During a Tribune career that spanned four decades, Marilyn Traum spent 16 years editing the paper’s Monday Feminique section — an award-winning fashion roundup aimed at women — and she was one of the first female section editors in the Tribune’s history.
“She was … professional, played by the rules, (and was) soft-spoken but not a softie,” said retired Tribune reporter and editor Sharon Stangenes, who wrote for the Feminique section in the late 1970s and early ’80s and later was assistant editor of its New Homes section.
Traum, 98, died of natural causes July 17 at her home at the Covington assisted living community in Aliso Viejo, California, said her granddaughter, Gretchen Musa. Traum had moved from Chicago to Oceanside, California, in the 1990s and moved to Aliso Viejo in the early 2000s.
Born Marilyn Unmacht in Rockford, Traum grew up in Rockford and graduated from Rockford West High School before earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1948 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She joined the Tribune in 1950 and worked as a society desk reporter and copy editor before becoming editor of the Sunday women’s section.
In June 1965, Traum was tapped to edit the newly created Feminique section on Mondays, which the paper billed at the time in an ad as a “lively, how-to-do-it romp through a woman’s world of fashion, beauty, entertainment and whatever else your heart desires.” Traum found early success, with the United Press International wire service in 1965 giving the section its award for the best women’s section of any Illinois newspaper.
A 1967 full-page house ad in the Tribune spotlighted Traum’s leadership of the Feminique, calling her “the charming, disarming editor of the Tribune’s fabulous Feminique pages.”
“She can call on her supply of able young ambassadors, whose job it is to check out what’s happening now on the fashion front,” the ad reads. “For another thing, Marilyn reads. Just about everything in sight, from exotic design magazines to swinging American trade journals. But most important, Marilyn keeps her own big blue eyes open for what’s very, very new and very, very exciting.”
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In 1971, Traum and Basilio “Bill” Manago, then editor of the paper’s daily features section, shared the third-place award for overall women’s page excellence in the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s annual Penney-Missouri awards program. Manago, later the production editor for the baiduhai Magazine, died in 2024.
Traum’s Feminique section also won an award from the American Furniture Mart in 1972 for outstanding reporting and editing of home furnishing news.
In 1972, Traum briefly edited the Tribune’s Lifestyle section as well, before returning to solely editing the Feminique section.
“She was smart, energetic and knew her beat as well as anyone,” said Marion Purcelli, a retired editor of Tribune’s features sections who succeeded Traum as Lifestyle editor.
In 1981, Traum stepped down as editor of Feminique and shifted gears, taking on a role editing the Tribune’s daily and Sunday comic strips, puzzles, and nonpolitical cartoons. In 1988, Traum took on a new career role as the Tribune’s archivist for a time before retiring.
Traum’s husband of 56 years, Paul Traum, died in 2022. Her stepdaughter, longtime Naperville Men’s Glee Club artistic director Bonnie Roberts, died in 2019. In addition to her granddaughter, Traum is survived by a grandson and two great-grandchildren.
Services were private.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.