Vincent DeVeau

Infobox Person
name = Vincent DeVeau

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caption =
birth_date = September 15, 1952
birth_place =
occupation = Writer, Editor, Journalist
nationality = flagicon|United States American, flagicon|Ireland Irish
residence = Dublin, Ireland

Vincent DeVeau (born September 15, 1952) is an American writer and editor based in Dublin, Ireland.

Background

Vincent DeVeau was born in Astoria, Queens, New York City, the only child of Vincent W. DeVeau, Sr. and Jeanne Carroll Gerahty DeVeau.
His father enlisted in the U.S. Navy Seabees in World War II, and saw action in the recapture of the Aleutian islands Attu and Kiska from invading Japanese forces in 1943. His parents married in Williamsburg, Virginia on March 7, 1943, immediately prior to his father's deployment to the Pacific.
His mother spent part of the war years in Hollywood, California, where she lived with a maiden aunt whose eccentric and rather bohemian household sheltered an ever-changing cast of unusual characters, among them at various times the actor John Ince, and some years earlier his brother Thomas Ince, the film director long rumoured to have been shot and killed by William Randolph Hearst while on a weekend excursion aboard Hearst's yacht.
Following the war, his parents settled in Jackson Heights, Queens and his father began work as a longshoreman on the New York City waterfront and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In 1960, he left the waterfront to take a job with American Airlines, from which he retired in 1971.

Early life and education

DeVeau's formal education was entirely Catholic, as he was passed from the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart at Blessed Sacrament School, to the Marist Brothers of Archbishop Molloy High School and finally to the Jesuits of Fordham University in the Bronx, from which he received his undergraduate degree in literature and art history. The Jesuit involvement in his education was limited, however, by his enrollment in Fordham's Bensalem College, an experimental, largely autonomous, self-governing college founded by Fordham president Dr Leo McLaughlin, S.J. and poet Elizabeth Sewell, based upon independent scholarship and functioning essentially as a commune. It was described by the now defunct Look magazine in 1970 as "the farthest-out college in the United States". A phenomenon of the countercultural radicalisation of higher education of the time, Bensalem graduated its last class in 1974.

Career

After graduation, DeVeau moved from the Bronx to Manhattan and began several years of working at a variety of jobs, including stints on Wall Street, as a bank teller, cab driver, swimming pool labourer, furniture assembler, telephone book delivery man, house painter and electrical utility planner, among many others.
He moved to California in 1976, where he worked in the Hollywood film industry for a number of years, on such productions as Simon & Simon, Knight Rider, and Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories (TV series), and became a member of the Directors Guild of America.
Between shows, he spent an increasing amount of his time in the west of Ireland, finally moving to Ventry, County Kerry in 1989.
In 1991, he became an Irish citizen, and following a move to Dublin in the same year, he began yet another career, this time as a journalist.
He wrote a column for "U" magazine, The Last Word, from 1991 to 1994. He served as editor of Cara magazine from 1995 to 2001, and as editorial director of Smurfit Communications, then Ireland's largest consumer periodical publishing house, until the company was sold in 2004. He is the author of several short stories which have been published in various magazines and hundreds of feature articles for newspapers and magazines in Ireland and the U.S..
Immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, he broadcast a series of essays on Radio Telefís Éireann over seven straight days. A number of his other broadcasts on RTÉ have been collected in "A Living Word" (Townhouse, Dublin, 2001) [http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1860591469] and an edited version of his interview with film director Fred Zinnemann has been collected in "Fred Zinnemann, Conversations with Filmmakers Series", (ed. Gabriel Miller, University Press of Mississippi, 2005) [http://www.ecampus.com/book/1578066980] .
He has been married twice, in 1988 and 2002. His first marriage produced a son, Christopher, in 1991. He has been separated from his second wife since 2005.
He is currently working on a novel, and as an editor for the Irish Daily Mail.

Family history

DeVeau is the great-great-great-grandson of James Gerahty, a Dublin city councillor and barrister, and author of several influential pamphlets published during the crisis leading up to the Act of Union 1800 which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, including "The Present State of Ireland, and the Only Means of Preserving Her to the Empire, in a letter to the Marquis Cornwallis", London, John Stockdale, 1799. Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis was at the time the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, appointed following the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. (He is perhaps better remembered in the U.S. as the British general in the American War of Independence whose 1781 defeat at the Siege of Yorktown is generally considered the end of the American Revolutionary War). In an interesting coincidence, Gerahty's law offices were located at 31 Holles Street in Dublin, which is the exact location of the Holles Street Maternity Hospital, where DeVeau's son, Christopher, was born almost 200 years later.

He is also a grand nephew of Digby George Gerahty (1898-1981), who, under the pen name Robert Standish, was a featured contributor to the Saturday Evening Post and the author of many novels, including "Elephant Walk" (1949), [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000CC5AJ2] which was made into a 1954 Paramount Pictures film [http://imdb.com/title/tt0046951/] , directed by William Dieterle, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Dana Andrews and Peter Finch.

His grandfather, George DeVeau, had the dubious distinction of lending his name to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case ("DeVeau v. Braisted", 363 U.S. 144, 160) [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=363&invol=144] in which Mr Justice Felix Frankfurter, writing the unanimous opinion of the Court, concluded that the Waterfront Commission of New York did not act unconstitutionally when it required the removal of George DeVeau from his office as Secretary-Treasurer of the International Longshoremen's Association (which may also have had some impact on the decision of Vincent DeVeau's father to leave the waterfront at around the same time). The Court's opinion in the case is still frequently cited as a precedent in various actions involving state's rights and the regulation of interstate commerce.

His maternal grandfather, James Digby Gerahty, had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and was at various times a director of such companies as the DuMont Television Network and the First Colony Corporation.

References

A Living Word (Townhouse, Dublin 2001) [http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1860591469]
Fred Zinnemann: Interviews University Press of Mississippi, 2005) [http://www.ecampus.com/book/1578066980]
Michael Apted interview [http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-A-Ba/Apted-Michael.html]
Financial Times, 12 April 2002," eCommerce Web Interfaces: If It Ain't Useful, It Ain't Valuable" [http://www.ftpress.com/articles/article.aspx?p=26344]
Sunday Business Post, 14 March 2004, "Battle lines drawn in magazine price war" [http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2004/03/14/story315095743.asp]