Jeanne O’Connor and Jim DeRito

[00:02] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: This is Jeannie O'Connor. I'm 72 years old. Today is May 22, 2023. We're in Logan, Utah.

[00:15] JIM DERITO: Okay. I'm Jim DeRito age 53. Today's date is May 22, 2023. We're in Logan, Utah, and I'm interviewing my mom, Jeannie. So I guess the first question, just to set it up a little context. Well, thanks for coming out, mom. All the way from New York in Syracuse out here to Logan, Utah, for your oldest granddaughter's graduation. That's why you're here. And just conveniently, we've got this interview set up. So I thought this would be convenient for the girls to have a little background, your two granddaughters, about you, given that we are a couple thousand miles apart kind of thing. So some of the questions, I guess, to start off, and start off way back when, you obviously come from a really big family, much larger than typical, what was it like growing up with all those siblings in Syracuse, New York?

[01:09] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Well, first of all, Jim, I am thrilled, out of my mind to be here for Kayla's graduation and for this event, too. And we're having a great time already, and the week is just going to buzz by, and I'm going to say, oh, my God, I'm going home again. I am one of 14 wonderful children. My father uses the term wonderful. I'm not sure we would have used that same term. And it was an amazing experience. Why? Because we always had teams. We had enough kids to have teams for anything we ever did. And when you have that many kids in your family, there's no parental interaction at all. They just couldn't do it. So we had tremendous freedom, freedom that kids today don't have. We were outside for as much of 24 hours as we could possibly be. Nobody was out looking for us. Nobody was concerned. Nobody was worried. That's the kind of freedom and independence we had. It was amazing. We grew up across the street from a huge park in Syracuse called Burnett park. It's an 88 acre park, and it was our personal playground. It had a zoo and an Olympic swimming pool and swings and day camp and anything 14 kids could get into. That's what we had. That was our daily thing. We would skate in the winter until our toes were frostbitten, and we would sled until they were frostbitten and then go home and scream because they hurt so much. So that's what we got to do. We played capture the flag in the flower park across the street and kickball, and we were all pretty good at that stuff. We never stopped running ever, ever, ever.

[02:59] JIM DERITO: Nice. That's pretty amazing. Quite a way to grow up, for sure, I guess. Thinking about your siblings, I guess. Maybe list them out. I know you can do them very quickly, but kind of slowly from oldest to youngest, to put them all in order, I guess.

[03:14] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Okay. The oldest is sue. She would have been about 78 or 79 now, but she passed away two years ago after an accident in which she had a. A brain bleed. And then there's Julie. She lives in Texas. And she and her husband Tom have three wonderful girls, also in Texas. Linda is married to Mike, and they have two kids, Katie and Peter. Billy is next, and he lives in New Jersey with his wife, Pat. They have two kids, Matthew and Denise, and four grandkids. Peter, my brother Peter, lives in Syracuse, and he and his wife Karen have one son. And Peter had two daughters. They all live in Syracuse. And then there's me and my number one son, as they say, number one son. And then my sister Marie lives in New Jersey with her husband, Mo. And they have four kids, three living in New Jersey, one in San Francisco, and nine grandkids. Timmy. Tim lives in Syracuse with his wife, Sharon. And they have two kids and one grandchild. Mary lives in Syracuse with her husband, Otis. They have one son, Josh, who is an attorney in Dallas. Okay. Mary David lives in Syracuse with his wife, Kim. They have three kids. David. Martha lives in Syracuse, and she has two sons, Brendan and Brendan. Ann. I'll think of it, Martha. Tommy is deceased. Maggie lives in Syracuse. She's 62. She has four kids who also live in Syracuse. And then Patrick lives in Pennsylvania. He's the baby of the family, and he is a baby, and he has three kids now grown. That's. It.

[05:35] JIM DERITO: Took a while. I know you want to do them fast now. Just a sibling.

[05:40] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Susie, Julie, Linda, Billy, Peter, Jeannie, Marie, Timmy, Mary, David, Martha, Tommy, Maggie, Pat.

[05:44] JIM DERITO: Impressive.

