In her 27-year career as a journalist and commentator, Jorie Lueloff was long known as the first woman to anchor a TV newscast in Chicago and as one of the first women nationwide to do so, according to Tribune news reports.
“Jorie was one of the smartest, coolest, classiest and most intelligent anchors I ever worked with,” said Andy Shaw, a former WMAQ-Ch. 5 reporter who later was political editor and CEO of the Better Government Association. “And she was amazingly kind to me as a TV newbie when I started at Channel 5 in 1976. She … lived life large and well.”
Lueloff, 85, died of natural causes Thursday at the Plymouth Harbor retirement community in Sarasota, Florida, where she lived, said her sister, Caroline Williams. Lueloff had resided in Lincoln Park until moving to Sarasota permanently in 2012. She also had owned a farm in Eagle, Wisconsin.
Born Marjorie Lueloff in 1940 to Marjorie and Reuben Lueloff, she grew up in the Milwaukee suburbs of West Bend, Grafton and River Hills. Her father was an executive with West Bend Aluminum and later with Bell & Howell, and also served as River Hills’ village president.
After graduating in 1958 from the now-merged Milwaukee-Downer Seminary, Lueloff earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and international relations from Mills College in Oakland, California. She worked for a year for the Central Intelligence Agency before leaving to take a job in news features at the Associated Press.
“I wanted to write documentaries and at the same time travel some,” Lueloff told the Tribune in 1976, referring to her time at the AP. “I kept trying to get overseas.”
Sensing that the future was in television news, Lueloff left the AP in 1965 to join NBC News, which assigned her to its owned-and-operated station in Chicago, WMAQ-Ch. 5.
A 1970 Tribune article speculated that Lueloff’s hiring was “tactical,” as rival station WBBM-Ch. 2 already had two women among its on-air staff, Lee Phillip and Sheri Blair.
In 1968, WMAQ promoted Lueloff to be Chicago’s first female news anchor.
“I was shocked to be offered an on-camera spot in Chicago,” Lueloff told the Tribune in 1968. “This had never been part of my plan.”
Early on, Lueloff was a reporter for the station’s 5 p.m. newscast, alongside John Palmer, Len O’Connor and Harry Volkman. Some members of the station’s overwhelmingly male professional staff, she told the Tribune in 1968, initially were less than welcoming.
“Caustic remarks by certain staff members cut me to the quick, and I knew they expected me to flop,” she told the Tribune. “Like some women, I am emotionally disturbed by criticism, and desperately wanted to cry. I decided that my best defense against the barbs was to keep calm and do a job.”
Former Channel 5 and Channel 2 news editor Deb Segal, who worked with Lueloff at WMAQ, called Lueloff a trailblazer for women with “a backbone of steel” who “took an enormous amount of crap, both on screen and off.”
“I was privileged to work with both Jorie and Lee Phillip back when women anchoring any broadcast were barely accepted by the manosphere that was television, or the public at large,” she said. “Jorie may have been an attractive, soft-spoken blonde with wholesome good looks, but make no mistake — there was nothing fluffy about her. She really did have a backbone of steel.”
Over time, Lueloff said she noticed less hostility from male colleagues.
In 1968, Lueloff began co-anchoring Channel 5’s six-day-a-week, 30-minute noon newscast, first with Charles Heath and then with John Dancy. The role made her the first female in the country to anchor a TV newscast in a major market, the Tribune wrote in 1970.
In July 1970, Lueloff added the role of reporting features for NBC’s network news, including reporting features for NBC’s “Today” show.
In 1971, Lueloff married Richard Friedman, who unsuccessfully had run for mayor that year as a Republican against Mayor Richard J. Daley.
Lueloff reported in the 1970s on patients who two decades earlier had received radiation treatment for tonsils and adenoids but then, years later, were diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
Her reporting prompted several hospitals, including Little Company of Mary Hospital and Michael Reese Hospital, to recall patients who had received that treatment.
“Her groundbreaking series saved lives, mine among them,” Segal said.
