No more deadlines: Glenview communications specialist Lynn Stiefel retires
Glenview's emphasis on strengthening communications must proceed without its own great communicator, Lynne Stiefel.
The village's former communications specialist, and before that a veteran journalist with several community newspapers, retired May 28.
"I've accomplished what I need to accomplish. It felt right," Stiefel said last week from San Diego, where she was visiting one of her two sons, Danny. Lynne and husband Dan Stiefel's other boy, Alex, lives in Chicago's North Center neighborhood.
She and Dan celebrated their 37th wedding anniversary on May 27.
Starting her part-time job with the village in May 2011, Lynne Stiefel enjoyed a full 10-year run with the village, where she's lived for 30 years.
She'd had a head start on village lore after covering it for a decade with Pioneer Press' Glenview Announcements.
"I've always said this, it was the perfect job and the perfect time for me," she said. "I had a lot of experience and knowledge of Glenview and its history and also a great deal of knowledge of how government works, building sewers. It just seemed like the perfect job, and it was."
She wasn't kidding about the sewers. Her favorite topics were village land and property acquisitions, developments.
"There really was a good rush of growth there. I liked that, it's exciting for a village to develop new things," she said.
Coming from a radio and television background in Wichita, Tulsa, Houston, Boston and before that as a student at the University of Illinois' CBS affiliate, WDWS radio, she didn't have a lot of newspaper layout experience but came to enjoy that, too, with the Glenview newsletters she put together.
"It was like writing my own little newspaper," she said.
A Skokie native, Stiefel got into print with the Lerner papers in 1989, covering Morton Grove. In 1992 she took the Morton Grove beat with Pioneer Press, started covering Glenview and Northbrook schools, then covered Glenview full-time beginning in 2001.
"I loved being a reporter. That was a very fun and a very stressful time," she said.
"Old guard" without being stodgy, she said, Stiefel was a just-the-facts reporter averse to the trend of opinionated writing. So she got out.
As communications specialist she was able to simply serve as a voice of the village.
"Glenview is just such a great community and I met so many people I consider friends," Stiefel said. "I live here. It's unique when you get to write about and inform people about a place where you live, as well. I really enjoyed it."
That is, until she felt the time was right to disembark. Stiefel doesn't have firm plans for her retirement other than to do some volunteering and work on a back-burner project she's keeping under wraps.
An anniversary trip with Dan to visit their son in San Diego was a good start toward a presumably more relaxing next chapter.
"I just need to decompress this summer, from all the stress of 50 years of deadlines," Stiefel said.