Leslie McCarthy, Author at Leslie Gibson McCarthy

Any given shift

Posted on March 4, 20211 Comment

For more than two decades, Des Peres resident Michelle Moffat has worked as an inpatient surgical nurse, a rewarding career that’s given her a front-row seat to the spectrum of the human condition: fear and pain, hope and healing, life and death. Or as any nurse will tell you, any given shift.

They’re heroes aren’t they, our front line health care workers? And that was before COVID-19. Eleven months in and it’s not a stretch to say we have hit a pandemic wall, from vaccination frustration to February fatigue. If you ever think you can’t keep going, talk to a nurse.

“Sure, I was scared and anxious at first because there was so much unknown,” said Moffat, who works for BJC Healthcare at Missouri Baptist Hospital and has had eight negative COVID-19 tests. “But I wanted to help …

Read the rest of the column in the Feb. 26, 2021, issue of Webster-Kirkwood Times.

On 9/11, ‘We held hands’

Posted on September 11, 2020Leave a comment

shutterstock_62949358 — The first image we saw on the “Today” show.

Portions of this originally published in the South County Times Sept. 8, 2006, on the 5th anniversary of 9/11. Originally written Sept. 11, 2016:

As my dad tells the story, he remembers a Sunday afternoon when he was 7, with his parents playing cards in the front room of his family’s north St. Louis flat.

Suddenly, his dad called him into the room and threw him a dime. “Go buy a paper!” his dad said, as the newsboy on the corner was shouting “EXTRA! EXTRA!”

The date: Dec. 7, 1941.

That’s how breaking news was disseminated 75 years ago. And as he has told over the years the story of how his family learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor – a day that changed America forever – it was the details that he remembered that I remember: An afternoon card game. Neighbors in the front parlor. A shouting newsboy.

Details. We always remember the details.

And so now I recall a Tuesday morning 15 years ago. I’m a stay-at-home mom taking care of my boys, my two lovely boys. Matt, 7, had just been picked up by his second-grade carpool, and Jack, 4, was eating Cheerios at the kitchen table before preschool. I had promised Jack we would walk that day, in just his second week at the new place. And why not? Southminster Presbyterian is located only two blocks away — four-tenths of a mile — and it is a beautiful, crisp September morning.

And once Matt was picked up, the morning went like this: I’ve got one hand on a coffee cup, the other on a newspaper. I’ve got one eye on the baseball standings, and one ear on a small TV in the corner of the kitchen and NBC’s “Today” show. Jack is seated next to me, in a booster seat he’s thisclose to not needing anymore. It’s just before 8 a.m., CDT, and Matt Lauer and Katie Couric are bantering about … something.

That’s when I hear semi-familiar NBC “Breaking News” music and look up from the paper to see the infamous plume of smoke trailing from one of the towers of the World Trade Center. At first, Matt and Katie treat it as a curiosity, speculating about a small plane. But it’s a freakish enough accident to get me out of my chair and turn the volume up.

A few minutes later, the second plane hits, in full view of a nation, a mom in a kitchen, and her four-year-old eating Cheerios. That’s where we were, as a songwriter would ask a few months later, when the world stopped turning.

‘You promised’

My oh my, has it been 15 years? You remember your own details just like I remember Cheerios, baseball standings and walking my four-year-old to preschool. “Maybe we should drive today,” I gently suggested. “No mom, I want to walk,” he said. “You promised.”

I had indeed. I didn’t want to leave the news reports, but I had to get him away from TV. I had to get him to school.

This was still early in the day, before the Pentagon would be hit, before the skies would be cleared of planes, before the two towers would fall as easily as a stack of a 4-year-old’s blocks. But we left the house on that 8-minute walk to Southminster, and we held hands the entire way. Somehow, I knew I didn’t want to let go.

He’s a sophomore in college now, a member of the last class of kids who could possibly have any memory of that day 15 years ago. That’s quite a burden for his generation to carry, but something tells me they will shoulder it well.

