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.