Peter Talty and his wife Janice sat near the back during Jim McCormick’s funeral Mass last March at St. Christopher’s Church in Tonawanda, near Buffalo. It was a strange sensation, explained Talty, an occupational therapist who used to live in Liverpool: He knew few people in the church, yet he grieved this loss like family.
Afterward, the couple started walking toward their car, until Janice Talty made a spontaneous decision. She approached Suzanne Matecki, the oldest of four McCormick children, to express condolences and to explain why her husband felt this loss with such intensity.
Matecki was deeply moved. Like wildfire, it went through the McCormick family:
The shoe guy is here!
That touched off a wave of hugs, handshakes and tears, a celebration of one of the most beautiful and impossible of friendships between these two grandfathers — a tale so extraordinary that for both families, it offers a kind of enduring comfort:
“The story,” Talty said. “It keeps going and going.”
Jim McCormick died at 86. There is plenty to write about this U.S. Army veteran who loved dogs and building sandcastles, who played softball with a passion and revered the New York Yankees, who performed on the “nose flute” — I’ll leave it to all of you to Google that — and would use that instrument to serenade his children and grandchildren on their birthdays.
“He believed life was good and fun,” said McCormick’s wife Jean, and she said her husband lived it that way from the moment she first met him on a blind date, more than 60 years ago.
This particular tale, I think, fits that philosophy, and explains why Talty — who lived in Central New York while he led the occupational therapy unit at the Loretto Health and Rehabilitation nursing home — felt such a loss at McCormick’s funeral.
“We were the other half,” he said, speaking of McCormick and their four collective feet.
It begins like this: When McCormick was born in 1939, he arrived with one foot significantly longer than the other. As he told me for a column I wrote eight years ago for The Buffalo News, the doctor said there was no particular reason for the condition beyond an act of nature — but also warned his parents, as McCormick’s family recalls, that there was no guarantee the child would ever walk.
McCormick not only walked: Before long, through sheer determination, he could run. He learned to deal with multiple challenges caused by the situation, and he grew into a man with a size 9 right foot and a size 13 left. Like Talty, he had a rich and expansive sense of humor, which is how he faced a world that in many ways was never easy.
What that also meant, for much of McCormick’s life, was that he needed to routinely buy two pairs of shoes in different sizes to create one pair that fit, paying twice to basically throw one pair away. That seemed to be his fate forever, at least until 1971, when his mother-in-law was watching the 11 p.m. news on television and a famed Buffalo news anchor named Irv Weinstein offered this astonished reflection:
In that day’s want ads in the old Buffalo Evening News — as a journalist, allow me this quick sigh for the days when we had “want ads” — someone had posted an ad that read: “Man with two different-size feet …. looking for man with opposite sizes for purpose of buying shoes together.”
The McCormicks couldn’t believe it: This man was a size 9 left, a size 13 right, the exact opposite of Jim.
The ad came from Talty, who matched not only McCormick’s shoe size but his good-humored disposition. A key moment in Talty’s life that pretty much explains the guy: In the late 1960s, as a young man, Talty was working at a Sears and Roebuck’s near Buffalo, where he was often expected to wear different costumes — say as a clown, or as Magilla Gorilla — while handing out coupons, in the store.
One day, he was asked to hand out coupons while wearing full pajamas, which many uneasy shoppers didn’t realize was a costume. “They were alarmed,” said Talty, who was not only unfazed, but set up shop near an escalator. Among the shoppers passing by was one Janice Pepe. She was in the company of her sister Ann Marie, who already happened to know Talty from work.
Talty, it turns out, had introduced Ann Marie to his brother Bernie. Those two became a couple and later married, and Ann Marie figured – through an introduction of her own – maybe she could pay it back.
She was right. Peter and Janice have now been married for 60 years.
