Fortune colleagues remember John Curran

There are some nice quotes from Fortune journalists Carol Loomis and Bethany McLean about their former colleague, John Curran, who died last week at the age of 59, in the obituary on WestportNow.com.

Here they are:

Carol Loomis of Fortune, the longest serving employee in the history of Time Inc. and a highly awarded financial journalist, recalls of Curran: “I had the double pleasure of working with John when he was a brand-new, smart, hard-working reporter, and then seeing him rise to editing, where I particularly remember his putting a revised, improved beginning on one of my derivatives stories that might actually have encouraged somebody to read it.”

Author Bethany McLean, who, as a Fortune journalist, gained fame by first exposing the financial underpinnings of Enron as a shell game, recalled Curran’s influence at the beginnings of her career.

“I’ll never forget going to John in my very early days at Fortune and telling him that I didn’t think I should be a journalist, because I didn’t like making those tough phone calls that some stories require. He said, ‘Bethany, most of us don’t like making them. You don’t have to like it. All that matters is whether you do it or not. ‘  I swear, I think about that all the time in life as well as my work.”

Read more here. Curran was working at Bloomberg News when he died.