In Memoriam

Raymond J. McEachern '65 He was genuinely interested in people By Anne Downey '95G

When Ray McEachern '65 died in August from kidney failure, his friends and family remembered him as an unassuming, honorable person who was always supportive and never said an unkind word about anyone. McEachern was a journalist for 35 years, and besides his Catholic faith perhaps the most important value he held was the power of narrative. He saw stories everywhere, and he was gifted at writing them.

He was the fifth of eight children born to working-class parents who lived in the Creek Hill section of Portsmouth, N.H. His mother was a homemaker and his father was a house painter and a night watchman for the Portsmouth city yard. The city stored trucks at the yard, and at night the keys were left in them—that's how the McEachern children learned to drive.

The children enjoyed both a solid family structure and a lot of freedom. They sailed across North Mill Pond on small ice floes and played around the Boston & Maine Railroad tracks, but they had responsibilities as well: they were caddies at the Portsmouth Country Club, sold Christmas trees and had their own painting business. Their father was a city councilman and the head of his union; the whole family honed their political skills at home. "When you have eight kids in a small house, you learn to be adaptable and resourceful at an early age," his brother William says.

In high school, McEachern played on four championship golf teams. Like three of his brothers, John '62, Paul '63 and Duncan '65G, and sister Margaret '80G, he attended UNH, but he lived at home and hitchhiked back and forth. English professor Don Murray '48, '90H was his mentor. McEachern was a precise, detail-oriented writer who liked the polishing stage of the writing process, and Murray's ideas about writing influenced him deeply. "My brother liked to say, 'Easy reading is hard writing,'" William says.

When his brother Paul went into the Navy, McEachern ran for his seat in the New Hampshire legislature and was elected at age 21. After graduation, he attended Boston University Law School for a year. While there, he was diagnosed as bipolar, a condition he controlled successfully with medication, although the treatment compromised his health and led to kidney disease.

McEachern became a reporter and columnist at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., a job he held for 35 years. He covered city hall and wrote a weekly column called "Quincy Common" in which he often wrote about his neighbors on Hough's Neck, a place he described as "Quincy's down-to-earth place, right next to heaven."

McEachern never married—his colleagues and his community became his family. "Ray had a genuine desire to understand people's stories," says William, "and their challenges became his challenges, whether he wrote about them or not. For example, he knew someone who owned a store who was hardworking but limited in understanding about navigating bureaucracies while running a business. Ray helped him out with it. It was the way he engaged with life. He took on all the life he could handle."

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