JUDGE THOMAS F. MORAN

(1910-1938)

Thomas F. Moran was born in Crew County, Ireland in 1868 and came to the United States when he was 18 years old. He worked in a machine shop in Cleveland, Ohio as an apprentice. While working there, he learned Morse Code. It was there he adopted the name "Barney" as there were four "Toms” that worked in the machine shop, this name stuck to him throughout the rest of his life. He attended night school in Cleveland and went to Chicago to attend Chicago College of Law. He came west on a train dispatched to Winslow, Arizona, and there worked for the Santa Fe Railroad and practiced law on the side. His legal practice became so successful that he gave up all other work and focused solely on law.

He moved to Reno and in 1911 became District Judge, a position he filled until his death in 1938. Over the course of his 27 years on the bench, he presided over thousands of cases. After the passage of Nevada’s six-week residency law for divorce, 4,745 divorce cases were filed in Reno. This would cause Judge Moran to grant 40 divorces a day, spacing the trials at 10-minute intervals. Some of the most notable of these divorces were princess Barbara Hutton Mdivani’s divorce from her first husband Alexis Mdivani, and professional boxer Jack Dempsey’s divorce from his first wife, film actress Estelle Taylor. He resigned from the bench on July 22, 1938, after being ill for over a year.

Judge Thomas F. "Barney" Moran, who was well known in Reno as a "self-made man," died August 19th, 1938, at the age of 74.