SHIRLEY - 1931
She's Old School
Thru And Thru
Hates The D.H.
And Steroids Too.
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| One of my favorite photographs of my beloved Ma, circa 1952 or '53. |
On Mother's Day, Sunday, May 10th, Lily-Rose Dawson at the Wise Wolf substack site wrote an E-Ticket tribute to her mom, and to great moms everywhere.
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Lily's excellent article inspired me to write this tribute to my Ma, Shirley. May always finds me reminiscing about her because 1) it's the month of Mother's Day, 2) it's the month of my Ma's birthday (May 13th - today!), and 3) May was my Ma's middle name.
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Ma grew up in a dirt-poor family during The Great Depression; she grew up wearing used clothes donated to the poor. And those were some of the better aspects of her early years. (There were some unwanted "experiences" that I won't even mention here.)
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My siblings and I were lavished with gifts every Christmas Day - everything we really wanted, plus lots of popular 1960s & '70s clothing. Ma wanted us to have wonderful Christmas gifts that we would cherish, and to have clothes that the other kids wouldn't ridicule us about - brand new, hip, groovy, "with it", fashionable. In other words, she wanted us to have all the things she had to do without when she was a kid.
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| The Groovy D-FensDogG (a big Monkees fan), showing off the paisley shirt and fringed vest that his Ma bought for him. The vest was a cherished garment, which made all the 6th & 7th grade girls jealous of me. Guffaw-😎ut-Loud! |
When I became an adult (yeah, I know that's a debatable statement), my Ma confessed that she and Pa charged their credit cards up the wazoo every December, and they'd get the credit cards fully paid off in November of the following year, just in time to charge them up again during the next round of Christmas gifts for We Three Kids (Nappy, Bonehead and me). For a time in the mid-1960s, my Ma simultaneously held down three part-time jobs in order to help make ends meet!
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Pa and Ma didn't have the smoothest of marriages; they actually separated twice for awhile. But they never divorced and ultimately stayed together for the sake of We Three Kids, whom they both dearly loved. In their later years, they settled into a very comfortable & happy life together.
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Make no mistake about it, I would wish both of my parents on every single child who ever lived! Every child deserves a Pa and Ma like I had! (Thank you, God, my Father, for the countless blessings in my life, which began with my Mom & Dad!!)
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On March 17, 2005, I wrote a review for a book about BASEBALL, which I posted on the Amazon ("BigBitch") website. The review was titled > Hitting It Right On "THE SWEET SPOT". To this day, I think it may be the best thing I've ever written. Right after I published it on Amazon, I took my Ma to lunch at one of her favorite restaurants to celebrate the feeling I had. Below is an excerpt from that review:
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* Growing up po' (not Third World po', of course, but American po'), one Summer my Brother and I played for a baseball team in the "economically challenged" part of town. One day our Ma asked, "Do you realize that you're the only White guys on the team? Everyone else is Black." We both had to pause for several moments to contemplate that before answering, "Oh yeah, that's right, huh?" She later confessed that it was the proudest she ever felt of us. And she realized then and there that she had raised us well! LESSON: It don't matter what color your skin is, because when your team loses a ballgame, every player is BLUE!
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In 2014, Susan Flett Swiderski's blog, which I routinely followed, posted "In Praise Of Old Broads", in which she and her co-publisher, Julie Kemp Pick (I called her "Gem Julie") asked readers to post comments about their very favorite old broad. I didn't even realize that they were going to award a free copy of their wonderful new book to the person whose comment they most enjoyed. I just naturally wrote & posted a comment about my Ma because... it was an opportunity to publicly praise my Ma, who had gone "Home" (aka "Heaven") nine years earlier.
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Here is the comment I wrote, which won me a free copy of the book, even though I didn't realize I was involved in a writing competition:
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Stephen T. McCarthy - September 5, 2014
Well, my favorite old broad was definitely my Ma (who also happened to be a big Frank Sinatra fan). Talk about TOUGH! Her photo should always be included with the expression "tough old broad". She did not put up with ANY crap, and God help the person who messed with a member of her family!
