As a reporter covering philanthropy and the arts for the weekly Pioneer Press newspaper chain for more than four decades, Dorothy Andries was a longtime fixture at concerts and charitable events on the North Shore.
In that role, Andries frequently reviewed performances at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, where she interviewed figures such as composer Henry Mancini and conductor Christoph Eschenbach. She also regularly attended and wrote about fundraising events for groups such as the United Way and the Kidney Cancer Association.
“(Dorothy) adored being on the move, and having too many things to do on too many evenings,” said Andries’ sister, former Chicago Sun-Times classical music critic Wynne Delacoma. “She loved going to the parties, she loved interviewing people, she loved going to concerts and doing reviews. She just loved being out in the middle of it all.”
Andries, 89, died of natural causes Sept. 26 while in hospice care at the Cantata Adult Life Services skilled nursing facility in Brookfield, said her son, WTTW-Ch. 11 senior producer Daniel Andries.
A longtime Deerfield resident until moving to the Oak Park area five years ago, Andries had been living at the Sunrise of River Forest senior living community in River Forest.
Born Dorothy Delacoma in Chicago in 1937, Andries grew up in the Edgewater neighborhood and graduated high school in 1954 from the North Side’s now-shuttered St. Scholastica Academy, where she was literary editor of the school yearbook. Andries also studied piano, and as a high schooler, she won a citywide piano concerto competition.
After earning a journalism degree from Marquette University in 1958, Andries married and managed her home. She also did some freelance writing, including penning a 1963 Tribune first-person article about how she and her husband — then Chicago residents — had decided to give up having a car and how their lives had changed afterward.
In 1967, they moved their family to Deerfield, and Andries began working as a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press’ Deerfield Review newspaper, covering events such as local school board meetings. Almost immediately, she began reviewing arts performances as well because of her background in music. Her first review was of an event at Ravinia in 1967.
Several years later, Andries joined Pioneer Press’ reporting staff full-time. One of her early distinctions was to closely follow the earliest years of the Steppenwolf Theatre Co., which began its first season in 1976 in the basement of a Highland Park church.
Andries’ articles and reviews helped elevate Steppenwolf’s profile considerably in the years before the theater company relocated to Chicago in 1980 and eventually became world-renowned, Delacoma said.
Andries relocated to Milwaukee with her husband in 1978, where she was on the staff of the Milwaukee Sentinel from 1978 until 1981, working as a features writer and a travel editor.
Upon moving back to Lake County in 1981, Andries briefly served as managing editor at North Shore magazine before rejoining Pioneer Press the following year.
At Pioneer, she was a music critic for the papers’ Diversions entertainment guide — a section that she eventually ended up editing — and she created and edited a glossy quarterly magazine called Q. In 1986, she founded and edited Trend, a weekly section for Pioneer’s papers about society and charity events.
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“It grew, grew, grew with advertising, so at its peak, at Christmastime, it would sometimes be 24 pages just for social charitable news,” Andries told the Chicago Reader in 2009, referring to the Trend section. “(Trend) is all the major challenges and woes of the Earth. It’s Alzheimer’s (disease) and AIDS and arthritis. It’s cancer and battered women. And it’s (also) all the things that make life worthwhile. It’s the symphony and opera and education. And I think it’s a really wonderful thing — to get their message out. I was proud of that work.”
In 1989, Suburban Newspapers of America honored Andries with an award for best breaking news story for a piece she wrote for the Wilmette Life newspaper. That same year, the Illinois Press Association gave a top award to the Evanston Review’s lifestyle section, which Andries co-edited and for which she also wrote articles.
“Dorothy was always positive; in a newsroom where complaints were as common as misplaced commas, she was a rarity. She never complained. She hummed classical music softly while she worked,” said retired Pioneer Press editor Virginia Gerst, who oversaw Andries’ music reviews as the Diversions section editor. “Her copy was clean, her writing lively and always arrived ahead of deadline. You can’t ask for more than that.”
For several years in the mid-1990s, Andries hosted an interstitial program, “Critics Choice,” on the now-defunct WNIB-FM radio station, which consisted of her reviews of performances at Ravinia.
Andries loved her later work covering charitable events, her son said. She considered that coverage “amplifying the work of angels,” he said.
Andries left Pioneer Press as a full-time employee in 2009, but she continued writing for the chain as a freelance reporter. She contributed freelance articles to Pioneer Press — which Tribune Publishing acquired in 2014 — until retiring in 2019.
Andries’ husband of 57 years, Donald, died in 2015. A son, DJ, died in 2008. In addition to her son and her sister, Andries is survived by two other sons, David and Darrill; 11 grandchildren; nine great-grandchildren; and another sister, Marguerite Delacoma.
A memorial mass and celebration of life service will take place at 10 a.m. Jan. 2 at Holy Cross Catholic Church, 724 Elder Lane, Deerfield.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.