Jeanne L. Gleason died Nov. 18, 2019. She was 77. Gleason earned her bachelor’s degree from Medill and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. She worked as an elementary textbook editor at Scott Foresman, Silver Burdett Ginn, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin.
She is survived by her brother Robert Gleason, her nephew David and her dear friend and caregiver, Ruth Otey.
Charles Thomas Alexander, professor emeritus at Medill and former director of the Medill News Service, died Nov. 15, 2019. He was 91. Alexander was born in Minneapolis on Sept. 21, 1928, but his family home was in Mount Vernon, Ind. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Duke University, 1950, he served in the military during the Korean War and studied for two years at the Boston University School of Theology. He obtained his master’s degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and began his journalism career with the Washington Star in 1956 as an assistant city editor. He then became managing editor of Delaware’s Wilmington Morning News and Evening Journal in 1961, and then an editor and publisher of the Dayton Journal Herald in Ohio. He returned to Washington, D.C. in 1975 to serve as a professor of journalism and director of the Medill News Service. He retired in 1994.
He loved sports, music, theater, travel and the church, and served as an elder of the Georgetown Presbyterian Church for over 30 years.
A long-time Alexandria resident, he is survived by his wife of 68 years, Elizabeth; his daughters Elizabeth and Lucy; and grandchildren Charlie and Emma.
John Henry Worthington, a navigator and proud WWII veteran, died Oct. 16, 2019. He was 97. He graduated from Temple University and earned his master’s degree from Medill in 1948. He lived in Evanston and worked for the Chicago Sun Times, before moving to Michigan, where he worked for The Detroit News for eight years. He completed his career as an editor and publisher of the D.A.C. News . After his wife’s death, Worthington moved to Foxboro, Mass., where he took up golf, gardened, went on walks with his beloved pet, Diva, and enjoyed a leisurely retirement.
Worthington is survived by his children, grandchildren, and brother.
Carol Kramer, a magazine editor and newspaper reporter, died Aug. 13, 2019. She was 79.
Kramer was born August 16, 1940, in Chicago, graduated cum laude from Marquette University, and then received her master’s in journalism from Medill.
She was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, a writer on the New York Daily News Sunday Magazine, and an editor at the paper’s short-lived afternoon edition, the Daily News Tonight, started by Clay Felker.
She was a lifestyle editor at 7 Days, a city weekly that folded in 1990, and an editor at Allure, Martha Stewart Living and Real Simple, among other publications. She volunteered every week at a local homeless shelter for nearly a decade.
Friends and coworkers remember that she always dazzled them with her encyclopedic knowledge of history, Broadway show tunes, English literature and arcane Catholic doctrine. She could rattle off presidential history — and list the presidents — with envy-inducing speed.
Kramer was a deft headline writer, an accomplished accordion player and a wonderful cook. According to her friends, her heart was enormous, her wit, biting, her oxtail stew, sublime.
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=carol-kramer&pid=194024838
Betty D. Hegner, a writer, editor, and conservationist, died Oct. 6, 2019, at the age of 87. Born 1932 in Montana, she was a regional reporter in her local 4H chapter. In high school, she edited the newspaper and yearbook and served as a crew member for many theatre productions. She graduated second in her class and won multiple scholarships to attend Medill.
After graduating, she worked as a writer and editor for Institutions, a Chicago-based publication for which Richard Hegner’s company provided commercial art content. Through that connection the couple met and they married in 1960. In 1965 they moved from Chicago to their beloved farm in Harvard, Ill.
Betty and Richard started Hegner Real Estate in a remodeled chicken coop on their farm in 1972. They saw a keen opportunity with the RE/MAX concept and purchased the master franchise for Northern Illinois in 1977. Together, they built RE/MAX into the leading real estate brand in the region. Avid conservationists, Richard and Betty planted over 300,000 trees on their land and in 2009, they received the award for “Outstanding Tree Farmers of the Year” from the Illinois Tree Farm System. The Hegner Theatre Wing at Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota, Fla., is a testament to their commitment to the arts.
Betty served on the boards of directors for the Soil & Water Conservation District of McHenry County, Woodstock Fine Arts Association, and Raue Center for the Arts. She and Richard started the CARES Foundation and the Hegner Family Foundation. She belonged to the Natural Organic Farmers Association, League of Women Voters, Parent-Teacher Organization, and the National Organization for Women.
Betty is survived by her children, step-grandchildren, great-grandchild and brother.
Robert Wagner,a social worker passionate about helping people with mental illnesses, died August 12, 2019, at age 86. After fighting in the Korean war, he graduated from Medill and then earned his AM in social work from the University of Chicago in 1963. He married Barbara Wagner in 1961, and they had a son and daughter.
Wagner worked with students with developmental disabilities at Dixon State School and with the geriatric population at Manteno State Hospital as an Illinois Department of Mental Health employee. He later established Annex House, a halfway house for adults recovering from mental illness. In his retirement Wagner enjoyed painting and writing, especially poetry. His wife said his poetry often reflected his experiences as a social worker. He is survived by his wife, children, grandchildren, and nieces and nephews.
Billie M. Jones (MSJ48), a reporter, editor and teacher, died Sept. 18, 2019 at the age of 95. She and her husband, Hugh N. Jones, were married for 71 years. Jones, born from generations of coal mining interest developers in Cherokee and Crawford counties, was herself a member of the Miners Hall and Museum in Franklin and contributed to the Miners Park in Pittsburg.
After finishing high school in 1942, she worked on a production line, first making detonators for WWII 150mm anti-aircraft shells and then as an administrative clerk compiling reports from production lines. She later attended the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas and graduated in 1947. During summer vacations, she worked as a reporter for the Pittsburg Headlight and Pittsburg Sun.
