John Flynn Rooney
John Flynn Rooney

When John Flynn Rooney joined the Daily Law Bulletin as a reporter in 1988, he didn’t know if he was passionate about the law.

“It was a competitive environment where I had to learn the inner workings of the court system quickly,” Rooney wrote on the eve of his retirement in August while reflecting on his early days spent covering the Cook County Circuit Court. “I did that by developing relationships with court staff, attorneys and judges. I tried to earn their trust by reporting and writing accurate and balanced stories.”

Rooney would spend the next 27 years of his life finding his passion for the law while working as a staff writer for the Law Bulletin, even after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in May 2014.

This progressive disease, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, destroys the body’s nerves and causes paralysis. It is eventually fatal, and there is currently no cure. From the time of diagnosis, the average life expectancy for an ALS patient is between two and five years.

After a two-year battle against ALS, Rooney died this morning at the age of 56.

When he learned of his diagnosis, Rooney wrote in the Law Bulletin that he wanted to keep working for as long as possible.

“I won’t allow ALS to define me,” he wrote at the time. He continued with the Law Bulletin covering attorney discipline and the business of law until his retirement in August.

His colleagues in the news and legal communities agree that it is not his disease but his intelligence and incisive writing that defines him.

“No detail seemed too minor to escape his attention. No question appeared too tough to ask. No story was too big or too small, or too difficult, to handle,” 1st District Appellate Justice Michael B. Hyman said as he presented Rooney with a lifetime achievement award last month during The Chicago Bar Association’s Herman Kogan Media Awards. “And, there never was a personal, partisan, or ulterior motive when it came to the way John practiced journalism.”

For Thomas A. Demetrio, a partner at Corboy & Demetrio P.C., it was Rooney’s love for his family and courage in the face of his illness that stands out most.

“He is an individual I will always hold dear to my heart … I keep coming back to the word courage. But that’s the word. That’s the word,” Demetrio said. “He was a courageous, dear family patriarch who’s going to be sorely missed.”

He described Rooney’s early years spent as a runner at the firm. To this day, runners at Corboy are affectionately called “Rooneys” among its lawyers and staffers.

“It’s a badge of honor to be called a Rooney,” Demetrio said.

As a second-generation news man — he is the son of the late Edmund J. Rooney Jr. — Rooney earned his bachelor’s degree in communications from Loyola University of Chicago in 1982 before spending three years as an editor and reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago, where he covered education, transportation and federal courts.

While at City News, Rooney broke a story in 1982 about the Chicago-area deaths from cyanide-laced Tylenol. That reporting earned him a Peter Lisagor Award from the Chicago Headline Club.

It was also at City News when he met then-editor Bernie Judge, who later became the Law Bulletin’s publisher and hired Rooney in 1988 after he completed his master’s degree in public affairs reporting at Sangamon State University, now known as University of Illinois Springfield.

“I thought he would make a great addition,” Judge said about his decision to hire Rooney. “He was a solid reporter, a good writer and a man of absolute integrity.”

Judge described Rooney in an interview today as a man who could be hard-hitting with his sources when he needed to be and as someone who “reflected the best of the free press” during his working years.

“He was a man in the true sense of the word,” he said. “You can be all kinds of things, but it’s very hard to be honest and honorable and to respect not only the people that you work with but to respect the people that you cover.”

After a short time spent as a reporter for the Tampa (Fla.) Tribune and a producer for Walter Jacobson at WBBM-TV Channel 2, Rooney started with the Law Bulletin, covering the county courts from the Daley Center and reporting on 1st District Appellate Court decisions.

After four years, he moved to the Dirksen Federal Courthouse where he would spend another four years covering the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and a handful of corruption cases against lawyers, judges and other elected officials, including Thomas J. Maloney and Adam N. Stillo Sr., both former Cook County circuit judges.

Rooney returned to the Daley Center in 1997 — reporting on the tenures of Cook County chief judges Harry G. Comerford, Donald P. O’Connell and Timothy C. Evans before becoming a general-assignment reporter in 2003. He held this position until his retirement.

In his farewell column published in August, Rooney described how his limited mobility, slow speech and atrophy in his hands dictated his decision to leave.

“It has been my great honor and privilege to write about the members of the Illinois legal community,” he wrote. “I especially appreciate the patience of lawyers and judges who encountered my slow-poke typing during the past several months.”

Rooney is survived by his wife, Meg, and their sons, Ned, Jack and Dan.

A visitation service will be held on Wednesday from 3-9 p.m. at St. John Fisher Church, 10234 S. Washtenaw Ave., in Chicago. There will also be a Mass at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday at the same church. Both services are open to the public.