Kathy Caton will share her book The Redemption of Uncle Richard, “Boss” Croker The Lion of Manhattan: From Irish Immigrant to Tammany Boss. The book is in part, an overview of Ms. Caton’s family lineage that focuses on the history of this intriguing and colorful individual. After decades of working on her family genealogy, Ms. Caton discovered Richard Croker, Tammany Boss, was indeed her great, great, grand uncle, immigrating to the United States from Ireland. She found during her extensive research, many redemptive qualities in this so-called “crime boss”, as she found many of the historical summaries depict him for his negative influence and corruption of New York politics. However, this book investigates and illustrates his character in depth, and ultimately finds him to have some significant endearing attributes while it dives head on into his personal life and his political career. This biography begins in Ireland, way before Richard and his parents immigrated to the United States and continues throughout his tragedies and triumphs both and out of the spotlight. Ms. Caton was fascinated to learn about the evolution of our political structure here in the United States and how that structure, in many respects, has modeled the past as well as changed very little from the designs of these formative Tammany bosses, one of which is this Uncle, Boss Richard Croker, The Lion of Manhattan.
She recently is a retired music educator and continues to work as MD for the Hazardville United Methodist Church, plays keyboards for Silk City Jazz Band and hosts a private studio in her new home in Ellington, CT. She is a composer, a novice writer, writing blogs for Broadwayworld and SBU Alumni blog and began to investigate writing in 2008 while recovering from an accident that halted her work as a public school educator and musician for a few years. During that recovery time, she self-published her first book, “Da Capo-from the beginning” and dedicated it to those students that made a difference in her life.
Largely due to the lifestyle change during the Covid19 pandemic, she was able to spend more time chasing her family history, including her roots to the American Revolution when she fell upon Richard Croker’s life and backstory. Intrigued with finding a variety of tales about him and his life, she became passionate about researching any and all things about him, including speaking with DNA fellow family links that also encountered some of his pictures and information. Kate felt that she wanted to “right a wrong” in that her father George suggested his family heritage may have had criminal content. Kate is here to share this historical overview that touches in a lot about Richard’s character, which includes a lot of redeeming qualities to his “person,” who also shares with Kate, direct lineage to Brigadier General John Mead.
Any reader that enjoys reading about Irish American and New York history, rags to riches stories, or historical political themes, may enjoy this in depth study of the man, his crimes and influence during the Industrial Revolution as well as her intentional call to liberate his legacy from, up until now, the depicted notion of just “The Crime Boss of New York. She will have books available for sale and signing.