[05:45] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: It's all one word.

[05:48] JIM DERITO: All right. How were your parents growing up? I know Grandpa O'Connor ran a business. O'Connor Moser. Right. The grocer. Very successful, obviously. That's kind of neat. So, yeah. What was it like having Bill and Susan as parents?

[06:06] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Well, they were distant parents. As Washington, everybody then, all of my friends had the same thing. We never thought anything should be different, because that was a status quo. Parents did not have a lot to do in their kids lives, even to the selection of college and career. They really didn't sue. My mother, Suzanne Hopstein, had the patience of a field of saints, not just one. And I believe she could do that because she had a little switch in her temple here, and she was able to switch us completely off. I am convinced of that. My father was either on and up and funny and fun or scary. Very scary. When he was up, he was great, but when he'd come home from work, we'd look at his face, get an idea, is he in an ulcer mood or is he in a good mood? If it was ulcer, we scattered and he would not see us for the evening, any of us. We would not make noise. We'd go up to our rooms, do whatever we did, or go down to the basement, which was redone, and we had a lot of rolling stock down there, and we'd roller skate or ride bikes or whatever. So it was a different time. Relationships with kids and adults were nothing like they are now. And for us it was great, pretty much. But there wasn't any guidance either.

[07:36] JIM DERITO: You said you kind of had teams, though, with your siblings. I guess, in terms of obviously being able to play sports. I mean, you got a full basketball team three times over there.

[07:45] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah.

[07:46] JIM DERITO: But were you closer to any some of your siblings? I guess just given an age and things like that, obviously, you know, a.

[07:51] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Lot of people have asked me this exact same question, and what I say to them is that you can take any 14 people in a population, put them in a line. There are always going to be some that you're energetically attracted to, and there are going to be some that you're not, and it's not different in a family. Mary was the funniest, most uniquely gifted one. Susie was my one mentor, who kind of was the archangel of me when I was younger. So those two, Maggie, I spent a lot of time with her. Patrick or Tommy, really close to tom and Maggie. But now Mary doesn't talk to anybody in the family. Our brother Patrick does not talk to anybody but Bill. It's kind of a strange bunch of.

[08:49] JIM DERITO: That's a lot. Yeah, obviously.

[08:51] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah.

[08:52] JIM DERITO: You were saying Mary was gifted. How so?

[08:54] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Mary Carol humor.

[08:55] JIM DERITO: Oh, yeah.

[08:56] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Just funny, her humor. She lived with me for a short while. She made me laugh every day, and I couldn't figure out where she came up with this stuff. She was like a stand up comic, only personal. It was fun. And it's really too bad she cut everybody off after. I think it was my mom died. Yeah, it was about that time. And she never called and said, this is why she just wouldn't take anybody's calls. Yeah. Do I blame her? No. No. It's just something in her that perceives something in us, something deficient, I believe.

[09:40] JIM DERITO: Did you have any favorite relatives? I guess, growing up, I guess.

[09:43] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Definitely. Aunt Peg. Aunt Peg was my mother's twin to and the sweetest lady on earth. So there's 14 of us. Every year, for our birthdays, she would send a card to our house, even when she lived with us with a dollar, and we called it the annual. And we were so thrilled to have a dollar. And she was just great. She never forgot our names like most people do, because how can you remember that many names? She was just wonderful. And not like mom. She was much softer, much more outgoing. Do you remember her at all?

[10:22] JIM DERITO: No, I don't think I do.

[10:24] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah.

[10:24] JIM DERITO: Fortunately. Yeah.

[10:26] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah, yeah. She was great.

[10:29] JIM DERITO: You said your mom obviously had to switch things off. Having that many kids, you would think, for sanity's sake.

[10:36] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah. No, I believe it. We've talked about this, the sibs and I, and we think that that's what allowed her to remain sane. She was an incredible reader, which we are all grateful for, because we are all readers from age four. That's what we did. And I still do books I don't want to read on a screen. And I think it was a self protective mechanism. She would go into her book, switch this thing off, and she was not a crazy woman.

