So passionate about and devoted to news was Bernard Judge that it was not hard to believe that ink flowed through his veins. An esteemed reporter and editor, Judge was a profound influence on both the publications he worked for and a generation of journalists.
Bernard Martin Judge, known to everyone as “Bernie,” died early Friday at his home in Chicago surrounded by his family. He was 79 years old and had faced his inevitable end with typical mettle, sending an email in late April to four friends on the staff of the Tribune.
It read, “I have inoperable cancer in my pancreas and liver. The goal from now on is to remain comfortable. That’s it. Hope my next note is sunnier.”
There was no next note.
“He died peacefully,” said Kimbeth Judge, his wife of more than 50 years. “That was great but almost ironic. When I married Bernie, I married a storm. By that, I mean our life together was always exciting, tumultuous and full of the unexpected. Through it all we lovingly raised three children, who are the best of both of us.”
Bernard Judge was born Jan. 6, 1940 and raised on the city’s South Side. He was one of the four children of Bernard A. and Catherine Halloran. His father, one of 15 siblings, had served as a messenger for Irish rebels during the 1916 Easter uprising, coming to Chicago a decade later. He was an inspiration to his son, who once said, “My dad never had a thing when he grew up and only had a sixth grade education. He took night classes here to earn a high school diploma and finally became an insurance salesman.”
Bernie was 15 years old and a freshman at Leo High School when his father transferred to offices in Oak Park and his family, which then included Bernie’s brother Larry and sisters Mary and Catherine, moved to the west suburbs. Bernie attended Fenwick High School, working part time at a grocery store to help pay his $200 annual tuition.
He would decades later be the first recipient of Fenwick’s annual Accipiter Award in 1997 and was later inducted into the Catholic school’s Hall of Fame.
In a speech at the school in 2018, Judge recalled for a group of students that his sophomore English teacher had planted the seeds of his eventual journalism career by telling him that he “had better than better-than-average observation skills.”
After graduating in 1957, he attended what he once referred to as “a variety of colleges,” among them the University of Dayton and John Carroll University in Ohio, before transferring to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he majored in English.
In 1962, he was drafted into the Army and sent to a Nike missile site in Pennsylvania where, he later said, “I wasn’t doing much that was adventurous. I was the battery clerk, the security clerk, the mail clerk and I ran the PX (Post Exchange). I was ordered to Vietnam in 1963, but the orders were canceled days later because I didn’t have enough time left in the service to be sent overseas.”
In 1965, he went to work for the City News Bureau, taking a 50 percent cut in the salary he had been making during six months working for U.S. Steel's South Works on the Southeast Side.
His first journalism task was as a “copy boy,” a junior worker who did menial tasks, but he soon rose to the ranks of reporter.
He had already met through family members a college student named Kimbeth Wehrli. After dating for more than a year, they married on July 9, 1966, and eventually settled in Barrington, where they raised their children, Kelly, Bernard R. and Jessica.
“His ambition was motivating,” said Jessica Judge Schott, who lives with her husband John and their two children, Henry and Ava, and operates a Pilates studio in Glenview.
“His legendary work ethic, integrity and humility inspired me at every single turn,” said Kelly Judge Goldberg, a teacher and consultant living with her husband Michael in Deerfield, their two children Daniel and Isabella off at college.
Son Bernard, who is in the recycling business and lives in Oak Park with wife Gina and their son Declan, said, “My dad had no time for phonies.”
Around the time of his marriage Bernie was hired by the Tribune, where he would distinguish himself over the next 17 years, first with his energetic coverage of state and federal courts and his writing about state government and politics.
In 1979, he became the paper’s city editor, in charge of assigning dozens of reporters to cover the daily news in all its wild and varied facets. One of the reporters under Judge’s charge was Bruce Dold, now the Tribune’s editor and publisher.
“He ran a no-nonsense newsroom,” said Dold. “If you worked for him, you got the story right and you got the story fast because he would not accept anything short of that. You did not want to disappoint him.”
Little wonder then that actor Ed Asner, researching the role of Lou Grant, the gruff-but-honorable newspaper editor he was to play in the eponymous television series, spent days at the paper studying the styles and mannerisms of Judge and his editor colleague Don Agrella.
Another person in Judge’s stable of reporters was former Tribune reporter David Axelrod, now a noted political consultant and commentator. He wrote of Judge in his bestselling 2016 book, “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics,” recalling the day he started at the Tribune: “The first to extend his hand to me was Bernie Judge, the young dark-haired city editor, who would become a great mentor and lifelong friend.”