Over the years, when asked by teachers and others if he remembered anything about that day, Jack would say, “I remember watching planes crash into a building. I remember walking to preschool. I remember my mom crying.”

Funny thing about memory. At some point, memory stops becoming the things you actually recall and start becoming the stories you hear over and over. Jack remembers Cheerios for breakfast and a small TV in the corner of the kitchen because my oft-told recollection has become his.

It’s why we tell stories.

And so he will always remember this detail, about the 8-minute walk to preschool that followed two planes crashing into tall buildings that day: “We held hands.”

28 years

Posted on June 27, 2020Leave a comment

At about 1:45 p.m. on June 27, 1992, I was getting ready with my Dad to walk down the very long aisle of St. Sabina Catholic Church in Florissant, Mo.

If you’re familiar with the place, you know how long — long enough to give you plenty of time to think about what’s about to go down. And all I could think of was how lucky I was to be marrying that tall guy waiting at the end of it.

Here are two pictures, the very first one taken of us together and the most recent, along with a column I wrote in 2017 on our 25th anniversary. Still holds up, even in the midst of a pandemic. Oh, and glad to say that my friend Colleen from the column is still my friend Colleen Hagerty Haug. Friendship holds up, too.

Father’s Day 2020

Posted on June 20, 2020Leave a comment

Watching the sunset on Bonita Beach, Fla., in January 2020, shortly after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Among the skills my Dad learned as a typesetter was to read upside down. Printing, as he learned it in the 1950s, was a tedious process that involved setting hot metal type into a wooden tray backwards and upside down, so a page could be printed forward and be read right-side up.

Backward, forward, upside down, right-side up. Pretty much explains this year 2020, and we’re not yet halfway through.

This is Father’s Day weekend, a bittersweet one as the loss of my Dad is still quite new. He died June 5 in his south Florida retirement community of pancreatic cancer after being on hospice care for seven weeks, all of which my three brothers and I were blessed to spend with him at different times and intervals.

Because nothing is normal when you are battling terminal cancer in the midst of a global pandemic, none of the past three months have been either. But you learn a lot through something like this. You learn that courage is sometimes as simple as getting out of bed everyday. You learn heroes come in all shapes and sizes and show up when you need them most. You learn that sometimes, life will come at you backwards, forwards and upside down, and there’s nothing you can do except trust that, at some point, everything will be made forward and right-side up. Thanks to our Dad, we had a head start on knowing that.

Here is a column I wrote on Father’s Day 2016, not about typesetting but about synchronized swimming. As is typical of almost almost anyone’s “Dad Stories,” this man had a lot of layers. I hope you’ll keep reading, as it’s a good story, too. And if you’re lucky enough to have your dad still with you, give him a hug or a phone call and tell him you love him because you just never know when life will throw you upside down.

Bogota

Posted on June 5, 2020Leave a comment

Among the gifts I received from my Dad, Les Gibson, were a love of reading and history, of poetry and persistence; of arcane knowledge and trivial facts — the latter of which made the game show, Jeopardy must-see TV.

We watched it together just about every night for the past 7 weeks as he battled pancreatic cancer from his retirement community in Estero, Fla. In typical fashion, he knew more of the answers than anyone in the room most nights, including one night a few weeks back when he answered a question about the northernmost city in the Andes Mountain range.

“Bogota,” in a voice faintly audible from his easy chair, a destination that most nights took every bit of his strength at which to arrive from the slumber of those whose hospice status had vacillated to and from “actively dying.”

Bogota, and the explorer John Ledyard, and the abolishment of Prussia in 1948 — all Final Jeopardy questions of the past few weeks that provided him an ounce of pleasure in a world of hurt.

This afternoon, he slipped away at age 85 after living with pancreatic cancer for the better part of six months. He leaves behind a loving family and a lifetime of friends who were, and are, like family.

