A sailor's friends bid farewell
to a Grosse Pointe institution

If ever there was the perfect image of a self-made man who got joy out of life, it was Bill McCourt, whose name graced a shoe store in the Village, a building he built at the southwest corner of Kercheval and Notre Dame.

His father, Arthur, died when he was 8. His mother, Mary, had tuberculosis so Bill grew up in an orphanage, quit school as a teenager to support his mother and sister, served as a radar man in the Navy in World War II and went ashore at Iwo Jima – and took pictures.

He crewed aboard Mackinac racers 22 times. He died in Florida June 26 and his second wife, Laura Cook McCourt, appropriately had his memorial service last Monday at the War Memorial overlooking Lake St. Clair, where Bill loved to sail.

McCourt got into selling shoes by accident. He filled in for a friend who was on vacation and discovered his natural cheer and love of people made him a world-class shoe salesman.

His store at one point was the largest volume seller of Docksiders in the world and he had more inventory than the company.

His first wife, Barbara, died in 1980. They had three sons -- Larry, David and Brian. Three years later he married Laura. Bill liked to claim that he had two dates in his life and he married both of them.

In 1985, he and Laura sold their Grosse Pointe home and sailed into the sunset aboard the 48-foot ketch Tinamara. They sailed to the Caribbean, Europe, Scotland, and the east coast of North America for the next 16 years.

But the pair returned often to the Pointes to visit their friends and tell their tales of sailing adventure. Rugged, tanned, weather-beaten and always smiling, McCourt and Laura would show up for a Rotary Monday noon lunch at the War Memorial, a civic service group that he served as president in 1983-84.

Some of McCourt’s ashes will be scattered off the Cove Island Light in Ontario’s Georgian Bay, the marker for the longer route in the Port Huron-to-Mackinac race.

In memorializing Bill, the first woman president of the Grosse Pointe Rotary, Theresa DiVirgil, who spent a career as a travel agent, pointed out that it was sometimes difficult to book hotel accommodations for the pair because they traveled the world.

“I always had to find hotels that would accept their pet parrot,” she said.

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