Joe's Page

In Memoriam: Joe Healey
by Alan Irvine

n Wednesday, March 1, 2000 storytelling lost an important voice: Joe Healy. Joe was born into a large, Irish Catholic family, and, like one of his brothers, eventually entered the priesthood, taking orders with the Fathers of the Holy Spirit. At Duquesne University in Pittsburgh he served as a chaplain at the campus chapel where his influence soon reached far beyond the campus bounds, pulling in whole families from surrounding communities. Embracing the new influences sweeping the church in the 1960s, Joe took an unconventional approach to worship, incorporating folk music and new liturgies, inviting children and families to take an active role in services. He began weaving stories into his sermons to illustrate his main points. Over time he realized that his congregation remembered the stories but forgot the sermon points, and so he began to tell more stories and fewer sermons, developing and polishing his tales.

Growing theological disputes with his order led Joe to leave the priesthood in the early 1970s. He moved on to direct Theos, an organization dedicated to ministering to the grieving. Once again, Joe found himself falling back upon story, using storytelling to help people confront their grief over a lost loved one and begin to heal. Such a ministry is often draining, however, and after a few years Joe resigned.

For his third career, Joe embraced the stories that he had so often used in the service of other work, and became a professional storyteller. He joined NAPPS (now the National Storytellers Network) and the Network of Biblical Storytellers, and help found the Pennsylvania Speakers’ Association. He became an active member of the Pittsburgh storytelling community, a member of both Storytellers Unlimited and StorySwap, serving as StorySwap’s first Vice President. He told his stories most regularly in local preschools and Head Start programs, schools and adult day care centers. Children throughout his community of Wilkinsburg knew him as Mister Joe and the Storyman and would call out to him as they passed in the streets. Eventually some of them were bringing their own children to schools and centers and introducing them to the wonders of Mister Joe’s stories. When a pair of local teachers started up the Heartwood Bus, a program to tell stories on the school bus as a way of introducing students to important values, Joe was the first teller to volunteer for the project and remained one of the core tellers ever after. Joe led storytelling workshops at conferences throughout the region, drawing on his earlier work to design exercises to use storytelling to soothe the grieving.

When NAPPS first promoted Tellabration as a national event, Joe was intrigued. He contacted NAPPS for more information, then set off to bring Tellabration to Pittsburgh. He contacted the local storytelling and folk music groups in search of sponsoring organizations, production team volunteers, and interested tellers. As Producer, Joe designed and organized a hughly successful event. Joe stayed on to produce two more Tellabrations (and to perform at every Pittsburgh Tellabration since.) By the time he turned the job over to someone else, he had drawn up extensive production notes and time tables, all of which soon became the basis for the Producer’s manual now supplied to first time Tellabration teams.

Most of all, however, Joe was deeply loved—a comforting presence, always ready with a word of support or inspiration, with a tale for any occasion. He prefered to tell short folk tales, and his stories usually carried some moral. Not an overt, "this story is good for you" sort of moral, but something to think about afterwards. Joe was the guiding grandfather to a generation of storytellers.

On March 1, Joe was sitting in a restaurant with his regular morning coffee when a deranged gunman walked in and shot him. His death shook his entire community. At the funeral home, his family set out the worksheets and exercises from Joe’s workshops on storytelling and grief, so that people could take them home and use their stories of Mr. Joe to help ease the pain. Joe himself designed much of his funeral service, writing out the homily and the stories to tell. Fittingly enough, in our time of grief, it was Joe himself who ministered to us one last time

—published in WIP Winter 2000

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