Award-winning Daily Herald writer, editor dies at 89

A longtime, award-winning Daily Herald writer, who forged her entire journalism career after 18 years as a stay-at-home mom, died this week at the age of 89.

Eleanor Naomi Rives died at a nursing home in Raleigh, N.C. on Monday, nearly a quarter century after she and her husband, Phillip, retired and moved to Pinehurst, N.C.

Their daughter, the Rev. Kay Johnson of Raleigh, said journalism became a central part of her mother's life once she was nearly done raising her children.

And writing continued to be a way of forging relationships even into retirement, as her series "Southern Exposure" for the local newspaper The Pilot chronicled her experiences as a displaced Illinoisan in North Carolina.

Rives began writing poetry at the age of 9, a pursuit she would maintain throughout her life, before and after the start of her professional writing. In 1942, she earned her bachelor's degree in English at Northwestern University.

In 1967 that she began working part-time at a small local newspaper before moving on to Paddock Publications three years later. She became a multiple award-winning feature writer and later Women's News Editor.

"She said, 'People will tell me anything because I'm just a housewife,'" her daughter laughed.

Johnson, who was a freshman in college when her mother started writing for newspapers, said the transformation of the woman she knew only as Mom was both surprising and uplifting.

"She developed a professional side - she had always just been Mom," Johnson said. "One time I called her while she was working and I didn't even recognize her voice. She said, 'I'll call you later.'

"The main difference was my father started cooking dinner."

The Daily Herald's current publisher and CEO Douglas Ray said he started at the paper around the same time as Rives.

"I worked with Eleanor in the early '70s," Ray said. "I was a reporter and she became the women's editor. She was a key member of the features department, wrote and edited, and was an excellent representative of the paper.

"She focused on women's issues and provided an important perspective because of her life's experience as a suburban resident and reporter chronicling important women's issues of the day."

Johnson said the welfare of the mentally ill and the elderly was also a focus of Rives' work throughout her writing life.

Rives began developing dementia as a result of vascular problems around 2005. Her husband looked after her until his own death in 2007, after which she was cared for in a nursing home in Raleigh, Johnson said.

Her funeral is today, Saturday, at Southern Pines United Methodist Church in Raleigh, with visitation directly following the service. Arrangements are being handled by the Cremation Society of the Carolinas.

In addition to Johnson, Rives is survived by her another daughter, Christine Fitzgerald of Chicago, and son Phillip Rives and his wife Beth of Rockford; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.