OBITUARIES
John G. McCormick gave a voice to those who needed it most.
The longtime head of the former Health and Welfare Planning Association raised the consciousness of society, promoted public health initiatives, and had no fear in confronting government officials with the real-world consequences that their funding cuts would have on the region’s homeless, poor and hungry.
Mr. McCormick, 93, of Upper St. Clair, died Feb. 23 after a decades-long battle with heart disease.
Mr. McCormick testified in a 1983 hearing in front of then-presidential hopeful Sen. Edward Kennedy that massive mill closures in the Pittsburgh area hit social service agencies so hard that emergency food requests had hit an all-time high.
“We found that many people who had worked their whole lives, paying taxes, giving to charities and supporting the economic base of our communities were now facing the immediate problem of how to obtain enough food,” Mr. McCormick told the late senator, according to a November 1983 story in The Pittsburgh Press.
Raised in the Brooklyn, N.Y. neighborhood of Park Slope, Mr. McCormick had an idyllic childhood, working as an usher at Ebbets Field — home of the former Brooklyn Dodgers — making deliveries for the local butcher on his bike and summers spent on a farm in the Hudson Valley.
He graduated from St. Francis Academy in January 1944, and immediately joined the World War II effort as an 18-year-old private in the U.S. Army.
Mr. McCormick served in France in the 13th Airborne Division for two years and returned home on compassionate leave to attend the funeral of his younger sister Catherine, who died after years of battling the effects of polio.
“She was the first person with polio in New York to graduate from high school,” said Mr. McCormick’s daughter, Peg McCormick Barron, of the South Side.
His sister’s death spawned Mr. McCormick’s lifelong interest in public health, Ms. McCormick Barron said.
“It was very near and dear to his heart and I think it did drive him,” his daughter said. “He was raised in a very close Irish Catholic family, and she was his only sister.”
Like other veterans his age, Mr. McCormick rarely discussed his combat experience, but he loved the time he spent over the years with the Veterans Breakfast Club of Western Pennsylvania, and he later started a veterans group at his independent living home.
“My dad really, really enjoyed the camaraderie of veterans,” his daughter said. “He was very proud of his service. But, he didn’t talk a lot about it, because he always deflected talking about himself.”
Mr. McCormick went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in biology from St. John’s University on Long Island in 1949 and a masters degree in public health from Columbia University School of Public Health.
In the late 1940s, Mr. McCormick went to work for the local tuberculosis society in Olean, N.Y., spreading awareness and education. It was there he met Constance Sullivan, a public health nurse.
“He knew she liked to golf, so they went golfing on their first date,” Ms. McCormick Barron said.
The couple fell in love and married in June 1952.
Mr. McCormick worked as a coordinator and health administrator at the Brookline, Mass., Health Department and as a public health instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health before he was offered a position as planning director of the local Health and Welfare Planning Association in 1964.
His move to Pittsburgh served as a reunion for Mr. McCormick and the late Harry “the Hat” Walker, an old friend from Brooklyn who was posted with the local FBI office.
“They did not know each other as children, though they lived just a few blocks away,” Ms. McCormick Barron said. “But they worked at Ebbets Field and went to St. John’s together. Harry and his wife helped my parents find a home in Dormont.”
Two years after he joined the HWPA, Mr. McCormick was named associate executive director, and in 1975, he was promoted to executive director, a post he held until the end of 1989, when he left the agency to become a parttime consultant with United Way of Allegheny County. He retired in 1998.
Mr. McCormick also worked for a number of years at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health as an associate professor.
For many years, the HWPA was the only nonprofit in the Pittsburgh area that did social service planning and public health research for the community, but as other similar agencies came along, it was dissolved in 1991 and its work was absorbed into the United Way.
“They developed community health plans to address all sorts of public health issues,” Ms. McCormick Barron said of the HWPA. “It was about teaching people and advocating for prevention.”
As leader of the agency, Mr. McCormick’s role varied.
He conducted research, promoted awareness and made recommendations of behalf of the agency into myriad social issues, such as how to address homelessness and hunger, and even became embroiled in the desegregation of Pittsburgh Public Schools.
Mr. McCormick urged action in 1977 when the HWPA lost federal funding for afterschool and summer programs when district leaders failed to come up with an acceptable integration plan for students.
In 1988, Mr. McCormick underwent open heart surgery and turned over a new leaf, his daughter said.
“He was very devoted to his recovery and he advocated for people to have good heart health,” she said. “He was very involved.”
Mr. McCormick’s lifestyle change — in which his wife joined him — was so dramatic that family friend Ellen Mazo featured the couple in a book she wrote.
“He was my inspiration for healthful living,” Ms. Mazo said. “So much so that I turned to him and his equally health-conscious wife Connie for their keys to good health in my book.”
For more than 50 years, Mr. McCormick also enjoyed serving as a lector during services at various Catholic churches, Ms. McCormick Barron said.
“He had a very distinctive Brooklyn accent and a really beautiful voice, but he couldn’t carry a tune to save his life,” his daughter said, laughing. “He liked to think he was the great Irish tenor John McCormack — he had a lot of his albums. He was trying to channel him but it didn’t work.”
A beloved patriarch, Mr. McCormick often could be found ringside at his children’s and grandchildren’s events, leading a cheering squad with “the wave.”
“He was an early adopter of the wave,” his daughter said. “He was always involved and engaged in whatever we were doing.”
The always dapper Mr. McCormick loved bow ties, tortoise-shelled glasses and hats — especially Irish newsboy caps. He also was a fixture at the Dormont Pool, where all of the regulars knew of the “McCormick float,” Ms. McCormick Barron said.
“We spent hours and hours of our lives there,” she recalled. “My dad loved to float with his toes out of the water and he would paddle around on his back for hours. Everyone recognized it. It was very unique.”
Ms. McCormick Barron said one of her favorite memories of her father is seeing him snuggled up in his easy chair on cold winter nights, listening to the recordings he had made months earlier of the sounds of the ocean.
“We would go on these trips to Maine and the Cape and he would make recordings on an old reel recorder,” she said. “I always thought he was ahead of his time.”
Along with his daughter and his wife, Mr. McCormick is survived by his daughters Catherine Ann McCormick, of Falls Church, Va., and Patricia Ann Ackerman, of St. Charles, Ill.; his sons, Neil Francis McCormick, of Sinking Spring, Berks County, William Patrick McCormick, of Bethel Park, and Timothy Shaun McCormick, of Annandale, Va.; 11 grandchildren; and four great grandchildren.
The funeral was held Thursday.
Memorial donations are suggested to Friends of Dormont Pool Inc. at https:// friendsofdormontpool.org.