They are people who made impacts big and small. They struggled, rejoiced, achieved, redeemed, dreamed. Here are a few people who made their mark on Chicago in different ways before they died in 2025.
Tony Fitzpatrick, artist; b. 1958
His celebrated work as an artist — from collages to essays — held a prism to the city. Mr. Fitzpatrick grew up in Lombard, the son of a funeral home worker who got on his case about finding direction in his life. The pressure campaign abated following a contentious car ride with his dad in which the younger Fitzpatrick, in his 20s at the time, proclaimed that art was his life. “Finally I said, ‘Look, you need to listen to me and clean whatever it is in your ears out of your ears,’” he recalled in an interview with his alma mater, College of DuPage. “I’m going to tell you the only thing I want to do seriously is this, and that’s all I’m going to do.” His dad pulled the car over. “Half pissed, half relieved, he said, ‘OK, then do it like your life depends on it, not one step backwards.’” Read more.
Ron Dean, actor; b. 1938
The actor was often cast as a hardened police detective, as he was in “The Fugitive“ and “The Dark Knight.” His life was a stunning second chance success after an equally stunning derailment. In 1955, Mr. Dean, 16 at the time, fatally shot Chicago Police Officer Albert Brown after escaping from a North Side lockup and finding a gun in the lockup watchman’s desk drawer. He had a troubled childhood marked by petty crime and bouts in state reform schools. When police asked why he shot Brown, Mr. Dean replied, “I don’t know. He came at me, and I shot him,” according to a Sun-Times story. After 12 years in prison, he found acting and became a beloved fixture in the city’s acting community. He performed with a Second City improv troupe and was cast in productions at the Goodman and Steppenwolf before finding roles on the big screen. “He was a kid who panicked and made a dreadful mistake, and he knew it all his life,” said his longtime friend and companion Maggie Neff. “He felt like he got what he deserved.” Read more.
Sister Jean Dolores Bertha Schmidt, nun; b. 1919
The beloved Catholic nun skyrocketed to fame at 98, with a maroon and gold scarf warming her neck, as chaplain of the Loyola University Chicago men’s basketball team during its Cinderella run to the 2018 NCAA Final Four. But she was a local icon long before she gained national status. Even at 103, she rose daily at 5 a.m., returned emails, read news on her iPad, said her prayers and was in her office in the student center on Loyola’s Rogers Park campus by 10 a.m. She greeted students each morning and, if she saw a student sitting alone in the cafeteria, she’d be sure to stop by and strike up a conversation. She valued student interaction above all else. It was “like oxygen to me,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir “Wake Up with Purpose!: What I’ve Learned in My First Hundred Years.” Read more.
Rosarina Rizzato, widow of slain Chicago Police Officer; b. 1939
She mourned, but heroically carried on, after her husband, Chicago Police Officer Anthony Rizzato, and his partner, Sgt. Jim Severin, were killed by a sniper while walking outside the Cabrini-Green housing complex in the summer of 1970. Mrs. Rizzato was 31 and had a 6-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter. She never dated again, devoted her life to her kids and maintained an open-door policy at her North Center home with friends, neighbors and Catholic nuns constantly sitting down for coffee and homemade cookies. Her husband’s police star was displayed in her living room not far from a painting she had made of him in uniform. “She wasn’t bitter,” said her son, also named Anthony. “Our father’s legacy was helping others, so we needed to move on and do the same.” Read more.
Richard Garwin, physicist; b. 1928
He was a whiz kid physicist working at the University of Chicago when, at 23, he was tapped by the federal government to accomplish something no one else had been able to: build a second-generation atomic weapon. He succeeded. In the decades that followed, he advised the U.S. government on how to help keep the world from blowing itself up. The hydrogen bomb scared a new level of living daylights out of people. It could provide a force hundreds, even thousands of times greater than the atom bombs the world had come to know after the United States used them on Japan in World War II. Read more.
Pat Scala, beef guy; b. 1947
He spread the gospel of Italian beef. In the 1970s and 1980s, he approached hundreds of hot dog and burger joints that already were getting their Italian sausage from his family’s meat wholesale operation — Scala Packing Co. — and pitched them on the virtues of adding Scala’s Italian beef to their menus. To ease the transition, he basically taught Italian Beef 101. Trim like this. Slice like this. Add the all-important herbs and spices to make the juice for the sandwiches so they’d come au jus. “Every Italian beef stand owes him a little respect. Hats off to him,” said Chris Zucchero, the second-generation owner of Mr. Beef, which for decades purchased beef from Mr. Scala. Scala Packing Co., which was located on the Near North Side, closed about a decade ago. Read more.
