By Steve Landwehr
STAFF WRITER
July 06, 2009 06:00 am Everyone's life has a story. In "Lives," we tell some of the stories about North Shore people who have died recently. "Lives" runs Mondays in The Salem News. BEVERLY — The 1938 box office hit, "Boys Town," was largely a Hollywood creation. But Spencer Tracy won his second Oscar as best actor for his portrayal of a real man, the Rev. Edward Flanagan, who really did found Boys Town, just outside Omaha, Neb., in 1917. John J. McCarthy could attest to that. Boys Town is where he began his career mentoring boys from adolescence to manhood. Salem has had its own, smaller version of Boys Town on Winter Island for more than 150 years, and it was at the Plummer Home for Boys that McCarthy left an indelible stamp on a part of the local community that at the time had nowhere else to turn. McCarthy died at the Essex Park Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Beverly on Wednesday, June 24, at the age of 84. He was the oldest of five children born in Cambridge to John and Winifred McCarthy. He attended Rindge Technical School in Cambridge, and later earned one bachelor's and two master's degrees. He also saw combat duty as a paratrooper during World War II. His sister, Virginia McCarthy, said he never told anyone, but he also spent three years in a Catholic seminary. "Evidently he found out it wasn't for him," she said. But all this was just prelude to his calling, which never paid very well but satisfied something deep inside him, something that could be traced to his own childhood. 'My boys' After his time at Boys Town, McCarthy worked at the Division of Children and Youth in Milwaukee and as the associate director of Boston Children's Services. In 1965 he was named director of the Plummer Home, a position he held for 20 years. While the home is a safe refuge for abused or neglected boys, and a better outcome than they might otherwise have, a stay there is a sure sign something has gone terribly wrong in their lives. Nonetheless, Salem's Rocky Loughe has fond memories of the man who would later become his godfather, the man all the boys called JM. Loughe came to the home in 1973, when he was 12 years old. He says in the seven years he was there, he never knew McCarthy to miss a day due to sickness. "He always said, 'This is my home, these are my boys,'" Loughe recalled. McCarthy never married and had no children of his own. But it turns out he was an amateur sleuth skilled at tracking down parents and other relatives of abandoned boys. "He found them from Florida to Canada, all on his own time" Loughe said. He even located Loughe's father, but Rocky declined the opportunity to meet him. He said McCarthy was the kind of man who kept everything together at the Plummer Home, the kind of man who, "knew how to solve problems." Maybe that's because he kept himself so well-informed. "John was a reader," sister Virginia said. "I never, ever saw him without a book or newspaper in his hand." Their mother was an intelligent woman, she said, and she thinks that's where her brother acquired his inquisitive nature. Boxes of memories McCarthy's parents separated when he was young, and Loughe thinks McCarthy's absentee father prompted him to help boys who were going through the same experiences he had. Loughe left the home to go to college, the first year partially paid for by a fund the home established. McCarthy left the school five years later, worn down by the daily commute from his home in Natick and the string of duties his position required. "He wasn't loving it anymore," Loughe said. When McCarthy moved to a nursing home, Loughe and other former charges tried to help by going through his things. On a shelf in a closet they found boxes and boxes, filled with every letter, every Christmas and birthday card his charges had sent him over the years. "Years later, kids were still writing him," Loughe said. Loughe's wife, Lisa, is Catholic, and after the two dated a while, he began attending services with her. When he decided to become Catholic himself, he asked McCarthy to be his godfather. "There'll never be another guy like him, you couldn't replace him," Loughe said. "He's my hero that's all I've got to say. He was a hero to a lot of boys." Staff writer Steve Landwehr can be reached at 978-338-2660 or by e-mail at slandwehr@salemnews.com.
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