Phyllis and Calvin McCourty were responsible for McCourty’s upbringing in Nyack, New York, where they resided. His father passed away in 1990, at the age of 34, from a heart attack that was caused by asthma-related problems.
Meet Calvin McCourty and Phyllis Harrell
Calvin McCourty was an Army veteran and a supervisor in Lederle’s computer departmen Laboratories in Pearl River, New York.
Calvin was a high school basketball player and that was where he and his future wife, Phyllis who was a a cheerleader started dating. They were deeply in love with one another, and they cherished their time spent raising Devin and Jason in their modest home in Nyack Plaza.
Phyllis was a nurse at the time of her husbands death . She was doing laundry one night when the phone called to tell her that Calvin had suffered an asthma attack and gone into cardiac arrest. Unfortunately, he passed away before Phyllis could reach the hospital to say her final goodbyes.
Harrell’s strong willpower is what brought Devin and Jason to achieve greater success in their life. This all began with the way she raised her children. She referred to it as an iron fist.
Harrell, a nurse at Rockland Psychiatric Center, had the boys driven in a taxi every day from their elementary school to their grandmother’s house in Nyack Plaza .
Mary Brady, an Irish immigrant who lived downstairs, occasionally watched Devin and Jason and reported back to their mother if she noticed them engaging in inappropriate behavior.
Harrell was a strict mother who wouldn’t let her sons hang out in the wrong kinds of locations, and her sons were afraid to disobey her. She was and still is a tough, fighting woman.
In one terrifying incident, Harrell was a passenger in a car that was returning two patients to the psychiatric facility when an accident occurred, causing the driver to hit the gas instead of the brakes and forcing Harrell to fight for control of the wheel as the car swerved across two lanes of traffic.
She tore the ACL in her knee, necessitating multiple operations, a knee replacement, and permanent disability.