Conan O’Brien’s parents die within three days

Conan O’Brien’s parents, Dr. Thomas O’Brien and Ruth Reardon O’Brien, pioneers in their respective fields of medicine and law, died within three days of each other this week.

Dr. O’Brien, a forward-thinking epidemiologist, died Thursday at age 95. His wife, a lawyer who broke barriers for women in the legal field, died Monday at age 92. They were married for 66 years and both died at their home in Brookline, Mass.

Conan, 61, said The Boston Globe about his late father: “For the rest of my time on earth, I will hear from people who want to talk to me about my father. I’ve never met anyone like him, and he happens to be my father. If I Met Him When I happened to meet him in a hotel lobby, I thought, “Who the hell is this guy?”

Thomas O’Brien and Ruth O’Brien were both born in Worcester, Massachusetts. 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 had already given birth to nine grandchildren at the time of their deaths.

Ruth O’Brien was one of four women in her graduating class at Yale Law School in 1956 and later became the second-ever female partner at the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray.

Thomas O’Brien graduated from Harvard Medical School and spent much of his medical career there, serving as an associate professor until his retirement in 2019. He also served as the first director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

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The respected doctor traveled the world helping to train other medical professionals in the use of antibiotic resistance tracking databases to advance the response to viral outbreaks. He co-founded the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance, which works to strengthen the apparatus that monitors and responds to antibiotic resistance around the world.

Conan remarked globe “Science said there was no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, 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 love of comedy comes directly from his father, who introduced the O’Brien children to famous pranksters like Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. “The loudest laugh I ever heard was when he was sitting next to him in the theater watching Peter Sellers in a play Pink panther Movie,” Conan recalled.

Ruth O’Brien and several family members discussed her employment at Ropes & Gray in 2017 at the presentation of a company award recognizing her influence 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 juggling six children between two working parents. “But some of the husbands probably thought it was beneath him to do some of these things. He just thought it was a joke and the kids seemed to love it.”

Conan recalled: “There were six children, two dogs, a cat, my grandmother, a parakeet. I’m not kidding, this house was kind of crazy sometimes. Nice madness, but the madness is still the same. I don’t know how.’ They did it, but they did it pretty well.