Claire Schmuckel Landau, 86, a longtime editor of a national medical journal and a former columnist for the Chicago Sun newspaper, died of septic shock Wednesday, March 27, in Northwestern Memorial Hospital. For 28 years beginning in the 1960s, Mrs. Landau served as managing editor of the Chicago-based journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, reviewing manuscripts and overseeing production. “She really was the heart and soul of that journal,” said her husband, Dr. Richard Landau, whom she married in 1943. “She did everything from editing copy, getting advertising, devising the layout and keeping the business records.” Before joining the medical journal, Mrs. Landau wrote five columns a week about veterans affairs for the Chicago Sun during the 1940s. Raised in a suburb of Milwaukee, Mrs. Landau attended Carleton College in Minnesota on a music scholarship and later toured the country playing clarinet with a symphony in the 1930s. She retired from the medical journal in the early 1990s. In addition to her husband, survivors include two daughters, Susan Axelrod and Kay Fricke; and five grandchildren. Services will be private.
