Glenview 83-year-old 'just can't stop writing'
Charles "Chuck" Loebbaka is obsessed.
"I can't stop writing. I edit my emails, even, so they're really good. It's instinctual. I write it and I fix it," he said.
The retired Glenview resident and former village trustee, a newspaper man from way back, Loebbaka has gotten on a serious book-writing roll since he first published one on his friend Irene Hughes, the late psychic, in 2009.
Loebbaka, 83, has written two series of fiction books following a consistent main character. The latest book in his Paris trilogy of historical fiction, "Fate," received "outstanding" evaluations in five writing categories in the 2020 Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards.
Following characters and events from pre- and postwar Europe, the reviewing judge also noted "Fate" included "a fascinating glimpse of the founding of the state of Israel, the likes of which I haven't read since Leon Uris."
Loebbaka will take it.
"No awards," he said, "nice review."
A man who broke into the business 50 years ago by writing obituaries for the Chicago Heights Star at $75 a week, he's not in it for the money. (Granted, while newspaper jobs have diminished since Loebbaka earned his University of Illinois communications degree in 1959, receipts have improved.)
Loebbaka is certainly in it for the long haul - journalism, public relations, even political campaign management until retiring in 2009 after 27 years as Northwestern University's director of media relations. His initial intent was broadcast journalism; he's instead seized upon the written word.
An Evanston native, a request by then-Illinois Treasurer William Scott in 1968 to run his campaign for Illinois attorney general temporarily drew Loebbaka out of one editorial position on the North Shore. That campaign ended successfully.
Another, serving as press secretary for Gov. Richard Ogilvie's reelection bid in 1972, ended with a loss to Dan Walker by less than 1% of the vote, Loebbaka said.
These campaigns helped develop contacts for his career as a novelist.
"I retired from Northwestern and I just kept writing," said Loebbaka, whose wife of 48 years, Diana, died in 2006.
"Lola: the lost memory," "Sparrow: the lost baby" and "Darlin: the lost twin" are a trilogy of noir crime mysteries inevitably solved by private detective Jack Lamont, the surname also given to one of Loebbaka's five cats.
In 2019, he released a compendium of those books, "Kiss Me Goodbye," on Kindle. All his books are paperbacks available for purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
"I planned to write one noir and then ... couldn't stop," he noted, a pattern emerging.
While one can't just go and riff on noir crime without doing some legwork, Loebbaka's Paris trilogy required serious research.
"Love and Death in Paris" (2012), "Paris Orphan: Escape from Evil" (2014) and "Fate" (2018) starts with a couple trying to survive in Europe during the Holocaust. The series introduces young Parisian heroine Hannah Abramov, then follows her throughout Europe, Palestine and Israel from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.
For a time, "Paris Orphan" had been in the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center bookstore.
Loebbaka "knew nothing about the Nazi occupation of France during the Holocaust," he said, until after visiting the second-oldest of his three sons, Jeff, who lived in Paris in 2008 and 2009.
He drew upon sources such as Serge Klarsfeld's "French Children of the Holocaust," which details records of children and their families deported to Nazi death camps. Loebbaka dedicates "Fate" to "a Jewish girl and the 11,000 Jewish children of France who shared her fate in World War II."
He read Tatiana de Rosnay's "Sarah's Key," and to create a German counterpart to Hannah he learned the ugly truth of birthing centers run by Nazis in occupied countries.
"I just kept researching other stuff," Loebbaka said. "It's like a history lesson, really, that no one every taught me."
Naturally, he is exploring a sequel, a continuation of Hannah's experiences.
"I get very attached to these people, and Hannah is my special character," he said.
"She represented, to me, what happened to a lot of French children in the Holocaust, and I just drew her character out of what happened to some of these kids. She was my inspiration for what happened to all these poor children who got killed by the Nazis."
The reward is bringing fictional characters like Hannah to life.
"I'm not in it for fame or money, I'm just in it because it's what I want to do, and I'm a writer," Loebbaka said. "It's a rewarding pastime, a hobby, whatever you want to call it. It's a rewarding time in my life to be able to do this."