralia police officer who captured Roy Gardner in a hotel room — Louis S. Sonney.
I was honored nearly two decades ago to help Sarah capture and preserve her life stories in the book, “Laboring in Love.” She died in April 2016. Her book shares the immigrant stories of her parents, Angelo and Teresa Ciranny, who traveled from Italy to Tono (once a company-owned mining community in south Thurston County and now a ghost town). They eventually settled in Centralia. She also told several stories about her mother’s cousin, Louis Sonney, whose name (like her maiden name Cirrani) was Americanized upon entry to the United States from Sonni to Sonney.
Sarah told me that Louis gave a pistol to her Uncle Tony Ciranny, who had left Tono to settle in Philadelphia. When her uncle returned to Italy to visit his family, he took the gun with him, and his younger brother Giovannino found it in his suitcase. The boy took it outside to a farm near a river and accidentally killed himself. They found his body two days later.
“I understand that Grandpa Salvatore, Mom’s father, never shaved again and dressed in black from then on,” Sarah said.
After working in the Tono coal mine, Louis landed a job as a Centralia police officer.
“Mom never wanted us kids to know about the Mafia in Italy or America,” Sarah said. “She was proud to have a relative who worked as a police officer.”
The family was proud, too, when Louis captured the notorious but charming train robber Roy Gardner after he had escaped from a train in Castle Rock enroute to McNeil Island federal penitentiary. Louis later moved to Hollywood, where he produced B movies with his son, Dan. Although Dan and his business partner, David Friedman, were known as the sunshine boys of smut, Sarah said, he sent all four of his daughters to Catholic school.
But it’s the century-old story of the notorious train robber that Seattle history buff Casey McNerthney shared during his McMenamins presentation. The former Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter who works as communications director for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has written dozens of articles for HistoryLink.org.
He has introduced his wife, Laird, and two young children to Northwest history, even requesting the Olympic Club’s Roy Gardner room during an overnight stay in Centralia June 13, the anniversary of the day Gardner arrived in Centralia in 1921.
“We had a blast staying at the Olympic Club on Saturday night,” McNerthney said. “It’s so cool to think of how the space and the building and Tower Avenue are all preserved.”
The weather this year was similar to that when Gardner hid in Centralia, checking first into the Dale Hotel under a fake and unfortunate name—J. Patton, with the same surname as the town constable, Luther Patton — before moving to the Hotel Oxford next to the Olympic Club.
After checking into their room, the McNerthneys visited Holley’s Place, where they met owner Holley Kaiser.
“The kids each got ice cream and were in heaven,” McNerthney said. “Then we walked to the Rollerdrome, which is also such a cool place. We met Devin, whose family owns it, and he was so kind, sharing the history with them. I showed our four-year-old the poster on the wall from the Fats Domino show there on June 8, 1960. (That would have been an amazing show to see.) I think the highlight for the kids was the roller skating — which went better than expected for them — and the bouncy house and the photo booth.
“Before dinner at the Olympic Club, we showed the kids the pictures and paintings on the wall and explained the room names and how each was named for someone who was part of the history of the Olympic Club. I’m not sure if they totally grasped it, but it was sure fun to share with them. Such a fun connection to that space, which is a real treasure.”
After his presentation, I researched McNerthney to learn more about his background. Before going to work for King County in the spring of 2020, he was executive producer of digital media for KIRO-TV for seven years, a reporter at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer from 2004 until March 18, 2009, when the newspaper quit publishing a print edition, and then a reporter and producer for Hearst Seattle Media until May 2013. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Western Washington University in 2003.
But it was a personal project he launched in March 2016 that piqued my interest. He gathered the stories of the last survivor of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, Ireland, a woman who lived in Seattle. He put together a website, Lily1916.com, to share the story, photos, and audio interviews of Elizabeth Ann “Lily” Kempson McAlerney, who happened to be his great-grandmother.
Perhaps it’s because 23andMe lists my ancestry as 99.3 percent Irish, but I loved the 1996 movie Michael Collins starring Liam Neeson and learned so much through it about the Irish fight for independence from the United Kingdom. Although it took place 140 years later, the Irish uprising in 1916 against British rule resembles our nation’s fight for freedom.
