Barry Sullivan was born in the Bronx in 1930 and spent his formative years there. When it came to academics, he always sought the best, and enrolled at New York's Regis High School in 1945. A scholar-athlete in every sense of the word, he was not only the captain of the Regis basketball team that won the city title in 1948, but was a proud member of the school's Virgil Society, where students competed with other schools in tests of the twelve books of the Aeneid.

"His performance standards were quite high, and he found it difficult to understand why the rest of us had to work so hard to meet them," recalled a colleague from their days at Chase Manhattan Bank. "If St. Peter decides to delegate the entrance exam to Barry, we're all in trouble."

Sullivan had his choice of any school in New York but chose to go to Georgetown on a basketball scholarship in the fall of 1949. One of seven members of the sterling 16-1 freshman team of 1950, Sullivan joined the varsity in the 1950-51 season, debuting with 22 in the opener and scoring in double figures in 16 of his next 18 games. He scored 25 in the Hoyas' against LIU, matching it five days later against American. Sullivan's season ended four games early due to illness, but he still led the team with a 16.1 scoring average.

As a junior, Sullivan matched his 16 points per game average. He led the team in scoring in ten games, including 26 versus Princeton, 25 versus Pittsburgh, and 25 versus George Washington. Sullivan was on his way to becoming a 1000 point career scorer, but opted to enlist in the U.S. Army at the height of the Korean War. He finished his studies at Columbia in 1955, but his athletic reputation remained intact. Despite not having played competitive basketball in three years, he was approached by the New York Knicks and offered a contract.

"I signed a contract with the Knicks, but then I said I've got to be out of my mind," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1980. Instead, he headed west to Chicago, taking a job at Inland Steel and going to night school at the University of Chicago for his MBA.

In 1957, Sullivan was recruited back to New York by the Chase Manhattan Bank, where he quickly rose up the management ladder, The youngest senior vice president in the company's history, he led offices in New York and London. In 1980, the 49 year old Sullivan was recruited from Chase to become Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the First Chicago Corporation. It was the best of times and the worst of times for Sullivan, who took over a struggling bank in the midst of a recession, built it up in the 1980's, only to see the banking industry take its toll on the firm in the banking crunch later that decade.

"He built up the once debt-ridden institution to become the city's largest bank and the country's second-largest credit card lender," reads an award presented to him at Columbia in 1996. "He instituted a community lending program to restore nearly 3,000 housing units and more than 100 commercial properties." But in 1987, the bank lost over $500 million and by 1991, he stepped down with the bank in renewed turmoil. (First Chicago was sold to Columbus-Ohio-based Bank One, who later was acquired by Chase.)

In 1992, Sullivan found a new calling: government. Returning to New York, David Dinkins named him deputy mayor for finance and economic development and two years later he became the chief operating officer at the city's Board of Education.

Sullivan's later years were spent in Bronxville, NY, where he served as vice chairman and chief operating officer at KRoad Power, a sustainable energy distribution company. He even found time to go back to school, taking graduate courses in theology at Fordham University into his early 80's.

Barry Sullivan died in 2016 at the age of 85.