- Barry Emmet Rohan, a newspaper reporter who worked at major US newspapers in Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis and Detroit in a nearly 40 year career, died the morning of May 31, 2013 in Grosse Pointe, MI, after emergency surgery. He was 76.
Born on October 12, 1936, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Emmet and Renee Rohan, Barry would spend most of his youth and adolescence in and around Kaukauna, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Kaukauna High School. After graduation, he served in the army as a morse code radio operator in the Philippines. During that time he had many adventures including leaves in Hong Kong and Tokyo.
After his discharge from the army, he attended and graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, with a degree in journalism. His first job was at the Waukesha Freeman and after a stint with the Milwaukee Sentinel, he became a copy editor and features writer at the Chicago Tribune.
In Chicago he met his wife, Kathryn Hannan, where they married on June 18, 1966. Soon after the young couple moved to Minneapolis, where Barry was a reporter with the Minneapolis Tribune and later worked as a speech writer for Dayton-Hudson. It was in Minneapolis they had their two children, Elizabeth and Brendan.
In 1975, the family moved to Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan. Barry was a business news and science writer for the Detroit Free Press from 1975 until 1998 with a few lost years due to a contentious labor dispute. As a business reporter, he developed a column about Michigan's small businesses.
In the 1980s, he researched and wrote an extensive family history that ultimately connected distant cousins in Ireland and the United States.
Barry also wrote a definitive history of his grandfather, Barry Conners, a successful playwright and one of the first screenwriters in Hollywood. The article, 'My Grandfather's Trunk,' was published in an essay collection his daughter co-edited and played a part in a revival of Conners' 1925 comedy 'The Patsy' in 2011 by the Transport Group in New York City.
After his retirement, he was a tutor in an adult literacy program. And together with his dog Pippi J, he visited patients at the Michigan Rebilitation Center and participated in the Reader Dog Program at the Grosse Pointe Library.
He is survived by his wife of 46 years, Kathryn Rohan, two children, Elizabeth, of St Clair Shores, MI and Brendan, of New York City; grandson, Conor Curran; sister, Mary Anne Garrity, of Prairie Du Chien, WI and brothers Sean Rohan, of Kaukauna, WI and the late Michael Rohan.
Donations in memoriam can be made to the Michigan Humane Society michiganhumane.org or The Southwest Solutions Adult Learning Lab swsol.org/adult_learning_lab.
Published in Appleton Post-Crescent on June 12, 2013
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1936 - 2013 (76 years)
Education - High School
