Sean c. Morgan
When Red McWilliams played the Sweet Home Highland Games and Clan Gathering last year, he didn’t expect to be married, living in the Northwest and holding a reception at the games a year later.
McWilliams, an Irish folk singer, met his wife, Cathy, a kilt maker, last year at the games. After the games, he continued talking to her by email, visited her at her home in Tacoma, Wash., and eventually married her.
McWilliams had never been to the Northwest before and had not performed on the West Coast. Early in the year, he sent out emails to festivals around the country, and Greg Downs, founder of the Sweet Home games, was among those who responded.
McWilliams traveled to Sweet Home from his home in Texas. He hadn’t expected to know anyone at the festival, but it turned out he saw a couple of vendors he knew from Texas festivals.
“We sat there and we popped a couple of beers,” McWilliams said. “This gal with a Dodge Neon with Washington plates pulls in.”
She said something to the people McWilliams was with and pulled away. He asked who she was, and later the two ended up hanging out all weekend.
Being at the Sweet Home games was an unlikely event for Mrs. McWilliams too.
“About three years ago, I gave up coming to any Oregon games at all because of the cost to come down, the distance, I had to take time off,” Mrs. McWilliams said. “I was losing money.”
Last year, Clan Cian Chieftan John Navin coaxed her into coming down for the clan’s annual general meeting. Mrs. McWilliams decided she needed some time off.
She pulled into the Sweet Home games and saw a couple of friends talking with Mr. McWilliams. She said, hello, and drove away.
Later, she needed to fill up her ice chest and didn’t know the way to Safeway. Mr. McWilliams offered to take her. She bought her favorite beer, Henry’s Private Reserve, but Mr. McWilliams was looking for a brown ale. The only one available was Moose Drool.
“We came back and had a little barbecue, talked and he played a bit,” Mrs. McWilliams said. “I don’t care how much he swears up and down, Friday, he did not kiss me. It was Saturday.”
Apparently Mr. McWilliams tells it that way, but he didn’t Saturday at the games. They shared Moose Drool and sat on the tailgate of a pickup talking till about 2:30 a.m. Saturday night of last year’s games.
Mrs. McWilliams is five feet tall counting her shoes, and one of the first stories Mr. McWilliams heard about her was an encounter she had at the Enumclaw, Wash., games just a few weeks earlier.
One of the athletes at the games had grabbed her. She told him if he did it again, she would put him on the ground. When he did, she made good on her promise and dropped him – on her ankle.
“When I’m telling Red this story, I just felt kind of bad,” Mrs. McWilliams said. “I’m not the kind of person, picking fights in beer gardens.”
That night last year at the games, the two “were getting very pleasant with each other,” Mr. McWilliams said. “I said, ‘Before you kick my butt, I have to tell you one thing. My name is Red McWilliams, and I’m going to kiss you. I kissed her and backed away like this.”
McWilliams showed how he shrank back from her.
“He says, ‘My name is Red McWilliams. You may now kick my (butt),” Mrs. McWilliams said. “What a pick up line.”
It may have been cheesy, she said, but she knew he was harmless and had to be all right if he was sitting with her friends earlier.
“He was so sweet,” Mrs. McWilliams said. “I let him know I wasn’t going to deck him.”
“She didn’t hit me,” Mr. McWilliams said.
“He was a perfect gentleman,” Mrs. McWilliams said. Sunday morning, Mr. McWilliams bought breakfast for her and two friends at the Skyline. “I thought, this is really sweet.”
They spent the rest of the weekend having fun until she had to take off for home to get her children, and they exchanged business cards.
Mr. McWilliams couldn’t think of anything else as he left last year’s festival. Neither could Mrs. McWilliams.
When she wrote a three-line email to him, he responded with three pages and was headed to Tacoma to see Mrs. McWilliams.
“Everything just sparked,” Mr. McWilliams said. He met her children and visited again a couple of weeks later.
“It was like, my gosh, my heart just leaped out when I saw him,” Mrs. McWilliams said.
That’s when they exchanged rings. Mrs. McWilliams wasn’t too sure at that point, so she visited Mr. McWilliams in Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas.
That was when she knew, meeting his friends and learning about how generous he was, that she would marry him.
He played his last gig for the year in El Paso, Texas, and just kept heading north and west.
Mr. McWilliams moved to Tacoma just before Thanksgiving, and they were married on Feb. 15.
“We’ve come full circle is the way I put it,” Mrs. McWilliams said. “When we got married, we wanted the reception in Sweet Home. It seemed so fitting”
Mr. McWilliams is used to festivals with attendance of 70,000 to 100,000.
“But the nice thing about little festivals, I can talk to people,” Mr. McWilliams said. “At a big festival, I have to be out there playing or sitting at a table selling CDs.”
Mr. McWilliams has adopted the Sweet Home festival in a way because of what it now means to him and his wife.
“I want this thing to survive,” Mr. McWilliams said. “I want to come back here, and I met my wife here.”
Playing here, he told the festival that they could work out payment later depending on how the festival did.
“I like small towns,” Mr. McWilliams said. “I’m from a small town (north of Pittsburgh, Penn.), a community like this. Everybody knows everybody. I like the festival because it’s small. I would like to see it grow to the point it is self-supporting. I don’t want to see it come out of Greg’s pocket or the sponsors. I want to see it fund itself, but I do not want to see this thing turn into 10,000 people. That would ruin the ambience.”
Ideally, the festival would reach annual attendance of about 3,500 and no more than 5,000, Mr. McWilliams said. “I met my wife here,” and it was also the first time he had been to the Northwest after 30 years in Texas.
It was 80 degrees last year, he said. Everyone was sweating.
“I’m like, what’s the matter with you,” Mr. McWilliams said. “I’m freezing with a long-sleeve shirt on and dry as a bone.”
Mr. McWilliams is also helping out with the Tacoma games, serving on the board of directors.
They have two children at home, Rebeccah, 7, and Caroline, 10. Mrs. McWilliams’ son, John, 17, lives in Texas.
The McWilliams hosted a ceilidh, an after-hours celebration, as their wedding reception Saturday night. They toasted with Moose Drool and shared cake and beer with everyone who chose to stay after Saturday’s games.