Even as the Philadelphia region looks to figure prominently in determining McCain's future, the area figured prominently in his past, most devastatingly as the place where Carol McCain was horribly injured on an icy stretch of Route 320 in Gulph Mills on Christmas Eve 1969 while her husband was imprisoned in Hanoi.
Carol McCain spent the next six months in Bryn Mawr Hospital, while their daughter, Sidney Ann, 2, stayed with her grandparents Mary and Joe Shepp, an insurance agent, in Lansdowne. Her two sons, Doug and Andy, from her first marriage, to an Annapolis classmate of McCain's, stayed with friends in Florida, where the McCains had been living. (John McCain had adopted the boys.)
Over the next two years, she had 23 operations.
"She was leaving my house on Christmas Eve," recalled Connie Bookbinder, 71, one morning last week. She sat at the kitchen table of her Haverford apartment, surrounded by pictures of the old days, including a couple of John McCain. "She went out of my driveway and turned left."
It was Carol McCain's third Christmas while her husband was a POW; she was visiting her parents, when she drove over to see to the Bookbinders in Gulph Mills. Less than a mile away, near the hanging rock on 320 (a landmark said to have sheltered George Washington and his troops), McCain's car skidded into a telephone pole. Thrown from the car, she lay for hours by the roadside until police found her.
"She told me she didn't think she was going to survive," said retired Dr. William "Bud" Stewart, of Malvern, the orthopedic surgeon called in that night. "It was snowy and icy, and she didn't think she was going to be seen."
