James Daly; made QuickDoc program for medical libraries
James A. Daly, a free-spirited fiction writer, Vietnam War resister, and program developer of QuickDoc, a widely used software that helps medical libraries document the interlibrary loan of journal articles, died at his Brookline home Thursday. He was 62.
Mr. Daly, known to many as Jay, had struggled with colon cancer the past two years and had surgery in January and again May 19.
Born in Boston and raised in Hyde Park, Mr. Daly was the oldest of four brothers. He graduated from Catholic Memorial, a Catholic all-boys preparatory school, and attended the College of the Holy Cross on an ROTC scholarship to study English.
In his teens and early 20s, Mr. Daly wrote rock 'n' roll songs, playing guitar with musicians in the area. After graduating from Holy Cross in 1968, however, he went on to fulfill his obligations to the Navy during the Vietnam War for almost three years, working as a legal officer on the USS Compass Island. But he then became a conscientious objector and resisted fighting. He was honorably discharged as a lieutenant junior grade.
"We didn't have all the money in the world," said his brother Brian of Mansfield. "He was specific in the last meeting we had, two weeks ago, . . . and we got to talking about the old times. He talked about how he enjoyed his service and liked being at sea. But he had courage and he had principles and he lived by them.
"He told me, 'I'm not going to kill anybody, not for this,' " his brother said.
"They tried everything they could do to threaten him," he said. "First they tried the soft line, then the hard line. I told him I couldn't have had the courage to stand up to it. I would have gone. He became more specific about how it wasn't worth it. I think history has shown that he was right."
Mr. Daly had his only child, Eowyn, in 1971, and raised her as a single father in Hyde Park before moving to Brookline when she was 6.
"We had a close relationship because it was just the two of us since I was 2 years old," said Eowyn Daly Griffin, now a kindergarten teacher in Brookline. "He was very honest, almost to a fault. But he never raised his voice.
"He was very peaceful," she said. "He never hit me in his life. He had me write papers on trust if I did something wrong - you know, lectures, long lectures. Words of advice. It was always long discussion. He never said anything short."
While juggling his parental responsibilities with jobs instructing English students at Boston University and as a librarian at the Lincoln Public Library and the Roslindale Public Library, Mr. Daly wrote fiction and literary criticism.
His novel "Walls," a coming of age story featuring a graffiti artist named Frankie O'Day as the protagonist scrawling existential messages on walls, was published in 1980 by HarperCollins. At one point in the book, Mr. Daly wrote a passage in which O'Day's father seemingly opines about self-determination.
"All of us with these thin, fragile bubbles of happiness, different sizes," the father says in the book, "some of them bigger and stronger and rounder, like a fat man's bubble, and others thin and very, very weak, like someone whose scared in the dark. But all these bubbles are things we make for ourselves, little worlds we create."
His short story, "Unity," appeared in Ploughshares magazine in 1984. And he also wrote a book of analytical commentary on S.E. Hinton, another author of fiction for young adults, such as the work, "The Outsiders."
"Jay was a real, what people get called, a man of letters," said Pat Clancy, a close friend since college. "He had an insatiable appetite for reading. He was always just a real joy to sit around and talk about some novel that has come out a few months before and what has going on in the political scene. But he had a great sense of humor about it.
"It was always a joy to talk about politics, to talk about things that are weighty and things that are absurd and try to tell them apart. He could see the absurd in the weighty and the weighty in the absurd," Clancy said.
In an about-face, Mr. Daly went from writing literature aimed at wistful youths to writing computer code for programs used at medical libraries. He earned a master's at Simmons College in library science and took a job at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in the mid-1980s as an information specialist at its library.
While there, in the late 1980s, Mr. Daly conceived, wrote, implemented, and maintained QuickDoc, which allowed Beth Israel and other libraries to document the interlibrary loan of journal articles.
QuickDoc was an early and efficient way to share medical library information and is now used by 1,500 medical libraries, said Margo Coletti, a close companion, who was codirector of Beth Israel library with Daly. Coletti said Mr. Daly continued to work for Beth Israel and to refine QuickDoc until his final days while marketing out of his house by word of mouth or at conventions.
"Everywhere he went he would be surrounded in every conference by medical librarians who would spot him and would all want to go speak to him personally," Coletti said. "He would train people how to use it.
"When people called him with problems he would spend way longer than necessary talking them through - very patient, very kind," Coletti said. "It wasn't like a software support call, it was like a chat with your brother. He had his own listserv for users of his product and when the first notice was posted that he passed away within eight minutes there were 18 messages of sympathy, shock, and sadness. It was incredible. He was so well loved."
Mr. Daly's is predeceased by his brother Michael, who passed away three years ago.
In addition to his daughter and brother, he leaves another brother, Kevin of Washington, and his 5-year-old grandson, Thomas Griffin, whom he saw every week, in what the family dubbed "Tuesdays with Thomas."
A funeral Mass will be held at 9 a.m. today in St. Susanna's Church in Dedham. 