Reprinted with Permission of the Albuquerque Journal

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Ex-Journal Writer Had No-Nonsense Outlook

By Paul Logan
Journal Staff Writer
John Curley was an award-wining Albuquerque Journal writer who went on to work at The Wall Street Journal and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Curley, an athletic person who didn't smoke, died July 28 of inoperable lung cancer at his home in Festus, Mo., south of St. Louis. He was 50.
Curley came to Albuquerque in 1977 and worked for about 21/2 years on Impact, the Journal's weekly magazine. Two of his colleagues were Fritz Thompson and Howard Houghton.
Thompson, who is retired, said Curley was "one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet."
Houghton, a city editor with The Santa Fe New Mexican, said Curley was "a compassionate kind of guy ... He wasn't brash, showy or egotistical. A quiet sense of humor. Nice to work around."
Curley was an accomplished swimmer, skier and golfer who played shortstop for the Post-Dispatch softball team. He was a classical guitarist who was on the board of the St. Louis Classical Guitar Society for 16 years, said his older brother, W.J. Patrick Curley of New York City.
"He had developed a very simple but effective outlook on life— no nonsense, very direct, great partiality," his brother said. He liked to see the world very clearly and understand it very, very clearly."
Born in Pittsburgh, Curley was the son of Walter Curley, U.S. ambassador to Ireland during the Ford administration and ambassador to France under President George Bush.
Curley tried to avoid mentioning his background to others, his brother said.
"He wanted to have a very direct contact, person to person, with the subjects he was writing about and didn't want another layer of information coming between him and the story," his brother said. "He wanted to be accepted for who he was."
Curley worked on his high school newspaper at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and at his college newspaper as an undergraduate at Yale.
He was a writer with the Irish Independent in Dublin, Ireland, before coming to Albuquerque, his brother said.
Curley won first place in the 1978 Albuquerque Press Club contest for best investigative story. He won for "The Big Tax Break," which described how two large real estate developers were receiving undeserved tax discounts.
He captured another first in the 1979 New Mexico Press Association's interpretive reporting category.
After working a few years for The Wall Street Journal, he made another career change, his brother said.
"People around him were grinding away (in New York City) and he wanted something that had a bit more to offer ... to have some time with (his) family," Patrick Curley said.
Curley wrote for the Post-Dispatch from 1986, including coverage of the conflict in Somalia in 1992-93. He had been working on a story about cancer on his home computer before he died.
At a memorial, people he had written about talked about the journalist.
"He made a connection," his brother said. "I think that's what people admired and respected and loved— that sense of consistency between his private and his professional life. He was the same person."
Other survivors include his children, Nina Curley and James Ross Curley, both of St. Louis; sister, Margaret Liles of North Yarmouth, Maine; and parents, Ambassador Walter and Mary Walton Curley of New York City.
Memorial donations may be made to Hospital Albert Schweitzer of Haiti, P.O. Box 81046, Pittsburgh, PA 15217, or the St. Louis Classical Guitar Society, P.O. Box 11425, St. Louis, MO 63105.

Copyright 2003 Albuquerque Journal