Obituary: Anne Mullaney / Attorney who owned Harp & Fiddle in Strip District
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Anne Mullaney thought she had beaten cancer, but it returned after six years and she died on Good Friday at the age of 54 -- in the hospice she helped raise money to build.
She was best known as the owner of Mullaney's Harp & Fiddle in the Strip District. Many a night she could be found there with her husband, Maurice "Mo" Cohill Jr., but she was also a lawyer whose resume ran longer than her pub's menu. She served on many boards, often as president, and the countless times Ms. Mullaney went beyond her official duties are what her many friends remember.
Take the Christmas season of 1992 when a truck carrying food for a Steubenville food bank broke down in the Strip District. The driver was handed a pile of citations and fines totaling $1,700. Ms. Mullaney heard about the missionaries' dilemma from an Ohio client.
She served as general counsel to a number of hospitals in four states, but in May 1993, she took this little case before the magistrate. She got the penalty knocked down to $180 and, when she discovered her clients didn't have that, she went to an ATM, grabbed a stack of 20s and handed them to Bonnie Rawson, regional director of God's Food Ministry and Provisions.
After an overwhelmed Ms. Rawson shared that story with a newspaper columnist, Mr. Cohill, a senior U.S. District Court judge, read the story and finally summoned the courage to ask Ms. Mullaney out.
Mr. Cohill, 81, recalled that he'd been previously impressed by Ms. Mullaney after an introduction at the pub, but their age difference gave him pause. That newspaper column about the "Strip District angel," which he still keeps, convinced him she was a special woman and he needed to take a risk.
They'd spend another 12 years dating and he'd spend a decade asking her to marry him before she consented. "She was elusive," he said.
"Theirs was an unlikely pairing, no doubt," Ms. Mullaney's brother, Tim Mullaney, said. "He's four years younger than my mother, a widower, not Catholic. But after Anne got sick the first time, they decided to take the plunge."
With their marriage in November 2005, they followed many other couples who had met at Mullaney's. Since the bar opened in 1992, more than 70 couples who met at the pub have married.
Ms. Mullaney and Mr. Cohill made a home a couple of blocks away from the pub at the Cork Factory. She was a past president of Neighbors in the Strip and, only two weeks before she died, the group gave her the Legends of the Strip Award, though she was too ill to attend the ceremony.
First Published April 24, 2011 12:00 am
