AL FITZPATRICK AND SUSAN MANGO CURTIS
Funeral led to a reunion
A funeral turned into a BJ reunion for Susan Mango Curtis.
The funeral was for Mango’s father-in-law, Jim Rivers.
I’ll let Mango explain the rest:
“I
was in Akron this week for the funeral of my father-in-law, Jim Rivers, and had
a pleasure of taking 94-year-old Al Fitzpatrick out to dinner with Socrates. It
was absolutely a pleasure to be able to talk with Al about Knight-Ridder.”
In 1956 executive editor Ben Maidenburg
hired Al as the first person of color in the BJ newsroom with about 600
employees. Ben was big on reclamation projects, too, like hiring me even though
I was blackballed by Dayton Daily News editor Jim Fain, nationally known
columnist, for my union activities. Ben simply said, “You were there 13 years;
it was their fault. Pick a side and stick with it.”
So I became State Desk editor Pat Englehart’s
assistant editor alongside Harry Liggett, who founded this BJ Alums blog and
turned it over to me when he knew he was dying.
Al was a Kent State Journalism School
graduate. He rose to managing editor at the BJ, the first of his pigmentation
to reach that rank in a metropolitan newspaper.
As for Mango, she was assistant managing
editor at the BJ, Northwestern University professor, and at the Tallahassee
Democrat. She came from Savannah, Georgia and wound up in Chicago.
In 2021 Mango received the National
Association of Black Journalists-Visual Task Force Legacy Award.
In 2020 Mango was named Black
Journalists’ Education Journalist of the year.
In 2019 she received the Society
for News Design’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Mango is a 1981 graduate of the
Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and a 1977 graduate of
Great Mills High School in Lexington Park, Maryland.
Her career includes art director for
the National Rifle Association, where she designed American Marksman magazine.
