Being a newspaper reporter was not just a job to Pat Butler, it was more of a calling.
In 1987, he won a Peter Lisagor Award, Chicago’s highest honor in journalism, for his series on how the loss of factory jobs put a strain on mental health and alcoholism services in Chicago.
Mr. Butler worked at the time for Lerner Newspapers, which ran dozens of weekly community papers in and around Chicago.
In 1968, Mr. Butler was a Columbia College student freelancing for Lerner when he received an assignment he referred to for the rest of his career as his “baptism” into the business: covering riots that broke out in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
“I found myself crouched beside a squad car with another reporter and cop,” Mr. Butler recalled in a 2016 WGN Radio 720 interview with host Rick Kogan. The trio were hiding from a sniper on the ninth floor of a nearby high-rise that was part of the Cabrini-Green public housing complex. “The nearest round landed about eight, nine feet away,” he said.
After the riots he was hired full time. Months later he again found himself in danger while covering the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
This time he was running from baton-wielding police outside the convention hall, recalled Mr. Butler’s girlfriend, Kathy Hills.
“He ducked into a doorway to hide and there was another man in the doorway, and they started talking and the fella said, ‘Since we’re hiding here together we should introduce ourselves. My name is Winston Churchill.’ So Pat jokingly said, ‘If you’re Winston Churchill, I’m the Earl of Ormond.’ Because that’s a noble Irish title associated with the name Butler. But it turned out this guy was actually Winston Churchill’s grandson who was also working as a journalist covering the convention,” Hills said.
Mr. Butler, who became a fixture of the city’s press corps in a career that spanned more than 50 years, died Thursday from cancer and dementia. He was 83.
“I was too poor to go to law school, I was too immoral to join the clergy, and I had a bad left eye which kept me from becoming an Army officer, so what else does one do in a case like that? They become a newspaperman.” Mr. Butler said during the radio interview. “And I haven’t regretted it for a single moment.”
The story he was most proud of was one he did after a 90-minute interview with former President Jimmy Carter after he got out of office, Hills said.
“He was such a part of Chicago history and just an old-school, shoe-leather reporter who’d go into any sort of dangerous, quirky, crazy situation,” said William S. Bike, associate editor of Gazette Chicago, a community newspaper where Mr. Butler worked in recent years. “And he didn’t drive, he took the CTA.”
Mr. Butler worked for neighborhood papers his entire career.
“He never wanted to go higher. He loved the neighborhood stuff,” Hills said.
“He was not polished, but everybody who met him recognized how brilliant he was, and people are drawn to people who are smart and decent, and he was as decent a guy who has walked this earth,” Hills said.
Mr. Butler was an explorer of the city, a historian and devotee of its nooks and crannies. He wrote three books in recent years about the North Side: “Hidden History of Lincoln Park,” “Hidden History of Ravenswood and Lakeview” and “Hidden History of Uptown & Edgewater.”
He was also a past president of the Ravenswood-Lake View Historical Association.
He also gave tours of Graceland Cemetery and at one point as a young man dated a grand-niece of Mary Todd Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln’s wife, for three years.
Mr. Butler grew up as a member of St. Gertrude Parish in Edgewater. His father was a ”political operative” who had a drinking problem, Hills said. His mother was not able to support him, so she handed care of her son to Maryville Academy, a Catholic organization that cared for and educated abused and abandoned children.
His mother would visit on Sundays when she could, Hills said.
“He was brilliant, but he was pudgy and wore glasses and he got there and was being picked on, but he managed because he was so smart, and all his tormentors eventually became his people,” Hills said.
“He was very grateful to Maryville. He said, ‘I had a roof over my head, a fabulous education and food every day, and that wasn’t guaranteed at home,’” recalled Hills, who began her relationship with Mr. Butler 18 years ago after the two met through Match.com, an online dating service.
“I was older than he was by three months so he called me his cougar,” she said with a laugh.
In addition to Hills, Mr. Butler is survived by his daughter, Kathleen Butler Greenan, and two grandsons.
Prayers will be held at 11:15 a.m. Thursday at Lawrence Funeral Home, 4800 N. Austin Ave., followed by a procession to St. Robert Bellarmine Church, 4646 N. Austin Ave., where a Mass will be held at noon.
