Paul Giordano

(Missouri & Hertford 1985) (1 November 1962 – 1 October 2022)

Paul was born on November 1, 1962, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Saverio Paul and Barbara (Merli) Giordano. He grew up in an extended Italian American Catholic family that also included his sister, grandparents, numerous aunts, uncles and cousins on both sides who frequently gathered on Sundays and other days to celebrate special events.

Paul attended Trailwood Elementary School and Indian Creek Junior High in Overland Park, Kansas. In 1981, his senior year at Shawnee Mission South High School, he was the catcher on the baseball team that won the state championship. That fall he enrolled at the University of Missouri-Columbia where he met his future wife and was a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, where he made many lifelong friends. 

That same year he was accepted into Harvard Law School and simultaneously awarded the Rhodes Scholarship, one of only 32 U.S. residents to receive the prestigious award that year. He deferred his Harvard acceptance for two years and put his Rhodes study at Oxford University on the fast-track, completing three years of courses in two years.

On August 16, 1986, he married Mary Margaret Sterner in Kansas City, Missouri, and she joined him in Oxford. In 1987, Paul graduated from Oxford University with a master’s degree. That autumn the young couple returned to the U.S. and Paul entered Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1990, Paul received his jurisprudence doctorate cum laude and then began a career in law, banking and insurance that spanned more than three decades.

Read the full obituary for Paul Giordano.