Jack Rosshirt

Jack Rosshirt, a world-traveling attorney, international negotiator, ravenous reader of histories and mysteries who lived and worked on four continents and had a wicked talent for one-liners, died in Austin, Texas on October 17. He was 91.

Jack was born in 1931 to Evelyn and Leo Rosshirt and raised in Lansing, Michigan, where his father was a superintendent in the Fisher Body plant. Jack had an early passion for sports. (“Don’t forget to say I was on the team that won the Lansing grade school city baseball championship,” he told his kids.)

After graduating from Kansas City’s Bishop Hogan High as an honors student and multi-sport athlete, Jack attended the University of Notre Dame, where he enrolled in Army ROTC and earned a Bachelors’ degree and a Law degree. Also at Notre Dame, as he later told his kids, he lived across the hall from Heisman Trophy winner John Lattner, and was a defensive halfback on the undefeated Interhall football team that won the campus championship (a fact for which this obituary is the sole documentation).

Jack taught business law at Notre Dame after graduating from the law school, and in 1957, he married Alana Moynahan of La Grange Illinois, who graduated from Saint Mary’s College in 1955 with a degree in Theology. The couple moved to Fort Holabird in Dundalk Maryland, where Jack received counter-intelligence training and where he and Alana met Don and Jane Gralen, who became lifelong friends.

After Jack completed his Army service in Pasadena California, he and Alana settled back in LaGrange, and Jack began his legal career doing trial work for Wyatt Jacobs in Chicago. He later worked at Texaco before joining the legal department of Amoco, soon taking a three-year assignment that took him and Alana and their five boys – John, Tom, Dave, Matt, and Dan – to Iran, from which he launched many family trips to promote and support the travel and education of his kids.

When the family returned from Iran in 1973, Jack continued his work in Amoco’s Legal Department and became Chair of the International Law Committee of the Chicago Bar Association. In 1978, Jack and Alana moved from Chicago to Houston, where Jack in 1981 became Manager of Negotiations for Africa and the Middle East and later co-founded the Association of International Petroleum Negotiators, which now has thousands of members around the world.

In 1987, Jack and Alana moved to Nairobi, where Jack headed Amoco Kenya, running the company’s in-country operations and maintaining relationships with the country’s President, Cabinet ministers, the US Ambassador, and members of the international business community. After three years in Kenya, Jack and Alana moved to Copenhagen where Jack became head of Amoco Denmark. By the time Jack retired and settled in Austin in 1992, he had traveled to more than a hundred countries.

During his career, Jack cultivated many passions and hobbies which flourished in his retirement – from travel, to tennis, to reading and writing, to attending sporting events all over the globe.

Jack was the author of Kenyan Quest and Return to Dublin, stories in which he used his familiarity with far off places to give his narratives a realistic feel. And he never stopped reading books. Even at the end of his life, he would call a son and say: “Send me the top five New York Times bestsellers, which he would read and then donate to the Westminster Library, the facility where he lived. He was likely to tell a visitor “If you’re looking for a good book on the Battle of the Bulge, there is one right over there,” pointing to his bookcases.

Jack was always ready for a road trip to a sporting event – whether it was a college baseball game in San Antonio or a professional tennis match in Melbourne. On his wall at Westminster, he displayed a framed set of ticket stubs to The Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open, his proof that he had completed the fan grand slam. He was in the stands with his kids when Joe Montana led the Irish back from a 22-point deficit in the final seven minutes to win the 1979 Cotton Bowl. He was with his kids in the Olympic Swimming Hall in Munich in 1972 to see Mark Spitz win his seventh gold.

Jack was distinctive in his passions and original in his personality. If he appeared to like you, he truly did – because he never put on a show for anyone. And because he didn’t worry if you liked him, he could be who he was and say what he thought. That’s where the fun came in. One lifelong friend called him “our favorite curmudgeon.”

To his fans, he had a great sense of humor and a down-to-earth appeal. One said, “He had a stock of one-liners he would deliver under his breath, and he left a trail of moments that were better and funnier because he was there.” He once complained of an organization where “One mediocre guy hires another mediocre guy and they give each other awards.” And he would sometimes turn his one-liners inward, once referring to himself as “a blundering guy who can’t talk about poetry and has no sensitivity.”