Yet this is no time to pause for romance: We need to keep scrolling back. Talty, it turns out, was born with a clubfoot, meaning his left foot was twisted inward. As McCormick also learned, Talty discovered at a young age that humor was a kind of medicine in coping with the pain and struggle of those years.
While surgery would eventually help straighten out his foot, it never came close to equaling the other foot in size, even as Talty grew up to become an occupational therapist who also taught at Keuka College and the University at Buffalo, and wrote several books.
One of his feet, to this day, remains four sizes larger than the other. In the pre-McCormick era, that always meant buying two pairs and throwing out one mismatched pair, because even thrift stores said no thanks to the leftovers. Fifty-five years ago, in desperation — knowing the odds of a positive outcome were undoubtedly worse than hitting a million-dollar lottery — Talty placed the ad in the Buffalo paper…
…And it was seen by Weinstein, this gritty, wiseguy giant of Buffalo TV, who recounted what it said on his newscast, in disbelief.
Mildred Maccubbin, McCormick’s mother-in-law, was watching that night, and told McCormick. Until that point, the only memorable response received by a discouraged Talty was from a friend of his brother’s, who used a theatrically muffled voice to make a phony inquiry that involved supposedly erotic interest.
McCormick’s call, however, was the real thing. He explained to Talty how he was a career guy in the insurance business, with an impossibly similar situation. It turns out they had plenty of other attributes in common, including an interest in fitness, particularly running.
At first they would visit shoe stores together, as well as lining up side-by-side at more than a few road races. But McCormick eventually became the lead guy, buying shoes and delivering them to Talty — or mailing them, during the years when Peter and Janice lived near Electronics Parkway, in Liverpool (where Janice said her own lasting gift was a lifetime friendship with a Liverpool neighbor of the time, Meribeth Schaufler, that endures to this day).
As for McCormick and Talty, their shoe-buying connection went on for a solid 40 years. The tale gained a measure of celebrity when McCormick’s daughter Suzanne wrote a story about the two men in 1993 for Runner’s World, which led to a separate piece a few months later in The National Enquirer. Talty went to the supermarket and bought 15 copies — his podiatrist laminated one, and hung it on the wall — and his description of the cashier’s reaction is the absolute high point of a YouTube video I attach, in which Talty tells the tale.
Talty also correctly predicted, in that talk, that at the funeral for whichever friend went first, the surviving guy would understand a unique sorrow:
“He’s back on his own.”
While the two men stayed in touch right up until the weeks before McCormick’s death — they occasionally would go out to dinner with their wives, two artists who shared their own overlaps in life — the shoe buying eventually tailed off. Talty said McCormick was such a passionate shopper in the prime years that Talty still has a pair or two sent by McCormick that he has yet to wear. The digital world also made it easier to buy mismatched shoes, and the two men eventually settled into much different routines.
Talty winters in Florida, while the McCormicks always spend their summers at a beloved cottage in Canada, across the Niagara River from Buffalo — where Jim and his family were devoted members of the Buffalo Canoe Club, which has its own softball league near a gorgeous Lake Erie beach.
Four months after McCormick died, his family is mourning the loss of a guy who lived life with such joy. “We miss him like the devil,” Jean said. Matecki, their oldest child, said she and her daughter McKenzie recently received matching tattoos that say, in McCormick’s handwriting: “I love you.”
The Canoe Club will honor McCormick Sunday when Jean throws out the first pitch for the softball season opener — her husband played in that league for years, and then became a scorekeeper. He was also a joyous participant in the club’s annual sandcastle competition, on the Fourth of July.
Knowing exactly what their dad would have wanted, the McCormick children and grandchildren got busy in that contest, last weekend. They made an elaborate Yankees cap on the beach, but their masterwork was a pair of feet built out of sand, seashells serving as toenails, with one foot about four sizes larger than the other.
Those uneven sand feet won a blue ribbon — of course they did — and as a storyteller, I think I can say this of what that top prize represents:
For Jim and Peter, now and forever, there will be a tale to match.
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