Martin "Marty" Marcus

Marty was born on December 20th, 1933, a third-generation Chicagoan, the son of Meyer Marcus and Mary Schwartz. Marty and his late sister Iris grew up in the Albany Park and Hollywood Park neighborhoods on the north side, where he attended Von Steuben High School before going to college at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ohio State University, and Northwestern University (from which he graduated in 1955). After serving in the U.S. Army, during which he drove an ambulance and wrote for Stars and Stripes, Marty returned to Chicago where in 1959 he married Sue Ann Schuster, whom he first met in Columbus, Ohio. The couple raised a family, settling in Wilmette for 45 years before spending their later retirement in Northfield.

Marty was a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan who attended hundreds of games at Wrigley Field including the 1945 World Series. He loved playing sports too. As a young man, it was Chicago-style softball; as an adult, it was tennis. Other games like bridge, and especially Scrabble, were longtime passions which included many local and national Scrabble tournaments where he often enjoyed a high player ranking. With his innate love of the English language, Marty was a lifelong reader and an accomplished writer. His books include humor, fiction, memoir, and poetry, the best known of which are Yiddish for Yankees and Hollywood Park. When he wasn’t attending short story writing classes at Northwestern, he was running his own writer’s workshops out of his home.

Marty was also a commercial writer in print, radio, and television. Starting at WBBM-AM radio where he wrote comedy sketches for the Gold Coast Show, he went on to a long career as a creative director at Leo Burnett, Needham, Harper & Steers, and other Chicago-based advertising agencies. Among the accounts he worked on were iconic Chicago-based brands like United Airlines and McDonalds.

Marty enjoyed his time away from the office with Sue Ann, taking many vacations in Europe and Mexico as well as closer to home in Wisconsin and Michigan. In the 1980s, they bought a cottage near Land O’Lakes, WI, where they would spend entire summers for more than three decades, enjoying the north woods and entertaining visits from their children, grandchildren, and many friends.

Marty was a great teacher whose children and grandchildren all remember learning something new and fun from him: tennis, fishing, piano, and even driving on the dirt roads around Land O' Lakes. Fishing in Wisconsin is something he had been doing since the 1930s, starting with his own father; music is something that had always surrounded him, from the glee club at Von Steuben to playing piano and singing harmony while organizing entertainment on his Army base in Germany, to enjoying classical, jazz, and opera on his stereo or at Ravinia Park.

Marty maintained deeply held values and was never shy about sharing what he thought or felt about serious issues that affect everyone, as well as those things happening in the world at any given time. In the 1960s, he campaigned successfully to overturn a local ordinance barring Black people from owning or renting homes. In 2012, he traveled daily to Milwaukee to knock on doors for President Obama’s re-election campaign.

Those who knew him understood implicitly his commitment to education and honesty, his respect for science, and his belief in the collective good of humanity, which was as strong as his love of family, fun and humor. Marty was not religious, but he felt very blessed. He loved holiday gatherings, greeting everyone at the door with his big smile and a big hug, and always with a very content look on his face as he looked out onto the dinner table and at his family.

Marty is survived by his wife of 66 years, Sue Ann; along with their children George (Kim), John (Ann), Jane (Jim), and Ted (Lisa); his grandchildren Max, Will, Lucy, Oliver, Sam (Jess), Claire, Michael, Alex (Evan), and Chloe; and great-grandchildren Banba, Barney, and Presley.

A memorial gathering for family and friends will be held in the coming weeks.

In lieu of flowers, donations in Marty’s memory are suggested to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) (www.aclu.org/) or Anti-Defamation League (ADL) (www.adl.org/).