Author: Mike Sielski

One person after another shuffled toward her from the funeral line snaking down the center aisle, through the vestibule of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, out to Forest Avenue in Ambler, and I wondered as I approached her how long Meg Kane could keep this up. The sad, grateful smile. The long, tight hugs. The posture she maintained, straight as a soldier, when the shock and grief simmering within her should have sent her to her knees.

It was Friday, April 12, 2024. Eight days had passed since the house fire that killed her parents — the kind of unbelievable tragedy that interrupts a local newscast, helicopters hovering over the smoldering ruins. Unbelievable, too, because it had happened to Meg. Over the quarter-century that we have been close, she has risen through the public relations industry to a place of power and influence within Philadelphia without compromising the qualities that made her, above all else, a decent human being. It always seemed that her intelligence and drive, her character and achievements, melded to form a shield that would protect her from catastrophe. Something like this doesn’t happen to someone like Meg, I thought that day, as if such a thought were anything other than a mind trick, a weak attempt to reconcile how and why my friend’s mother and father were dead.

The line stretched to more than 200 people, perhaps more than 300. No one standing in it should have been surprised at its length. Meg had relationships and connections throughout the Delaware Valley, of course, but more than that, she and her family had embodied the blending of some beautiful and long-conflicted aspects of Philadelphia’s history and culture. They had learned to live with and revel in the tensions inherent in certain traditions here. Their roots were that deep. Their hearts were that open. Hers most of all.

That background is one reason Meg has been the ideal face of the campaign to bring the World Cup to Philadelphia and promote it once it was here, to play up and celebrate the happy marriage of soccer and the city. It also is the reason that — through every match, every publicity event, every meeting, every long and restless night before and during this tournament, all while the eyes of the globe had been on Philadelphia — she has been holding all that pride in the same palm as so much pain.

Everything essential in life

There she is again. Another quickie interview on Fox29. Another guest spot on a PHLY Sports panel. Another four paragraphs of insightful quotes to us at The Inquirer. Another Amtrak ride up to New York or 14-hour flight to Doha, Qatar, to see what she could learn, then another debrief with her colleagues at Philadelphia Soccer 2026. Here’s what they did. Here’s why it did or didn’t work. Here’s what we can and should do.

Nothing new for Meg Kane. Nothing out of the ordinary. Revitalizing Tastykake’s brand and business when its headquarters relocated from Hunting Park to the Navy Yard … making ready the way for Pope Francis’ visit to town in 2015 … counseling the Philadelphia Orchestra and the archdiocese … all this at the tenderest of ages, all this before she turned 45 in January.

“When the odds are against us,” said her friend Christopher Pinto, the development lead of the Philly Pops, “this city calls Meg Kane to make the impossible possible.”

Who was better to evangelize about Philadelphia, to make the case that it was an ideal location for the biggest event in the world’s most popular sport? Who else had the requisite combination of local expertise and enthusiasm to share the multitudes that the city contained? Meg’s mother, Debbie, and biological father, Richard, had divorced not long after Meg was born. Debbie then married Steve Wood in September 1983 — a Little Flower alumna and a North Catholic graduate reconnecting 15 years after they’d met as teenagers on the Wildwood boardwalk.

Meg wasn’t yet 3 when Steve became her stepfather, but the word was appropriate only in its most literal sense. He was Dad, too, and she was his daughter, full stop, and everything that was essential in his life became essential in hers …

… and everything included their early-afternoon car trips together starting when Meg was 7, when Steve would pick her up after another half-day at St. Martin of Tours School and drive down I-95 to 13th and Walnut, to the bar that Steve and his brother, Bill, had opened in 1980, to Woody’s — to the best-known gay social establishment that Philadelphia has ever known. While Steve balanced the books, Meg — still in her Catholic school uniform, her plaid skirt and saddle shoes — sat at the bar, the daytime bartenders fixing her fresh cherry Cokes, making them the right way, muddling the fruit and filling her glass with fountain soda, the little girl chatting up the customers and playing Ms. Pac-Man on the arcade machine upstairs and remaining mostly oblivious, never thinking anything there was strange or sinful, her parents never suggesting anything was.

The cognitive dissonance might have caused constant friction in one family or torn another apart. It didn’t exist within Meg’s. Steve had one rule about the visits that Meg, her younger sister, Liz, and their younger brother, Stephen, made to Woody’s: If you see someone there you know, keep it to yourself. “It was important we never outed anybody,” Meg said. “At that time, there were people for whom Woody’s was an oasis, an escape, the one place they could be themselves.”