There will be more space and time for words later, but for now it’s enough to know his struggle and pain has ended, and that he’s reunited with our mom, Betty. And he knew Bogota.

Originally appeared on Leslie McCarthy Stories Facebook page June 5, 2020.

The South County Times: The last column

Posted on March 27, 20201 Comment

Each Friday since July 2003, the South County Times, a weekly community newspaper in South St. Louis County, allowed me, quite literally, one column of type. I did my best to fill it for more than 15 years, 870 weeks in a row and more than 400,000 words — but who’s counting?

Where did I get my material? I’m a mom first, thanks to Tom, my history-teacher husband of nearly 29 years, who also doubled as an editor and sounding board. The best topics were often right in front of me. Our boys, Matt, 25, and Jack, 23, are now grown and flown, but they gave me plenty of material growing up, I never wrote about them without asking permission first, although as they got older they pretended not to care. They still pretend not to care, but that doesn’t mean I stopped writing about them. I’m pretty proud of the men they have become.

I also told stories in and around my South County neighborhood, beginning with our little suburb of Crestwood and spilling over into Affton, Fenton, Sappington and other surrounding areas.

But on March 27, 2020, the South County Times published its last issue, a victim of declining advertising and the coronavirus. My last column is below. I think I left on a high note. My Grandma Gibson would agree.

Here’s what i wrote:

Leaving the light on

Each morning around 5:30 a.m, our 7-month-old puppy and I walk the neighborhood. For about the past week or so, we’ve noticed that nearly every porch light on the block has been left on overnight. It’s comforting to know that despite the greatest challenge of all of our lives, we persevere.

I think about a lot of stuff in those early hours, mostly about how we are going to get through this. I think about the example of our everyday heroes: health care workers and first responders, grocery store clerks and teachers.

I also think about my own heroes, one being my paternal grandmother, Ella Pearl Gibson. Born in 1902, she was 16 and married with a baby on the way at the onset of the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic. When she was 19, she was burying that first child. By the time she was 22, she had buried three babies. She also lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and threats of polio. I came along in the 1960s, and my greatest memories of her are a soft laugh and a strong, steady spirit, one that remained until her death in 1976.

I wished I had been old enough to ask her how she survived what she did. I can only guess that it was a simple strength that allowed her to get out of bed every day and live the life that was in front of her. She fed her family, and cooked and cleaned and showed up at her job as a dimestore clerk. And in her leisure time, she sewed and quilted and kept her hands working, perhaps so that her mind wouldn’t dwell on things she couldn’t control.

I still have one of her quilts, red and white and tattered. I can examine the tiny, perfect stitches that remain intact some 50 years after they were made. I can think about the hands that once held what I hold in mine right now. Maybe that’s how we get through this, by examining our own DNA and holding in our hands tangible proof — a quilt, a Bible, an old photograph — that because of who we are we have more strength than we know.

So this is how I leave this space, maybe for a while, maybe forever. It’s been the privilege of my career to write for the South County Times, 870 weeks in succession. They weren’t always home runs, but I am grateful for getting an at-bat every week for 17 years.

Thank you for letting me share stories of my family and my community. I’m a better writer and a better person because of all of you. I’ll be on Facebook and my website, lesliegmccarthy.com. I’m not going anywhere.

The porch light’s still on.

The rest of the story

Posted on December 20, 20193 Comments

My column in the South County Times of Dec. 20, 2019, tells the remarkable story of my nephew Nick Gibson, his chance encounter with a bone marrow registry in 2008, and Jennifer Golden, the Long Island mother of three who survived a bout with leukemia after getting Nick’s stem cells in a bone marrow transplant in 2018.

I always wish I can write more than the 450 or so words I’m allowed each week, but word counts are important. So here’s more to the story:

Nick was the last grandchild known by my mom, Betty Gibson, who died of leukemia on March 3, 1994, at age 55, and who is the reason Nick stopped by that table at the University of Missouri all those years ago for the registry.

