Joseph Vincent McCarthy (1887 - 1978)

Born 12 Apr 1887 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

Died 13 Jan 1978 at age 90 in Tonawanda, Erie, New York, United States

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Biography

Joseph McCarthy is Notable.

Manager of the New York Yankees

The career gap, 1916-8, suggests WW I service.

Mostly I skimmed Alan Levy's book for family information. Here are some of the highlights:

Joe McCarthy's father was apparently a typical hard-working member of the carpentry and building trade in the Germantown area . But the word "apparently" must be emphasized, as the nature of the man would be forever unknown to young Joseph Vincent, because his father died in a work accident when Joe was but three years old [sic]. He had fallen off a scaffold [sic].

[Joe's] relations with his mother and with his local East Germantown Catholic Parish (St. Vincent's) were always close.

When Joe was a young adolescent, Mrs. Susan McCarthy married again, to a man named John Cassidy. Cassidy had children from a prior marriage.

While baseball was a joy, Joe McCarthy's boyhood in Germantown was anything but a mere light mixture of school and baseball. When he was not in school or at a sandlot playing ball, Joe was working. ... Mrs. McCarthy worked as a child care nurse for a wealthy Germantown family named the Chews. ... Joe did not finish high school; he had to work. He delivered ice in Germantown. He dug post holes for a fencer, what he later described as 'back-breaking work under a broiling sun." And after grammar school, he worked as a bobbin boy at a Philadelphia yarn mill. ... Pridefully he once confided to a reporter that at the mill he rapidly became the best and most dependable of the bobbin boys and gained for himself a promotion to "head tender," giving him a salary of $6.50 a week, $1.50 more than the other boys' weekly wages.

One of Joe's brothers, Maurice [McCarthy], worked as a truck driver for a stage company in Philadelphia. Sometimes Joe accompanied him when there was a lot of stage equipment to move. He was able to watch many shows, and this began what would be a life-long love of the musical stage. If he ever had any visions of performing, however, they were quickly dispelled: "One night an act failed to show up," he recalled, "so a pal and I filled in. We got a very rough reception. What a break for me," he laughed. "I might have been a song-and-dance man instead of manager of the Yankees."

Sources

• Geni Family Tree