The bartenders there picked up extra work at Liz’s and Stephen’s christening parties. Bill’s partner, Lee Mallon, showed up to the family’s annual Christmas party dressed as Santa. Debbie, who became a principal at Norwood-Fontbonne Academy in Chestnut Hill after years of teaching in the archdiocese, loved to tell the story about the earnest couple who made an appointment to tell her something troubling … except the delicate topic had nothing to do with the couple’s children. The husband had been downtown, and he and his wife had been praying about whether to share what he saw with Debbie, and, well … Your husband walked into Woody’s. And Debbie let out a belly laugh. Oh, I know … By the way, have you forgotten what my last name is?

At the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s, Steve and Bill kept employees on the payroll even though they couldn’t work anymore, held celebration-of-life luncheons at the bar, and covered the cost of memorial services and burials when no one else would. Those trips to hospitals and funeral parlors were rarely, if ever, spoken of within the Wood family. Steve’s mother had died when he was 4 and his father when he was 13. His siblings had raised him, and he considered business associates to be friends and friends to be family, and maybe a young woman who later would be charged with uniting a diverse but territorial city behind a common mission had to grow up immersed in such acceptance, such label-free loyalty.

There was Meg, riding with Steve every morning during her high school years from their new home in the Montgomery County suburbs to Academy of Notre Dame in Villanova — a school with a great speech-debate program for a teenager who knew she’d end up talking for a living — the two of them listening to WIP throughout those 45-minute commutes. “It’s how I learned to be a sports fan,” she said. “My passion was cultivated because of our relationship.” There was Liz, going her own way at Mount St. Joseph Academy. There was Stephen, heading off to St. Joseph’s Prep. But it wasn’t until Meg’s freshman year at La Salle, when a male student she didn’t know knocked on the door of her dorm room to thank her — Your family owns Woody’s, right? I don’t know what I would have done without it — that she perceived her family as resting at the center of every Venn diagram of Philadelphia, sharing something in common with every group and subgroup.

I met her during the first semester of her junior year at La Salle, when she took a journalism class I was teaching in the fall of 2001. It is an intimidating thing to be a 26-year-old adjunct professor, to have taught for just two years, and to suspect immediately that one of your students is smarter and wiser and more sophisticated than you are. Ten days into the term, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, she proved she was.

Class began at 9 a.m. I tried to get 20 minutes worth of lecture time in as black smoke billowed from the World Trade Center towers and my students, a few of whom hailed from New York and North Jersey, chewed their fingernails and fidgeted in their chairs. Finally, Meg shot me a look that said, I know you mean well, but … please, we gotta get out of here. When the class reconvened later that week, I asked for the students’ forgiveness for my stupid officiousness, for my failure to read the classroom, and we spent the rest of the period discussing and venting about the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. In September 2011, Meg sent me a letter — not an email, not a direct message, a letter, on paper, more permanent — recalling that week. You did what a teacher is supposed to do, she wrote. You earned our trust, and you never lost it. It remains a treasured gift, that letter and its contents, that benefit of the doubt, that measure of grace that I hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve.

By then, Steve and Bill had sold Woody’s and opened another bar, Knock, and Meg had lifted off and would continue climbing in her career: from La Salle — she was her class’s commencement speaker — to graduate school at Maryland; from earning a master’s degree to planning and publicizing some of the city’s biggest events; from getting a text message in November 2019 from Angela Val, who was the CEO of the city’s convention and visitors bureau at the time, to meeting her that night at the Ritz Carlton. We need you, Val told her. We’re going to bid on the World Cup.

It was the project of a lifetime. It gave her the runway and credibility to open her own PR firm, Signature 57, in 2021. It put her front and center as the captain of the city’s World Cup cheerleading squad — “the Pied Piper of Philly soccer,” someone called her. And she still could be the daughter and sister and friend she’d always been, ready at a moment’s notice to give whatever had to be given. Drive five hours one way to attend the funeral of a colleague’s parent? It’s a day. What’s a day? Get off a plane after a week of work in Ireland and head straight to a chamber of commerce dinner that night? Work an 80-to-100-hour week? Of course. How else would she be there for her family if she didn’t excel in her professional life, if she didn’t squeeze her responsibilities and extra efforts into the smallest possible windows of time?

