Stephen Curran, a psychologist who specialized in police departments and natural disasters, died of pancreatic cancer July 4 at home in Cockeysville. He was 74. Stephen Francis Curran was born in Baltimore in 1950 and grew up in the Campus Hills community near Towson as the middle of five siblings.
His father, Raymond Curran, was a mortician and funeral home director, and his mother, Virginia, was a homemaker. Growing up he was coached in youth football by former Baltimore Colt Gino Marchetti, a Pro Football Hall of Famer, and Joe Campanella, and went door to door in December selling Christmas trees. He graduated from Towson Catholic High School in 1968 and Mount St.
Mary’s University in 1972, where he studied psychology and sang in the glee club. Mary Claire Curran, a daughter, said Mr. Curran’s father’s work as a mortician, which sometimes involved retrieving dead bodies from the scenes of drunken-driving crashes, sparked his interest in the brain and how it works.
“He was always so calm under pressure,” Mary Claire Curran said. Roseann Curran, his wife, said the two first met at a mixer at Mount St. Mary’s and went a year without seeing each other again before reconnecting at a Vietnam War protest.
The two were married in Towson in June 1974 and celebrated their 50th anniversary this year. “We were dating other people when we first met,” Roseann Curran said. “The next year things had changed.
” Mr. Curran earned a master’s degree from what was then Loy.