Kevin Callahan ’73
Kevin Callahan, Arlington Heights, IL, died March 24, 2024, from pancreatic cancer.
In 1978 he earned a master’s in French from Middlebury College. He was a brother in the Society of St. Edmund, founding resident order of Saint Michael’s College, until the 1980s before marrying and becoming a management consultant.
While a resident Edmundite at the College Kevin for a time in the 1970s was “the Voice of the Purple Knights” and organized a memorable “dribble-a-thon” in Ross Field House. In those years he conducted “on location” research about the Edmundites by visiting all the major Edmundite sites in France. Shortly after graduating, he taught at Rice Memorial Catholic High School in Burlington.
For a time in the 1980s he was assistant chaplain at St. Basil’s College in Toronto (Canada), and in the 1990s he was real estate agent in Quebec, Canada, according to alumni surveys.
Once leaving the Edmundites, Kevin was the founder and president of The Project Management Consortium, Inc. a Chicago-area consulting company. In 2004, a book that he authored, The Essentials of Strategic Project Management, published by noted business publisher John Wiley and Sons, provided advice for executives and managers.
He lived in Arlington Heights with his wife, Catherine.
While no obituary was available to the College or word about survivors, an article posted on the suburban local-news website Patch in his Chicago home area in 2024 by a friend and admirer, John W. Fountain, shared John’s impressions about Kevin and his life of service, from a eulogy. Excerpts:
“His name was Kevin Callahan. He was my brother. Whatever dissimilarities between us—race, culture, politics, religious denomination or our favorite college football team—they were cosmetic and inconsequential, and none of them an impediment to true brotherhood. It mattered not that Kevin is white and I am Black. That I am Protestant and he is Catholic. That we lived miles and worlds apart—Kevin in a mostly white Chicago northwest suburb, and me in a mostly Black south suburb. Or that our upbringings—Kevin’s in Connecticut and mine on Chicago’s impoverished West Side—couldn’t have been more diametrically opposed.
“True brotherhood—the ability of men to connect and build upon the intersection of our humanity mirrored in the faces of each other and to come together for the common good; the mutual desire to try and leave the world a better place than how we found it…
“A Good Irish Catholic born in Patterson, New Jersey, Kevin Callahan wore his love for Notre Dame University, for Fighting Irish Football, Touchdown Jesus and all the seasonal pomp and circumstance of the blue and gold on his sleeve. Especially when the wind was nipping and the home crowd roaring on a late-fall Saturday in South Bend, Indiana.
“Brother Kevin, as I affectionately called him, also had love for the bodhrán—the round frame drum used in Irish music. He took up playing the bodhrán later in life, eventually checking it off his bucket list. He mastered it well enough to play on an impromptu unofficial tour of pubs with friends late fall in November 2022 when he visited Ireland with his wife Catherine Galley—the true love of his life.
“I can still see Kevin beating his bodhrán that December in 2018, just a few weeks before Christmas, his foot patting rhythmically to a friend’s traditional Irish music on banjo as Kevin played for friends and family at a party in Chicago, marking their 33rd wedding anniversary …”
The eulogy continued later: “We met sometime in 2012 …after Kevin began reading my weekly column in the Chicago Sun-Times, which I had begun writing two years earlier. He dropped me a line by email ever so often, commenting on a column about my “bucket list.” He sent another note after a piece about my mom’s bout with Alzheimer’s. Another after a column on a reading program I was just starting at south suburban Matteson Elementary School near where I lived.”
John shared that Kevin volunteered to “try to teach the children in Matteson,” telling him, “Earlier in my life, I taught languages to high school students, and I think the old skills are still there.” That started Kevin as a weekly regular for a school program called “Real Men Read.” John, in eulogizing Kevin, said, “It was seven years ago that Kevin was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He had to take time off from reading from time to time during treatment but vowed to come back. He beat cancer. And he returned, always faithful.
“But cancerous tumors eventually returned … Kevin’s mantra was simple: Not ‘Why me?’ But ‘Why not me?’ … The expressions of his heart were pure. He spoke of his desire to be the difference he wanted to see … [and he] poured upon others the compassion of Christ from his mortal soul.”
