Sharing a History

A businessman's ties to Saint Peter's go back five generations

In a world of frenetic change, some things remain the same. Michael McCormick, for example, is a key supporter of Saint Peter’s.

In the 1850s, an Irishman of that name was driven from his homeland by the Great Potato Famine. He settled in New Brunswick, found work as a railroad laborer, married, was a parishioner of the newly built Saint Peter the Apostle Roman Catholic Church and had six children. Many of the second generation helped fund the sacristy built in 1891 on Somerset Street.

“You can find their names on the plaque in the entranceway of the church,” says his great-great-grandson, a 48-year-old insurance executive and Freehold resident who also proudly bears the moniker Michael McCormick.

As history records, the church started a clinic that in 1907 became a 25-bed hospital—and is now the 478-bed Saint Peter’s University Hospital. And today’s McCormick shares both his time and his resources with that hospital because— well, just because. “It’s part of the fabric of who I am,” he says.

He recalls no specific moment when his parents or grandparents told him this was an important tradition to uphold. Instead, it was their actions that spoke. McCormick’s grandfather, D. Carl McCormick, an insurance agent who began writing policies for the hospital in the 1950s, served on its advisory board. D. Carl’s wife and daughter were members of the ladies’ auxiliary. “And I had a granduncle who worked in the pharmacy department,” says McCormick.

When he mentions family members who were born at Saint Peter’s, it gets almost monotonous. His parents were; so were he and his two brothers. So was his wife, Antoinette, who is a controller for the company iPlay America. So were her parents and her three sisters. Want to guess where Mike and Antoinette’s children—12-year-old Michael Jr. and 5-year-old Jack—came into the world?

As a partner in his family’s insurance company, now called the Pavese/ McCormick Insurance Agency, with corporate offices in South Brunswick, McCormick still writes much of the hospital’s coverage. “In fact, 25 years ago on my first day in the business, working with my dad, I went to Saint Peter’s to discuss a renewal,” he recalls.

But the relationship goes beyond births and business. McCormick has been on the hospital foundation’s Community Golf Outing Committee since the early 1990s. For a decade he has also been on the board of the Friends of the Margaret McLaughlin McCarrick Care Center, a nursing home that is part of the Saint Peter’s Healthcare System; he’s now its president. He recalls gratefully the treatment his late grandmother received when she spent her last two years at McCarrick: “They could not have been kinder to her.”

McCormick supports other good causes in the community, he says, “but none where I give as much focus and effort as I do for Saint Peter’s, to raise money and get other people involved. I try to bring friends and clients to events like the gala, to show them what the hospital means to the community. Of the last 25 galas, the only one I missed was right when my son Michael was born.”

Will the sixth generation of McCormicks keep the tradition? He hopes so. “Our older son has an interest in medicine, and because of our connection he talks about medicine with people at the hospital,” he says. “But we won’t have to push him to support Saint Peter’s. I wasn’t pushed into it when I was a kid. It’s just part of our family legacy.”