Pioneering Courier woman reporter Ranstrom dies

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Surrounded by male colleagues, Verla Ranstrom works at her desk in the former Courier-News building on Lake Street in Elgin during the 1960s. | Photo courtesy~Phillip Ranstrom

Updated: March 4, 2012 8:09AM

Verla Ranstrom, who covered World War II before becoming one of the few female news reporters in the Fox Valley during the 1960s, has died in California, her family reported this week.

Her son, Chicago TV documentary producer Phillip Ranstrom, said she died Dec. 21 at her daughter’s home in Tarzana, Calif. She was 92.

She had worked at The Courier-News from 1960 until 1976, mainly covering goings-on in the Kane County courts and county government. She had continued living in her home on Standish Street in Elgin until she broke her shoulder in a fall in August 2011. A letter to the editor written by her was published in The Courier-News as recently as September 2010.

Ranstrom’s longstanding reporting on one beat she knew well set a pattern for such future female Courier-News journalists of the ’70s and ’80s. They included Marian Gallery, daughter of the admiral who captured the German submarine U-505, who covered McHenry County; Mercedes Meyers, who covered Carpentersville for many years; and Jane Glenn Haas, who began as a woman’s page writer but ended up winning awards for political coverage.

Phillip Ranstrom said his mother was born Verla Mae Crawford on May 6, 1919, and was raised in Harrisburg, Ill., the daughter of a coal miner and farmer. Reading was her escape from the monotony and isolation of her simple, rural life, he said. She climbed trees so she could secretly read the books she’d collected — an activity her mother tried to discourage.

But her passion for words and ideas prevailed and, in 1940, she took the little bit of money she could gather, hopped on a train with 5 cents in her shoe and got off at the University of Illinois in Champaign. She left the university just prior to graduating to cover the liberation of France from the Nazis, for the San Francisco Herald and AP Newswire, then returned to the United States and worked as a reporter at the Bloomington Pantagraph. Later, she worked for the San Francisco Herald and AP Newswire, where she covered the end of World War II from Paris, Phillip said.

Eventually, she moved to Los Angeles, where she met Terrell Ranstrom, a professional musician and singer billed as the world’s fastest six-string guitarist. They got married and landed in Oroville, Calif., where their children, Phillip and Melodie, were born. They later ran a boarding house in Pocatello, Idaho.

Courts reporter

Divorced in 1960, Ranstrom put her two children on a train and moved to Elgin because her mother then was living there and working as a nurse at what is now called the Elgin Mental Health Center.

Within a week, Phillip said, she landed a job as a reporter at The Courier-News and then moved her family into their own home.

“She was one of the first people I met when I started there in 1972,” said former Courier-News Managing Editor Mike Bailey.

“She covered the Kane County courthouse and, like a good reporter, she knew judges by their first names and could walk into any courtroom at any time and immediately command the respect of everyone present. She had a nose for a good story and a passion for getting the facts. She was compassionate and fair but could not be intimidated when she wanted the truth. She was truly old school.”

In 1965, Copley Newspapers, which then owned The Courier-News, awarded Ranstrom the Copley Ring of Truth Award for a series of stories about pollution in the Fox River.

“Having grown up on a farm with crops, animals, clean air and water all around her, having a respect for nature was a central part of who she was,” Phillip said.

She communicated regularly with the environmental activist known as The Fox, a secret Robin Hood-like figure who was famous for dumping buckets of sewage into the offices of local polluters.

But in 1976, he said, she was forced into early retirement during a disagreement with the newspaper’s management team.

“At just over 5 feet tall, Verla championed the little guy’and the smaller things around us that most people missed. She was courageous, an adventurer and traveler, a non-conformist, ahead of her time,”” Phillip said.

In her later years, he said, his mother continued to read voraciously, did some writing, collected antiques and worked in her garden.