Family Archives - Leslie Gibson McCarthy

It’s in the DNA

Posted on January 28, 2022Leave a comment

Most of us know little about our great-grandparents, eight distinct people who, on average, contribute 12.5% of our DNA. That’s a lot of genes that make us who we are. Maybe it’s a crooked smile, a cowlick, a sense of humor or a strength you didn’t know you had. It came from somewhere.

And so we begin Year Three of a global pandemic, and I go searching online for resiliency. I find Mary Kennedy Clifford, my mother’s paternal grandmother. Born in St. Louis in 1877 to Irish immigrants John Kennedy and Catherine McKenna, at 22 she married Tom Clifford, a young man from the neighborhood who thought he might give it a go as a pro baseball player. That’s another story.

In this one, love prevails over baseball, and they marry in 1899. Within a year, they have their first child — a boy also named Tom. Two years after that comes John, then Ed, Bill, Rich and Hugh. Six boys in 12 years, all living under one roof on 11th Street, part of an acre now occupied by an exit ramp of Interstate 70. Her mother, now widowed, lived with the family, too. Can you imagine running that house? Cook, clean, mend, eat, pray, love — day after day, with no modern amenities. A life centered around family and St. Michael’s Catholic Church.

And then came a day that would change Mary forever. It was always a vague family story, but this confirms it: Newspapers from Sept. 9, 1912, detailing the drowning of Tom Clifford, age 12, who told his parents he was going to play baseball one Sunday afternoon. But the other team never showed up, so the group decided to go swimming in the Mississippi River. For Tom, it was his first, and last, time.

The wake was at the family home. “Please omit flowers,” the obituary read. At the time, Mary was five months pregnant with her seventh child — a girl, Margaret, who would be born in January and die less than seven months later. “Cholera infantium,” the death certificate read. A year after that, Mary’s mom, Catherine, died at 71. “Arterio sclerosis.”

How do you survive a three-year stretch like that? I like to think faith had something to do with it. And family. And rising every day to take care of business. Cook. Clean. Mend. Eat. Pray. Love. Mary would have her youngest child the next year, 1915 — a boy named Joe. She’d live through World War I, the Spanish Flu and half of the Great Depression until dying at home on Oct. 24, 1936. “Chronic endocarditis,” the death certificate read. A broken heart.

Her six surviving sons would live for decades, see many wonders of the 20th century and spawn 15 grandchildren and close to 50 great-grandchildren. I’m one of them. So are some of you reading this newspaper.

The current stretch we’re in? We can make it through. It’s in our DNA.

Originally published in the Webster-Kirkwood Times Jan. 24, 2022.

Click here to read a newspaper account of the drowning of Tom Clifford:

St. Louis Star Times Sept. 9, 1912 Clifford Drowning 09 Sep 1912, Mon The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri) Newspapers.com

A very, very good dog

Posted on October 2, 20213 Comments

At some point today we’ll pick up the chew toys: the rope monkey and the squeaky skunk and the flying squirrel that’s now half-rope and half-matted fur.

It is after all, the weekend, time to clean and vacuum dog hair, and make the house a bit more presentable after a week in which Molly has reigned supreme over all. Which is what every week for the past two years has been like since the October day in 2019 when we drove up to West Point, Ia., to pick up a puppy from Rafter W Farms.

We had no idea what we were getting into.

What we were getting was a 20-pound miniature goldendoodle, a specialty breed of golden brown hair that never got curly — a “toy” golden, the perfect dog. A long snout that made a smile more obvious; a long tail with so much hair on it that it looks like a plume when it’s curled up and wagging, which is often and awesome at the same time.

Two years ago this week, she completely took over our lives — beginning in the early days where we were like, “What were we thinking, getting a puppy at our age?” The family text string was working overtime with frequent updates and pictures: updates on her thrice-daily walks; her affection for eating acorns; and the frequency and consistency of, well, poop. Matt in Chicago wondered why we waited so long. Jack took advantage of his last three months living in the house to bond with her. We willingly shelled out money for daily pet care, premium snacks and mobile grooming. We rearranged social outings and work schedules to make sure she didn’t spend too much time alone or in her kennel.

She was a Godsend during the pandemic, from the early unsettling days of 2020 to the long months that dragged on, making work at home bearable and fun. Molly was a constant presence who needed us as much as we needed her.

If you notice a subtle change in verb tense, well there’s a reason: On Thursday, we had to say goodbye to our beloved Molly much too soon, and much too unexpectedly.

Last Thursday morning, she either got bit/stung by an insect or ingested some kind of toxin that seeped into her bloodstream, resulting in a slow — at first — reaction that ended up in anaphylactic shock. So what started out as a nervous trip to our Arch Animal Hospital vet for what we thought were stomach issues ended up a few hours later with a transfer to the emergency pet hospital for what the vet called a “systemic and violent reaction” to the toxin.