Betty was of Irish descent, was about as faithful a Catholic as you can be, didn’t know a stranger, loved to laugh and loved her family fiercely. Nick was just 3 when she died, and most of his memories of her are stories we’ve told over the years. But I got to witness firsthand how much joy he and his brother Dan brought to her life. Once those grandkids came, it was over for the rest of us. Not really, but you know how grandmas are.

So when Nick notified that he was a match for someone, our family’s collective heart soared. Here’s the column I wrote about his experience as a donor through the registry DKMS. When you think about it, it’s pretty remarkable that a complete stranger who lives in another part of the country can share parts of an individual’s DNA.

It’s quite possible the match was through Nick’s maternal line, and if so there’s not a better family than the Dixons and the Rallos of Southern Illinois. Or maybe it was the Gibsons and Cliffords of St. Louis, Nick’s paternal lineage. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the connection. I like to imagine that one of these families, generations and generations ago, stepped off Ellis Island in New York Harbor in the mid-19th century and then had to face living and surviving in a new country. I’m guessing one family member said, “I’m staying here,” and another said, “New York’s too crowded, I’m heading west.” And just like that, goodbye forever. Yet here we are, in 2019, connected again.

There’s one more element to this story: When DKMS informed Nick that his his recipient wanted to meet him, they began exchanging emails. In her introduction, Jennifer attached a picture of her family at Disney World taken about six months before she got sick, and Nick shared that picture with us.

The first thing you notice was the smiles of a mom and a dad and three beautiful girls at the Happiest Place On Earth. But there was also this: In Jennifer’s hair a red and white polka dot bow, just like the one worn by Minnie Mouse.

That’s the part of the picture that prompted me to close my office door. My mom, Nick’s Grandma Betty, loved Disney World — and Minnie Mouse. Her dream was to retire to Florida after raising her family in Missouri, and she said she wanted to live close enough to Disney World so she could get a job as Minnie. (Which was really funny because she had no experience in amusement parks, nor any mascot training that we know of.) But she loved everything Disney, and I’m pretty sure she might have applied if given the opportunity.

She and my dad had just begun looking into retirement communities in Florida when she got sick. She was diagnosed in June of 1993 and died nine months later.

So seeing that picture of Golden at Disney World with her husband and three beautiful daughters, with Minnie’s bow in her hair, made all the sense in the world. Maybe Betty got that job as Minnie Mouse after all.

The bone marrow registry DKMS matched Jennifer with Nick, and it all started with a cheek swab. Here’s how to join.

Good Golly Miss Molly

Posted on October 12, 2019Leave a comment

With college tuition behind us and our boys settling into their careers, we have a bit of free time now, which means the possibilities are endless: Travel. Become wine experts. Sit in the recliner watching Netflix for as long as we darn well please. But somehow Tom and I decided we needed another challenge.

“Maybe it’s time to get a dog,” I said one night when one incredibly cute canine bounded across the TV screen. “I’m thinking it’s now or never.”

He didn’t agree or disagree, although he might have heard, “Look at that dog. Isn’t it clever?”

Then this happened: One month, I’m admiring the puppies of my college friend’s family dog breeding business on Instagram; the next, Tom and I are driving to Iowa to pick up a miniature goldendoodle. And now Molly, our two-month old, three-pound bundle of fur, has turned our world upside down.

In what universe did I think bringing an eight-week old puppy into our home at age 56 was a good idea? And in what cosmos did a 57-year-old husband agree to it?

Ours, apparently, and while we’re sleep deprived and covered in puppy slobber, we couldn’t be happier. Molly was bred by Rafter W Farms of West Point, Iowa, owned by my college friend Cindy Wellman and her husband Miles. It’s operated by their son, Tyler, 20, a junior at Iowa State who has been showing livestock competitively since age 8 and has a few Iowa State Fair championship banners hanging in their family home.

