Chasing Miracles, The Crowley Family Story - Part Three: The Family

John’s strong work ethic and sense of purpose are what he called upon to put himself through business school and develop his professional career.  He earned a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, a JD from the University of Notre Dame Law School and an MBA from Harvard. He also served in the U.S. Navy Reserve as an intelligence officer, and finished a six-month tour of duty at the Center for Naval Intelligence in Virginia in 2007.

Both John and Aileen credit their Irish heritage with their focus on the importance of family and their indomitable sense of humor.
Aileen’s ancestors emigrated from County Cork, as did John’s, and settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “My parents were both born and raised there. I knew my great-grandmother, her name was McCray, and she had 12 children, and from those children we have a family reunion every year. It’s been going on for about fifty years in Scranton, where there’s a very large Irish population,” says Aileen, whose father is Martin Holleran, a prominent businessman who has been featured on Irish America’s Business 100 list.

“My father worked for General Electric, and we moved about every two years all up and down the East Coast. We were always the new kids in town but I knew I had my family around. The one thing we’d always look forward to was the family reunions, and weddings, and our cousins’ house – we have a very large extended family that made those moves a little easier.” says Aileen. She thinks that her Irish heritage particularly manifested itself in “having very close family members, people you can lean on. A lot of people don’t have that. More than half the people in the theater last night [for a screening of Extraordinary Measures] were our relatives who came from as far as four hours away just to spend two hours with us in the theater.”

“Laughter, too, that’s one thing you learn in a big Irish family – you laugh a lot at each other, but also at yourself,” says John.

This trait has clearly been passed on to Megan Crowley as well, who has the wry and witty personality that is captured by Meredith Droeger’s acting in the movie.

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