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Meet I'm a child of the 50s who went off to Notre Dame to worship Football. Before I knew it I was married and working as an Art Director at a big Advertising Agency in their Phila., New York and Chicago offices. After seven years, while working in the Chicago office, I threw it all away to come home to Phila. and open my own tiny ad agency. I must insert here that the last TV commercial I worked on in Chicago won a "Best Humorous" Clio and went on to be named 1971's "Best TV Commercial in the World." (no kidding!) After seven amazing but not very profitable years, I got a job as Creative Director at Hallmark Cards. By now I was a single parent, and I dragged my five children, kicking and screaming, all the way to Kansas. After eight good years (regular paychecks) I threw it all away again. The very day I resigned, I met my future wife, Karen, who had been hoping I could get her a job at Hallmark. A year later we married and a month after the wedding we moved back East to the tiny, bucolic Borough of Narberth in the Phila. suburbs. There, while Karen trudged off to work each day, and the new step-brothers, Ted and Terry, went off to high school, I sat in my converted garage/studio in sandals, tee-shirt and shorts and designed, illustrated and wrote humor books. I also wrote a novel (unpublished), and on a lark I spent two years as the editorial cartoonist for the local weekly, tasting for the first time the fun of annoying "the authorities." In 1987, a member of the Phila. Inquirer Editorial Board moved in across the street, and I started doing op-ed art for the Inquirer. Ten years later, in the midst of a long, slow freelance summer, I came up with the idea of delivering op-ed art on the Internet. In 1998, after a magical first visit to Ireland, I took up painting. (My paintings and limited-edition prints can be seen at my painting website.) I come from a family of artists going back four generations. Three of my six wonderful children are artists, a fourth is a musician, the fifth a writer, and the sixth actually has a job. You can see a lot of Maguire family art, including work by my mother and grandparents, at www.maguiregallery.com. I have published a few essays and my local commentary, "The Burro of Narberth," is posted from time to time on the community bulletin board at the Narberth train station. I recently self-published an e-book novel based on my experiences in the Greeting Card business. It's fun and scary and called The Art Factory. Once video camers shrunk to pocket size, I started making videos, of Ireland, of Echo Lake, my upstate New York "summer studio," of County fairs and Irish fiddlers and explorations of my paintings. They've become a passion for me. You can see them on my Video Page. I am not the Barry McGuire who sang "Eve of Destruction." Neither am I the McGwire who hit 70 homeruns, nor the Barry who hit 700, (and if you saw me in a bathing suit you'd see that I've never used steroids either). Although I met my talented wife, Karen, in Kansas City, she's originally from Lubbock, Texas. Karen is a freelance editor, indexer, and a compiler of Day-at-a-Glance calendars. She's worked on books and calendars for such luminaries as the late Roger Ebert, Dear Abby, Dr. Ruth, Dave Barry, and Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers. And she's currently working on her 20th year of a "Spiritual Moments" calendar. Because she also does an annual Lefthanders calendar she knows the life story of every single famous lefty/southpaw who ever lived. She sings like an angel, plays piano and bass guitar, and has beautiful feet.
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