It all changed within a matter of a few hours. Her organs began to fail and she did not respond to treatment. By 8:30 p.m., they told us it was doubtful she would make it through the night. So we made the awful, horrible decision to euthanize, and Tom, Jack and I were able to be with her when she was put to sleep in a most gentle and pain-free way. But not before raising her head and seeing her glorious tail wag one last time — at the sight and smell of Jack and Tom rushing into the vet’s office just before we transported her to VSS.

Turns out, that was her goodbye to all of us.

We are shocked and saddened. She was just entering her prime — she turned 2 Aug. 11 — and we would have celebrated our “gotcha” day this Tuesday, Oct. 5. She was our Molly Girl, our Doggie Dog. And she taught us many things, such as:

Sometimes, a good walk around the block, no matter the weather or the temperature, is just enough to settle you down.
The surest way to make a neighbor a friend is to walk past their house every night.
A dog begging for a belly rub is a fail-proof way to curtail screen time.
A 20-pound dog can play soccer, push a regulation ball the length of a backyard or balance it on her nose — and bark in delight at the same time.
Naps are good.
Snuggles are contagious.
Love is unconditional.

We will miss her forever. From the bottom of our hearts, we want to thank Dr. Angela Garcia at Arch Animal Hospital, the best vet ever, and Dr. Jennifer Eisele, the ER vet at Veterinary Special Services, as well as the staffs of both places. Thanks to Cindy Berndt of Critter Sitters, our beloved pet sitter who was responsible for the soccer tricks and who jumped right back in despite an 18-month hiatus in pet care. Thanks to our friends Cindy and Miles Wellman and Rafter W Farms for helping us find the most unique and perfect canine the world has ever seen. That’s not an exaggeration.

She was a very, very good girl.

Our Field of Dreams

Posted on August 11, 2021Leave a comment

You know we just don’t recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they’re happening. Back then I thought, well, there’ll be other days. I didn’t realize that that was the only day. – Doc “Moonlight” Graham, to Ray Kinsella in the movie “Field of Dreams”

In the summer of 2003, just before embarking on a family vacation to Minnesota, I pitched an idea to my editors at the Sporting News: A 15^th anniversary story about a baseball field in Iowa.

By that point, “Field of Dreams” was already part of baseball lore and 50,000-60,000 people a year were making the pilgrimage to the tiny farm outside of Dyersville, Ia., where the movie was filmed in the summer of 1988.

And this was Sporting News calling, so then-owners Don and Becky Lansing were more than gracious to a sportswriter who asked if it would be OK to bring her family along for the interview. It was more than OK. Though they no longer lived in the farmhouse that was used to film the interiors, they met us there, gave us a tour, and offered the porch for the interview. And that’s where I sat talking to the Lansings while Tom, Matt and Jack played catch on the field, frolicked in the corn and acted out scenes from the movie.

Some stories in a career transcend time, and this is one of them. It’s a moment I’ll never forget, watching my husband and our boys, who were 9 and 7 at the time, play on that field – from the same porch where Annie sat watching Ray and his dad have a catch. Sometimes, you do recognize the most significant moments of your life as they’re happening.

Below is the story as it appeared in the July 9, 2003, issue of the Sporting News as well some photos. The Lansings sold the farm in 2011 to a group from Chicago, and the Aug. 12 game between the Yankees and the White Sox has renewed interest in the site. But the movie endures, and I swear every damn time I watch it I get a lump in my throat at the end.

“Field of Dreams” has become part of our family lore, and it’s safe to say if there’s one constant for a family with grown children, it’s baseball. Two of the best moments of this summer of 2021 have happened around baseball: visiting Jack, a St. Louis realtor, in his downtown St. Louis Ballpark Village office; and heading to Chicago to see Matt, an attorney, who surprised his mom with tickets to a baseball game. Which team? The White Sox. Of course.

The corner of a corner lot

Posted on April 19, 2021Leave a comment

“This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”

I read that recently from the writer Richard Powers, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for his novel, “The Overstory.” Perspective-changing? Definitely. I can honestly say I haven’t looked at trees the same way since.

And so a story about a tree for the month of April, the month of Arbor Day celebrations and poetry. I don’t think it’s an accident these two intersect.

This tree is now a 22-foot white oak that grows near the corner of a corner lot in Crestwood. A tree that’s been growing 14 years this spring, since the time it arrived in a 10-year-old’s backpack, a sapling wrapped in a paper towel. I remember the day he brought it home, unpacking his lunch, a pencil box and a bunch of crumpled papers before proudly holding it up and saying, “When is Dad coming home?”

It was a 2007 Arbor Day giveaway, compliments of the state of Missouri. Do they still do that for 4th graders? I certainly hope so.

They planted that twig a few days later, a stake marking its place and mulch protecting is base. They watered it together that first summer, and somehow it survived into the first winter. After that, a second spring, followed by seasons and seasons of windstorms, thunderstorms, snow storms and ice storms. It took a few years to sprout noticeable branches but until it did, it didn’t seem to mind being tagged as second base or as an end zone marker for little boys’ games. …

Read the rest in the April 16, 2021, issue of the 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 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.

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.