Gayle Anne McCrystal

In 1956, our nearly 4 year old mother heard Walter Cronkite report that nobody planned to turn out to the polls because President Eisenhower was such a shoo-in over Adlai Stevenson. Her immediate reaction?

"I'm going to send a letter to the President telling him to ring the church bells. That way, everyone will know it's time to vote!"

Photo ops with TV and newspapers followed. It wasn't long before a plane with Ike himself onboard touched down in a field in Peoria. He stepped off the plane, approached young Gayle, and to accentuate his greeting he reached down and ruffled her perfectly-coiled pigtails - only to be startled as she wailed loudly with horror in the piercing tone that only four year old children and four hundred year old banshees can summon:

"My hair! My hair! You messed up my hair!"

Aides swooped in to hurry the President away without taking a single picture. The only photographic evidence of their meeting is Gayle perched upon her father's shoulder, still visibly distraught and wiping tears from her face. If it had happened today, the entire world would have seen the clip of "Pigtail Pullin' Dwight" making a toddler cry.

Our mother lived in 14 different homes by the time she was 14, so she excelled at fitting in. This also taught her to just move to another apartment whenever her freezer needed defrosting.

Cripplingly shy, it wasn't until she was out of college and in the workforce that she found her raison d'etre and learned to mask her shyness. Yet, it still frequently compelled her. Per her own recollection she largely shunned party invites, and spent most parties she hosted in the kitchen recharging her mental batteries, as she never felt she learned to truly mingle. But if you were lucky enough to spend time with her one on one or in a very small group, you were likely having more fun than most parties are anyway.

At Purdue she joined the staff of The Exponent, their student newspaper, and yearned to be a reporter. Graduating with an English major and a journalism minor during Nixon's wage/price freeze, she took what was available: the director of a Savings Club at a bank. But within a year, her undeniable competence saw her climb to VP of Advertising. She created a subsidiary to sell her marketing plans to other banks around the country, and then at age 30 she left to start her own advertising & PR business. She was always looking for ways to diversify her approach from the standard advertising campaigns of the time, be it publishing big books, lecturing at conferences, or starting her own business radio show to promote her clients' ventures. She was even tapped to serve a term as President of the Sales and Marketing Executives of Cleveland.

Calling her whip-smart isn't sufficient - she was impossibly clever, with the ability to juggle an endless number of tasks and responsibilities (as long as she could tackle them one at a time without constant interruption from her children). She had the gift of seeing the world not just as it is, but as it should be - paired with the cojones to confront and convince anyone as to why it should be that way. And while you spoke, she never showed any hint that she was correcting your grammar in her head.

Above all, she was CAPABLE. An attribute she was not only naturally gifted with from birth, but consciously cultivated throughout her entire life. Nowhere was that more apparent than her dedication to being the most relentlessly kickass mother anyone could ask for. Seven years after marrying her beloved husband Jim in 1985 she had her first son Patrick, followed shortly thereafter by her second son Matthew. As a mom she was always ready to lend a friendly ear after a hard day at school, to dance and sing in the kitchen while cooking a meal as elaborate as our nascent palates could allow, or to lay down the law whenever we forgot who the Sheriff in town was. According to her, one of her proudest moments as a mother was hammering the pins out of Patrick's door and confiscating it when he went through a slamming phase.

After retiring, and then seeing her children venture forth into the world, she turned her vast passion for life towards her favorite hobbies. Like driving, which she called her sport; when a navigation app chirped that the trip would take 37 minutes, her response - "Oh yeah? I can do it in 22!" To balance adrenaline with Zen, she became enthralled with raising koi fish and pondscaping. Our backyard was an ever-changing warzone for several years as designs were improvised, implemented, scrapped, improved, and iterated upon. The end result was a stunning multi-tiered square enclosure with upwards of a dozen large, beautiful koi of many colors - complete with two trickling waterfalls and wooden decks which extend out over the pond's surface - all surrounded by a fragrant garden of flowers and herbs. It was her little slice of heaven. Her Zen sanctuary; Her masterpiece.