[11:07] JIM DERITO: That makes sense.

[11:08] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah.

[11:09] JIM DERITO: Well, Coleridge sounds like an ideal place to grow up, obviously. Right across from the park in Burnett and not too far from school. I guess you all walk to St. Patrick's for school and everything. Not that far away. A huge house, an enormous place to hold 14 kids and have a playroom in the basement, obviously.

[11:29] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah. It was a perfect place to grow up. Between the park across the street, all the room in the house, which was an amazing house, and the fact that we walked everywhere, including downtown, into school, and we never thought a thing of it, ever. We never complained. We just. It was our life. We loved it. Yeah. Yeah.

[11:54] JIM DERITO: And then they also had a place on a Tisco lake, right? A camp, basically.

[11:58] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Oh, yeah.

[11:59] JIM DERITO: So I don't know when that came into being or how. How often you went out there.

[12:04] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: That was the summer of my. When I got out of 8th grade, they bought the house out there, and we would go there the day after school let out for the summer, and we would come back the day before school started in the fall, like right around Labor Day, or until a bat came into the camp. And because we're out there and it's trees and it's water and stuff, it attracts bats. And every year. Well, not every year. But most years there was a bat at some point, and my father, not being an outdoorsman or a hunter of any kind, it freaked him out. Well, we didn't like it either, but sometimes we would go home a few days early because a bat came down the fireplace.

[12:53] JIM DERITO: Oh, boy.

[12:54] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: It's like, did anybody think to close the flu? I'm just wondering. So it was great. We had boats and sailboats and motor boats. And my mother used to call me the queen of Itisco Lake because, you know, by freshman year in high school, we were out driving those boats ourselves, picking up our friends at the other end of the lake. And we'd be gone all day.

[13:16] JIM DERITO: Nice. That's where to spend a summer.

[13:18] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah, it was great until I had to go to work.

[13:23] JIM DERITO: That's good. Are there any funny stories your family tells that come to mind about you or any particular ones or you remember?

[13:33] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: This is a good, typical story of the O'Connor family. Now, John Carrillo and his brothers and sons would come in to do the interior painting of the house. Every, I don't know, five years or so, they would come in and just paint. So this one time they had done the painting and we had a powder room and a bathroom off the kitchen. So you'd go through the powder room and into the bathroom. Well, one of us geniuses, the day after painting, went in with a box of crayola crayons and did our own personal artwork in the bathroom. So my father gets home from work that night and he calls us all downstairs and we're all like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. What is it? So he lines us up. This didn't happen often. He lines us up and he says, someone used their crayons on the newly painted bathroom. I want to know who did it. And the first one who says, I didn't do it is going to be spanked. So we stood there quietly for a minute, and I took a little step forward and I said, daddy, I didn't do it. He cracked right up. Honest to God, I thought he was going to fall off his chair. He could not believe after what he had just said. And here I am, this little kid with his rag curlers in my hair and cute as heck with my teddy bear. I was probably four or five. And I said, daddy, I didn't do it. And I knew I didn't do it. And he just laughed and he let us all go. So to this day, I don't know, I would guess it was Peter. So everybody clapped me on the back and they said, good going, Gene. So I love that story, and it's true.

[15:33] JIM DERITO: Nice. Actually had a lot of good friends growing up. You went to St. Pat's from kindergarten through high school, right?

[15:40] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah.

[15:41] JIM DERITO: And you said you have your best friends kind of grown up, your kinder buds that went that entire time with you. The four of them, I guess. What were they like and. Or, I guess other friends kind of growing up at that time, from school or wherever.