He was generous with his kids but frugal with himself. Fifteen years before he died, his own gravestone was already in the ground next to Alana’s, waiting for his death. When he was teased for being so obsessively prepared, he explained, “When your mother died, they gave me a two-for-one deal.”

He loved life in Austin. As a lifelong tennis player, he could often be found hitting balls at Westwood Country Club or in the chair as a USTA official refereeing tournaments. Jack gathered weekly with Notre Dame friends, and served for a time as President of the Notre Dame Club of Austin. He remembers dropping by the Governor’s office in 1995 to leave a commemorative T-shirt for the upcoming Notre Dame-Texas football game – and getting a thank you note back from Governor Bush.

Jack did not love getting older and as anyone around him would agree, he wasn’t a good sport about it either. When he had decided to move out of his home, he toured a retirement facility where he was shown a grand dining room and told, “We have a lot of parties here. These people know how to get down.” Jack said: “But when they get down, can they get up?”

Even as he aged, he never stopped dreaming of travel, and he fantasized about escaping into new adventures. He once asked his son for some cash. “How much do you need,” he was asked. “Three thousand dollars,” Jack said. “That’s a lot of money. What are you going to do with it?” “I need to pay some people here to look the other way while I make my escape.”

He always was dreaming of a rebirth, a breakthrough that would restore the health of his youth. After he had been using a wheel chair for several years, he asked a son: “Tell me why you think I will never ride a bike again?” In the last year of his life, when he heard his grandson and wife and kids were moving to College Station, he said he wanted to go College Station too and buy a house to live near them.

The unifying passion that ran through his years and made sense of his life was his love and commitment to his kids and their families.

Jack was raised in the 1930s in a traditional Catholic household with a strict German father, but he outperformed his upbringing in inspiring ways. The tougher things got, the calmer he became – especially in the face of illness, whether his own or that of a family member.

When Jack’s 23-year old son Matt was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 – at a time when fear and ignorance were high and people were getting fired for volunteering for AIDS organizations -- Jack brought Matt home with love and compassion, welcomed Matt’s partner into the family, and joined a support group for friends and partners of people with AIDS, where on many days he was the only straight man there, and almost always the only man over 50. A Catholic priest friend who ministered widely during the early days of AIDS and witnessed the breakup of many families, heard this story and said: “Your father was a hero.”

The place in the world where Jack felt most at home – and also most on vacation – was on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, meeting friends, seeing a game, watching the crowds, and walking the grounds. After Alana died in 2009, he would travel alone to campus at least once a year. In his later years, he would get one of his kids to go with him. On his final visit to campus, he felt his roots and reflected to a son: “I walked down this road many times to meet your mother.”

His moments of greatest happiness were sitting at a festive table with a crowd of friends and family laughing and telling stories – or reading a book quietly in the next room, taking refuge from friends and family laughing and telling stories. But whether he was in a quiet mood or a boisterous mood, it was never hard to tell what moved him most: whenever his kids told him, “You’ve been a great dad,” he laughed with joy.

Jack believed in his Catholic faith and had become more active in it in recent years – welcoming the Eucharistic Ministers who visited him at Westminster. But he knew he would never match Alana’s religious depth. Like a man who married into a rich family so he wouldn’t have to worry about money, he had married Alana in part to share in her spiritual wealth in the hope she would use her connections to lift him up. His sons are convinced that he made a shrewd match.

Jack is survived by his son John and his wife Sharon (nee Stanberry); son Tom and his wife Molly McUsic; his son Dave; his son Dan and his wife Jean (nee Graham); eight grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, his sister Betty Ann Spallone and her children John, Kathy and Karen.

A memorial service will be held at 10:30 am on Saturday, October 28 at Westminster Manor, 4200 N. Jackson Blvd, Austin with a reception to follow. In lieu of flowers, please consider a gift to CASA of Travis County, where Alana volunteered as a court-appointed advocate for abused and neglected children.