My Giving Story: John Roche ’57

“I owe it all to the University … and I want to support it.”

John Roche and his wife of 62 years, Maureen, have had a good life and he credits their success to his University of Detroit School of Law education. It’s one of the reasons he has supported the University financially for decades.

He began attending University of Detroit with aspirations of becoming a doctor, in an effort to please his mother. However, it didn’t take him very long to decide he was not going to be a doctor. He took a course in constitutional history and was fascinated.

“I couldn’t stop reading the textbook,” he said. “I went through it in two weeks, and it must have been about a thousand pages.”

He asked his older brother, who had recently graduated from University of Detroit’s law school, what law school was like. His older brother said it was just like that constitutional history class Roche had loved. After two years of undergraduate education, Roche got enrolled in law school.

“The law school has improved dramatically since I was there,” Roche said. “When you graduated, you didn’t know how to do anything! Now they have all these clinics that the kids work in, and they do all sorts of things so that they’re ready-to-go lawyers when they get out of school.”

After graduating and working for a private firm, Roche applied to work with the Michigan Attorney General’s Office where he worked for 13 years. Most of that time he was counsel for the state’s transportation department under fellow University of Detroit Law grad Frank J. Kelley ’51.

Now, retired, Roche and his wife maintain friendships across the country and play a lot of golf.

“I had a good life and I owe it all to University of Detroit Mercy and I want to support it,” he said.

Roche has created an endowed scholarship in his name—supported with charitable gift annuities, annual gifts and a bequest in his estate plan—to help current and future law students.

You can have a similar impact, and there are so many ways to make it. Please contact Teri Carroll at (313) 993-1262 or carroltl@udmercy.edu to discuss how you can help shape the future of Detroit Mercy.