Yahoo Lifestyle Conan O'Brien's parents, pioneers in medicine and law, die within 3 days of each other
Thomas O'Brien, 95, and Ruth Reardon O'Brien, 92, were married for 66 years.
Conan O'Brien's parents, Dr. Thomas O'Brien and Ruth Reardon O'Brien, who were pioneers in their respective fields of medicine and law, died this week within three days of each other.
Dr. O'Brien, a forward-looking epidemiologist, died Thursday at 95. His wife, an attorney who broke barriers for women in the legal field, died Monday at 92. They were married for 66 years and both died at their home in Brookline, Mass.
Conan, 61, told The Boston Globe of his late father, "For the rest of my time on earth I will be hearing from people who want to talk with me about my dad. I've never met anyone like him, and he happens to be my father. If I met him randomly in a hotel lobby, I'd think, 'Who the hell is this guy? He's the most interesting person I’ve ever met.'"
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Thomas O'Brien and Ruth O'Brien were both born in Worcester, Mass. The couple married in 1958 and remained together until the end of their lives. They raised six children — Neal, Luke, Conan, Kate, Jane, and Justin — and at time of their passing had welcomed nine grandchildren.
Ruth O'Brien was one of four women in her graduating class at Yale Law School in 1956, and she went on to become the second-ever female partner at Boston's Ropes & Gray law firm.
Thomas O'Brien graduated from Harvard Medical School and spent much of his medical career there, serving as an associate professor until he retired in 2019. He also served as the the first director of the infectious diseases division at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
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The eminent doctor traveled the world helping to train other medical professionals on the use of databases that track antibiotic resistance, as a means of advancing response to viral outbreaks. He cofounded the World Health Organization's Collaborating Centre for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance, which works to fortify the apparatus that surveils and responds to antimicrobial resistance around the world.
Conan remarked to the Globe that "Science has said there's no such thing as perpetual motion, but my father was proof that that was wrong… My father was in constant motion. And he was interested in everything — absolutely everything."
The longtime late-night host also said his penchant for comedy traces straight back to his father, who introduced the O'Brien kids to famed funnymen like Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin, and the Marx Brothers. "The loudest I've ever heard anybody laugh was sitting next to him in a theater watching Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther movie," Conan remembered.
Ruth O'Brien and several family members discussed her tenure at Ropes & Gray in 2017, on the occasion of her receiving a company award recognizing her impact and influence. "The other mothers thought it was a riot, that Tom O'Brien was doing these carpools and was one of the girls," she reflected on the hectic task of managing the parenting of six children between two working parents. "But some of the husbands I guess thought it was beneath his status to be doing some of this stuff. He just thought it was a joke, and the kids seemed to love it."
Conan recalled, "There were six kids, two dogs, a cat, my grandmother, a parakeet. I'm not kidding, that house was kind of madness sometimes. Lovely madness, but madness still the same. I don't know how they worked it out but they worked it out pretty well."
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