So Good Golly, Miss Molly, we’re adjusting to a new life. We’ve made friends with the staff at PetSmart. We’ve Googled phrases such as: “Why do puppies eat their poop?” Our new favorite product is Nature’s Miracle Advanced Severe Enzymatic Formula, a spray bottle of sunshine that eliminates odors – most of them.

We’ve rediscovered the backyard. We talk to our neighbors over the fence again. That thing about dogs lowering your blood pressure? I’m pretty sure it’s true.

And our boys? They’re taking it in stride. Matt is settled in and working in Chicago, happy that his mom is not obsessing over his every move. Jack is living at home until January and is a huge help, not to mention clearly Molly’s favorite household member.

“Matt and I always joked you guys would get a dog to replace us when we left,” he said. “We can’t believe you actually did it.”

Meanwhile, Rafter W Farms has puppies available and Molly wouldn’t mind sharing South County. They’re salt-of-the-earth, the Wellmans of West Point, and one of the finest families I know. Iowans tend to be like that. Is the state heaven? I have no idea, but I am pretty sure that the little Iowan who eats and sleeps in our home is heaven sent.

Originally appeared in the South County Times on Oct. 11, 2019.

Heaven’s lace, 2019

Posted on June 22, 20192 Comments

The lace was never meant for warmth. Even though the first Saturday of February 1959 was unseasonably warm, a mink stole adorned the young bride as she left the church in her white silk gown, capped with lace from just above the waist moving into sleeves down each arm and ending in a point on top of her hand.

A 20-year-old bride, Betty Clifford, marrying a man four years her senior, Les Gibson, who lived with his mom on the StreetWhereSheLived.

And so Feb. 7, 1958, dawned warm and dry, and a morning wedding at St. Liborius Catholic Church in old North St. Louis begat a wedding brunch at the Heidelberg Inn, which begat a wedding reception at the old Swiss Hall on Arsenal St. It was a St. Louis wedding through and through, with the three essential ingredients: beer, music and mostaccioli.

There was no honeymoon. Just a half-hour drive north to a three-bedroom, one-bath ranch home in a brand new neighborhood in Florissant, Missouri, a growing suburb in north St. Louis County.

For the next 35 years, there she would live with Les and together they would raise four children — three boys and a girl.

Betty, a derivative of Elizabeth, was an apt name for a mom of the 1960s and ’70s: June Cleaver without the pearls, Carol Brady without Alice. She made sure God was at the center of the family, and if she had any vices they were Pepsi-Cola, popular fiction and Winston cigarettes, not always in that order.

By 1994, the year leukemia got the best of her at the age of 55, she had raised a lawyer, a businessman, a journalist and, ultimately, a captain in the United States Navy. And the family that buried her on a cold day in March had grown to include two daughters- and a son-in-law, and two rambunctious grandsons on whom she believed the sun rose and the sun set.

Over the next decade, there’d be one more daughter-in-law and seven more grandkids — the third just six weeks after her death. She’d have thought the sun rose and set with them, too.

The dress? Tinged with dirt on its edges with a small mostoccioli-stain, the gown was rolled up and placed in a bag for a dry cleaning it never received.

My Mom’s Stuff

I was her only daughter, so somehow, the dress came into my possession. I don’t recall ever seeing it growing up. I never played dress-up with it, never contemplated its lace, never dreamed what it would be like to wear during my own wedding. It just appeared in my basement a few years after she died, along with other items I salvaged from our house in Florissant when my dad remarried four years later and sold our childhood home. I was a young mother with a full-time job then, so the dress was pushed further back into the milieu that was simply My Mom’s Stuff.

Meanwhile, that family she taught to pray together stayed together, taking reunion trips over the years with Dad to places such as Breckenridge, Yellowstone, Gettysburg, the Outer Banks, with the grandkids at various stages of their lives and alway the centers of attention.