[15:54] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah. Again, we were pretty much inseparable, I would say, from age, from first grade, when we figured out how each of us got to school from our respective streets. Because we were on each street, starting at Coleridge. There was me and Mary O'Brien. Then Whittier was Barb Clark and Rosemary Murphy. Then we'd go down. Judy Conroy wasn't exactly in our group, but we'd meet her at Bryant. Then at Tennyson was Helen. And then Kathy Knight came over from Wilbur to meet me. We'd walk up the hill at Coleridge, and we'd just go collect each other on our way to school. This went on until we were seniors, and it was fun. And then we'd go to somebody's house for lunch and have ridiculous food that I would never eat now, like chef Boyardee. Macaroni and Oreos, for example, or bologna sandwiches on white. But that was fun. And we always went home at lunchtime, but we did. There wasn't a cafeteria at my school. We did have kids who bust in, but not many. It was a local irish school, separate from the Ukrainians, separate from the Polish. We had our old school, and everybody in my class was terrific. There were only 42 of us. 42. Pretty much going all through, you know, a few left, a few came in, but that was the basic number. Yeah.

[17:28] JIM DERITO: Yeah, I guess I went there for four years, from elementary, fifth grade through 9th grade. Yeah, definitely different, I guess, at that time. Now it's closed in apartments, right?

[17:38] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah. Condos, condominiums. I've never been in to see those, but I want to.

[17:42] JIM DERITO: I have another.

[17:43] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: I'd like to jump it up. How many nuns did you end up having?

[17:47] JIM DERITO: More than half, I guess. My teachers were nuns.

[17:49] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Like, did you have misses Murphy, Rosemary's mother?

[17:52] JIM DERITO: Yes, I think I did.

[17:54] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah.

[17:54] JIM DERITO: She might have been at St. Bridget's at the time, if I remember that right.

[17:57] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: She may have. She may have. Most of ours were nuns. I think we had Miss Ryan for second grade. She was very old, which meant she was probably 40. But we thought she was ancient. Like dinosaur ancient. But all of ours were nuns. And despite all kinds of stories I've heard from many people, I didn't think our nuns were bad at all. In fact, I think they kind of liked us. But we were respectful kids too. Nobody brought a knife or a gun to school. And we didn't talk back to them, obviously. And we did not talk back to Monsignor or the priest because they were pretty scary as far as. Oh, I could get in trouble for. I could get in trouble for this.

[18:41] JIM DERITO: I guess you and I take it for granted. But a lot of people do get a kick out of catholic schools, I guess. And going to school with nuns and priests and that type of thing.

[18:48] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah.

[18:49] JIM DERITO: I mean, being pretty different, you know, from typical secular schools, I suppose.

[18:53] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: So. Let me follow that up. At Ludden. How many religious taught you?

[18:59] JIM DERITO: Probably less than half there.

[19:02] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: But did you have some good ones?

[19:03] JIM DERITO: Oh, yeah. No, they were all good teachers, I thought, for the most part.

[19:06] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah. And you hear so many stories about physical punishment or harm. I didn't see it. I mean, was I wearing blinkers? I don't know, but we didn't have that.

[19:22] JIM DERITO: They threw erasers at us occasionally.

[19:25] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah, but that's. They usually missed. And a chalk. A piece of chalk. That doesn't hurt.

[19:32] JIM DERITO: Pretty minor, actually. I came across your high school yearbook, I think, when I was at St. Pat's. And it said you never missed a basketball game. So I guess your love of basketball started early then, huh?

[19:45] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah. Yeah. And it has continued to this day. And it was a big deal because we weren't a big sports school. We didn't even have gym. Do you realize that? Gym. We did not have gym. So there was baseball, which your dad played. Basketball, which he played. And we had the same guys on both teams. And, yeah, I never lost that love of basketball. And that's really where it began. I still don't know all the rules, but I know what happens when somebody makes a basket.

[20:19] JIM DERITO: That's good. So after you finished high school, you had me pretty soon thereafter. But then you went on to upstate medical center and you got your nursing degree. Was that something you always kind of were drawn to, you know, become a nurse from an early age?

