Tom Houlihan, a longtime columnist for the Star and one of the founding members of the Homewood-Flossmoor Chronicle, died Nov. 23 following a decision to end cancer treatment in favor of palliative care. He was 76.
Houlihan was born in 1949, and grew up in Morgan Park on Chicago’s South Side. He graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a degree in journalism in 1971.
After graduation, Houlihan’s career in journalism started with Crescent Newspapers, a now-defunct chain of newspapers that once covered the ‘crescent’ of suburbs around Chicago. There, he worked for the Lockport Herald as both a reporter and editor.
“He was just an excellent reporter, and, I mean, everybody loved him,” said John Ostenburg, a longtime friend and former business partner of Houlihan’s. “He just had a real natural ability. He also had a very creative streak.”
Ostenburg and his wife are godparents to one of Houlihan’s three sons.
“I don’t know any person that I ever, in my life, have heard say anything bad about Tom Houlihan,” Ostenburg said. “In right about 50 years of relationship that we had, I can think of no instance where I would have thought, jeez, why’d he do that, or why’d he say that? It just was not in his nature.”
After leaving the Lockport Herald and traveling for a few months in Spain, Houlihan came back to Illinois and took a position at Lewis University, where Ostenburg taught journalism.
“In the history of journalism, one of the outstanding moments was the penny press,” Ostenburg said. “And so we decided we were gonna start this newspaper, and it was going to be a weekly paper that would sell for a penny a copy.”
That project became the Lockport Free Press, which they started in 1976. Houlihan did almost all of the paper’s reporting. Though the publication was short-lived, Ostenburg said the two were “good newspapermen, but poor businessmen.” Houlihan met his first wife, Kat Houlihan (née Raymond), when she was hired to sell advertising for the paper. They were married in 1979.
In 1982, Houlihan became a full-time reporter for The Times of Northwest Indiana, where he stayed for six years. From there, he was hired at Star Newspapers, where he became a weekly columnist.
“There were all kinds of new subdivisions popping up in the south suburbs, and he did this comparison between the names of the subdivisions and the names of cemeteries,” Ostenburg said. “He wrote really good columns for the Star, and was very well-read. I mean, it was a popular feature in the Star for a long time.”
Houlihan stayed in that role for the next 20 years. In 2007, when the Star was merged with the Daily Southtown to create the SouthtownStar, he was working as the Star’s editorial page editor. Following the merger and the subsequent closure of the Star, Houlihan moved to a position as a communications writer at Governors State University.
Kat Houlihan died suddenly in 2000, leaving Houlihan to look after the couple’s three sons: John, Joseph and Emmett Houlihan.
“Kat had not had any indications or signs of any kind of an illness or anything,” Ostenburg said. “It just came on all of a sudden, and all of a sudden his life was completely different.”
Ostenburg said he admired the way Houlihan handled his personal tragedy and cared for his sons.
“The way he was concerned about his sons, how they would be able to handle the situation and grow up, I think was just such an indication of who he was,” Ostenburg said.
In 2003, Houlihan remarried to Patty Houlihan (née Briske), a former Star reporter, and the family moved to Flossmoor.
After several years out of the field of journalism, Houlihan returned to the industry in 2014 when he became one of the three co-founders of the Homewood-Flossmoor Chronicle, together with Eric Crump and Marilyn Thomas.
“We’re grateful for his contributions to the Chronicle and to the community,” the Chronicle posted to its Facebook page Nov. 24. “Tom will be missed.”
Houlihan retired from the Chronicle in 2020. Three years later, he was diagnosed with colon cancer.
“He was very clear-minded about it. In typical Tom fashion, he faced everything in a very direct way,” Ostenburg said. “The doctors had told him previous that there was really no cure.”
One of the projects Houlihan took up in the later part of his life was the preservation and planting of pawpaw trees. He’d developed an interest in the little-known trees, which produce edible fruit and were cultivated by indigenous people for hundreds of years before European settlement, in 2013.
Houlihan set himself to re-establishing the trees in Flossmoor, starting in his own backyard. On Nov. 15, about a week before he died, his family celebrated him by hosting a tree-planting event to establish a grove of 100 pawpaw trees in Flossmoor near Butterfield Creek.
During the event, Ostenburg said, Houlihan had shared a story he’d been told during his Lutheran upbringing that stayed with him.
“He had been told the story of Martin Luther being asked, ‘if you knew that tomorrow was going to be the last day on earth, what would you do?’” Ostenburg said. “And Martin Luther said, ‘I’d plant a tree.’”
A memorial celebration will be held in early 2026, according to the family. Specific details have not yet been announced.
elewis@chicagotribune.com
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/F3DTQBBNKBAGVKHTAKJ5UL2QL4.JPG)
