Month: October 2010

A Letter to Dad

Dear Daddy,

It has been a busy week. We’ve been talking and thinking of you – each in our own way. Aidan told me he had a dream that you were floating in an inner tube in the water at the beach – maybe you were happy to be able to be free and enjoying the waves – (probably as happy as you could ever be at the beach.) Maybe you were letting us all know you are at peace.Like Aidan’s dream, you are in our hearts uniquely – each of us with our own story with prologue, plot and epilogue. Each story is the gift of our time with you, the part of your soul that is within us and the lessons you taught – not by lecture — but by the way you lived and the example that you gave us.

As a child, my memory is peppered with scenes of you helping someone … with pro-bono legal advice, finding a home, a place to stay, a job or getting an education or into a drug rehab – addressing needs large or small. It always seemed these personal stories had some twist to the challenge – some level of injustice that needed to be righted. The degree of the need or complexity of the challenge was not a concern — you acted swiftly without a second thought in some cases, not really knowing before it was resolved how the story would end. Your compassion for others drove your actions – whether you could afford to help or not — you offered the skills, the funds, the knowledge or relationships to address the need.

Time has muted the details for me. I have vague recollections of accompanying you on these road trips to deliver a check or papers or just to visit a lonely friend. I know we could draw up a long list of people impacted by the generosity of your spirit — many of them here today– those who were on the receiving end of you giving of yourself without any expectations of something in return. Daddy, I admire your compassion for people and your acceptance of all people in a real way and I can only hope I could live up to the high standard you have set for us. You lived the Gospel, Dad, and most importantly, you did so humbly in a way that conveyed to us that this was simply the right way to act.

While humble with regard to your good deeds, you were understandably proud of your achievements athletically both as a young man in high school and college and then again, as a “master” – in the “over 40” age group. Dubbed the “silver fox” at your 40th birthday, you could outrun most of your much younger competitors and most definitely me! Speaking of which…thanks for staying with me during the 15 k Parkway Classic when the race staff told me the finish line was “just around the corner” only to find that the finish was at least another quarter mile and an “S” curve ahead. You and I ran together, while Ron ran ahead – he wasn’t ready to commit.

I like the story of you and Dan delivering Sunday papers – it epitomizes both the dutiful father and the proud runner. You had just returned from your morning run – probably with icicles down your neck – and you took the car to help Dan with the route. Finished and ready to settle into the Sunday Inquirer magazine yourself, you turned the cover to find a large picture of you during your most recent race which must have finished with several loops on a track. It must have been your Irish luck that not only was the picture prominently displayed in the magazine but the leader of the race showed in the background. The Inquirer Magazine just happened to snap the picture of you on an earlier loop with the race winner on his later (and final ?? loop), making it look like you were ahead! And of course, knowing now that your picture was in this edition, you and Dan went dumpster diving to retrieve the extra papers for safe keeping and appropriate distribution. Well, to be clear….DAN went dumpster diving, while you DIRECTED.

Daddy, I will miss your impish nature like your love of sweets and ice cream. You created the original “McSorley bowl of ice cream” — a term reserved for a dish filled to the brim. I can see your sad pout when you couldn’t have a second bowl. June says that even the grandkids knew where to go for a treat because you always had a stash…

And I have rich memories of the boyish Pop-pop – the one who played passionately against Alex and Aidan to defeat the Emperor Zurg on the Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger spin at the Magic Kingdom. The Pop-pop wrestling the younger kids in your lap , the giggling and squeals that accompanied them….and more recently, your chats each Saturday morning just hearing about the day or the events of the week.

Growing up, you were larger than life. We couldn’t walk from your office to the cleaners or the hardware store without several hellos and stops for a chat. It seemed everyone knew you whether from the City, the law practice, running, church or wherever – everyone knew Paul McSorley. You were so much a part of the community you were like the Mayor of Fox Chase. Apparently, this experience continued beyond Fox Chase like when you and June were on your honeymoon in San Francisco and a runner went by and yelled, “Hi Paul!.” Surprised, June asked why he didn’t stop seeing as you were in San Francisco and unphased, you said, “Well, he was running…he was probably timing himself.”

As an adult, the larger than life Dad became the man I admire — and even that sounds so inadequate. I so respect your learned approach to any issue, your commitment to justice and compassion and your firm belief in our representative government, even if at times the candidates frustrated you – frustrated us all… Oh Dad, you would not have been pleased this election day…

Daddy, thank you for passing on your focus and discipline. What a gift you gave us all – to decide what we want, commit and build and plan and execute. You would be proud to know that I see it now budding in my boys as they attack training for cross country and lacrosse in the same way you trained for a marathon or committed to give up alcohol. Determination and focus are the elements of success!