The marvelous koi thrived for years, but after one particularly harsh winter we discovered they had gone to the great pond in the sky. The backyard was a bit lonelier for a time, until Gayle discovered a feral orange cat regularly spending time on the deck. She named him Baker, after a red-haired relative, and started putting food out for him. Before too long, a black and white cat she suspected of being Baker's mother became a regular visitor as well, so she was deemed Oreo. After some time, Oreo gave birth to a full litter comprised of Jacki, Polly (both with spotted coats a la Jackson Pollock), Beaty, and Nicki. She had suspicions, though never confirmed, that Baker may have had something to do with their arrival. Regardless, she knew she was careening towards the life of a crazy cat lady, so one by one she trapped them and sent them to be neutered/spayed - earning Nicki her name (short for Eunich). Their skittish, feral nature and Gayle's acute cat allergy turned out to be a perfect match, and the gang enjoyed each other's company from afar for many years.

Her other great passion was travel. She wasn't content with watching a documentary - she wanted to pick a country, learn as much of the language as she could, go explore the cities, look at the art, eat the food, see the sights, and even stray from the beaten path a little sometimes - as long as she had a reasonably comfortable, odor-free hotel room to retreat to at the end of the day. Some of the most treasured weeks of her life were spent soaking up artistic masterpieces in France, Italy and Greece, among many others. She had an unwholesome obsession with the 400-years-dead baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. "If I lived back then, I'd be his groupie!"

In her final decade, she made hiking a necessary part of every day, whether solo or with her dearly beloved hiking club. Some of her most treasured friends were made during these golden years. She logged almost 9000 miles since joining in 2017, each and every step bringing a smile to her face. It wasn't long before she took the initiative to lead hikes herself. She was relatively close to her goal of reaching the 10,000 Mile Club when she was diagnosed with Peritoneal-Ovarian cancer.

This wasn't some lumpy mass of cells they could excise in a few hours and then call it a day. It was thousands of tiny tumors coating the interior lining of her abdomen. In her words: "I'm f@#*ed." Through it all, she kept her brain sharp as a tack. She ran circles around poor, unsuspecting teams of medical professionals with combined decades of schooling. She walked into their offices wielding packets of research papers, knowing all the possibilities involved with potential treatments, and kept them coloring within the lines if they ever said something that made her feel they were potentially misunderstanding or mishandling the situation. They only got a break when they injected her 90lb frame with enough Benadryl to knock out a horse. One of her biggest takeaways from this era was that everyone needs to be a fierce advocate for their own health.

She endured a daunting 18 rounds of chemotherapy, between 3 to 4 times the average person receives. She was one tough mother. She persevered, and was out there hiking as often as she possibly could - and even some times she possibly couldn't, or shouldn't. It was her favorite thing. Her peace. Her idea of "quality of life".

Every two weeks, she would adorn her royal tiara and arrive at chemotherapy with a bag of mini tiaras for the nurses, radiating positivity on everyone she encountered. But as the anniversary of her first visit came and passed, it became clear to her doctors that radiation, from neither chemo nor tiaras, could take her much further. When they got the news, her sons returned home and, along with her loving husband Jim, made sure she was surrounded with love. Not just from us, but also many of her dearest family and friends who visited in her final weeks. When the time came, she was at peace, in her favorite room, surrounded by flowers, with family holding her hand.

She was funny, fierce, and utterly fabulous. Fearless, fantastic, fascinating, fashionable, and fervently forthright.

Forever loved, forever missed, never forgotten.

Patrick, Matthew, and Jim

A Celebration of Life will be held Saturday, September 27, 2025, from 2-4 p.m. at Red Tail Golf Club in Avon, Ohio. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to PetFix of Northeast Ohio https://www.petfixnortheastohio.org/