Peter McGrath ’61 P ’01

Peter McGrath ’61 P ’01 has lived a tremendous life of service and entrepreneurship. Now, at 80 years old, he is a first-time screenwriter and his script, Because of You, was recently awarded the Grand Prix in the Feature Script category in the Kosice International Film Festival.

His persistence showed early on when, as just a teenager, he changed the course of his life for the first time. After being denied entry to the Prep for ninth grade, he attended Devon Prep for the first two years of his high school career. Because he really wanted to be at the Prep, after his sophomore year, he traveled to 17th and Girard one day to meet with Mr. Charlie Bonage, the longtime registrar, to advocate for his admittance to the school.  

“I got on the bus, came down, and knocked on the Prep’s door,” he remembers. “After speaking with Fr. Joseph Ayd, the principal at the time, I told him, ‘Give me any exam you want me to take.’ He gave me a Latin exam, and about 15 minutes after taking the Latin exam, while I was taking the math exam, he told me that I scored 100% on the Latin exam. He said that if I did half as well on the math exam, that I would be in. A few minutes later, he came back and told me that I was in.”

At the Prep, McGrath had to take Pennsylvania history to catch up to the Prep’s academics, and he remembers Father Ayd tutoring him in his office at lunch. “When it was time to apply to Georgetown, he was extremely helpful,” remembers McGrath. “He wrote me a great letter to the Director of Admissions.”

At Georgetown, McGrath was a student in the Foreign Service School, and after his sophomore year at Georgetown, he received a Farrell Lines Foundation Award and scholarship from the Farrell Lines Steamship Company. After receiving the check for his scholarship, he wrote the company a letter and said that if he were ever in New York, he would come to thank the company personally. The following May, he did just that. They were impressed and asked if he would like to go to Africa for the summer and work on a freighter. McGrath worked on the SS African Lightning for three months, and had a life-changing experience. He also wrote a paper for the company, analyzing the logistics of their port operations. “They found that fabulous, and they offered me a job on the spot at the end of the trip, but I couldn’t quit school, so I had to turn them down,” he says.

After graduation from Georgetown, McGrath attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he received a master’s degree in public administration and a doctorate in political economy and government. There, he began coaching crew at Kirkland House, one of the undergraduate houses. This love for crew is an adventure that has stayed with McGrath throughout the years, as he still rows for Prep alumni teams. While he didn’t get to row for the Prep as a student, “eventually I did get to row for the Prep,” he laughs.

After working for the U.S. government in Vietnam on three different occasions, McGrath got into banking, and in the early ’80s, he started his first company, which led to his being a co-founder of the technology company that he is now the fifty percent owner of, Coriendo.

Today, McGrath’s newest adventure is Because of You, his screenplay about a love story that took place during World War II, inspired by his own family history. After a question about his uncle who fought on D-Day, McGrath opened up his family’s files about his uncle, where he found a letter that his cousin had given to him. “It was from a woman who was in love with my uncle, and nobody knew about it,” he explains. “The opening sentence was to my grandmother, and read, ‘Dear Mrs. McGrath, this letter is hard for me to write and hard for you to receive.  I’m sure you probably wonder who it comes from. It comes from the English woman who deeply loved your son.” 

After discovering the letter, McGrath thought, “I’ve got to tell this story.” 

“I’ve never written a screenplay, but there's a lot of things I eventually did in my life that I was never officially trained for,” he says. “I kept telling myself that I can do this.”

He is currently in the process of submitting the screenplay for consideration, and it has been selected for awards in eight film festivals. He has been enjoying the process of receiving feedback and polishing the screenplay, in hopes that he will find an investor to make it into a movie.

McGrath’s advice to younger Prep alumni is, “Always show up in person. Say thank you. Engage with people in as many face-to-face opportunities as you can. That’s how people get to know you, and that’s how things happen.” He has certainly seen the fruits of making things happen time and time again.