Searching “McCloskey” Probably Doesn’t Mean What You Think

I review McCloskey equipment specifications before they reach customers. Spec sheets, tolerance tables, dealer brochures, the works—roughly 200+ documents a year. I’ve rejected about 12% of first drafts in 2024 for missing data or misleading claims.

What I never expected from this job is that the most confusing thing in my workweek isn’t an engineering drawing. It’s the search bar.

“Mccloskey” shows up in our website analytics in ways that make no sense together. Jaw crusher buyers from Kansas. A paralegal in St. Louis looking for a lawyer named Patricia McCloskey. Someone who typed “eddie jacket” and landed on us anyway. There is no single answer to “what is McCloskey?” The right answer depends on what you need, so let’s sort it out scenario by scenario.

Three McCloskeys. Only One of Them Crushes Rocks.

To be fair, the confusion isn’t entirely the searcher’s fault. A surname doesn’t tell you much.

The McCloskey I work for makes mobile crushing and screening equipment—tracked jaw crushers like the J50v2, stackers like the R230, screening plants like the ES250 (Source: mccloskeyinternational.com, model pages). If your search includes a machine type, this is probably the one you mean.

There’s also the legal McCloskey: Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis attorneys who became household names in 2020. And then there are the other McCloskeys—a spar varnish brand, a motors shop in Colorado Springs, and what looks like dozens of smaller companies that happen to share the last name.

Which one you’re looking for changes what you should do next. Here are the three cases.

Scenario A: You’re Buying or Renting Equipment

If your search history looks like “mccloskey jaw crusher,” “j50v2 specs,” or “r230 stacker for sale,” you’re in the right place. You’re a quarry operator, a contractor, or a fleet manager, and you want machine details—weight, throughput, dimensions, power requirements.

Here’s where I’ll give you the unpopular take: the sticker price is the least useful number on the quote.

Why do I say that? Because I’ve watched buyers pick the cheapest crusher on paper, then spend more in a single season on downtime and parts than the price difference between machines. Total cost of ownership isn’t just the purchase price. It’s transport, setup, wear parts, service intervals, and the cost of every hour the plant sits idle waiting for a dealer to respond.

“I’ve said this to every dealer we work with: the sale isn’t the cost. The cost is the machine running, the parts available, and the answer coming back fast when something breaks.”

Three things worth checking before any equipment decision:

• Dealer distance. A support team two hours away beats one two days away, even if the equipment costs more upfront. Time zones matter too—a same-day answer is a different product from a next-week answer.
• Wear part availability. Ask how long a replacement jaw or screen deck actually takes to arrive. Not the salesperson’s estimate—the warehouse’s real lead time. A crusher that’s down for three weeks has a cost that dwarfs most price differences.
• Rental or resale flexibility. A mobile setup that can move between sites holds its value differently than a fixed installation. If your work is seasonal, that changes the math further.

From my side of the table, spec compliance is the whole game. A throughput number without the test conditions behind it—feed material, feed size, moisture content—isn’t a spec, it’s a guess. I’ve bounced more than one marketing draft back with that exact note, and I’ll keep doing it. The same standard is what you should expect from any supplier.

My own rookie mistake, for what it’s worth: in my first year here, I assumed “standard duty” meant the same thing to every dealer. It doesn’t. We approved a brochure that described a screen as “standard duty” without defining the amplitude specs—cost us a $22,000 rework and a very long phone call with a buyer in Ohio. The fix was a spec attachment in every contract. The lesson applies on both sides of the table: vague language is expensive.

If you’re after equipment, the fastest path to a useful answer is including the model number in your search. “Mccloskey j50v2 spec sheet” beats “mccloskey jaw crusher” every single time.

Scenario B: You’re Actually Looking for the Lawyer

Here’s something I didn’t expect when I took this role: a large share of “mccloskey” searches are about a legal couple in St. Louis, not about machinery. If you typed “patricia mccloskey lawyer” or “msrk mccloskey”—that typo shows up in our analytics weekly, and I always read it as “Mark”—you’re looking for Mark and Patricia McCloskey.

They’re both attorneys in St. Louis, but you probably know them from the 2020 incident: they pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters who were walking down their private street. Felony charges followed, they took plea deals in 2021, and Missouri’s governor pardoned them later that year (Source: public court records and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2020–2021). Mark McCloskey then ran for U.S. Senate in 2022 and lost in the Republican primary.

The name is a coincidence, in case anyone wonders. The crushing equipment company and the law firm share a surname and nothing else. If you’re writing about one McCloskey, don’t quote the other’s website—that mix-up has cost more than a few credibility points.

I’m not a legal expert, and I can’t speak to their current practice or availability. But the TCO angle applies here too: the real cost of legal representation is never just the retainer. It’s the hours you spend verifying a lawyer’s credentials, the clarity of the fee agreement, and the risk you take when a firm’s public reputation heads in a different direction than your case needs. If you’re evaluating any lawyer—not just the McCloskeys—check state bar records, ask about fee structure in writing, and read the engagement letter before you sign.

If the legal side is what you meant, add “St. Louis” and “attorney” to your search. You’ll skip the equipment noise entirely.

Scenario C: You Didn’t Mean McCloskey at All

Then there’s the rest of the search landscape. I don’t have hard data on how many visitors land here looking for something unrelated, but based on the emails we redirect, my sense is it’s a steady trickle.

The most common are other McCloskey businesses: the spar varnish company, the motors shop in Colorado Springs, and the occasional regional firm that shares the name. Less common but real: people searching “eddie jacket,” who most likely want a waxed-cotton motorcycle jacket and definitely don’t want a 50-ton mobile crusher. Don’t hold me to this, but I’d guess the search engine matched us through some forgotten product name, and neither of us got what we wanted.

And “why did the first congress meet”? Honest answer, since I looked it up the first time it appeared in our logs: the First Federal Congress convened in New York in 1789 to establish the executive departments, create the federal court system, and propose the Bill of Rights (Source: U.S. House of Representatives, history.house.gov). Good trivia. Wrong website.

“Mccloskey victoria” cuts both ways. It might mean a dealer or service location in Victoria, British Columbia, or Victoria, Australia—both real heavy-equipment markets. Or it might be a person named Victoria McCloskey. If you’re looking for machinery in either Victoria, add a product type to the query. If you’re looking for the person, I can’t help you reach her, and frankly, she’d be easier to find with a more precise search too.

The most frustrating part of this keyword mess: it repeats weekly. You’d think adding “crusher” to the search would fix it—and usually it does—but not always. When someone lands here expecting a law firm, or a jacket, or a history lesson, our brand takes the hit even though we never claimed to be any of those things.

How to Tell Which McCloskey You Actually Mean

Two-minute test:

1. If your search contains “crusher,” “screen,” “stacker,” or “conveyor”—you’re in the equipment world.
2. If your search contains “lawyer,” “attorney,” or a first name like Patricia or Mark—you’re in the legal world.
3. If your search contains a jacket type, a history question, or a location that might also be a person’s name—you’re probably in the wrong tab. Close it, refine the query, and try again.

The reason this matters isn’t politeness. It’s cost. A vague search looks free, but it isn’t—every wrong click and misdirected email burns minutes against your week. The quote that looks cheapest on the surface is the one that most often hides the follow-up costs. Same logic applies to searching as to buying equipment: the more specific you are upfront, the lower your total cost later.

Two extra words in a query cost nothing. They save us both a lot of time. So before you click back to Google: are you looking for the crusher builder, the St. Louis law firm, or something else entirely? That single answer will get you where you need to go.

Specific machine specs and dealer availability change; verify current details at mccloskeyinternational.com.