[20:33] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: You know, Jim, that's a really good question. We had so little in the way of academic counseling from, like, our senior and junior teachers. We didn't have counselors who were advisors at that point. You became a teacher, a nurse, maybe a few other things that I'm not thinking about. But we didn't know that the world was our oyster. That we could have expanded this to included a lot of different fields. So I went to nursing school. That has set me up well for life for a lot of reasons. First of all, the knowledge of anatomy and physiology and disease and things like that. That said, would I maybe have done something else? I may have. I may have. I'm not sure what. Because we didn't. Nobody said, well, Gene, you could be an architect. You've got the math skills. You're a pretty good drawer. You could do that or any other thing. So, you know, I felt it was limited. Barb went to nursing school. Rosemary went to nursing school. Helen did a secretarial course, which back then was considered kind of lowbrow. That was only for the dumb kids. And Mary O'Brien went to UB, and she was the smartest of us all.

[22:05] JIM DERITO: Yeah, I guess your options were kind of limited back then, or at least what was presented at some point.

[22:10] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Well, you know, back then, there were women in law school, there were women in med school. There were female architects. Not as many as there are now. But we didn't know because nobody ever said, well, geez, did you ever think about, I don't know, going to the fashion institute in New York or becoming a curator for a museum? We didn't feel that we had the options. We didn't have the Internet to skate through and say, this looks good. Oh, I'd like to try that. We didn't have that. Yeah. Yeah.

[22:48] JIM DERITO: So you went nursing for a while, though, I guess upstate, and then with a red cross, and then you kind of got out of it and into a variety of different jobs, I guess. What was your favorite of those types of jobs?

[23:02] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: No, there's no question. Hands down, holistic healing work. Hands down. Once I read the book, and I'm sure you have it, too, Louise Hayes book, you can heal your life. I knew then that I had to get out. The trend started, let's see. By the nineties for a cover your ass medical mentality, it became litigation. Happy things had to be done in triplicate, quadruplet. You lost the ability to simply be with a patient. I found that very upsetting because that was my 1st 20 years in medicine, was being close to patients. Sick ones. I like the sick ones. I don't like the ones you see every day. I want to be in the ICU when they're throwing up blood. But our relationship with our families was amazing. And really, by the time I left upstate in the eighties, it was really beginning to change. And it's gotten much, much worse, we did not have hospitalists then. We had attending physicians who came in and did rounds on their patients twice a day, morning and night. Every attending physician did that. It's not that way anymore. They're hospitalists who don't know you, who don't know your history. And I got out way before that happened. But Susan and I. For the recording. Susan's one of my best friends. She's an emergency room physician for 35 years. We talk a lot about the changes and the differences, and she said that she had to get out because it was emergency room medicine, she said, can be practiced by chimps, because no matter who came in, no matter what their diagnosis, you took your iPad, you typed it in, and there was a standard of care soc for everything wrong. There was no thinking outside the box, or you were disciplined, so it changed a lot. But holistic medicine, which can be practiced on so many different levels and doesn't have to be in a hospital, although more are, including Reiki and essential oils, they are. We do have some of that happening, but we didn't then, and so that was a whole new career. And so would I ever go into medicine again? No, not the conventional medicine that I learned.

[25:47] JIM DERITO: That makes sense, I guess, if you could do it again, I guess that's where you'd start.

[25:51] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Maybe I would start by going through and getting the masters to be a nurse practitioner, which I didn't do. That's what I would have done. Because you have more say in how a patient's taken care of, and it was important to me. It was really, really important.

[26:15] JIM DERITO: Makes sense. Let's see. Any funny stories or memories or characters from your life that you want to share or talk about.

[26:24] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: I have a very funny story about Patty Wilson. You remember Patty, don't you?

[26:28] JIM DERITO: Yeah.

[26:30] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Patty Wilson and I were asked to pack up and clear a house on the Onondaga indian reservation land. This is by one of the chiefs of the Onondaga nation, which is in Syracuse. And so we were there day after day. I mean, it was a huge, monster house, and it was a lot of work. But, you know, we were bright. We knew what to do. This wasn't all that long ago, by the way, maybe 15 years ago. So one day we stop, and Patty said, jean, did you see the fur coats in that closet? And I said, no. So she said, come here. So she opens the double doors, and they are filled with floor length fur coats. And, I mean, the real thing, you know, like mink. So she puts a mink coat on, and it's got these little. It was hot. It was the middle of summer, July. She puts this mink coat on, which is fabulous, and it has all these little buttons. For reasons unknown to me, she started to button the buttons, and she's walking around the house in this amazing coat, and all of a sudden, I said, patty, they're home. She freaks out. And for about a minute, I didn't say it wasn't true. And I just started laughing my head off. And I wanted her to tell that story at my funeral. And I was going to say, at my funeral, I'm going to pay $50 for the person who says the funniest story about me. And I wanted it to be patty, because maybe in the translation, it doesn't sound as funny. It's like, oh, my God, I'm in trouble. I can't get the thing off. She couldn't get the buttons unbuttoned fast enough. And we laughed about that for months. It was so funny.