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She was a sports fanatic - particularly loved baseball & football - and she knew more about those sports than most guys do. For years she even worked professionally as a secretary for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
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I remember one time she and I went to a Dodgers Vs. Angels pre-season exhibition game. Pitching for the Angels was Jim Abbott, a man who had been born without a right hand (and who years later, as a Yankee, pitched a 'No-Hitter' against the Cleveland Indians).
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There were two twenty-something-year-old guys in the seats next to ours. At one point in the game, Abbott pitched his way out of a jam and one of the two guys said, "Give that pitcher a hand."
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Ooooohhh! My Ma verbally lit into that guy like you wouldn't believe, right in front of all the other fans. That guy started stammering, and backpedaling like crazy, insisting he didn't mean it "that way" (which of course was a bunch of B.S.). When my Ma got done with that guy, he was embarrassed to hell and you could tell he would have crawled into any convenient hole he could find.
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Another time, my Brother was mouthing off to her, and he pushed one of her buttons (which he did constantly) and she took off after him. Now, what makes this particular episode so memorable is that my Brother had a broken leg at the time and his leg was in a full cast. He saw that look in her eyes, and then she started coming toward him, and my Brother dropped his crutch and hopped downstairs to his bedroom. But...
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...it wasn't over yet. She picked up his crutch and went after him with it. He managed to get to his bed, and she raised that crutch, ready to bring it down on him when... God intervened. The crutch broke through one of the ceiling tiles and got hung up in it. A couple of times she tried to swing it down but it wouldn't come loose from the ceiling tile. So she just turned and stomped off, going back upstairs.
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And there's my Brother lying on his back on his bed looking up at that crutch still lodged above him in the ceiling and just swinging back and forth. (If you wrote that in a screenplay nobody would believe it, but it really did happen just like that!)
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And I know it sounds terrible, my Ma going after my Brother with his own crutch but... you didn't know my Brother. Ha!-Ha! {*To borrow from 'Monty Python & The Holy Grail'... he got better. 😄*}
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And that gives you a good idea of how tough an old broad my Ma was.
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The comment from Susan, in which she later announced that I had won the contest, still warms my heart:
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Wanta hear whose favorite old broad comment won a copy of Old Broads Waxing Poetic? Okay. (Insert drum roll here.) It's a pleasure to announce that (ta-DA!) Stephen T. McCarthy takes the prize this time around with his expression of unabashed love and admiration for his mother. (sniff) Ya gotta love a guy who loves his ma.
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Below is what is amongst my favorite memories related to my Ma, and when I told her the story, I could tell she absolutely adored it. She laughed so hard and was almost glowing from the inside out:
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I had gone to a department store to buy her a Mother's Day gift. After I had selected something, I took it to the Gift Wrapping department. They had all kinds of wrapping examples for customers to choose from.
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I saw one display of a package wrapped in paper that looked like a newspaper's Sports section with headlines & stories about various sporting event outcomes. I told the woman behind the counter that the gift was for my Ma on 'Mother's Day', and I wanted it wrapped in the Sports-themed paper. A very perplexed expression grew upon the lady's face, and then she said, "This is for Mother's Day?"
I replied, "Yes".
She asked, "And you... and you want it wrapped in the Sports Headlines paper?"
"Yes", I responded. And then I added, "Well, my Mom... she's not like the others".
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Today, in 2026, I still suspect that when I related that story to my Ma, she probably considered it the greatest compliment that I ever gave her.
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I was sitting right next to my Ma, as we watched the bottom of the 9th inning of the 2001 World Series together. (In my opinion, the greatest Fall Classic in the history of Major League Baseball!) Roughly 5 months later, in 2002, I was sitting next to my Ma again, watching a TV program about the Arizona Diamondbacks, when Mark Grace was shown and mentioned. I said something to my Ma about Grace and she said, "Uhm... I kinda forget. Who is he again?"
