William B. Mahoney

Who was William B. Mahoney?

William B. Mahoney 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..

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.