When Joe Leary passed away last week at the age of 90, The Reporter family lost a longtime friend and contributor. Raised in Milton, the “Double Eagle” (BC High and Boston College) grad had a 30-year career as an executive with Gillette, then helped to found the Irish American Partnership, a non-profit that supports education, job training, and economic development in Ireland. With his broad and in-depth knowledge, his monthly columns in the Boston Irish Reporter helped to keep the community informed about events on the island of Ireland, North and South.

In 2016, Joe’s family was profiled with a Boston Irish Honors award, and its history was captured in an extensive profile by the late Jack Thomas, a Dorchester native and longtime newspaperman with the Boston Globe, who wrote, in part:

“The story of the Leary family of Boston is rooted in an event so shameful in Boston history that it’s not talked about much, but in the summer of 1834, Protestant thugs burned the Ursuline sisters’ school and convent in Charlestown and drove the nuns out of Boston. Nearly a century later, in 1928, a young Dorchester woman, Mary Nolan, graduated from an Ursuline school, the College of New Rochelle in New York. In 1946, she collaborated with Boston Archbishop Richard J. Cushing and others to induce the Ursulines back to Boston to establish Ursuline Academy on Arlington Street.

“Today, the academy prospers in Dedham, offering independent Catholic education to 430 girls in Grades 7 through 12. The Leary family continue their mother’s mission on behalf of the Ursulines, an order of sisters founded in Brescia, Italy, in 1535, and noted for its commitment to the education of girls.

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“Joseph F. Leary Jr., was the first-born son of Joseph and Mary (Nolan) Leary’s four children, two boys (Joe and Kevin) and two girls (Patsy and Betty). He met his wife, Eileen, while she was a nurse at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, and they married in 1959. She died in 1981. The Learys were more Catholic than Irish, or as Joe put it, extremely Catholic. ‘The house at 480 Brook Rd. in Milton was dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus,’ he recalled. ‘There was a big picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall, over the RCA floor-model radio – there was no television – and we’d all go into the living room as a family and kneel and say the rosary – my mother, father, the children, and grandmother. And there was no fooling around about it. Father saw to that.’

“Litanies of life in the Leary home are a reminder of how rapidly life in America has changed. Joe was eight years old on that day of infamy, Dec. 7, 1941, when his mother returned home to report that she’d heard on the radio that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. ‘I wondered, where the heck is Pearl Harbor,’ Joe recalls, ‘and so we looked it up.’

“He awoke the next day to a shock, an endless line of antiaircraft guns along Route 28 heading from Otis airbase on Cape Cod to Boston Common. ‘A terrible presence overcame us. We didn’t know what war was, but we learned quickly, because suddenly there were German ships off Boston, and German spies on Cape Cod. My father was issued a helmet and assigned to a tower at Milton Academy to watch for German planes.’

“In the age before television and before sophisticated radio news, many people looked to newspapers as the primary source of world events. In the late spring of 1944, as Americans awaited news that the Allies had invaded Europe, 11-year-old Joe was something of a celebrity as he delivered morning and evening Boston newspapers in Milton. ‘My mother said to me that I’d be the first to get the news, and if the newspapers had a story about the invasion, I was to call her right away.’

“Politically, the Learys look back yearningly on their generation as comfortably swaddled in the Democrat Party. ‘I don’t recall anybody in my family being Republican,’ said Joe. ‘Perish the thought,’ chimed in Kevin’s wife Mary. Although they agreed on 99 percent of political issues, being Irish, the family would ferret out the one percent and argue it to death.

“Joe was recruited (to the Partnership) by Charles Feeney, the philanthropist, and although it took the new president three visits, the person he recruited to be chairman was former Marine Corps Commandant Paul X. Kelley, whose military manner made an impression in Ireland. Leary shuttled to Ireland more than 70 times and listened to lectures by Cardinal Cahal Daly, who wagged his finger, barking in a brogue: ‘We’ve got to bring the IRA into the government.’”

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Under Joe Leary’s leadership, the Partnership issued grants of $20 million to almost 300 projects in Ireland. He retired on Aug. 31, 2016 and embarked on a new passion, Boston history, particularly before the Revolution. He continued to write a monthly column about Ireland for the Boston Irish Reporter until 2019. His funeral was last Monday, Sept. 25 with interment at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Canton.