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Well, Mark Grace was my Mom's favorite D'Backs player. Ma forgetting who Grace was would be almost akin to > Dennis Eckersley forgetting who Kirk Gibson is! I asked my Ma to repeat what she had just said, and when she did, I told her, "Put your shoes on and get your coat. We're going to the hospital."
She said, "Why?! What's wrong?"
I replied, "I don't know, but we're going to find out".
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Just as I suspected, my Mom had suffered a stroke. She recovered from it well, thanks to God & > THIS. But she was never quite the same after the stroke. Her personality had become much more docile. The feisty old broad had checked out.
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One day when we were alone together, perhaps a year and a half before she passed on, I asked her to sit at the dining room table with me and listen to a song that I loved and which, as I told her, always made me think specifically of her. We just sat at the table and silently listened to 'Beautiful' together. Needless to say, she had tears running down her face before Gordon Lightfoot's song had come to an end.
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BEAUTIFUL -- Gordon Lightfoot
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FYI, some of my Ma's favorite singers were Bobby Darin & Frank Sinatra. She had priceless memories of dancing to Tommy Dorsey's 'Boogie Woogie' when she was young. I once saw her start crying while listening to 'April In Paris' by Count Basie. I asked her why she was crying, and she said, "Because I'll never be able to dance to this again".
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Ma loved her some very soulful music, too. It was through her records that I was first introduced to 'Mercy, Mercy, Mercy' by Cannonball Adderley; B.B. King's 'The Thrill Is Gone'; and 'Honky Tonk' by Bill Doggett.
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My Pa had passed on in 1996. In her later years, by happenstance, I introduced my Ma to the songs 'Since I Don't Have You' and 'Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye' by Brian Setzer and Glen Campbell, respectively. She'd ask me to play them, then she'd start weeping and ask me what I thought Pa was doing in Heaven right then.
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My Ma had a terrific sense-of-humor; she loved clever wordplay and, like my Pa, she even appreciated black or dark comedy. Her Top 25 Favorite Movies list included everything from 'Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs' and 'Gulliver's Travels' to 'Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison' and 'Dr. Strangelove'. She was extremely intelligent and very well-read. Her favorite novel was 'A Tree Grows In Brooklyn' by Betty Smith, and that was one of her favorite movies, too. I'm sure my Ma strongly identified with Francie Nolan, the girl who grew up in desperate poverty and whose primary escape from that reality was her love of reading.
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| The inscription in the first edition copy of 'A Tree Grows In Brooklyn' which my parents gave me on my 23rd birthday. |
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| Inscription in a copy of The Holy Bible which my Ma gave me on my Spiritual Birthday in 2002. I used to call her "Binky Buckeye, Ohio's Flippin' Squirrel". |
One day, while she was in the hospice facility, I brought a Frank Sinatra compact disc to play for her (a CD which she had purchased for me some years earlier). Suddenly, while the song 'We'll Be Together Again' was playing, there was a weird glitch in the song; it kind of fuzzed-out for about three seconds, then it corrected itself and played properly from then on.
Ma asked me, "What was that?"
I told her, "I really don't know".
I have played that same CD countless times and never before then, and never since then, has the disc malfunctioned in any way whatsoever.
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About twelve or so hours before she went "Home" in the Summer of 2005, my Ma asked me who the man was that she saw standing in the corner of her hospice room. There was no one there. So I asked her, "What does he look like?"
She replied, "He looks like a painter".
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Well, at one time, my Pa worked as an interior house painter. The other thought that occurred to me was this: Many painters wear white clothing - white overalls and white caps. Did my Ma see a white-light angel waiting to take her Home?
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| Ma & Pa on Christmas Day, circa 1994. |
Again, I want to thank Lily-Rose Dawson for her substack article which inspired me to compose this tribute to my own Ma.
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May You All Bless & Be Blessed!!
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~ Stephen T. McCarthy
(aka D-FensDogG)