Yes, she thought it, too: Something like this doesn’t happen to someone like me. But things did happen. Debbie retired and, without her work in education, struggled in the void, losing weight, chain-smoking so much that her favorite blanket became pocked with holes where fallen ashes — and even the still-lit tip of one of her Merit Menthols, as she was dozing off — had burned through the wool. Stephen moved back in with his parents after finishing at Penn State and stayed with them for nine years, teaching English at Norwood, helping Steve care for Debbie. Liz and her husband, Michael McCabe, both faculty members at La Salle College High School, lost a baby daughter, Eleanor, and one night, Steve sat with Meg at his dining room table, a Phillies game on TV in the background. He had grown up without a mother and father. He had watched dear friends waste away to a deadly virus. Yes, these things and more did happen, but “my dad,” Meg said, “had an incredibly positive view of the world,” and at the table, he described to her how he had tried to comfort Liz.

Don’t despair, he said. Don’t despair. It’s the only way to keep going.

The horror of a ticking clock

On Thursday, April 4, 2024. Meg was in a room at the Fairmont in Washington, D.C., already awake for close to two hours, writing and rewriting speeches and teleprompter scripts for the Horatio Alger Association Awards, a three-day event for the philanthropic juggernaut that had become a signature project for Signature 57: a CEO’s retirement, the introduction of 12 new members, two major dinners, an undertaking so massive that Meg and four coworkers bunkered for a week in the hotel to complete it.

Still in her pajamas, she was trudging to the bathroom to wash her face when her phone buzzed and lit up pink, the color that meant Liz was calling. She assumed something was wrong with Francis, Liz and Mike’s 4-month-old son.

Meg looked at her phone. It was 6:42 a.m.

Liz?

Meg, she shrieked, I’m watching the house burn down!

What?

I’m watching the news. I’m holding the baby, feeding the baby, and the house is on fire!

Meg told Liz to call the police. She put her phone down and walked to the bathroom, violently shaking, and did not wash her face. She called her boyfriend, Keith Audit, and told him, I need you to find out if my parents’ house in on fire, and Liz called back and said that the police had told her that someone would be in touch and she had tried calling Steve’s phone but it had gone right to voicemail and Liz kept saying, It’s definitely the house, and I don’t know what to do, and then Meg said out loud an irrational thing: We have to call Norwood. Stephen’s a teacher. Stephen’s not going to make it to school. Someone has to let Norwood know to get a sub. And Meg hung up with Liz and called Shannon Craige, Norwood’s curriculum director, who told her the students were on spring break and Norwood was closed.

Meg looked at her phone. It was 6:53 a.m.

She called Stephanie Bambach, the vice president of Signature 57, who was in a room above her. When she arrived at Meg’s room, Bambach was surprised that Meg’s demeanor was as measured as it was. She was not surprised that Meg’s voice was trembling.

I have to finish writing the remarks for Saturday night, Meg said. I’m only halfway done. I can’t leave.

It doesn’t matter, Meg.

Meg reopened her laptop and emailed every document and every draft of every unfinished document to Bambach. She grabbed a black striped sweater and a pair of black leggings, went into the bathroom, and got dressed.

“I remember looking at myself in the mirror,” she said later, “and saying, ‘You will never wear these clothes again.’”

Bambach arranged for a car service to pick up Meg at the hotel and drive her back to Philadelphia. The two of them rode an elevator down to the lobby. Meg held her room key. She tried to hand it to Bambach.

In case, Meg said, someone needs to use my room.

Bambach didn’t take the key. Keep it. Good thoughts. It’s going to be OK. You might come back.

I’m not coming back, Meg said. It’s not going to be OK.

In the back seat of a black sedan, Meg’s phone rang again.

I’m at the house, Liz said. I just spoke with a detective. Mommy and Daddy didn’t make it.

Meg took a deep breath. Where. Is. Stephen?

He’s OK, Liz said. He got out.

Meg looked at her phone. It was 7:43 a.m.

The black sedan pulled up to her apartment. Keith was waiting for her. She threw her bags in his car, and they drove to Temple University Hospital’s burn unit. Stephen was there, in a bed in a room in the back, his face and body covered in soot. That acrid, sickening odor. Physically, somehow, he was fine.

“We were the luckiest people on that floor,” Meg said later. “He was going to get out of that bed and go home. That day couldn’t have been worse, but my God, it could have been.”

