Late in the fall of 1996, Leslie Gibson McCarthy took a hiatus from her job as an editor at The Sporting News to have her second child — a boy who would grow up to be a defensive lineman on a college football team. But more about him later.
By the time she returned to TSN the following spring, the national sports weekly had entered into an agreement with something called America Online to provide sports content, and she was issued an “email” address.
“What am I supposed to do with an email address when no one else I know has one?” she asked. “And isn’t content exactly what this magazine has been doing for the last 110 years?”
Twenty-seven years later, she has more email addresses than she can keep track of and still gets the concept of good content: a good story well told, no matter if it’s through ink on a page, HTML in a website, a post in social media or images through a lens.
Storytelling. That’s the thread woven through McCarthy’s 37-plus-years in journalism, communications and higher education, a career that has taken her everywhere from the media room of the White House to the locker room of the St. Louis Cardinals; from a cornfield movie set in Iowa to the mountains of the Canadian Rockies.
McCarthy earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1985 at Quincy University in Quincy, Ill., then a master’s in journalism in 1989 from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Upon graduation from Medill, she was hired by the St. Louis-based Sporting News — the third woman in the editorial department — and embarked on a 17-year sports journalism career.
Among her most memorable assignments for Sporting News were a retrospective on baseball’s old stadiums; interviewing Saint Louis University basketball coach Charlie Spoonhour 81/2 months pregnant with her oldest son; covering Major League Baseball’s All-Star games and NCAA Final Fours; and a visit to Iowa and the Field of Dreams movie set. She’s been a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America since 1990 — and still enjoys emeritus status.
She also has freelanced for St. Louis Magazine, the St. Louis Sports Commission, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, among other outlets, and for 17 years, from 2003-2020, wrote a weekly lifestyle column for the South County Times until the publication ceased, a victim of dried-up advertising and COVID-19. She returned to Times-Newspapers in the fall of 2020, writing monthly for the Webster-Kirkwood Times.
From time to time the Cardinals’ Gameday Magazine has called with assignments, such as a profile of the greatest woman in baseball history that few have ever heard of, Helene Hathaway Robison Britton; a chat with players and managers; or a chance to hang out with actor Jon Hamm. Yes, that Jon Hamm.
McCarthy currently works full time as senior associate editor for Washington Magazine, the alumni mag of Washington University in St. Louis. She has worked at WashU for 17 years, helping to tell the inspirational stories through producing content for The Source.
Content. There’s that word again. Content is storytelling, and storytelling is everything. But of all the stories uncovered over the years, her favorites come from home.
She has been married for 32 years to recently retired history teacher Tom McCarthy, who continually makes her laugh, pushes her to be the best she can be (see 52-hike challenge) and gives her most of her material for her column. Besides that, he’s brilliant, handsome and occasionally bests her in Wordle and The New York Times Spelling Bee.
Their oldest, Matt McCarthy, graduated from Marquette University in 2016, got his law degree from the University of Michigan in 2019, and is an associate at a Chicago law firm. He not only inspires her every day, but “Go Blue” is an important part of the family’s vocabulary. And that college football player born around the same time as email? In 2019, Jack McCarthy earned an economics degree from DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., where he spent four seasons playing defensive end for the Div. III Tigers. He’s now a succesful realtor in St. Louis.
What’s next? Her best content.