On the wall of Judge’s offices hung a framed quotation, attributed to A.A. Dornfeld, the longtime night editor at City News: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” During Judge’s Tribune tenure, two investigative reporting projects he directed won the Pulitzer Prize. He later served as a juror for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize awards.
“Bernie was one of the most ethical journalists I’ve known,” said Dold. “He is a legend, a great mentor and great friend. Everyone, in the newsrooms, at City Hall, in the courtrooms, deeply respected him.”
Judge left the Tribune to return to his old stomping grounds, acting as editor and general manager of City News in 1983, until moving to the Sun-Times in 1984 to become its metropolitan editor.
Tribune entertainment editor Scott Powers was a colleague of Judge’s at the Sun-Times and said, “I was lucky to work with Bernie on a number of projects. Bernie not only practiced his craft with clear-eyed professionalism and unwavering passion for finding the truth behind any story, he taught those lessons every day to people like me.”
Those were tumultuous newspaper years, fueled in part by the purchase of the Sun-Times by media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1984. That precipitated a confrontation between Judge and columnist Mike Royko, who had left the Sun-Times to work for the Tribune upon Murdoch’s purchase of the tabloid.
There are various versions of what incited a modest (if now legendary) encounter one night at that hangout for news folk, the Billy Goat Tavern. Judge referred to it as “stupid insult-trading that got out of hand” and owner Sam Sianis said, “It was nothing really. It only took a few minutes and then Bernie and Mike they were talking nicely again.”
Judge would leave the Sun-Times after four years to become editor and vice president of Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, a venerable publication serving the legal profession since the 1850s. He later also became editor and publisher of the monthly Chicago Lawyer magazine.
“The paper has bound many generations of lawyers together. It is extremely well led by Bernard Judge, who has been a beacon of excellence wherever he's been. And never has that beacon shone more brightly than at the Law Bulletin. The expansion of coverage under Bernie's stewardship was evident," said 7th U.S. Court Circuit of Appeals Chief Judge Joel Flaum.
Former Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice, the late Thomas Fitzgerald, said, “He has endeared himself to hundreds, if not thousands, of lawyers because of his integrity. He understood it wasn’t only getting the story, it was getting it right.”
He remained a mentor, understanding that, he said, “As a young reporter, there’s nothing better than being able to talk to a guy who’s been there."
Judge retired in 2007 but he did not stop working. He was named a non-lawyer Hearing Board officer for the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission, serving as a trial judge in lawyer disciplinary cases. He sat on the board of Catholic Charities and chairman if the Constitutional Rights Foundation. He was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame, received a lifetime achievement award from the Chicago Headline Club, garnered the Excellence in Journalism award from the City Club of Chicago, and received the James C. Craven Freedom of the Press Award from the Illinois Press Association.
In 2010 he co-authored, with Neal Samors, “Chicago's Lake Shore Drive: Urban America's Most Beautiful Roadway,” a lavishly illustrated history of the byway that snakes along Lake Michigan.
Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown, another of Judge’s protégés, favorably reviewed the book then and Friday on Twitter “reviewed” the man, writing, “This one hurts. Bernie was one of the best, a most worthy Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame inductee. And while it might embarrass him, the last newsman who could fight his way out of a bar. … Thank you for everything you did for me.”
Tribune columnist John Kass said, “Bernie was wonderfully old school. I was a copy boy when I worked for him and he made a lasting impression. He cared deeply about the Tribune and beating the competition and that didn’t stop even in his retirement. I’d see him on the street and we’d get into great conversations about the news of the day. He still cared, deeply.”
Judge took special pride in and was energetically supportive of his wife’s later-in-life-literary career. He served as her editor, sometimes to the point of, as Kimbeth put it, “mild marital strife.” He accompanied her to book store readings and radio interviews for her first published work, 2014’s short story collection, “Mothers and Others,” and her 2015 novel “The FlipSide.”
He also served as a go-to voice for obituary writers and was well aware of that sorrowful stature, telling a reporter, when he was only 65, that he believed he had become such a valuable resource because, “I’m the only one who’s not dead yet.”
Judge is survived by his wife, children and and grandchildren.
A service is set for noon June 22 at St. Giles Catholic Church, 1045 Columbian Ave., Oak Park.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com