Dad, no one can tell an Irish story quite like you. Did you hear the one about the lapsed catholic who decided to go to confession? Seeing a bottle of scotch and a glass with ice when he got into the confessional, he thought, “Wow, how things have changed.” And as he began to make his confession, he commented to the priest who said, “Get out of there, you are on the wrong side of the box!”

But some of your best qualities are hard to describe in simple terms – they are elusive only because they are so special…– like your ability to think positively and have faith that problems would work themselves out. Not in a polyanna sort of way but a genuine belief – or at least that’s what you conveyed to the rest of us. This was especially true in times of tight household budgets when you would figure out a way to do the things that you knew were important – planned or not – knowing that the budget may be strained. You took it one day at a time to figure things out. You had to drawn on that skill many times during my youth – figuring out funding for college, new babies and other big expenses that come with life’s surprises.

OR…like your silent and unspoken way of showing how much you cared….like the time you made sure that I had a card or letter EVERY day that I was away at 2-week camp at Camp Laughing Water. You had to start mailing the cards in advance to make sure I had one for the first mail call….and I was the envy of every kid at the camp because I got mail EVERY day for 15 days…. Now, as a parent, I SO appreciate the attention this took to accomplish your end.

Daddy, you are at peace now. You are free from the “leash” as you called it, from the oxygen cord and the human body that was failing. You are free again to be the marathon runner, the playful Pop-pop, the writer, and storyteller, the DAD we love so much.

I think you know you are beyond well loved and all of us here are sad to see you leave us.

But you are reunited with so many that you have missed for many years — Frank, Annie, Winnie, Pat,…just to name a few – during my last visit a few weeks ago you told me how you missed Annie and all the others…they welcome you now. Remember, Daddy that I love you and there are lots of people here who will now miss you….

October 9, 2010
St. Petersburg, FL

Good morning. I’m Suzie McSorley, the oldest of Paul’s seven children. I want to thank every one of you here for joining June, dad’s sister Roey, all of my brothers and sisters and step brothers and sisters and our children and some of our cousins, in this celebration of dad’s life. Your presence today is a gift to us, and a testament to the life dad and June built for themselves here in St. Pete. And it is living evidence of the support and friendship they found together in this church.

I don’t think that I can do my father justice today – but when I shared my fears with June this week, she reminded me that my father would never be disappointed with a mediocre effort – but he would be terribly disappointed if no one said anything about him. I assure you that that’s not about to happen!

My father was a man of many passions and talents – so many, that it’s hard to know exactly how he would want to be remembered. Sometimes I think he might want to be remembered as a story teller. He was an Irishman, after all, so he was a man of many stories. Some of them were even true. I’m sure that anyone who knew Paul had to endure at least one of his jokes. Most of them involved Irishmen in bars. He’d ask you if you’d heard the one about the Irishman who ordered three drinks every night, or the Irishman who went to confession, and if you said you had heard it, usually he’d tell it again anyway. At one point, I thought I would tell you one of these jokes this morning, but then I realized there couldn’t possibly be anyone here today who hadn’t heard them all already.

Sometimes I think my dad might want to be remembered as a memoirist. Twenty years ago, dad started writing regular monthly “letters” to us. He eventually called them his Jottings. Dad’s jottings are filled with just about everything – there are stories from his youth and stories from his years of practicing law and politics in Philadelphia, there are reflections on current events and on matters theological, there are travelogues, and syntheses of what he was reading at the time (some of us disparagingly called those sections his “book reports”). The Jottings were a monthly reminder of how wide-ranging dad’s interests were. We started posting the Jottings on the family website in 2000, and from that point on, dad came to view meeting his monthly deadline as a public service. When I last spoke with dad in mid September, he apologized for not getting his August jottings completed. He told me that he had reluctantly accepted that August 2010 would be the first missed issue in 20 years. We all loved to give dad a hard time about the Jottings, but I’m going to miss them as much as I’m going to miss the calls that he made every Saturday morning, to each one of his children.

Sometimes I think dad might like to be remembered as a runner. He started running in high school and he would tell you, if you asked, that he won the Philadelphia city championship for the mile in 1947. He picked it up again very seriously when I was in high school. He was a marathoner in the 1970s, when almost no one knew about or ran marathons, and he kept running well into his seventies. I have siblings and many cousins who were inspired, or encouraged in their running by dad’s example, love and support. He was also extremely proud of my brother Dan when he followed in dad’s footsteps and started running marathons, though Dan tells me that, at age 48, he’s finished with marathons! Of course, my favorite story about dad and his athletic pursuits is more of an aside. Many years ago, when I told my father that I was going to marry Tom Baker dad gave me his blessing, though he confessed that he had hoped I would marry someone who was more of a jock. 30+ years later dad had accepted Tom so completely that, when I visited dad in the hospital in August, he proudly introduced me to one of his nurses as his “son-in-law’s wife.”