Bob Irving, architectural cruise founder; b. 1931
He’s credited with founding the Chicago Architecture Center’s river cruise. It offered walking and bus tours, but the floating variety came along by chance in 1983 when a group in town for a furniture convention asked the center if a docent could accompany them on a cruise of the river aboard a privately chartered boat. The answer was “yes,” and Mr. Irving, an accomplished English professor and architecture buff — witty, occasionally curmudgeonly and always entertaining — would be their guy. Things went great, until a bridge closure prevented the boat, which had a tall profile, from returning to port. Passengers disembarked and took cabs home. Misadventure aside, the potential was clear. “After that we knew we had something good, and Bob pitched it and created the river cruise for us and fine-tuned it into what it’s become today,” said Lynn Osmond, a former president of the center. As the originator of the tour, Mr. Irving was granted more leeway in his unique description of buildings, like comparing the Mather Tower at 75 E. Wacker Drive to a giant phallic symbol. Read more.
Curtis Rowe, hotel housekeeper; b. 1963
Everyone in Chicago should have someone like Curtis Rowe at their workplace. He listened to “Happy” by Pharell Williams every day on the train and bus from Berwyn to the Embassy Suites hotel off the Magnificent Mile, where he worked in housekeeping. His colleagues knew when he arrived from the smell of the Salisbury steak or ribs he would reheat in the microwave for breakfast. It made them smile, as did most interactions with Mr. Rowe. “He was the only guy in a housekeeping department of all women, and he was a gentleman, the uncle of the crew, the father,” said his colleague Maranda Bradford. One endearing foible: He could never center the pillows on a bed. They were always skewed to whichever side he was standing on. Read more.
Dr. John Baptiste McClellan III, doctor; b. 1951
He was a trumpet-playing orthopedic surgeon who loved to spread joy by playing for staff and patients in hospital hallways, especially around Christmas. He wore tailored suits and drove luxury sports cars, always with a trumpet in the trunk. He listened to jazz while performing reconstructive surgery on knees, hips and shoulders. “He just had a love of music and a gentle soul,” his friend Dr. Ari Mintz said. Known as Dr. Johnny Mac to resident physicians, Dr. McClellan — a graduate of Wendell Phillips High School — worked at a number of Chicago and suburban hospitals over the years, last practicing medicine at Franciscan Health Olympia Fields. Read more.
Jimbo Levato, bar owner; b. 1936
Mr. Levato owned Jimbo’s Lounge in Bridgeport. And he was a gem. He wore loafers, a white tank top, short shorts and a black flat cap every day, regardless of weather. There was no bar nearer to the gates of the White Sox ballpark, and he was an unapologetic Cubs fan. At his annual golf outing he brought one club, a driver. He kept his signature tan by sunning himself in a lounge chair outside his tavern. “If it was 50 degrees, didn’t matter, he’d put his lounge chair right in front of the tavern and just lay there,” his son Mike Levato said. The tavern represented a second chapter in life for Mr. Levato, who worked for nearly 30 years as a dock hand at a South Side trucking company before he opened Jimbo’s in 1983. The bar closed in 2008. “It was just a neighborhood bar, nothing fancy,” his son said. Read more.
Dr. Glenn ‘Doc’ Bynum, boxing supporter; b. 1935
He served as the volunteer ringside physician for Chicago Golden Gloves boxing matches for nearly 60 years. With an easy smile and an encouraging “give it your best shot” manner, he checked the hands, pupils and heartbeats of thousands of fighters before they stepped into the ring. He wore a gold pendant of two boxing gloves around his neck and preferred driving a Cadillac, which in recent years had license plates that read “BOXING 9.” Dr. Bynum was also a family physician and obstetrician on the West Side, where he delivered more than 4,000 babies. He moved from Bronzeville to River Forest in 1974 to shorten the commute. To circumvent discrimination, Dr. Bynum asked a white colleague and friend to buy a house, then sell it to him. Read more.