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MSBA President 2006 -07 Even so, somehow she knew everything would be alright, as she always did when Pat was involved. "I remember standing in that lobby in Holman Field and the alarms were going off and people were panicking and I don't know why hut I said, `Don't worry, it's just my husband. "' Mary laughs when she tells that story. From her perspective, then and now, the situation probably was serious, but what could you do? As long as she had known Pat, he had had what she calls "a dan- gerous side," balanced by a "nine lives kind of thing." He took risks but they always seemed to work out. As for Mary, she says she learned early on to give up worrying about her husband. Even so, it's telling to note that Pat quit the fly- ing lessons; not long after, Mary became pregnant with their first child and life got too busy in the Kelly household for those kinds of hobbies. Building a Career Today Patrick can stand at the floor - to- ceiling windows in his corner office and watch other pilots land their planes on the same runway he almost crashed into. If he has any regrets about not being in their shoes, you wouldn't know it. Instead of earning a pilot's license, he's been busy building a career. In 30 years with the same firm he has gone from associate to senior partner; this month he also starts his one -year term as president of the Minnesota State Bar Association. It's the latest turn in a professional journey that started in high school, when Kelly began working for his father's construction crew. Although one might expect the owner's son to get preferential treatment, Kelly had the opposite experience. His father's direc- tive: "He always said I had to be a half - hour early to work and stay a half -hour after everyone else left, because I was his son," Kelly recalls. The habit stuck, spilling over into his law practice. "I still carry that today," Kelly notes. "That www.mnbar.org drives them crazy here, especially the young ones. The first face they see in the morning is me and I'm the last one they see at night." Kelly stayed with the construction crew through high school and college, partly because the money was good, and partly because he enjoyed being with the other workers. "I really got a sense of the hard - working American, working a full day at really hard labor," he says. "They were working to get an education for their kids." In 30 years with the same firm he has gone from associate to senior part- ner; this month he also starts his one -year term as president of the Minnesota State Bar Association. Kelly was working toward his educa- tion too, first as a high school student in St. Thomas Academy, and then as a phi- losophy and English major at Marquette University. In between, he took lessons from his blue collar friends on the con- struction crews: How to understand unions, how to keep your mouth shut, how to communicate, how to work hard. He didn't know it at the time, but these were seeds that would later take root in his law practice. Perhaps the seminal college experi- ence for Kelly was the year he spent abroad, at National University of Ireland. If he had been able to get by before on his native intelligence, that ability was severely challenged in this new setting. As he tells it, "The first day I'm dressed in jeans and a t -shirt and I walk into philosophy class and every- one's in black suits. And the professor is lecturing and he says, `We're going to lose too much in translation. We'll just do it in French.' and he switches over to giving the lecture in French. And every- one just followed along. These were really dedicated students — they were just able to do that. We did all the philosophers that way ... Nietzsche in German, Aristotle in Greek ... I just learned to figure things out. I had to." Kelly graduated from college in 1971, when the United States was still involved in Vietnam. He volunteered for the Army, choosing the infantry because he felt "it was the right thing to do," notwithstanding his very good friend who had become a conscientious objector, and other friends who were protesting the war. His two -year tour ended while he was in training in the States, and the Army "downsized" him into the Reserves, where he eventually left with the rank of captain. Near the end of his second year in the Army, Kelly received a call from a former dean at Marquette who was now the vice president of Creighton University. He was recruiting students and wanted Kelly to study there. Abandoning half - formed plans to take an MBA at an East Coast school, Kelly agreed. Three years later he graduated with a J.D. and began practic- ing with Lais, Bannigan & Ciresi in St. Paul, the firm that would eventually become Bannigan & Kelly and then Kelly & Fawcett. Diversity in Practice Kelly's practice today represents an amalgam of his experiences, and those of his predecessors. He inherited from for- mer partners an emphasis on municipal law, but created from his own experience the specialty in labor law, arbitration and litigation. Likewise, working as corporate counsel for the Minnesota State High School League reflects his interests, while the firm's newly developed international outreach is inspired largely by the back- grounds of attorneys working there and July 2006 A Bench &Bar of Minnesota 19