The parents of comedian Conan O’Brien’s parents died last week within three days of each other, and there was some comment on Facebook about the fact they had been married for 66 years and that Conan’s Dad, a physician, was a jester himself. But there was very little about Conan’s mother, Ruth O’Brien, so I took upon myself to add a comment about the fact that I had worked with her years ago when she was a lawyer at Ropes & Gray and I was a paralegal there. She was an amazing woman, a pioneer in her field and a role model for me, and I wanted to let people know that. And then I decided to expand on that Facebook comment.
When I was in my early 20s, I moved to the Boston area after getting married, and because I couldn’t find a paying journalism job (I’d had one previous 18-month stint at a reporter for The Easton Express), my husband’s parents suggested I try to get a paralegal position. They made no bones about the fact they would like me to forget about journalism — that’s not a fitting job for a nice Jewish girl is how one of them put it. Instead, I should go to law school and become a lawyer like their daughter. Since I had no other prospects and needed to work — I was helping put their son through dental school — I interviewed at a few large law firms and to my surprise, was hired as a paralegal at Ropes & Gray, a white-shoe law firm in downtown Boston. The man who hired me — Ed Benjamin — was the only Jewish partner there and I guess he liked the fact that I had gone to Brandeis University and knew how to do research. I was assigned to the real estate department of the law firm and that’s where I met Ruth O’Brien, one of the first female lawyers at Ropes & Gray who was allowed to work part-time since she had five children at the time, the oldest being Conan.
I remember Ruth would come to work in no-nonsense boots and a long skirt and she didn’t linger in the halls, shooting the breeze like some of her male colleagues did. She was too busy being a mom and a lawyer. Even though I was a full-time paralegal, charged with handling residential real estate closings for some of the firm’s more lucrative clients, I was writing freelance pieces on the side in an effort to build up my portfolio. Somehow, Ruth discovered I had written a piece for The Boston Phoenix, a well-known alternative weekly, about clinics around the city who helped rape victims and tried to collect evidence against their perpetrators. This was in the late 1970s and these clinics were among the first in the nation to do this kind of work. (At that particular time, it was incredibly difficult to convict rapists since so many people, law enforcement included, blamed the victims for their sexual assaults). I’ll never forget the day Ruth O’Brien came charging into my office, her trademark boots proceeding her, waving a copy of the Boston Phoenix.
“This is really good,” she said, plunking the article down on my desk. “I didn’t know you were a writer.”
I remember blushing and muttering something about wanting to be a journalist. Standing by my desk, Ruth nodded encouragingly. “You’ll get there, Alison. Just keep writing articles like this.”
This was the kind of woman Ruth O’Brien was. I don’t know how she did all the things she had to do in one day — with five kids and a busy job lawyering. And yet she found the time to mentor a 23-year-old paralegal who wanted more out of life than assisting lawyers at real estate closings. I never met her son, Conan — he was 13 and not around the day she invited me over to their house for her secretary’s wedding shower — but I often thought he was lucky to have a mother like her. RIP Ruth O’Brien and thanks for being such an incredible role model!
