That’s why the Musgrave Harbour resident has been handing out his homemade ID cards for the past eight years.
McCarthy makes them by cutting driver’s licence-size rectangular pieces from the slats of old window blinds and attaching a little round mirror. He then adds wording at the top of the card: “My I.D. CARD. ‘Sure, that’s me in there!”
His face brightens to a big smile as he places one in your hand.
“I’ve handed out thousands over the past eight years,” chuckled McCarthy. “I just do it for a good laugh. They’ve gone all over the world.”
McCarthy’s family is originally from St. Julien’s on the province’s Northern Peninsula, but the family relocated to Goose Cove, near St. Anthony, where McCarthy grew up.
He left the province in 1998 to find work in Alberta and retired five years ago from his job as a scaffolder in Fort McMurray.
When he and his wife, Lynn, moved from Alberta to Newfoundland upon his retirement, they decided to settle in Musgrave Harbour on the province’s northeast coast.
“We love it here,” he said. “We are right by the ocean.”
McCarthy was in Goose Cove recently and, in addition to handing out the ID cards, he had a number of small, decorative lighthouses in his pickup. He builds the roughly four-foot-high lighthouses from “old-fashioned clapboard,” which is hard to get, he says.
There are a few of his lighthouses around the Goose Cove and St. Anthony area, mostly made for family and friends.
One of those lying in his pickup was for the town of Goose Cove, for a special celebration this summer. His lighthouses sell for about $200.
“I got one here for the Come Home Year in August for Goose Cove,” he said. “I don’t build many. I had built a few for some family members and then some other people wanted one, so I built a few more.”
McCarthy said the ID cards and the lighthouses are only a hobby he’s gotten into. But, he says, there’s one more item he makes.
“I make weather forecasters,” he said with a chuckle. “There are two walnuts on them. If the walnuts are swinging it’s windy, if they are wet it’s raining, if they are hot, it’s time to sit under a tree. And if you see three walnuts you’ve had too much Screech!”