Lueloff also was an outspoken opponent of credit discrimination against women. Her advocacy was rooted in her own personal situation.
After marrying Friedman in 1971, she decided to open a charge account at Marshall Field & Co. She was the breadwinner, as her husband was temporarily unemployed. Frustrated that the department store had no interest in giving a gainfully employed woman a credit card but was perfectly content issuing a card to an unemployed man, Lueloff spoke up.
“I was so angry,” Lueloff told the Tribune in 1982. “They were more than willing to issue a card to an unemployed man than to a woman making her way in the world, with no credit problems whatsoever.”
Lueloff testified in Washington before the National Commission on Consumer Finance in 1972 about the matter, which elicited similar stories from women around the country. Ultimately, Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which President Gerald Ford signed into law in 1974.
Martha Teichner, a Channel 5 reporter from 1975 until 1977 who now is a CBS News correspondent, said Lueloff “had this wonderful presence” on the air.
“She was extremely well-dressed and dignified and that was a time before women on television — especially anchors — kind of relaxed and showed who they were,” Teichner said. “She was always very knowledgeable and very put-together and very prepared. She just exuded dignity.”
In the late 1970s, Lueloff’s noon newscast on Channel 5 regularly beat Channel 2’s “Lee Phillip and the News” in the ratings. She soon began co-anchoring WMAQ’s 4:30 p.m. newscast with Jim Ruddle.
“She was a damn good person,” said Ruddle, who now lives in New York. “She did her job and let other people do theirs. She was very good and very solid about what she did.”
In 1979, Lueloff’s popular noon newscast was moved to 11:30 a.m., in a decision forced by NBC bosses in New York. She continued co-anchoring top-rated late afternoon newscasts, by then with Chuck Henry.
Lueloff took over hosting Channel 5’s early-morning interview program, “Today in Chicago,” in 1980. Also in 1980, her midday newscast was moved back to noon, and she began hosting the station’s venerable political program, “City Desk.”
Later that year, Lueloff was removed from anchoring WMAQ’s late afternoon newscast. And the following year, Linda Yu and Henry replaced Lueloff in hosting “City Desk.”
After 16 years at WMAQ, Lueloff left Channel 5’s news department in February 1982 to pursue other interests at the station and elsewhere, though she continued hosting “Today in Chicago” on a freelance basis.
The Tribune reported in 1982 that she had rejected station management’s request for her to spend more time on the street, chasing fires and covering press conferences.
“I’ve been on the treadmill for 20 years,” she told the Tribune in 1982. “I really love what I’ve been doing, but I’m so tired of spending 10 hours a day meeting deadlines. I know there’s a whole big wonderful world out there, and I want to see it.”
In August 1984, Lueloff left WMAQ entirely and joined WLS-Ch. 7, where she began delivering commentaries three times a week on its 4 p.m. newscast.
In 1992, Channel 7 parted ways with its four rotating weekday commentators on its 4 p.m. newscast, including Lueloff. In 1998, Lueloff was inducted into the Chicago Television Academy’s Silver Circle.
“When I started, there was a feeling that if you were a woman, you should just cover fashion, movie stars and the wives of candidates,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1984. “Now they are covering hard news and all the top stories. It’s changed enormously, and for the better.”
With longtime Chicago news anchor Harry Porterfield, Lueloff co-hosted the 2004 Silver Circle Awards ceremony.
Other journalism work included travel reports and book reviews for the Tribune in the 1970s. She later penned a weekly column for the Sun-Times in the mid-1980s.
Outside of work, Lueloff and Friedman sponsored a family of 14 from Vietnam after the Vietnam War ended.
Lueloff’s hobbies included collecting rings and ashtrays, and spending time at antique malls, where she bought and sold antiques. She also enjoyed raising sheep, llamas and miniature goats at the couple’s farm in Wisconsin.
She and Friedman were very involved with the lecture series of the Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning.
Friedman died in 2023. There are no other immediate survivors.
A celebration of life service will be held in Wisconsin.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
