OBITUARY: Sean T. Kelly, Irish community booster

BY HANNAH ALLAM
Pioneer Press

St. Paul's Irish community lost one of its most devoted, most amusing and most colorful characters Thursday with the death of former Pioneer Press reporter Sean T. Kelly.

Kelly apparently died of heart complications in his St. Paul home, friends said. He was 67.

A New Yorker born to Irish immigrants, Kelly landed at the Pioneer Press after stints as an aspiring monk, a singer in an Army choral group and the producer of an insurance company's newsletter, said his longtime friend Jim Brooks, publisher of the Irish Gazette. Kelly worked his way through journalism school at the University of Minnesota by waiting tables in passenger railroad cars, Brooks said.

Although Kelly was passionate about writing, nothing matched his love for all things Irish. Kelly spoke Gaelic and taught the language in bars and coffee shops around St. Paul for more than two decades. He also helped establish the annual Irish Fair and was recently photographed for an upcoming book called "Irish Faces in America," Brooks said.

His contributions to local Irish residents were so appreciated that several of the 30 or so Irish bars around town already have asked to hold Kelly's wake, Brooks said.

"Everything he did was to further the Irish understanding," he said.

After retiring from the Pioneer Press in the 1990s, Kelly wrote a popular column for the Irish Gazette. Brooks said Kelly retained a lovely singing voice and was even hired to sing for a friend's mother at a nursing home.

Kelly's quirky personality inspired just as many tales as his community involvement. He never married and preferred public transportation to a car because he liked to add up the numbers of license plates while waiting at bus stops, Brooks said. For a while, he lived under the Wabasha Bridge on a houseboat that grew so cold during the winter that a beer bottle once froze to a glass table, friends recalled.

"He was cantankerous, but he had a lovely sense of humor," Brooks said.

There are no details on survivors. Funeral arrangements are pending.