And then this: The first next-generation wedding. The oldest son of her oldest son, Dan Gibson, married Jess Reeder of Paducah, Ken., Aug. 10, 2013. Jess was the girl Danny first noticed freshman year in a math class at the University of Evansville, the girl he’d linger in the hallway waiting for after class in the hopes she’d linger too.

She lingered all the way to the altar of the Neu Chapel on that same campus seven years later, on a sun-kissed Saturday afternoon.

And a part of the wedding: A ring-bearer pillow, made from the dress, adorned with Heaven’s Lace.

A postscript

Six years later, a second next-generation wedding. Nick, her second grandson and the only other grandchild she got to hug, is engaged to be married to the lovely Haley O’Toole — a match Mizzou Made.

We couldn’t be happier for both of them and can’t wait to celebrate with the O’Toole Family. Every time Haley came around, the family would be like, “She is so awesome… Nick what are you waiting for?” But all things in their own time, as Betty knew all too well.

So soon there will be another pillow adorned with the lace from a wedding dress of long ago. This time to be carried by two little guys named Ramsey and Max, the sons of Danny and Jess who are about the same age as the two little guys in the picture above left.

Life comes full circle.

How a dress lives on.

Of Mud Hens and Swamp Angels

Posted on April 6, 20181 Comment

A follow up, just as baseball starts up again all over the country, because there’s always more to the story:

Last summer, I wrote about the 60 or so descendants of my mom’s family, the Cliffords, who had gathered in Crestwood Park for a reunion. That same weekend, the Toledo Mud Hens were playing 430 miles away, significant because our common ancestor, my great-grandfather Thomas Clifford, had been an original Mud Hen.

Or so we always thought. Here’s what we knew: That he had played professional baseball just before the turn of the 20th century, in such cities as Shreveport, Paducah, Peoria and Toledo; and that there existed in the family an old photograph of a handsome young man with a twinkle in his eye and “Toledo” on his jersey.

But this is a story about baseball, where facts are as plentiful as fly balls and not all become legend. Shortly after the reunion, my cousin Mark Meyer, the keeper of the photograph that had been passed down to him from his grandfather, Rich Clifford, emailed the Mud Hens seeking more information.

Mud Hens historian John Husman kindly provided Meyer what stats he had on Clifford and asked for more biographical information. In return, Meyer sent him a digital version (left) of the old picture. And then he forgot about it.

Until last month, when he got this email from Husman: Good Day: We have had the Thomas Clifford image you so kindly gave the Toledo Mud Hens a year ago touched up a bit. A copy is attached for your use. We are displaying it at our ballpark this summer.

The display case at Fifth Third Park in Toledo, Ohio.

Included with the beautifully restored photograph (above left) was the text of a didactic to be placed beside it, telling the story of how Clifford, “versatile on defense,” played in 71 games in 1896 batting .271. But he only played the first half of that Toledo season. That July, the club was sold to a man named Charles Strobel, who, according to Husman, would come to be known as “The Father of Toledo Baseball.” Strobel had owned a team in Washington, and brought with him nearly all his players so he cut most of the Toledo players loose — including my great-grandfather Tom Clifford. Then Strobel changed the nickname from Swamp Angels to Mud Hens.

The display on Thomas Clifford at Fifth Third Park, Toledo, Ohio.

Because of Strobel’s marketing savvy, the club had plenty of photographs of the original Mud Hens. But until my cousin Mark sent his email, it had no pictures of Swamp Angels. Until now.

On Thursday, April 12, the Mud Hens celebrated Opening Day. In a display case at Fifth Third Field in downtown Toledo, amidst baseballs, bats, and Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett on a Wheaties box, now sits a restored replica of a 122-year-old photograph of my great-grandfather, the Mud Hen who never was.

We now know what happened to Tom Clifford. The original story in this blog is here. We always thought he was a baseball player who never made it big. But five generations and hundreds of descendants later, we now know that Tom Clifford, Swamp Angel, made it big enough.

A version of this originally appeared in the South County Times on April 6, 2018.