Sometimes, I think dad might like to be remembered as a politician. My earliest memory of dad is from the presidential election season in 1960. I came home from Kindergarten for lunch one day to find daddy, in his big gray coat with the giant Kennedy button on the lapel on his way out. He gave me a big hug and kiss, and headed back to the polls. He also made a run for the state legislature in the mid-sixties as the Democrats’ nominee against a local college basketball star. (That was Tom Gola, for those of you from Philadelphia). We got to ride with daddy in an open convertible in a fourth of July parade and we helped him to hand out leaflets to people as we went door to door. I’m sure we were more of a hindrance than a help. He never expected to win that campaign, but he ran a much closer race than anyone had expected. I think he was surprised at how disappointed he was when he lost, but that foray into electoral politics, served him well, since it earned him enough political capital that he was appointed to some high level positions in city government.

But I think most of all that I will remember my father as a lawyer. Given how much criticism lawyers take every day, you might not think of this as a great compliment. But I grew up proud to be the daughter and the granddaughter of lawyers. We may have had the only dinner table in the city of Philadelphia to which the rules of evidence were applied: this primarily meant that hearsay was not admissible in dinner table conversation. And my siblings and I were probably the only grade school kids in Philadelphia in the 1960s who actually understood the hearsay rule.

But I wasn’t just proud of my father because he was a lawyer. It was the kind of lawyer he was. He was an advice-giver, a confidant, a dependable friend, a problem-solver, a fixer-up of people and situations, a generous supporter and encourager of legal careers and other careers too. Every one of my lawyer cousins – and there are at least seven of us in my generation of McSorleys, and at least as many in the next generation, with many in the pipeline – each lawyer cousin has stories (mostly funny, but ultimately touching stories), of the leg up dad gave them in getting into the practice of law. They all had stints as clerks in dad’s law office, where they learned the distinction between enforcing the law when it was for the greater good and, as importantly, finding a way around the law when necessary to serve justice.

Dad supported his family of nine with his law practice, but getting rich was never a part of his plan. My cousin Frank Allen told me earlier this week, when he learned of dad’s death, that “there is no question that I would never have been a lawyer if not for [your dad]. He was my idol growing up from the time that I slept at your apartment while he was stationed at the Navy Yard. He kept Carolann and me alive in law school. He was supposed to pay me by the hour but really he just told me to take cash when I needed it.”

I was looking through my father’s papers the other day and found a memoir he had written of the first capital murder case that he tried. It was big news in Philadelphia at the time. But the part that struck me most of all was his attitude toward the financial burden he undertook in representing an indigent defendant. At that time, appointed counsel for criminal defendants were entitled to a fee of no more than $500, regardless of how serious the case, how long the trial, or whether there was an appeal, as there was in his case. His co-counsel, a much more seasoned attorney, chose not to handle the appeal because he wouldn’t earn any additional money for it. Dad says, “I had less of a burden in that area than he. The same arrogance that eradicated fear of not doing a proper job, also gave me the courage to undertake the appeal regardless of the economics. Any fears I might have had in that area were reduced by the belief that my father was there to help me over any rough financial hurdles. Money was secondary, the cause was the controlling factor.”

My dad lived his life that way. And that attitude – that doing the right thing is primary, and that taking care of material concerns is only secondary – permeated my childhood.

It is one of his many gifts to me and to my siblings and each of us surely could tell many stories of instances in which dad’s confidence that “we’ll work it out somehow” gave us the freedom to face the future with more confidence than the average person, to do what we love and believe in, knowing that everything will work out in the end somehow.

Most of all, though, I know that dad should be remembered as a person who was filled with love for every person he came into contact with. I think his great desire to fix things, to step in and help when others wouldn’t, grew out of his love of God, his love for his family, and his love of life.

I adored my father. When I was a child, I adored him as the perfect and all-powerful person I believed him to be. When I was a student, I adored him for his great pride in my accomplishments. As I aged and he did too, I adored him for the life he lived and the way he lived it. I never for one moment doubted that my father loved me, or that he loved my brothers and sisters.

To close today. I think I can’t do any better than the way he used to close his jottings. For 20 years, dad wrote at the end of every issue, in his beloved Latin, Pax tecum – peace be with you. So, peace be with you all – and with him, too.