Dorothy Collin covered Congress and coauthored the Tribune’s “INC.” gossip column during a long career in which she wrote about a wide range of subjects with insight and wit.
“Dorothy had a lot of premier assignments and was a great Washington correspondent,” said former Tribune Publisher and Editor-in-Chief R. Bruce Dold. “But the most interesting match might have come when she joined the Tribune’s popular, personality-driven INC. column. She knew all the political players and fed the column with her knowledge and sources and that great sense of humor.”
Collin, 85, died of complications from a collapsed lung Jan. 22 at Glenbrook Hospital in Glenview, said her nephew, Philip Collin. She had been a Lincoln Park resident for the past two decades.
Born Dorothy Sullivan in Denver, Collin was adopted as a child by her mother’s second husband and took on his surname of Collin. She grew up in north suburban Golf and graduated from the now-shuttered Niles East High School. She went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa, where she was the city editor for the Daily Iowan student newspaper and also co-edited the Daily Iowan magazine.
She worked for a time for a paper in Florida before joining Chicago’s American, a newspaper owned by the Tribune Co. that in 1969 became the tabloid Chicago Today. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was one of eight national conventions she covered in her career.
She gained attention with a profile of social activist and civil rights leader Julian Bond, whom Collin followed on a whirlwind speaking tour in 1969. Bond was just 29 at the time, and decades away from his eventual longtime tenure as chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but Collin correctly deduced that Bond had an impressive future ahead of him.
“Going with him to a speech, (through) a crowd, is like tagging after the Beatles, or maybe James Brown or the Bobby Kennedy of 1966,” Collin wrote.
In 1974, the Tribune absorbed Chicago Today, and Collin started writing a column simply called “People,” about noteworthy personalities both in Chicago and around the U.S. She was part of a press junket interviewing actor Warren Beatty after the release of the film “Shampoo,” while other subjects included profiling a meter reader, describing the work done by a video dating service and a wry look at the value of honorary college degrees.
In 1976, Collin began writing her own column, “Close-up with Dorothy Collin,” which took a look at serious issues such as domestic abuse. At the start of 1981, Collin moved to Washington to work in the Tribune’s D.C. bureau, covering Congress at the commencement of a new presidential administration. One of her colleagues was future Tribune Managing Editor Jim O’Shea, who at that time was the back-up reporter on Capitol Hill.
“Dorothy taught me how to write a story about the give and take needed to get legislation passed. ‘You need to say who won and who lost real high in the story,’ she told me, schooling me (on) how Congress worked,” O’Shea recalled.
“She could zero in on who was worth knowing and who was legislative furniture. Most of all, though, she made work fun with her witty and, at times, snarky comments about those she covered or even those she observed,” O’Shea said.
George de Lama, who worked in Washington and also went on to become a Tribune managing editor, said Collin was “warm, sweet, wickedly funny, assiduously astute and she was really diligent about learning her craft and learning her material.”
“She was a fearless and highly competent woman who always moved very confidently in what then was still very much a man’s world,” de Lama said.
De Lama noted that Collins knew all the “lions of the Senate and the men who ran the House” in the mid-1980s, and “she had their respect, and most days, their grudging affection.”
James Warren, a former Tribune Washington bureau chief and later a managing editor, called Collin “a pro’s pro with range, and a persistently upbeat spirit.”
“When newspapers were like great department stores, with subject experts on every floor, Dorothy was a politics department expert,” Warren wrote in an email. “She could write incisively about the inner workings of the U.S. Senate, a gripping feature about a tragedy or a happy-go-lucky travel story, and laugh at herself, and the world, when apt.”
Tribune “Answer Angel” columnist Ellen Warren competed against Collin when Warren was with the Chicago Daily News and then worked alongside her for the Tribune on Capitol Hill.
“Dorothy embodied the very best of old-school Chicago journalism — tough, cynical, endlessly curious, work hard, play hard,” Warren said. “She was a living, breathing encyclopedia of political Chicago and a hard-charging reporter when I watched her in action on Capitol Hill in Washington.”
In 1989, Collin returned to Chicago and joined the Tribune’s editorial board. A year later, she was tapped to coauthor the Tribune’s INC. gossip column with Kathy O’Malley.
During her INC. years, the column headlined with topics such as White House correspondents’ dinners, tussles between then-state House Speaker Mike Madigan and then-Gov. Jim Edgar, then-President Bill Clinton’s inauguration and acclimation to Washington, the naming of the State of Illinois Center after former Gov. Jim Thompson, and then-Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun’s relationship with her campaign manager, Kgosie Matthews.
“She was so knowledgeable — her whole life was reading politics and talking politics,” said Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed, a former INC. columnist and a longtime friend and traveling companion of Collin’s. “She had this way of (telling) a story as if you wanted to be a part of it — she immediately made you feel smart, and would bring you into this world of explanation that was not braggadocio, not that she knew more than everybody else, but you did sort of know that she knew more than everybody else. It was an amazing art — she would have all our fellow traveling companions in the palm of her hand.”
In 1994, Collin moved to the newsroom to return to covering politics, and in particular the state’s gubernatorial race that November. She retired the following year.
Collin traveled extensively to out of the way destinations such as Libya, India and Jordan. She took a solo trip to Afghanistan in 2008, surviving an accident in which her vehicle flipped and wound up in a ditch.
“An intrepid traveler, she embraced life with an adventurous spirit and was truly unafraid of anything,” said Leslie Hindman, a frequent travel companion. “My favorite memories were of a trip to Libya weeks before the Arab Spring went down. Dorothy and Mike (Sneed) were afraid of nothing. Another time (in Paris) she insisted on going to the Arab quarter where cars were on fire and she walked around interviewing people who were protesting — for fun.”
“Dorothy had been everywhere,” Sneed said. “She talked the world, she traveled the world.”
Collin leaves no immediate survivors.
A celebration of life is being planned for this summer.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
