A great community journalist died Thursday.
There are many other ways to describe Dennis Wheeler — adoring husband of Annie, loving father of three, lifelong White Sox fan, avid golfer, terrific guy — but I think he would be proud to be remembered as a fellow who devoted more than 30 years to providing news of the Southland to readers.
He was a reporter, news editor, editorial page editor and columnist for The Star. The Star, a twice-weekly paper, merged in late 2007 with the Daily Southtown, its archrival for many years, and Denny and I worked together for a time at the end of his career.
“He was just the most decent guy in the world,” said Myra Eder, former Star columnist, summing up the sentiments of nearly a dozen of his co-workers whom I spoke to about Denny for this column and likely anyone who ever met the man.
There are people who believe all newspapermen are alike. They think we’re in the business to sell newspapers, for the glory of breaking the big story or the money.
It’s laughable to those of us who have spent lifetimes in this line of work because few of us know how to sell newspapers (that has been proven beyond doubt), there’s very little glory in community journalism and even less money.
Wheeler — a tall, lanky fellow with what one former colleague described as a “Santa Claus laugh” — was as far from the stereotype of the hard-bitten, cigar-chomping, cynical newspaperman as you will ever get. But he was the epitome of the community journalist.
He played basketball for Lincoln-Way High School back when the district had one school and served a rural area. He became a teacher and coach at Bremen High School, working summers at The Star to supplement his income.
Teacher pay was so bad back in those days that some people claim that Denny actually switched to journalism for the money (often lamenting the financial choice), but to my knowledge he never doubted his decision to be a newspaperman.
He really cared about things like neighborhood disputes over the height of a backyard fence, rivalries between local high school teams and fundraisers for children suffering from cancer or people who had lost their homes in a fire. Denny knew that community newspapers were about the little things, the stuff that larger newspapers often ignore, the human interest stories about the lives of people who are, well, ordinary.
“Even after he became a news editor and editorial page editor, he would go to school board meetings to keep in touch with what they were talking about and meet the school board members so he could identify who they were when reporters wrote stories about them,” said Marge Seltzner, a former editor at the Star who worked with him for many years.
“He just loved being a community journalist,” said Al Macey, a former sports editor for The Star,
“He cared about every single thing that happened in every community we covered,” recalled Mary Paleologos, a former Star reporter who is now a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, D-2nd. “There was no story too small. When you were a young reporter working for The Star, Dennis made it clear that even the stories that seemed to have no significance meant a lot to the people who lived in the communities we covered, and it was our job to get that news out to the people.”
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“He was a kind, decent, solid individual,” said Frank Shuftan, the former Star editor who began as a reporter under Wheeler and would become his boss.
“That wasn’t an easy thing for Denny, but he ultimately handled it with professionalism and class, as he did everything in life,” said Shuftan, who is now spokesman for Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. “He was just so dedicated to local news. He was a pioneer in that he launched the Star’s editions that covered Oak Forest, Tinley Park and Orland Park.
“He opened up our office in Tinley Park in a house on Oak Park Avenue. I knew the guy for nearly 40 years, and in all the time we worked together I don’t think he ever took a sick day. There were days he came to work not looking really well, but I don’t think he ever took a day off.”
Everyone who worked with Denny Wheeler knows that each day he brought his lunch to work, and it was always the same: Soup and salad.
“That’s what we arranged for his retirement party in the newsroom,” Seltzner said. “It was an inside joke. It was soup and salad because that’s what he ate every single day.”
Frugal is another word that might describe Denny. But like most of us, he was so much more.
After his retirement from The Star, I wrote a column about him that had nothing to do with him being a newspaperman.
Wheeler was standing across the street from a neighbor’s house in Frankfort Township, where he lived, when he noticed black smoke billowing out of a home about 100 yards away. Wheeler and another man ran to the house and began knocking on the door to alert the people inside.
A man came stumbling out eventually and said his mother, 94, was still inside. She was on the second-floor porch out back. Wheeler ran up a wooden staircase, put the elderly woman on his back and brought her out of the house, which the fire chief would later say was a “total loss.”
“It was just very lucky I was out there,” Wheeler told me. “Don’t go making a big deal about this. It wasn’t like there were flames licking my feet or anything.”
But there were flames pouring out of the first-story windows of the house when Wheeler brought the woman out.
You know what colleagues said when I told them what Wheeler had done.
“Of course, he would. That’s Denny.”
That good neighbor thing is what Wheeler brought with him to The Star and what community journalism is really all about. You try to help people in need. Share information that may help them lead better lives. Keep a close watch on a neighbor’s house. And sometimes you have to tell people things they would probably prefer not to hear but realize they ought to know.
“You know one of the things he was proudest of was guarding Homer Thurman in a region basketball playoff game when he was at Lincoln-Way,” Macey said. “Lincoln-Way was the doormat of area high schools back then. They got beaten by everybody. Bloom Township High School was a powerhouse, and Homer Thurman may have been the greatest athlete in the school’s history.
“He was a three-sport all-state guy. And Denny would always brag that he guarded Homer Thurman in that championship game. Bloom won, of course. And I don’t know how many points Thurman scored. But Denny was the guy who guarded him, and he was always proud of that.”
“He was just a really good community journalist,” said Tom Houlihan, another former Star editor and columnist. “He was one of the nicest guys anyone would ever know.”
Don Snider, a former sports editor for the Sun-Times who became entertainment editor for The Star, remembered Denny as a “really good guy. A great mentor to the young reporters at The Star. A phenomenal teacher of journalism who understood the history of Illinois and the suburbs The Star covered.”
Almost all of Denny’s former co-workers apologized for saying things they knew, for certain, that others had said. Being journalists themselves, they realized I was probably looking for something new from every person. I hope they, and you, appreciate the repetition here.
Because that’s who Denny Wheeler was as a person and a journalist.
A gentle, kind man who would never have deliberately hurt another human being. A guy who wanted to serve his community while doing no harm. A fellow who devoted much of his life to reporting the facts, getting out the stories, because he thought it was important to the communities his newspaper served.
He never achieved fame or fortune, and no one can remember a single big news story Denny broke. And none of that mattered to him at all.
At the age of 76, Denny Wheeler left this world with the respect and affection of everyone he ever worked with, while the people in the neighborhoods that his newspapers served likely never knew who he was or what he had done for them. That’s the deal. He knew it. And it didn’t matter.
He was just the most decent guy in the world … and a great community newspaperman.
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