Posted by chicagomedia.org on March 18, 2009 at 14:52:54:
Nicholas R. Shuman, 1921-2009: Foreign editor at Chicago Daily News oversaw storied reporters
As a writer, he was honored for report on fatal 1958 Our Lady of Angels fire
By Trevor Jensen | Tribune reporter
March 18, 2009
Nicholas R. Shuman oversaw a storied staff of foreign correspondents at the Chicago Daily News and was a regular at a boisterous table of newspaper legends who lunched at the old Riccardo's on Rush Street.
Mr. Shuman, 87, died Tuesday, March 17, in Sunrise Assisted Living of Schaumburg, said his daughter Betsy Shuman-Moore. A former resident of Arlington Heights, he suffered from Parkinson's disease.
Mr. Shuman spent 27 years as a reporter and editor at the Daily News and an additional six years writing editorials, with a specialty in foreign and national issues, for the Chicago Sun-Times.
A reporter and financial editor the first half of his Daily News career, Mr. Shuman was a graceful writer who had two pieces published in "Done in a Day: 100 Years of Great Writing from the Chicago Daily News."
One was his award-winning report from the 1958 fire at Our Lady of Angels School on the West Side, which claimed 95 lives. Another was a dispatch from ground zero in Hiroshima, where the U.S. had dropped an atomic bomb years earlier.
From the mid-1960s to the Daily News' closing in 1978, Mr. Shuman was the national and foreign editor. The paper ran the oldest continuing foreign service in the country, and readers learned what was going on around the world from reporters like Keyes Beech, Ray Coffey and Georgie Anne Geyer.
"He was the best kind of foreign editor. He didn't bother you if you were doing good work and turning a lot of stories in," said Geyer, now a syndicated columnist. "He was very fun. He had intellectual depth."
"He had endless stories of how interviewing [Nathan] Leopold of the Bobby Franks murder gave him the chills, how he found a way to get JFK to shake hands with my mom," said his son, Mark.
Among those colleagues were Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists John Fischetti and Bill Mauldin and columnist Mike Royko. At Riccardo's, the newspapermen smoked, drank and sometimes ate their way through the noon hour.
After the Daily News closed, Mr. Shuman was an editorial writer at the Sun-Times until the Marshall Field family sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch.
His ire over the sale was intense and led to a public outburst one day when he shared an elevator with Marshall Field V, who had joked about not having to worry about building maintenance any longer. Mr. Shuman followed up with an equally angry memo to Field, accusing him of soiling the family's legacy.
"He felt a newspaper was about more than money," his son said.
After quitting the Sun-Times, Mr. Shuman taught journalism at Columbia College for about five years.
Mr. Shuman's parents were illiterate peasants who came to Chicago from rural Belarus and settled in Humboldt Park. He was fluent in Russian.While at Lane Tech High School, he got a job as a copy boy at the Chicago Journal of Commerce. He received a bachelor's degree in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before joining the Army Air Force.
During World War II, he flew Piper Cubs over Europe, armed with only a .45-caliber sidearm while marking coordinates for bombing runs.
Back home, he returned to the Journal of Commerce as a copy editor until being fired for trying to organize a Newspaper Guild chapter. He then worked for the Chicago Herald-American before joining the Daily News.
After work, Mr. Shuman always had time to chuck a ball around in the backyard with his son, and hoarded weeks of vacation time to lead his family on extensive driving vacations through Mexico and Canada.
Mr. Shuman's wife, Marilyn, who wrote advice and travel columns for the Daily News, died in December 2006.
He is also survived by another daughter, Kristin McLaughlin, and four grandchildren.
Services will be held at a later date.