John J. Driscoll Papers

John Joseph Driscoll was born in 1911 in Waterbury, Connecticut. The son of Irish immigrants, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Philosophy from Wesleyan University, from which he also received a masters degree in English and then earned another graduate degree in Philosophy from Brown University. He spent a year at Harvard Law School but left in 1937 to work for 40 cents an hour at the Bristol Company in Waterbury, where he waged a successful union-organizing campaign. He was soon appointed to a full-time position with the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. He soon moved on to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the United Auto Workers and the newly merged AFL-CIO.

Mr. Driscoll became executive secretary of the Connecticut State Labor Council in 1957 and was elected president in 1961, a position he held until his retirement in 1985. During that time he worked for the rights of public employees to unionize, served on the Governor's Council of Economic Advisors and on the state's first Commission for Higher Education. He was a delegate to five Democratic National Conventions.

Mr. Driscoll was married to Margaret Connors and had a son, David. He lived in Bridgeport when he died on July 21, 1994, at the age of 82.

Margaret Connors Driscoll was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, likely in 1915, and graduated in 1935 from Wellesley College. She received her law degree from Yale Law School in 1938, one of five women in the class.

Mrs. Driscoll was heavily involved in Democratic politics and labor issues before her appointment as a judge to the Connecticut Juvenile Court in 1960. She served as chief judge -- the first woman to do so -- from 1976 to 1978. She was a judge of the Connecticut Superior Court from 1978 to 1985.

Mrs. Driscoll died on May 15, 2000, in Fairfield, Connecticut, at the age of 85.