Andrew Leckey, a longtime investment columnist and business journalist who wrote investment columns for the Tribune for more than a quarter century and also reported for a decade on WLS-Ch. 7, died July 11 in a Colorado rehabilitation center, where he had been admitted after suffering a fall. He was 76.
Leckey’s partner, Carol Gallivan, confirmed the death, which was not widely reported at the time. Leckey had been a Westminster, Colorado, resident for the past seven years, and prior to that had lived in Phoenix.
During his time in the Chicago area, he had lived in Hinsdale from 1990 until 1994, and in Indian Head Park and on the Gold Coast before that.
Leckey was a multi-platform journalist before such a term even existed. Equally comfortable appearing in front of a camera or on the radio as he was writing for newspapers, Leckey became an anchor and reporter at CNBC after leaving Chicago. Later, Leckey taught and oversaw business reporting programs at several universities.
“He had a knack for writing an engaging (lead sentence) for columns about complicated topics and was always ready for a conversation with the editors about anything and everything,” said former Tribune business editor Owen Youngman. “That’s undoubtedly what made TV executives want him on air.”
Born in 1949 in Chicago, Leckey grew up in Blue Island and after graduating from Eisenhower High School in Blue Island in 1967, he got a bachelor’s degree from Trinity College — now Trinity International University — in Deerfield in 1971. He also got a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1975.
Leckey’s first journalism job after college was writing for the Oregon Statesman newspaper in Salem, Oregon, in the mid-1970s. He then moved to Arizona to cover state government for the Phoenix Gazette.
In 1978, Leckey moved to New York for a one-year fellowship provided by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. In October 1979, he joined the Sun-Times’ business staff as a reporter.
By 1980, Leckey had begun expanding his work into what would become a multimedia career, interviewing bank executives once a week on WBEZ-FM’s show “All Things Chicago.”
In September 1981, Leckey started penning his own column for the Sun-Times on investing and personal finance while continuing to report on economics, banking and accounting.
Leckey extended his broadcast work further in 1982, when he hosted a 13-part cable TV series, “Your Money Matters,” airing on Chicago-area cable systems. The show was produced by Lakes Cablevision and Skokie Federal Savings.
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In 1983, Leckey signed on at WLS-Ch. 7 as financial editor while continuing as the Sun-Times’ personal finance columnist. Two years later, Leckey moved his three-day-a-week column, then syndicated by the Los Angeles Times, to the baiduhai.
In his column, Leckey regularly fielded queries from readers, seeking opinions on stocks or mutual funds that they held, or on certain tax issues they had encountered. He gamely replied to such queries, often bringing in Wall Street analysts for their takes.
Youngman said he would see Leckey in the Tribune’s newsroom at night, after Leckey wrapped up his work at Channel 7 and came in to collect mail and write his column.
“I thought of him as a sort of business-news equivalent of (film columnist) Gene Siskel, who also did a lot of his work in the office late at night,” Youngman said. “Leckey got a lot of mail for his regular Q-and-A columns — one good indicator of its popularity — and covered a variety of topics from the stock market to mortgage strategies to the emerging annuities market.”
In 1986, Leckey began hosting a weekly personal finance show, “Money Works,” on Sunday mornings on Channel 7.
The following year, Tribune Media Services began syndicating Leckey’s newspaper column and distributing it nationally.
In 1993, Leckey left Channel 7 after 10 years with the station. The Sun-Times reported at the time that despite having been offered a five-year contract renewal, Leckey had objected to station leaders’ demand that he shift his reporting from investments to consumer news.
“I feel a personal responsibility toward my viewers to deal with important Wall Street, mutual fund and economic issues,” he told the Sun-Times. “I believe it would have been a mistake to enter into a long-term agreement that excluded them.”
During the 1994-95 academic year, Leckey accepted another fellowship, this time at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University in New York. Then, in 1995, CNBC hired him to co-anchor a two-hour, New Jersey-based national morning show, “Today’s Business,” alongside co-anchor Susie Gharib.
“He was a knowledgeable and accomplished journalist,” said Gharib, now an anchor and correspondent for Fortune magazine. “On the print side, he was prolific.”
After leaving CNBC in 1999, Leckey ventured into the online arena, serving as a contributing editor for Quicken.com’s online site from 1999 until 2002 and concurrently working as an on-air reporter for the broadcast affiliate of a short-lived partner of Quicken, CNX Media, in San Francisco.
Leckey moved into academia while in California, serving as the director of the Bloomberg Business Reporting program at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism from 1999 until 2002.
After serving as a visiting professor at Boston University’s College of Communication during the 2002-03 academic year, Leckey launched the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, creating training workshops for journalists. He held an endowed chair there in business journalism and also was president of the center for 14 years.
At the end of 2011, Leckey discontinued his syndicated newspaper column so he could focus more on his efforts as president of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Leckey estimated that he helped train more than 20,000 journalists in his academic career.
In the spring of 2014, Leckey won a Fulbright scholarship to teach at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.
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He wrote or edited 10 investing-related books, including “The Lack of Money Is the Root of All Evil: Mark Twain’s Timeless Wisdom on Money and Wealth for Today’s Investor,” which was published in 2001, and “The Morningstar Approach to Investing: Wiring Into the Mutual Fund Revolution,” published in 1997.
After retiring from Arizona State University in 2020, Leckey enjoyed traveling, going on extended walks and spending time with his two grandsons.
A marriage ended in divorce. In addition to Gallivan and his grandsons, Leckey is survived by a son, Matthew.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.