Jon Margolis covered politics for the Tribune as a columnist and national correspondent out of Washington and later was based in Chicago, covering sports and writing general news column.
“He was one of the best political reporters the Tribune has ever had,” said former Tribune publisher and editor in chief R. Bruce Dold. “He loved following (campaigns), talking to voters during the day, talking with the (politicians) late into the night. He did the hard work to really understand what was going on in the country, and his writing for the Tribune reflected that.”
Margolis, 83, died of natural causes Jan. 29 at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, Vermont, said his daughter, Katey. He moved to Vermont after retiring from the Tribune in 1995.
Born in Trenton, New Jersey, Margolis received a bachelor’s degree in history from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1962. Always interested in both politics and journalism, Margolis took a job with the Bergen Record in New Jersey and then moved to the Miami Herald, the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire and Newsday in Long Island, New York, where he built a national reputation for his coverage of the Attica prison riot in 1971.
Margolis was Newsday’s Albany, New York, bureau chief before joining the Tribune in 1973 as a national correspondent based in Washington. He covered four presidential elections for the Tribune, and sat on the panel of journalists interviewing vice presidential candidates Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen, alongside NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw and ABC News’ Brit Hume.
After the debate, Margolis wrote a first-person column explaining how he prepared for it.
“No one, it may be assumed, wants to make a fool of himself or herself in front of 50 million people. So a certain amount of planning is required,” he wrote. “You have to have enough questions to last 90 minutes, and you have to know what the other people are going to ask. Otherwise, you run the risk of having prepared nothing but a question that has just been asked and answered, leaving you with the choice of asking it again, sitting there with your mouth full of teeth or trying desperately to think of something else to ask. This is a consummation devoutly to be avoided.”
Margolis also was one of the first in the national news media use the term “gender gap” to describe different voting patterns between men and women. The Tribune in 1996 credited him with coining the phrase, which he first used in print in a February 1982 column that noted “a growing ‘gender gap’ in American politics.”
“Jon was serious about his job and politics, but he really got a kick out of the looniness of it all,” said Dorothy Collin, a retired Tribune political reporter and Washington correspondent.
Former Tribune senior writer Charles M. Madigan praised Margolis saying he avoided “tired political cliches” in his writing.
“I worked beside him at political conventions and on the road, and edited him when I was a news editor in the Washington bureau. He was always a delight to be with, no matter the setting, and he was a delight to edit — short sentences that were right to the point,” Madigan said. “That was a rarity in political writing. And he had a ‘man of the people’ perspective that … worked to his great advantage, because it meant he could talk to anyone. He was important to us.”
In 1989, Margolis moved to Chicago to work as a sports columnist, offering his observations and an occasional churlish remark on events from the World Series to the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and the short-lived Tour de Trump bicycle race, which was sponsored by a future U.S. president.
A year later he took on a general news column with a focus on politics. He also delved into various aspects of life in America, with columns touching on technology, culture and even manners, often with a sardonic flourish.
“Whatever its origins, rudeness has become ubiquitous,” Margolis wrote in January 1995. “It is applauded in situation comedies. It is honored in sports. It is effective in political campaigns. It pervades talk radio. It is so accepted that to oppose it is to risk being accused of stifling free speech.”
Margolis teamed with the late Tribune cartoonist Jeff MacNelly to co-author a paperback book about one of Margolis’ favorite pastimes, fly-fishing. With amusing illustrations and technical recommendations for the first-time fly-fisherman, “How to Fool Fish with Feathers: The Incompleat Guide to Fly-Fishing” was published in 1992. Tribune outdoors columnist John Husar called the book “funny and irreverent, saucy and entertaining.”
Margolis retired from the Tribune in March 1995 and moved to a log cabin in Vermont, to “practice my dry fly (fishing) technique, to bat fungoes to the local kids, and to try to write a couple of books before decrepitude sets in,” he wrote in his farewell column.
He wrote two books: “The Quotable Bob Dole: Witty, Wise and Otherwise,” which was published in 1996, and a work of popular history, “The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964,” which came out in 1999.
Margolis also taught classes as an adjunct instructor at several colleges in Vermont, and he was a regular columnist from 2010 until 2020 for VTDigger, an online news site in Vermont. In his final column, published after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Margolis implored his readers to seek greater understanding across the political divide.
“In the broader world, the body politic seems to have arranged itself into two conflicting tribes, or tribal coalitions, each with its own cable television network, social media outlets, and other sources of information and propaganda,” Margolis wrote. “Safely ensconced in its own cocoon, each group keeps telling itself how wonderful it is and how awful the members of the opposing coalition (are). How’s this for an idea: Every once in a while, some members of both tribes try wondering what’s wrong with them and their own, and try to understand the folks in that other coalition.”
In addition to his daughter, Margolis is survived by his wife of 59 years, Sally; a son, Michael; a sister, Susanna; and a granddaughter.
Services were held.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.