When Steve Lord “made deadline” on Friday for the last time as a Beacon-News reporter, he likely also made history.
With almost 47 years under his belt covering Aurora and other Fox Valley communities, the 69-year-old journalist is unofficially the newspaper’s longest-serving editorial employee.
“I don’t know if I have the resources to prove it,” said John Jaros, executive director of the Aurora Historical Society. “But I have a strong feeling he is probably the longest-running reporter … and it makes sense because that’s a heck of a lot of years.”
A lot indeed. Especially in a business known for chewing up and spitting out employees, as too many of us have seen happen right under our news noses.
The significance of Steve’s nearly five decades at The Beacon-News cannot be overstated, if for no other reason than the institutional knowledge he brought to this role – skills and experiences that not only defined his credibility as a reporter but provided valuable information about this community he could pass along to hundreds of colleagues who came after him.
As long as I can remember, for example, editors turned to Steve when a new hire came into the newsroom and was required to go on that introductory city tour.
“Few people in the world know the Aurora and Fox Valley community as well or care about it as deeply as Steve Lord,” said former Beacon-News publisher Rick Nagel, who realizes the value of a great reporter and gifted writer who has accumulated a “lifetime’s worth of local news coverage.”
Steve’s own start at The Beacon was in January 1978. Fresh out of J-school at the University of Missouri, he figured he’d work this job for a year or two and move on. But as he puts it, “it seems life had a different idea.”
At that time, Aurora was in the throes of a depressed economy based on the general decline in manufacturing in America, and officials were tasked with trying to do things locally to combat regional and national issues, he recalls.
Things went from bad to worse when gangs turned many of the city’s neighborhoods into those proverbial mean streets. And as the city’s murder rate soared, reporters “had to be careful how we reported gang incidents, even to what kind of photos we printed,” for fear of stories being used as recruiting tools by the gangs, Steve points out.
Under every administration this seasoned journalist had a front row seat watching – and reporting on – Aurora’s clean-up job that ever-so-gradually bolstered its image and reputation.
“I tell people who worked with me in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s who have left town and gone onto other pursuits that they would not recognize Aurora of the 2010s and 2020s,” he insists. “Many people who criticize Aurora today do not understand where it came from. It does not mean things are perfect, but it does mean Aurora has shown the ability to pick itself up, to address issues and to improve.
“Aurora is the embodiment of a life truism: People looking for perfection are often disappointed; those who look for improvement and progress find some sense of satisfaction.”
Here it should be pointed out that Steve did not just cover Aurora, and in fact over the decades reported all over the Beacon’s circulation area, including Yorkville, Oswego, Geneva, Batavia, St. Charles and Plano, and as a cub reporter, his hometown of Naperville, where The Beacon-News once had an office.
In all, he covered 18 mayors up and down the Fox Valley – starting with Naperville’s Chet Rybicki, then Aurora’s Jack Hill – and eight board chairmen in Kane, DuPage and Kendall counties. He also interviewed plenty of governors and other political bigwigs, including a one-on-one with then-U.S. Sen. Chuck Percy, a one-time GOP darling and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, in the early 1980s.
There was never a dearth of compelling subject matter as “we live in a big, populous, diverse area, which has made the storytelling here interesting and varied,” he notes.
But just as Steve covered a community’s transforming terrain, he also witnessed plenty of change in the news business. Those include conversions from electric typewriters loudly clickity-clacking on real paper to word processors and then personal computers, and from cast metal typesetting to software that allowed newspapers to be laid out and printed on PC-based systems.
Also over those decades, he experienced that seismic shift from solely print-based distribution to a digital platform, and from a family-owned business to a hedge fund conglomerate, all of which shrunk the newsroom.
Still, as Steve points out, there are things that remain true about journalism – reporters are still tasked with getting as much information as possible, accurately and quickly, whether it’s going online, on air or in print.
“Journalists want to be first, and quick, but it’s more important to be right,” he says. “Credibility is the main thing you have going for you, and if you lose it, it’s very hard to get it back.”
It’s important to note that in addition to his reporting skills, Steve is a talented writer, who won many awards for features as well as for news stories, some of which also made history. Like when he and photographer Donnell Collins made that remarkable 1997 trip to Alabama with Aurora’s late iconic youth mentor Fred Rodgers, who grew up in a bigoted South, to confront and to forgive one-time ardent segregationist George Wallace.
Steve was also the first reporter on the scene when Aurora was thrust under an international spotlight after a shooter opened fire in a near West Side warehouse in 2019, killing five Pratt employees and wounding five police officers.
While most days for a reporter are fairly routine, “there’s that 5 to 10% chance that every day, at any time, your day could change on a dime … and Pratt is the perfect example,” Steve says, adding that he started that day thinking all he had to do was write a few stories he’d already done the reporting on.
Instead, Steve stood for seven hours in the freezing cold outside the Henry Pratt Co. building, gathering all the news he could while also waiting on more information that would change lives forever.
“Once when I was speaking to a college journalism class, someone asked me how you become an expert on so many things. I told her, you don’t. I’m not an expert on very much at all,” he insists. “The key is to try to identify who the experts are, talk to them and write what they say.
“I cannot tell you how many stories I’ve done over the years where I would rack my brains thinking, there has to be another side to this, I just have to find it.”
Throughout his years as a Beacon staffer, Steve was known as smart, politically astute and an extremely fast but accurate reporter, which made him an editor’s dream.
“It would be difficult to find anyone with a deeper knowledge of the city and its residents,” Beacon-News Managing Editor Dan Cassidy said. “Along with being a great reporter, he has also been a great person to work with – smart, funny and always willing to share his knowledge to help others.”
I know firsthand Steve’s decision to say farewell to a career he loved did not come easy. He pushed through a couple of enticing buyout offers to keep writing news coming out of Aurora City Hall, a beat he covered off and on over the years including for about the past 10 years.
“People have been asking me why I’m retiring, and I do not have a solid answer, other than, it’s time,” he said. “It’s a combination of things – age, health, but mostly a desire to do some things other than what I’ve been doing.”
While he may have written his last staff byline for this paper, there’s a good chance you will see the name Steve Lord under some freelance stories in the future. Which might not add to his unofficial Beacon record, but is good news for a community that has come to depend on a reporter who knows the local landscape like the back of his hand.
“In his evolution as a City Hall reporter, Steve wanted to know everything – about what had happened before, what was happening now and what will happen after that,” said Auroran Tom Johnson, who retired in 2012 after 40 years as an editor at The Beacon-News.
“More than any other reporter I’ve seen, Steve knew the people behind the stories, their opinions, their reservations,” he continued. “He was immersed in his beat … a thorough professional reporter who never stopped asking questions.
“That’s what made him so valuable to the paper. He is not replaceable.”
Those of us who have been privileged to work with Steve know he’s got lots of stories about the stories he’s written over the years. But when I asked him for some final thoughts from this historic career, my colleague and good friend was brief and self-effacing.
“The stories I like the best are the ones that get a reaction,” he finally tells me. “And when people say what I wrote made a difference, it makes me feel good.”
dcrosby@tribpub.com
