In the time it took most reporters to figure out what the story was, rewrite man Phillip O’Connor could already have it reported and ready to publish; and what’s more, he’d have it accurate, concise and well-written, colleagues recall.
Mr. O’Connor was among the last of a mostly extinct breed of news reporters/editors called rewrite men, spending 40 years with the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Daily News. He was with the Daily News 21 years, until it closed in 1978; then with the Chicago Sun-Times for 19 years.
Mr. O’Connor, 84, who also taught journalism at Northwestern University for 35 years, died Thursday in Scottsdale, Ariz., where he had lived since retiring from the Sun-Times on Sept. 12, 1997.
“He was the fastest rewrite man I ever worked with or directed. Directing him was like having three reporters at work,” Roger Flaherty, a former Sun-Times assistant city editor, said of the award-winning writer, who was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame in 1995.
“Phil was a quiet, pleasant and seemingly shy man who was a bulldog in getting a story. He was on the rewrite bank — four to six reporters who worked mostly by phone, interviewing sources and commonly taking notes from a number of reporters to compile a story often written in as little as 15 minutes under deadline pressure,” said Flaherty.
Mr. O’Connor was born in Minneapolis on Aug. 23, 1931, and grew up in Sharon, Wisc. Lean and lanky from a young age, he played basketball in high school, and went to the basketball state championships. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Iowa in 1953.
After college, he worked first at the Clinton (Ia.) Herald newspaper, then at the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald before settling in the Chicago area.
Mr. O’Connor’s speed and resourcefulness as a rewrite man were legendary, as reflected in an Aug. 23, 2006 Web item written by former Sun-Times City Editor Alan Mutter, who’d first worked with O’Connor at the Daily News. Mutter, who’d left the newspaper business for the world of tech start-ups, was writing about a company’s newly developed computer program said to be able to write a news story in a second.
“That’s not bad. But Thomson could have boosted productivity even more if it had lured Phillip J. O’Connor out of retirement,” Mutter wrote in the Aug. 23, 2006 post on his blog, “Reflections of a Newsosaur.”
“Lean, bespectacled, soft-spoken and manifestly unassuming, Phil O’Connor was the fastest, cleanest rewrite man in Chicago, a town filled with great and legendary newspaper folk,” he continued. “Phil’s long, slender, swift-moving fingers crafted beautifully written, factually correct stories as fast as they unfolded. He was so quick that his desk was equipped with two computer terminals to keep up with him.”
Current Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown recalls that Mr. O’Connor was almost always at his desk, wearing his headset and typing, and was very quiet, unless he had to get tough with somebody on the phone.
“Phil was almost machine-like in his ability to bang out a clear and concise story on deadline. If you were calling in a story from the field, usually on a pay phone, you always knew you were in good hands when Phil was doing the rewrite,” Brown said.
“But Phil had great sources and scored lots of scoops on his own, mostly on crime stories … with more bylines in the paper every day than anybody else. He was also one of the most humble people you could meet in this business.”
Mr. O’Connor won many awards for his news reporting as well as his rewrite skills, and also worked as an investigative reporter behind the scenes on special projects.
He was among investigative reporters from across the country who traveled in solidarity to Arizona for the Arizona Project in 1976 — after the death of Don Bolles, an investigative reporter at the Arizona Republic whose murder in a car bombing was linked to the mafia and stories he worked on. The project, was one of the first nationwide efforts bringing together competitive investigative journalists to work as a team.
Colleagues recalled Mr. O’Connor’s Rolodex was gold, envied by most. And they recalled he was the type of reporter who couldn’t stand being idle, so that in down times when he was without an assignment he would get on the phone, almost invariably drumming up a story or two.
When former Sun-Times medical reporter Howard Wolinsky himself retired from the paper, he wrote an ode to a bygone era for Gapers Block on Feb. 11, 2008, that described Mr. O’Connor this way:
“Phil O’Connor, the last of the great rewrite men … could talk like a cop and more importantly could get the cops to talk — and meet impossible deadlines.”
Flaherty recalled that there would be times he would be working next to Mr. O’Connor and hear him quietly reaming out a bureaucrat who was trying to stonewall him as he successfully got the story.
“On Saturday mornings in a more competitive era, editors on the major papers would grab the competitor’s first edition, look at any top stories we didn’t have and try to duplicate them and go them one better. Phil would get one copy, I another. Shortly, Phil would come up to me and say, ‘I can get these two or three,’ and he did,” said Flaherty.
“I recall a Tribune editor saying to me one day that Phil had copied their story since there was no way he could have gotten to their sources. I laughed. I was standing next to Phil as he interviewed their sources. Phil did it all quietly with no fanfare.”
But Mr. O’Connor was a dedicated family man who at the end of the workday eschewed the hijinks and drunken nights at the Billy Goat preferred by some to go straight to the train station and home to his family.
“He was a great father to his five kids, actively involved in their lives and being a loving grandfather to their kids,” said Therese O’Connor, his wife of 57 years. “He was the most loving person, and we were so very, very close. It’s going to be hard. He was about as close to being perfect as he could be. I don’t know how else to describe him.”
Mr. O’Connor was active in his church, St. Patrick’s Catholic Community Church in Scottsdale, as well as in his neighborhood associations. He enjoyed traveling with his wife and reading, and also enjoyed walking. In recent years, he twice participated in the P.F. Chang’s Rock & Roll Arizona Half Marathon in Phoenix.
“He was always very healthy, tall and skinny, and he used to walk 10 miles a day. He lived in Elmhurst, and I live up in Kenosha, and our trains would come into the station at the same time, and we’d walk a mile over to the Sun-times building,” recalled former Sun-Times reporter and longtime friend Harlan Draeger. “He had marvelous contacts. I think he had the best list of phone numbers of any reporter that I knew. And he could reach anybody.”
Draeger added: “When he retired, they had a send-off for him up in the corporate office, and the commissioner of the police department and the top brass all showed up and saluted Phil. Then we all went over to the Goat for the real send-off and it was a mob scene there. We presented Phil this enormous gold Olympic-style medallion that said, ‘World Champion Rewrite Man.’ And that’s what he was.”
Mutter, in that same article on his blog, wrote of Mr. O’Connor:
“Keeping a watchful eye on the city desk, Phil could tell when I, the city editor, had a new story on deadline with no free reporter to write it. Madly typing away, Phil would nod his head slightly to let me know he soon would be ready for the next assignment. He was a sweetheart of a rewrite man. And he never needed to be rebooted.”
Services to be held in Scottsdale and are pending. Besides his wife, survivors include: sons John and Michael; daughters Molly, Maggie and Katie; 10 grandchildren; sisters, Marion McConnell, Virginia O’Connor and Kathleen O’Connor.
The names and telephone numbers of sources that Phillip O’Connor scribbled in his Rolodex file were pure gold, his colleagues recall. | Sun-Times Library
Phillip O’Connor’s retirement party in 1997 included an old newspaper tradition — the fake front-page commemorating his tenure. Behind him is Nigel Wade, who was then the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. | Sun-Times Library
Phillip O’Connor was joined by his wife and some family members at his retirement party. | Sun-Times Library