The Easter Monday rebellion in 1916, which the British quickly subdued, spurred Irish nationalists to fight in earnest for independence from the United Kingdom. It became a Free State on Dec. 6, 1921, thanks in large part to negotiations by Collins. However, fighting and terrorist attacks continued for decades as the Irish Republican Army fought to free Northern Ireland. Violence continued until a 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the 2005 formal decommissioning of the IRA.
Last year, I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning nonfiction book called “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.” It was a depressing story about the many people suspected of collaborating with the British who simply disappeared at the hands of the IRA. “Say Nothing,” FX Productions’ mini-series based on the book, was released in 2024 and aired on the streaming service Hulu.
McNerthney’s great-grandmother was born in Ireland’s County Wicklow on Jan. 17, 1897, the fifth of nine children. As a child, she moved to Dublin, where her impoverished family lived in two rooms.
She worked at Jacobs Biscuit Factory but lost her job in 1913 after joining a strike against harsh child labor conditions. Sent to Mountjoy Gaol in November 1913 for an alleged assault on strikebreaker, a woman she swears she never touched, the 16-year-old raised bail money within two weeks and added a year to her age to avoid reform school.
Despite her petite form — she stood 5-foot-1 and weighed 104 pounds with brown eyes, light brown hair and a sallow complexion — Lily continued fighting for fair labor laws. A photo shows her at the May 1914 Irish Trades Union Congress in Dublin standing next to James Connolly, an Irish trade union leader executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising. She lived with Connolly’s family in Belfast and, at 17, swore an oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic. She and five other girls who took the oath that day had their photo taken to mark the occasion, including Connolly’s daughter, Ina.
On April 24, 1916, when the Easter Rebellion erupted, Lily was armed with a revolver at St. Stevens Green Garrison. She served as a messenger running dispatches between the rebels stationed at General Post Office and Royal College of Surgeons, where she told family members later that she destroyed a portrait of Queen Victoria with a knife. Her role delivering messages likely kept her from arrest when the rebels surrendered.
She hid in a confessional at a Carmelite church, afraid to return home where neighbors might report her to police, then joined people attending Mass the next morning. Using her sister’s passport, she fled to Liverpool in England and then took a ship across the Atlantic to America, arriving at Ellis Island on July 9, 1916.
She boarded a train to Seattle, where an uncle worked in the shipyards, and found a job as a housekeeper. During a gathering with other Irish immigrants in October 1916, she met Matthew McAlerney, a railroad worker. They married on Feb. 20, 1917, and raised a family of seven children. In the late 1950s, she made lunches for students at a Seattle public school and, in the late 1980s, babysat McNerthney.
“Lily was the best,” McNerthney said. “She was fantastic.”
He stayed in her assisted living apartment with her when his parents worked late.
“We had great times together,” he said. “And she was 92 then!”
When a bully at school bothered him, Lily taught him how to punch the boy in the nose. Punch him once and he’ll stop picking on you, she told him. He worried about landing in trouble, but she assured him he wouldn’t. “Tell them I told you to do it,” she said.
“I never punched him even though she insisted I wouldn’t get in trouble for it,” he said.
She also outmaneuvered him when he tried to sneak out to the ice cream shop. Despite using a walker, she met him at the side door before he could escape.
“Somehow, without me talking about it, she had figured out what I was planning to do and also figured out how I’d try to pull it off — and was waiting for me when I opened the door,” he said. “She still had a sharp mind even well into her 90s.”
Lily read newspapers regularly and, beginning in 1934, received a pension of twenty pounds and two shillings each year for her service with the Irish Citizen’s Army during Easter Week.
According to the website, she sent the following note back in gratitude for the pension: “The purpose of this letter is to thank the Irish Government for the recent 15% increase in my pension. It is most gratifying to know that Ireland is concerned for the welfare of the veterans. Best wishes to the people of Ireland for peace and prosperity in the coming years.”
Lily died in Seattle on Jan. 21, 1996, four days after marking her 99th birthday.
“I was there the day she died in January 1996,” McNerthney said. “She died on her own time after saying goodbye to everyone who was there.”
People from Ireland called, saying they hadn’t realized she was still alive in Seattle and wished they had talked to her.
“That was when I realized I made a big mistake by not recording the stories I heard over and over as a kid,” he said.
But he has made up for it by sharing her story on a website for all to learn.
Next week I’ll share the story of Roy Gardner, the smiling bandit and king of escape artists, as told by McNerthney.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
