Lois Wille, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who worked for the Chicago Sun-Times, Daily News and Chicago Tribune, has died.
Ms. Wille, who was 87, had a stroke Thursday and died early Tuesday at the Clare retirement community downtown, according to her nephew Eric Kroeber.
Ms. Wille was known for her graceful writing and sharp analysis of urban problems and for taking on tough subjects.
Her first Pulitzer, in 1963 was in the name of the Daily News because it was for public service — the highest honor, always awarded in the name of the newspaper — but Ms. Wille wrote each of the five stories in the entry. Her reports on failures to provide contraceptive advice to women were cited “for calling public attention to the issue of providing birth control services in the public health programs.”
Her second, in 1989, was for editorials she wrote for the Tribune on a variety of local issues.
She also was a finalist, for editorial writing, in 1984 while at the Sun-Times “for her series of editorials which stressed ways to make Chicago city government more economical and efficient.”
Ms. Wille also was the author of the book “Forever Open, Free and Clear: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront.”
WMAQ-NBC5 political editor Carol Marin called her a “guiding force” for many Chicago journalists and “a fearless investigator” at a time when societal attitudes were dismissive of young women doing that job.
“She had this kind of quiet forcefulness,” said Marin, who sought Ms. Wille’s guidance as her career shifted to weighing in on editorial issues. “She would join your process and make you feel like you discovered something on your own.
“And she rejoiced in other people’s successes.”
Her nephew said she wasn’t afraid to take on any subject. “She got tear-gassed at the riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968,” Kroeber said.
The honors she won never went to her head, he said: “She had all the accolades, and she was the most down-to-earth person you’d ever want to meet.”
Ms. Wille grew up in Arlington Heights, the daughter of Walter and Adele Kroeber. Her mother was from the Chicago area, according to the nephew, and her father was an architect in Leipzig, Germany, who left because he was worried about Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. In the United States, Kroeber “had to start off as a bricklayer,” the nephew said. “But eventually he owned his own firm in Arlington Heights,” which was home to many German immigrants.
Ms. Wille went to Northwestern University and started her newspaper career at the Daily News in 1956 after working for two business publications.
“The Daily News was an afternoon newspaper, which proved to be its undoing,” Wille said in a 1991 interview for the oral history archive of the Washington Press Club Foundation, but was doing well when she started there.
She said she was one of just two women covering news.
“The women were a novelty,” she said in the 1991 interview. “We were different. It wasn’t an equal. But no hostility and lots of friendliness. Because women did have very limited kinds of things they covered, I also was not a rival. I was not a threat, which may have been significant.”
As a general assignment news reporter, she had covered welfare and heard that poor women “had no access to birth control services as part of their medical care.” At Cook County Hospital, doctors couldn’t tell patients about contraceptives: “If a woman said, ‘Is there any way I can avoid getting pregnant again?’ they had to refuse to answer her.
“It was an issue that none of the papers wrote about because they feared that the policy was entrenched because of the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church among Chicago’s political leadership and also because the church was just very powerful in the city itself and that it would be offensive to readers if this subject were written about,” Wille said in the interview.
“I had wanted to write about this problem for a long time, both because it was important to women’s health and because it denied an essential part of health care to poor women that more affluent women got as a matter of course,” Wille said. “It was difficult, though, to make any inroads because the city editor . . . whom I admired in so many ways, who had a good conscience on so many issues, was a very ardent Roman Catholic.”
But that editor “developed stomach ulcers and was out for extensive surgery and away a long time. And his first deputy filled in. His name was Bob Rose. . . . .
“Bob Rose said, ‘Go right ahead. Work on it.’ ”
Within three months after her birth-control series ran Sept. 13-18, 1962, in the Daily News, the Illinois Public Aid Commission agreed to pay for birth control for women on welfare.
Ms. Wille is survived by her husband Wayne Wille and two nephews, Eric Kroeber and David Kroeber.
Funeral arrangements are pending, according to Eric Kroeber.
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He said Ms. Wille and her husband used to go to Austria each year “to de-stress and hike around the Alps.”
“They’ve still got their walking sticks and their hats, with little pins from the towns they were in.”