In 1948 she received a master’s degree from Medill in and for the next two years was a reporter for the Metropolitan Section of the Chicago Tribune. In 1950 she retired to raise a family but she continued to do freelance writing and editing. From 1966 to 1968 she worked as Associate Editor of the Scarsdale Inquirer, a weekly New York newspaper, and from 1969 to 1971 was a Public Information Officer for the Center for Urban Education in New York City. After receiving teaching and supervising credentials from the City College of New York she began her 25 years of work as a teacher and administrator for the New York City public schools.
Besides her husband, survivors include her children, grandchildren, and nieces and nephews.
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/morningsun/obituary.aspx?n=billie-m-jones&pid=194093547
Lois Kroeber Wille, two-time Pulitzer winner and pioneering Chicago journalist, died July 23, 2019. She was 87. For 34 years she worked as one of Chicago’s bravest, fiercest journalists, often going undercover to report on economic and social inequality—on mental health and birth control, on juvenile justice and maternal care.
But those who knew her also remember her as wickedly sharp, quick and funny, with an upstanding moral code and deep compassion for others.
“For all of her awards and accolades, all her accomplishments, Lois was held in awe by so many people,” said her nephew Eric Kroeber told the Chicago Tribune. “I have heard from so many people, ‘Lois helped me so much when I was just starting out’ and ‘Lois was such an inspiration to me.’ Well, maybe she never heard any of that because it didn’t go to her head. To me and my family she was just the most down-to-earth, friendly and loving human being.”
She began in the newsroom of the Chicago Daily News in 1957, where all but one of her colleagues were male. And she quickly realized those men were held to a remarkably different standard, wrote the Washington Post.
“The men could have tantrums and throw their typewriters and yell and scream if something happened to their copy, or go off on two- or three-day benders, and it was considered very colorful and part of the great Chicago tradition in journalism,” Ms. Wille said in a 1991 oral history interview for the Washington Press Club Foundation.
But women had to appear “in control and calm,” she added, lest they be thought frail or temperamental.
Wille started as assistant to the fashion editor at the Daily News, writing soft news stories for what were then considered to be the “women’s pages,” according to the Tribune. She shot pool with Willie Hop and interviewed Cary Grant about his proclivity for women’s underwear over breakfast.
She thought the lighthearted stories were “really fun,” but gravitated to hard news, once breaking away from a fashion story she was writing to cover a fire she had spotted, according to the Times. After becoming frustrated that the stamps she was using to mail Christmas cards didn’t have enough glue, she pitched and wrote her first front-page story about citywide dissatisfaction with mailing stamps that didn’t stick to envelopes.
That story earned her one of the few hard news reporting slots available for women at the time, and she dove into investigative reporting, covering poverty, mental illness, and social justice.
She often went undercover, according to the Times. For her first series, she exposed abuses in juvenile court by pretending to be a legal aid. She posed as a medical worker in a mental health clinic, complete with white coat and clipboard. The Times wrote that while many might consider her tactics a “breach of journalistic ethics,” Wille was adamant that her methods were justified given the issues at stake.
And Wille’s reporting led to social change:
Less than three months after she reported on the lack of public funding for Chicago birth-control programs, the Illinois Public Aid Commission voted to fund birth-control aid for welfare recipients, according to the Washington Post. Wille’s story won her her first Pulitzer Prize.
Wille was born in Chicago on Sept. 19, 1931. Her father was a German-born architect who specialized in churches, and her mother was a homemaker, according to the Washington Post.
Wille gravitated towards journalism after she read Dale Messick’s comic strip about a redheaded reporter named Brenda Starr. She edited her high school paper and studied journalism at Medill, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1953 and a master’s in 1954, the same year she married Wayne Wille (BSJ53, MSJ54).
She also wrote the books “Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront” (1972) and “At Home in the Loop: How Clout and Community Built Chicago’s Dearborn Park” (1997).
In 1989, after Wille won a second Pulitzer Prize for her editorial writing, her colleagues wrote of her, “No question. If Lois Wille were running Chicago, it would be a better place. Fairer, more decent, more honest, more demanding and more giving, preserving the best part of its past, while reaching out eagerly to make even more of its future — for all of its people.”
In addition to her husband, Wille is survived by her nephews and several great-nephews and great-nieces.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/business/media/lois-wille-dead.html
Michael Dembeck died July 22, 2019. He is survived by his wife, his sisters, and his grandsons.
Nancy Frederick Shuker Weyr, a seasoned book editor who worked on some of the most popular books on American shelves, died July 31, 2019.
Her family wrote that “she was an extraordinary woman with specific and dearly missed gifts: a great sense of humor, a strong moral compass, an enduring love of the arts, a generous spirit, and a mind of her own.”
Born July 26, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Weyr grew up in Nashville, Tenn., and graduated high school there. She graduated from Medill, and soon after married noted documentarian Greg Shuker, with whom she had three children. Her family lived first in Virginia and in 1960 moved to Bronxville, where she lived the rest of her life.
In the book division at Time-Life Weyr worked on books that would become foundational texts in many American households, including Julia Child’s “Cooks of the World” series. She ultimately became chief of research for the entire book division.
She would later go on to run Senator Jacob Javits’s reelection campaign, reflecting a lifelong interest in politics, and to work in several publishing houses. She was made editor-in-chief for “Bottom Line: Personal,” a business-oriented newsletter, and she edited a “huge variety” of nonfiction books over the course of her professional life. After a long career in writing and language, Weyr spent her free time tutoring local high schoolers.
Her family wrote that Weyr loved the arts, especially theater, and was “always looking for ways to enrich the lives of young people” by exposing them to drama.
Weyr remarried in 1992 to Thomas Weyr, a celebrated author and journalist. She is survived by her husband, her two siblings, her children, her five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.