20 years at Daily Herald, helping clubs get their news published

For nearly 20 years, a pair of writers in the Daily Herald's Suburban Living section organized a seminar for local club officers to learn how to write up and submit their news.

Doris Mildred McClellan and Marianne Scott had been classmates and journalism majors at the University of Illinois together before joining forces again in the late 1950s at the Daily Herald.

Their annual "seminar" drew 500 women, who were treated to everything from a fashion show featuring garments made from sections of the newspaper, to gifts and even singing performances -- all designed by Mrs. McClellan and Scott.

"Both were real cut-ups," says Mrs. McClellan's daughter Linda Wilson of Lakewood, Colo. "But they were effective in getting people to participate in their local newspaper."

Mrs. McClellan had lived in Mount Prospect since 1957, and recently Schaumburg. She died Sunday at the age of 88.

Together with Scott, the pair realized they needed to engage readers to be the newspaper that residents turned to for information about their local communities.

"We were the faces of the newspaper," Scott says. "Everyone knew us."

They wrote up club news, weddings and engagements, and helped process submitted recipes for the food editor.

"We had to rewrite everything because in those days, it all came in handwritten," Scott says. "We heard from 92 clubs a week. I know because one time I counted all of them."

The pair retired together in 1980, after seeing the paper move from a weekly to a daily, and advance from using typewriters to word processing computers in the former downtown Arlington Heights newsroom.

Mrs. McClellan balanced her newspaper work with raising a family in Mount Prospect. She and her husband, Charles, who founded and served as the first executive director of the Lattof YMCA in Des Plaines, had three children.

"My mother loved working for a community newspaper," Wilson adds. "She recognized the importance of working with groups and local people, and saw the opportunity to disseminate their good news."

Besides her daughter, Mrs. McClellan is survived by another daughter, Gail (Allan) Bartz of Missouri City, Texas; and her daughter-in-law, Kay McClellan of Streamwood. Her son, Thomas McClellan, an Arlington Heights-based real estate attorney, died in October. Mrs. McClellan also leaves seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Funeral services will take place at 11 a.m. today at Trinity United Methodist Church, 605 W. Golf Road in Mount Prospect.