William J Leahy:BILL LEAHY, who has died aged 75, was a sometime Irish Timescorrespondent in Chicago. He penned insightful reports from the city, many of them involving its Irish-American community.
During a spell living in Ireland, he contributed to RTÉ radio’s Sunday Miscellany before returning to Chicago and, in later years, pursuing a career in academe.
Bill Leahy was born during the Great Depression in an Irish neighbourhood on Chicago’s northwest side to an Irish father and Italian mother. Leahy was inspired in his lifelong egalitarian left-wing views by a raconteur grandfather who was a democratic socialist of the Daniel De Leon stripe.
Just after the Korean War, he did a stint in the US navy on a supply ship before attending the University of Chicago and acquiring a Master’s Degree in English literature in the late 1950s. From there he embarked on a lectureship at Oregon State College (now university).
McCarthyism, the anti-communist witch-hunt stirred by senator Joe McCarthy, had peaked by then, yet remained powerful and so he didn’t last long. One of his closer colleagues was Bernard Malamud who afterward used Bill as the model for Leo Duffy, a rebellious Irish-American lecturer, for his 1961 novel A New Life.
His full-time academic career then cut short, Leahy knocked about as a freelance journalist and visiting lecturer in various locales.
In the early to mid-1970s he moved to Dublin, eventually becoming involved with the Workers’ Party to a degree that drew him to the attention of the Special Branch. Leaving Dublin under some duress, he spent time at the American University in Cairo, having his longest live-in relationship with an Afghani high-born lady he called The Princess. But Leahy, despite affairs of some duration, never married.
Returning to Chicago in the late 1970s, he wrote splendid insightful reports over the next decade or so for The Irish Times, the International Herald Tribune and other outlets. He also published an intermittent cult newsletter entitled Leahy’s Corner.
He managed to settle into a lectureship at Chicago City Colleges, a job he held until retiring in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, Bill was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, or a form of dementia close enough, and eventually was taken into care.
William Leahy: Born November 16th, 1933; died January 8th, 2009