She looked at her phone. It wasn’t yet 11 a.m.

Miles away

Two months. That’s how long she stepped away. From the World Cup campaign. From Signature 57. From everything except what was gone and what remained.

The fire’s official cause was undetermined. Its damage was incalculable. Steve and Debbie had no wills. Their birth certificates and Social Security cards were gone. Meg had to pick up the mail and pay the mortgage and pay other bills and access both their personal bank account and the finances for Knock and show up for every meeting with every lawyer and builder and contractor, everything moving incredibly fast and in slow motion at the same time, so many dear memories now coldly cataloged on an Excel spreadsheet.

She did not talk about the fire at all in public and only rarely in private. Her last name was not Wood; few strangers, if any, knew her connection to the tragedy. The relative anonymity was meager relief from the pressure she piled on herself. Who else could handle the fallout? Who else could inch everyone a little closer to normal again? It had to be her.

She didn’t have a newborn to raise, like Liz and Mike did. She hadn’t awakened in the dead of night to dodge flames and hold her breath to keep smoke from seeping into her lungs, like Stephen had. Hell, her poor brother couldn’t even cradle his baby nephew two months after their parents’ deaths: A potent combination — a crackle of July 4 fireworks and a quick post-traumatic contemplation of the fragility of human life — compelled him to hand Francis off to someone, anyone, before something terrible happened again. Nothing she was dealing with came close. Hell, she had been 150 miles away when the house went up. She hadn’t even been there.

Her friends worried that she was pushing herself to the brink of a breakdown and beyond. “She’s really not someone who leans on people,” Bambach said. “I wish she had leaned on us more in the aftermath. So much of her identity is who she is as a leader of Signature, of Philly Soccer, and accepting help from people was a position she was really uncomfortable with. As her friend, I had moments when I wished she would just ask for help.”

Two months. She couldn’t bring herself to take more time away from work. She ping-ponged between her guilt over what she had to do for her family and her guilt over her desire to return to her career. “I really struggled with that,” she said. “Everyone is replaceable at work. If I’m not there, does it run better without me? Are people doing better? Philadelphia World Cup 2026 — is it running better and smoother? Are they finding this to be easier without me? I thought about that even with Signature 57. I’m the founder and CEO, and I still grapple with that. You can go to dark places.”

The things that remain

On the kitchen table of her Fairmount apartment, Meg Kane reached into a box to handle the delicate pieces of her parents’ past and her present. Three pages from a memoir by talk-show host Mika Brzezinski, their edges singed black, survived the fire; Meg found them when she first returned to the house’s site. A couple of old family photo albums, the pictures mounted under sticky plastic, the books stashed in a sealed Tupperware container, seem untouched, save for their smoky smell. “It’s really hard to …” she said. “It takes you back there.” So does a black magnetic card that she lifted out of the box. The key to her room at the Fairmont. She kept it.

There’s a vision she can’t shake: Steve waking Stephen up, making sure he got out of the house, then remaining at Debbie’s side, knowing he could not leave her, his children knowing he never would. He had to be so scared in those final moments. He had to be so brave.

“At the end, there’s just grief,” Meg said. “I’m not sure I’ve dealt with the grief. I don’t know I’ve felt it all the way. I don’t know that I’ve allowed it to be something I fully felt.”

So she stores it away, lets it out only during the brief and rare breaks in her schedule, when the events and interviews have paused and some stillness and quiet return to her life. In May, Stephen proposed to his girlfriend, and at the engagement party, Meg pulled him aside for a conversation. It lasted 15 minutes. “It was the talk that everybody was avoiding all night,” he said, a talk about how much he had grown over the last few years, “the kind of talk you would want from your mom or dad.”

It was the happiest moment in a spring and summer that have had many happy ones. She partied on Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park and marched with several hundred Croatian soccer fans from Center City to Old City and rode a subway train quaking from the chants and songs of Brazil’s futbol fanatics, and she saw Philadelphia reveal itself as a world-class sports showcase. They are just Band-Aids, to be sure, covering the paper cuts of knowing that her parents never got to meet their son’s fiancée or hear their grandson speak his first word. But for those of us fortunate enough to call her a friend, they are the answer to the question we were asking as we stood in that church two years ago. How would she get through each day? How would she keep this up?

She did it by holding on to something a father told his daughters. She did it in the only way any of us can. She remembered that she has loved and is loved, and she did not despair.