Mary Forry, 60; cofounded Reporter Newspapers group

Mary (Casey) Forry, cofounder and president of Dorchester's Reporter Newspapers group, who delighted thousands of readers over the years with her ''Urban Gardener" columns, died Friday at her home in Lower Mills. She was 60 and had been a pancreatic cancer patient for 22 months.

Mrs. Forry brought determination and an effervescent good nature to everything she did, and that approach to life seemed to mean something as she survived a year and half beyond the time most pancreatic cancer patients are told they will live after their initial diagnoses.

Born in Jamaica Plain, the third daughter of Irish immigrants Martin and Mary Kate Casey, Mrs. Forry grew up in Belmont and attended St. Luke Grammar School and Rosary Academy. She met her future husband, Edward Forry, while working for the Sack Theatres chain. Married in 1969, they settled first on Codman Hill and finally in Lower Mills.

The Forrys shared a deep love of Dorchester. In 1973 they launched Boston Neighborhood News Inc., and in 1983 came the first edition of the Dorchester Reporter, which began as a monthly publication (its motto is ''News and Values from Around the Neighborhood") and has since grown into a weekly that covers the Dorchester landscape with a keen editorial eye. Over time, the Forrys' company came to include three additional monthly publications: the Boston Irish Reporter, the Boston Haitian Reporter, and the Mattapan Reporter.

In addition to her administrative duties as president of the company, Mrs. Forry's byline appeared regularly in the Dorchester paper through the 1980s and the early 1990s. Her Urban Gardener columns, especially her 1986 Thanksgiving Day column that highlighted one woman's holiday activities, were a favorite feature for many Reporter readers, and on occasion, Boston radio personalities including Peter Meade and Jess Cain read them over the air.

In a 1988 foreword to a self-published collection of Mrs. Forry's columns, her husband related how the paper was managed day to day: ''My job was to sell advertisements, to look for news stories, to snap a few photos to illustrate the paper. That was the glamorous part. Mary's was to type the stories, to make the material ready for the paste-up artists, to keep track of the ad orders, to hand-type each bill, and to put everything in the mail. Also she was to continue cooking, cleaning, getting the kids to school, and all the other things that go into 'keeping the house.' "

In 2000, Mrs. Forry was honored with the ''Always the Irish Heart" award by the Boston chapter of the USA Irish Chamber of Commerce.

In addition to her husband, Mrs. Forry leaves a daughter, Maureen of Dorchester; a son, William, also of Dorchester; a brother, James Casey of Sudbury; and two sisters, Margaret Casey of Fredricksburg, Va., and Kathleen Dawe, of Orlando, Fla.

A funeral Mass will be said Tuesday at 10 a.m. in St. Gregory Church in Lower Mills. Burial will be in Cedar Grove Cemetery in Dorchester.