Chicago journalist Lois Wille, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes

When Lois Wille started out in the newsroom of the Chicago Daily News in 1957, there was only one other female reporter. Most of her neighbors treated her as a novelty; one deskmate introduced himself by bending down and rubbing Wille’s ankle.

And while male colleagues sometimes threw typewriters on the floor or disappeared on drunken benders, Wille recalled that the city editor was mainly concerned with whether she and other female hires would cry in the office.

By all accounts, no tears were shed. And over the next 34 years, Wille established herself as one of Chicago’s most fearless journalists, writing investigative series on juvenile courts, mental health clinics and tenement housing conditions — sometimes by going undercover, without identifying herself as a reporter, to obtain the access she needed.

Her five-article series on the lack of public funding for Chicago birth-control programs was awarded the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for public service, one of journalism’s highest honors, and sparked policy changes that helped poor women across Illinois receive contraceptive information and services.

Fourteen years later, she turned from reporting to editorial writing, attacking government corruption and incompetence with a style that was pithy, incisive and often wickedly funny. She went on to oversee the editorial pages at three Chicago papers — the Daily News, Sun-Times and Tribune — and received a second Pulitzer in 1989 for her writing.

“Lois Wille has absolutely no weaknesses as a journalist,” her colleague and friend Mike Royko, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, told the Washington Press Club Foundation in 1992. “If she had been a man she could have been editor of the Chicago Daily News and Sun-Times.”

Wille (pronounced Willy) said she never sought such a position, preferring to focus on her public-policy advocacy and writing, including two books on city politics and urban development. She was 87 when she died July 23 at a retirement community in Chicago, five days after suffering a stroke, according to her nephew David Kroeber.

Editorial pages are often described as the soul of a newspaper, a place where anonymous writers guard institutional memory, battle with the business and political classes and seek to sway public opinion, albeit with far less fanfare than their bylined counterparts on the opinion pages.

As editorial page editor, colleagues said, Wille was a quiet but forceful presence in the newsroom, beloved by reporters and fellow editorial-board members for her moral clarity, insight into city politics and support for young journalists, especially women.

“When she went after a political figure who was acting inappropriately, wasting money in a culture of corruption, she found a way to diminish them that wasn’t cruel, wasn’t mean,” said Bruce Dold, the current publisher and editor in chief of the Tribune, who previously worked with Wille on the paper’s editorial board.

“She just had a way in words to put people into caricature,” he added, recalling that in the late 1980s, Wille described the obedient followers of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat, as “ducklings.”