Bob Kelly

I grew up in a small but loving and stable family consisting of my mother, Jane, brother Andy and grandmother, Mary on Chicago's West Side neighborhood of Austin until the age of 13 when my mom remarried and we moved to the North Shore suburb of Glencoe. The move was quite a culture shock for my brother and me but we quickly made friends largely through playing football and basketball. After finishing 8th grade at a small Catholic school in Winnetka I enrolled at New Trier East High School which was another culture shock. Four thousand kids in an amazing school that offered just about everything possible in the way of academics, the arts and athletics. I was fortunate to get a great education and play basketball on very good teams in a tremendously competitive conference called The Suburban League. I then attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison during the tumultuous early 1970s and graduated with a degree in English Literature. I spent the next 3 years selling athletic apparel for a company based in Evanston, Illinois and one season coaching a men's professional basketball team in Austria before going to Law School at Chicago Kent College of Law receiving a JD in 1981 I then enrolled in a Masters of Law program in Transnational Business and Tax at McGeorge Law School in Sacramento, CA. The program included 6 weeks of study at The University of Satzburg followed by an internship a law firm in one of a few dozen European law firms that participated. My internship was with the prestigious firm, Per Federspiel in Copenhagen. While there I also coached both a men's and a women's first division basketball team. I stayed in Copenhagen until June and the returned to Chicago and worked for 6 months with a Customs law firm until finishing my masters degree with a semester at McGeorge Law School graduating with an LLM in 1983. I then opened a solo law practice with a small office in Evanston. In 1984 I fell in love with a young woman from upstate New York. Our son, Morgan was born in June of 1985 and when her father became seriously ill in August we went to New York to be with her parents and she didn't want to go back to Chicago and I wasn't going to leave my son so I stayed. After years of working all kinds of jobs including bar tending, serving, substitute teaching, coaching basketball and selling radio advertising I finally took the time and energy to take the New York Bar Exam in 1984 in February. I was admitted to practice law in NY in June 1994. I was by then a full time single parent of a 9 year old boy so I opened a solo practice and began doing criminal defense and representing children in Family Court. I am currently only doing Attorney for the Child work. In May 2020 during the COVID shutdown I decided to fulfill a lifetime dream of becoming an author of entertainment stories. I committed myself to 3 years and 3 completed novels and having finished the initial draft of story number 3, I am on track to achieve my goal. I have always had a passion for Chicago and its people and I decided to write contemporary stories while bringing to life some of my feelings and observation of this fantastic city. I can only hope that my readers will enjoy reading my stories as much as I have enjoyed writing them.