[28:21] JIM DERITO: That's good.

[28:22] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: But my friends were all fun, you know, all the kids from, you know, my kinder buds. We just laughed all the time. We laughed a lot. We didn't have depressed kids in my class. We didn't have anxious kids. It was so much simpler and easier to laugh. And that's all we did. And we admit it to this day. And when we get together for our weekends, we'll go back and tell the story of Helen tipping over her desk in french class, and we'll tell the same stories because they were so funny, and we remember them.

[29:01] JIM DERITO: Let's see, what are the most important lessons you've learned in life, you think?

[29:10] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Gee, I don't think I read that question, Darren. I would have prepared something. Right. I read the first five. Okay. I think that I'd have to say, number one would be simple kindness, simple thoughtfulness and consideration. Even if that's not given back. I think the older you get, and you might agree or not, you listen better, more compassionately, without having to judge it. And I think that becomes easier by the year. And as I do a lot, a lot more spiritual work with a lot of really impressive teachers, that really comes back to me big time. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

[30:02] JIM DERITO: How would you like to be remembered?

[30:05] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: You know, I did read that, and I said, I really have to think about that one. I would have to say, number one, Jim. I want people to remember I was funny, and I want people to laugh about things I said or did that were hysterical, because I think that laughing is one of the cures for a lot of the things that are going wrong now on our planet, in our world, in politics, in medicine, and if we can just release some of that grief and sorrow and sadness and fear and fear, I think that's a pretty good thing. How else would you think I should be remembered?

[30:47] JIM DERITO: No, I think that hits a lot of it. I think a lot of stories like my kids tell or remember. Yeah. About funny things. So I think that would make a lot of sense. Absolutely.

[31:00] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Yeah.

[31:02] JIM DERITO: Yeah. I think that's. We hit them all.

[31:05] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: But before I want to wrap up, I want this to be played for your kids. And it will be. And I want to say, kayla and Jesse, I gotta wait till I can see it. You're amazing. You are such sweet, kind, thoughtful, quirky, creative kids. And I know a lot of kids, and they're not like you. You are in a class of your own. I feel better handing the universe over to you at this point in the history of our world than I would have been if you weren't on this planet. I adore you.

[32:02] JIM DERITO: I appreciate that, mom. Definitely.

[32:05] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: And Amanda, too. Sorry, Amanda. Didn't mean to leave you out. But you are a little older than the kids. And just to finish that one thought, I say that you four, as a family unit, are really quite spectacular. And I see it more and more by the year, not less and less, as is the tendency. I see your relationship with Amanda. Amanda and yours with the kids. This is something not everybody has, you know? Not everybody has that.

[32:40] JIM DERITO: Oh, yeah. No, we appreciate that. Definitely. And we appreciate you coming all the way out, like I said at the beginning.

[32:46] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Oh, my treat, too, you know? Yeah. And, you know, I'm going to be back for the double graduation in four years. But, I mean, obviously between now and then. Yes, again. Again. We'll probably see you in November, right? Hopefully with the kids.

[33:02] JIM DERITO: Probably just me. They'll be in school.

[33:05] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Okay. Then we can eat whatever we want.

[33:10] JIM DERITO: Yes, indeed. All right. Well, thanks, mom. I appreciate it.

[33:14] JEANNIE O'CONNOR: Thanks, Jim. It was fun. I might not stop talking for a few days.

[33:19] JIM DERITO: Is that unusual?