TOM AND CICELY HOULIHAN
by Gerald Houlihan
Tom was born the second youngest of eleven children to James Houlihan of Merasheen and Catherine Houlihan (Lamb) of Red Island in December 1902 on Houlihan's Point. Tom was three years old when his father died and left the task of raising eleven children to their mother in very harsh times. When he was just thirteen years old, he shipped to fish with his brother-in-law Syl Connors. At the age of fifteen, he joined his older brothers Pat and Bill who skippered schooners out of Petite Forte and Paradise. While fishing in the schooner Irene Hickey, he met and married Cicely Pearson of Great Paradise on January 1, 1928.
Cis, as she was better known, was the second of five children born to John Pearson of Great Paradise and Monica White of South East Bight. Her father died when she was very young and Cis was raised and educated at Belvedere Orphanage. After leaving the orphanage, she worked with a well-known business family, the Cliffs, in St. John‘s. She returned to Little Paradise after her mother married John Hickey, owner of the schooner Irene.
Tom and Cis had nine children (two died at a very young age) and lived on Houlihan's Point until the mid 1950s when they bought Vic Mulrooney's premises in what was better known as Philly's Bottom. Cis operated a small store, a popular gathering place for the youth of the community, until resettlement saw them move to Jerseyside, Placentia where she continued to operate a store until her death in 1990.
Tom fished all his life except for a short stint in the Dirty Thirty's when he worked on the Motor Road in Swift Current now known as the Terrenceville Highway and one summer at the Argentia Naval Base in the early 1940s. Although resettlement brought Tom to Placentia, he never really left Merasheen returning to fish for several years with his brother-in-law Jack Ennis. When Jack retired, he fished with his son Gerald until 1985 when poor health forced him off the water at the age of 83, possibly the oldest person to fish Placentia Bay at that time or since. He died in Placentia in 1989 at the age of 87.