Susan Wolfson, 54, a former North Side writer whose books showed locals and tourists alike how to find and enjoy the best Chicago had to offer, died of complications from spinal meningitis in a Seattle hospital on Thursday, Jan. 31.
She lived most of her life as a writer in the shadow of her famous stepfather, Ira J. Bach, who served as city planning commissioner to five Chicago mayors before becoming in retirement the city’s best-known interpretive guide for architectural walkabouts.
With him, she wrote several editions of “Chicago on Foot: Walking Tours of Chicago’s Architecture,” “A Guide to Chicago’s Historic Suburbs on Wheels and on Foot,” and “Guide to Chicago’s Train Stations: Present and Past,” typically handling editing, research and organizational responsibilities.
But after her stepfather’s death in 1985, Ms. Wolfson broke out on her own with the 1986 book “Seconds City: The Smart Shopper’s Guide to Almost 1,000 Chicagoland Factory Outlets” and continued to handle revisions for works she had written with Bach.
It was a profession born largely from her frustration with being overlooked, said her mother, Muriel Bach Diamond.
Susan Wolfson was adopted before she was a year old and was raised in Chicago. She graduated from Francis Parker School and the Goodman Theatre School, where she studied drama in the late-1960s.
She was a good actress, her mother said.
“She was very bright. She was witty and really quite brilliant,” her mother said. “And she really wanted to belong.”
And so a woman who later struggled to promote her own books scrapped her theater degree to work for Yesterday’s Children, a support group for adult adoptees seeking their roots. Around the same time, she co-wrote an unpublished book about her adoption and painful search for her biological mother.
Later, Ms. Wolfson helped update the 1987 and 1994 editions of Bach’s “Chicago on Foot,” which first came out in.
She married Dennis Mae in 1989 and moved to Seattle in 1990, where she raised their son, Gabriel Mae.
Other survivors include her father Joseph Wolfson; stepfather Josef Diamond; stepbrother John Bach; and stepsister Caroline Marandos.
A funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Friday in The Piser Chapel, 9200 N. Skokie Blvd., Skokie.
