William B. Mahoney

William B. Mahoney (1912–2004) was a prize-winning U.S. journalist and writer who had a successful late-in-life second career as a substance-abuse counselor.

Born to a farming family in Ballynacarriga in County Cork, Ireland, in 1912, Bill Mahoney immigrated to the United States with his parents and siblings when he was 14. Not long after the family settled in New York City, he became a copyboy at the New York Daily Mirror, a morning tabloid of the William Randolph Hearst publishing empire. Over the next years, despite being sidelined for a time by tuberculosis, he rose to the sports desk at the Mirror; he also organized for the Newspaper Guild. He was eventually joined both on the Mirror staff and as a Guild organizer by his brother, Dan Mahoney (1916–99). (Dan lost his job on the paper during the post-war purges of actual or suspected Communists).

After the United States entered World War II, Bill—who was unable to serve because of his earlier illness—left the Mirror for free-lance writing, and by the immediate post-war years was being published in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan. Two Post stories were anthologized, "The Stolen Belt" in the magazine's Best Stories of 1948 collection and "Wrong Guy" in a collection for high-school students.

By 1950, however, free-lance writing was inadequate to support Mahoney's growing family—he had four children from his two marriages, to Beatrice Shishko and Jeanne Adleman. He went back to journalism, joining the staff of the short-lived Daily Compass as a sports writer. After a stint in public relations, he edited the Hotel Trades Council's magazine Hotel, which won many union journalism awards under his leadership.

In the mid-1960s, having struggled for years with an ever-worsening drinking problem, he found sobriety with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous and moved to upstate New York, where he became an alcohol- and substance-abuse counselor for local public health agencies. Eventually he moved to Berkeley, California, and finally, in the early 1990s, to Miami, remaining involved with AA—and sponsoring scores of other alcoholics on their road to sobriety—wherever he lived. He died in Miami in 2004 at the age of 92.

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