Kathleen Kearney Naureckas (1936-2020)

Jim Naureckas

Today would be the 84th birthday of my mother, Kathleen Kearney Naureckas, who died at her apartment in Oak Park, Illinois, on September 30, 2020. In accordance with the journalistic maxim she taught me, "News is something that happens to or near an editor," allow me to tell you a little bit about her.

Kathleen Kearney as a toddler in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania.

She was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, a little town in the Alleghenies surrounded by coal mines and coke ovens. Her father had worked briefly in the mines, but by the time she came along, on October 12, 1935, he was a rather prosperous beer distributor. The fifth of seven children, Kathleen grew up a voracious reader, raised on Journeys Through Bookland, a ten-volume set that took children from nursery rhymes and Aesop's Fables all the way through to Shakespeare and Dickens. She fondly remembered daily trips in the summer to the local library. Her mother—like her father, the child of Irish immigrants—saw with a bit of alarm what kind of child she was turning out to be, and asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up—"besides a writer." Eventually, she later wrote, she "learned that journalism was one way to make a living as a writer," and declared that to be her ambition.

She was the editor of her high school paper, the co-editor of the yearbook, and spent a summer interning in a newsroom through Northwestern University's Cherub program. After that, Northwestern, in Evanston, Illinois, was the only college she wanted to go to—graduating in 1958 with a degree in magazine writing from the Medill School of Journalism. Her dream was to edit a magazine in New York City, like the New Yorker or Life, both of which she devoured weekly.

She took the first step on that ladder as an editorial assistant at the Chicago-based trade magazine, Rock Products (and its sister publication, Concrete Products—both  owned by the Canadian Maclean-Hunter Publishing group, founders of Maclean's and the Financial Post). Then she married my father, Edward Naureckas, a mechanical engineer (and part-time farmer) from Libertyville, Illinois. As was the program in those days, she stepped out of the workforce to have four children—Karen, Ted, Jim and Barbara. This kept her occupied through the entirety of the 1960s, a decade she would later claim to have missed completely.

In 1970, though, Dad quit his engineering job just as the US's victory in the race to the Moon resulted in a glut of engineers on the market. The unanticipated unemployment led to family belt-tightening—and prompted Mom to resume her journalistic career after an 11-year pause.

Kathleen Naureckas at the Libertyville Herald.

She took a part-time job as a reporter for Paddock Circle Newspapers, which was launching a chain of weeklies in Lake County, including the Libertyville Herald. Her first assignment was covering school board meetings in Wauconda, Illinois, a nearby village of 5,000. In a year, she was a full-time reporter; by 1977, she was the paper's managing editor. At a time when journalism was even more male-dominated than it is today, it was a striking achievement.

That was probably her favorite stop in her career, but the Herald was, if not exactly a small pond, not a very well-compensated one—something that must have been on her mind as her children started approaching their college years. She took a job with the Chicago Tribune, the more prestigious of the big city papers in our area, dropping several rungs to start as a copy editor; "nevertheless, I increased my salary by one-third," she noted when she retired from the Tribune more than 20 years later.

She had a variety of jobs at the Trib, working as picture desk supervisor, graphics editor, makeup editor (overseeing the physical printing of the paper), assistant news editor, editor of Friday (the weekend entertainment section), Page One editor and finally editor of the Evening Update.

My mother sometimes thought her talents were not fully utilized at the Tribune, but they do seem to have been recognized. Her colleague Phil Vettel left a memory on my Facebook page:

Kathleen was a tough and brilliant editor, and one of the shrewdest minds in the newsroom.

Years ago, the Trib would invite the occasional lowly reporter to spend a week at the 4 p.m. meeting, in which all the top editors would hash out which stories would be on tomorrow's front page. Everybody would vote on which 3–5 stories should go on the page. An intimidating prospect.

But one editor who had gone through the process told me, "Just pick whichever stories Naureckas chooses, and you'll be fine." And that's exactly what I did.

Kathleen Naureckas at the Chicago Tribune.

I can vouch for her editing skills, because she's the person who taught me to edit. Well, first she taught me to read, using the daily phonics comic strip that used to appear in the Chicago Tribune. It's one of my favorite early memories, to which I credit my own lifelong love of reading. She would edit my school papers, showing me what an editor's squiggles meant and why you shouldn't use five words when three will do. And she offered me valuable journalistic advice, like "If your mother tells you she loves you—check it out."

I used to think I got my skills from her, and my ideas from elsewhere in the family—like from her sister Adele, the family socialist, who twice ran for Congress on the Peace & Freedom Party line. I somehow grew up with more or less my Aunt Adele's politics—if not those of my paternal grandfather, who is said to have been a teenage gunrunner for the 1905 revolution in Lithuania—though I didn't know I had this heritage of radicalism before I became radicalized myself, the child of what seemed to me at the time as fairly standard-issue Democrats.

Looking back now, though, I think the hidden conduit for my rebellious nature—at least that portion I inherited from my Hibernian ancestors—was my mother. Reading over the collection of writings that she compiled for her children, I see that she was writing about NOW consciousness-raising sessions and sexism in children's readers—serious subjects for the suburbs in the '70s.

She also wrote an account of George McGovern's brief stint as a minister in Mundelein, Illinois, next door to Libertyville, at the beginning of his career; my grade-school support for McGovern, which I picked up from her and my father via osmosis, unlike approximately 97% of my third-grade class, is what taught me that I should stick to my opinions, no matter how unpopular, trusting that history would vindicate me sooner or later.

I am sure that I didn't know until well into my career as a left-wing media critic that my mother wrote a denunciation of Joe McCarthy for her high school graduation. After criticizing US imperialism in the Philippines and America Firsters, she wrote:

It becomes apparent that a lot of foolish and sometimes wicked things have been done in the name of Americanism.... In 1954 it is being used to justify what is known as McCarthyism; and the same old ingredients are cropping up again. There is the same appeal to prejudice, to fear and to patriotism. Why is it that those who attempt to destroy the core of our democracy insist upon doing it in the name of patriotism?

This was strong stuff for rural Pennsylvania in the 1950s, and my understanding is that when school officials realized the content of her speech, she was disinvited to give it—though its title ("Americanism, Real and Counterfeit") appears in the graduation program.

(It stings that she's not around to factcheck this piece with me.)

(Finishing Line Press, 2012)

After she retired, in 1999, she finally got her chance to truly become a writer—and nothing besides. She published a collection of poetry, For the Duration, in 2012; a second volume, Winter Ecology, is scheduled to come out posthumously. Poet Maurya Simon wrote that Kathleen's poems captured "the small and large triumphs of a spirit that has endured great losses with dignity and compassion." Loss is a frequent theme in these poems—as her youngest child, Barbara, died at the age of 14, a grief that my mother grappled with for the rest of her life.  In a poem called "Memento Mori," about the discovery of her great-great-great-grandfather's gravestone in County Cavan, Ireland, she writes:

I always thought I was my story's hero,

but what if my chapter's not the end but just the middle,

as it will seem when my descendants stand

on different ground two hundred years from now

to trace the weathered letters of my name?

Now that my mother's chapter has come to its end, I know she was her story's hero—and she is my hero as well. I hope I am worthy to carry on the tale.